1nc

Intellectualism and post-structural analysis breeds inaction and diverts the focus from the international stagethis makes exercising hegemony impossible Willis 95, Professor of Journalism & Director of Concentraion in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at NYU, 12-19-95 (Ellen, The Village Voice) If intellectuals are more inclined to rise to the discrete domestic issue than the historic international moment, this may have less to do with the decay of the notion of international solidarity than with the decay of confidence in their ability to change the world, not to mention the decay of anything resembling a coherent framework of ideas within which to understand it. Certainly the received ideas of the left, to the extent that a left can still be said to exist, have been less than helpful as a framework for understanding the Bosnian crisis or organizing a response to it. Although the idea of American imperialism explains less and less in a world where the locus of power is rapidly shifting to a network of transnational corporations, it still fuels a strain of reflexive anti-interventionist sentiment whose practical result is paralyzed dithering in the face of genocide. Floating around "progressive" circles and reinforcing the dithering is a brand of vulgar pacifism whose defining characteristic is not principled rejection of violence but squeamish aversion to dealing with it. In the academy in particular, entrenched assumptions about identity politics and cultural relativism promote a view of the Balkan conflict as too complicated and ambiguous to allow for choosing sides. If there is no such thing as universality, if multiethnic democracy is not intrinsically preferable to ethnic separatism, if there are no clear-cut aggressors and victims but merely clashing cultures, perhaps ethnic partition is simply the most practical way of resolving those "implacable ancient rivalries." Their musings of utopian societies drain support for hegemonyand well indict their methodologytheir K is so deep within the ivory tower that it cant even access society Hanson, 3 (Victor Davis, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor Emeritus at California University, Fresno, Ph.D. from Stanford, We Could Still Lose. National Review Online. August 11. http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3050721.html.) If one were to collate the news reports about the Mosul shootout, the lessons would be as follows: read two mass killers their Miranda rights; dodge their bullets when they shoot first; capture them alive; let Europeans cross-examine them in the Hague; lose no friendlies in the operation; do not disturb the residents next door; protect the Husseins victims from such oppressors (but without cracking their plaster); and in general remember that the entire scene will be filmed and then broadcast as Cops rather than as Hell Is for Heroes. I am not suggesting that we ignore the real dangers involved in ethnic profiling or discount the moral issues that arise from killing our enemy leaders and disseminating gross pictures of their corpses. And, of course, we should seek to distinguish Baathist culprits from ordinary Iraqis. My point is rather that, because we are products of an affluent and leisured West, we have a special burden to remember how tenuous and fragile civilization remains outside our suburbs. Most of us dont fear much from the fatwa of a murderous mullah, and few have had our sisters shredded before our eyes in one of Udays brush chippersmuch less ever seen chemical warfare trucks hosing down our block, in the same way that crop dusters fogged our backyards. Instead, we have the leisure to engage in utopian musing, assured that our economy, our unseen soldiers, or our system working on autopilot will always ensure us such prerogatives. And in the la-la land of

Washington and New York, it is especially easy to forget that we are not even like our own soldiers in Iraq, now sleeping outside without toilets and air conditioners, eating dehydrated food, and trying to distinguish killers from innocents. What does all this mean? Western societies from ancient Athens to imperial Rome to the French republic rarely collapsed because of a shortage of resources or because foreign enemies proved too numerous or formidable in armseven when those enemies were grim Macedonians or Germans. Rather, in times of peace and prosperity there arose an unreal view of the world beyond their borders, one that was the product of insularity brought about by success, and an intellectual arrogance that for some can be the unfortunate by-product of an enlightened society. I think we are indulging in this unreal hypercriticismeven apart from the election season antics of our politiciansbecause we are not being gassed or shot or even left hot or hungry. September 11 no longer evokes an image of incinerated firefighters, innocents leaping out of skyscrapers, or the stench of flesh and melted plastic but rather squabbles over architectural designs, lawsuits, snarling over John Ashcrofts new statutes, or concerns about being too rude to the Arab street. Such smug dispensationas profoundly amoral as it isprovides us, on the cheap and at a safe distance, with a sense of moral worth. Or perhaps censuring from the bleachers enables us to feel superior to those less fortunate who are still captive to their primordial appetites. We prefer to cringe at the thought that others like to see proof of their killers deaths, prefer to shoot rather than die capturing a mass murderer, and welcome a generic profile of those who wish to kill them en masse. We should take stock of this dangerous and growing mind-setand remember that wealthy, sophisticated societies like our own are rarely overrun. They simply implodewhining and debating to the end, even as they pass away.

The impact is global warfare

Kagan 7, Robert Kagan (Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund) 2007 End of Dreams, Return of History, Hoover Institution, No. 144, August/September, http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/article/6136
The jostling for status and influence among these ambitious nations and would-be nations is a second defining feature of the new post-Cold War international system. Nationalism in all its forms is back, if it ever went away, and so is international competition for power, influence, honor, and status. American predominance prevents these rivalries from intensifying its regional as well as its global predominance. Were the United States to diminish its influence in the regions where it is currently the strongest power, the other nations would settle disputes as great and lesser powers have done in the past: sometimes through diplomacy and accommodation but often through confrontation and wars of varying scope, intensity, and destructiveness. One novel aspect of such a multipolar world is that most of these powers would possess nuclear weapons. That could make wars between them less likely, or it could simply make them more catastrophic.It is easy but also dangerous to underestimate the role the United States plays in providing a measure of stability in the world even as it also disrupts stability. For instance, the United States is the dominant naval power everywhere, such that other nations cannot compete with it even in their home waters. They either happily or
grudgingly allow the United States Navy to be the guarantor of international waterways and

trade routes, of international access to markets and raw materials such as oil. Even when the

United States engages in a war, it is able to play its role as guardian of the waterways. In a more genuinely multipolar world, however, it would not. Nations would compete for naval dominance at least in their own regions and possibly beyond. Conflict between nations would involve struggles on the oceans as well as on land. Armed embargos, of the kind used in World War i and other major conflicts, would disrupt trade flows in a way that is now impossible. Such order as exists in the world rests not merely on the goodwill of peoples but on a foundation provided by American power. Even the European Union, that great geopolitical miracle, owes its founding to American power, for without it the European nations after World War ii would never have felt secure enough to reintegrate Germany. Most Europeans recoil at the thought, but even today Europe s stability depends on the guarantee, however distant and one hopes unnecessary, that the United States could step in to check any dangerous development on the continent. In a genuinely multipolar world, that would not be possible without renewing the danger of world war. People who believe greater equality among nations would be preferable to the present American predominance often succumb to a basic logical fallacy. They believe the order the world enjoys today exists independently of American power. They imagine that in a world where American power was diminished, the aspects of international order that they like would remain in place. But that s not the way it works. International order does not rest on ideas and institutions. It is shaped by configurations of power. The international order we know today reflects the distribution of power in the world since World War ii, and especially since the end of the Cold War. A different configuration of power, a multipolar world in which the poles were Russia, China, the United States, India, and Europe, would produce its own kind of order,
with different rules and norms reflecting the interests of the powerful states that would have a hand in shaping it. Would that international order be an improvement? Perhaps for

Beijing and Moscow it would. But it is doubtful that it would suit the tastes of enlightenment liberals in the United States and Europe. The current order, of course, is not only far from perfect but also offers no guarantee against major conflict among the world s great powers. Even under the umbrella of unipolarity, regional conflicts involving the large powers may erupt. War could erupt between China and Taiwan and draw in both the United States and Japan. War could erupt between Russia and Georgia, forcing the United States and its European allies to decide whether to intervene or suffer the consequences of a Russian victory. Conflict between India and Pakistan remains possible, as does conflict between Iran and Israel or other Middle Eastern states. These, too, could draw in other great powers, including the United States. Such conflicts may be unavoidable no matter what policies the United States pursues. But they are more likely to erupt if the United States weakens or withdraws from its positions of regional dominance.
This is especially true in East Asia, where most nations agree that a reliable American power has a stabilizing and pacific effect on the region. That is certainly the view of most of China

s neighbors. But even China, which seeks gradually to supplant the United States as the dominant power in the region, faces the dilemma that an American withdrawal could unleash an ambitious, independent, nationalist Japan. In Europe, too, the departure of the United States from the scene even if it remained the worlds most powerful

nation could be destabilizing. It could tempt Russia to an even more overbearing and potentially forceful approach to unruly nations on its periphery. Although some realist theorists seem to imagine that the disappearance of the Soviet Union put an end to the possibility of confrontation between Russia and the West, and therefore to the need for a permanent American role in Europe, history suggests that conflicts in Europe involving Russia are possible even without Soviet communism. If the United States withdrew from Europe if it adopted what some call a strategy of offshore balancing this could in time increase the likelihood of conflict involving Russia and its near neighbors, which could in turn draw the United States back in under unfavorable circumstances. It is also optimistic to imagine that a retrenchment of the American position in the Middle East and the assumption of a more passive, offshore role would lead to greater stability there. The vital interest the United States has in access to oil and the role it plays in keeping access open to other nations in Europe and Asia make it unlikely that American leaders could or would stand back and hope for the best while the powers in the region battle it out. Nor would a more even-handed policy toward Israel, which some see as the magic key to unlocking peace, stability, and comity in the Middle East, obviate the need to come to Israel s aid if its security became threatened. That commitment, paired with the American commitment to protect strategic oil supplies for most of the world, practically ensures a heavy American military presence in the region, both on the seas and on the ground. The subtraction of American power from any region would not end conflict but would simply change the equation. In the Middle East, competition for influence among powers both inside and outside the region has raged for at least two centuries. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism doesn t change this. It only adds a new and more threatening dimension to the competition, which neither a sudden end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians nor an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq would change. The alternative to American predominance in the region is not balance and peace. It is further competition. The region and the states within it remain relatively weak. A diminution of American influence would not be followed by a diminution of other external influences. One could expect deeper involvement by both China and Russia, if only to secure their interests. 18 And one could also expect the more powerful states of the region, particularly Iran, to expand and fill the vacuum. It is doubtful that any American administration would voluntarily take actions that could shift the balance of power in the Middle East further toward Russia, China, or Iran. The world hasn t changed that much. An American withdrawal from Iraq will not return things to normal or to a new kind of stability in the region. It will produce a new instability, one likely to draw the United States back in again. The alternative is a micro-political embrace of hegemony Calling intellectual attention to hegemony in terms of maximizing its productivity incorporates the reasons hegemony may be bad in the squotheir purely antiinstitutional politics fail to consider our alternative Adolphs and Karakayali 7, Micropolitics and Hegemony, Both Fellows @ European Institute of Progressive Cultural Policies, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0607/adolphs-karakayali/en

The starting point for this article was our joint reading of the text 1968 and after: Some Comments on Singularity and Minoritarian Politics[1] by Katja Diefenbach[2]. While we share the orientation to defending the concept of becoming minoritarian against the neo-universalist invectives of authors like Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek, reading the article we started reflecting again on the problem of the relationship between becoming and history, between quantum flows and segmentarity. Para-universalism has already been popular for several years. Its proponents are found not only in the camp of the leftists, which includes Badiou and iek, among others, but also in all the fields of the political spectrum. Everywhere difference, multiculturalism and other misapprehensions are held responsible for the decline of morals, authority and class consciousness, which is ultimately attributed to 1968, the starting point of a more or less lasting revolt, which was distinguished worldwide by not allowing itself to be pressed into the templates of the macropolitical. This was also Deleuze and Guattaris thesis: those who evaluated things in macropolitical terms understood nothing of the event, because something unaccountable was escaping.[3] Badiou and ieks criticism is directed against a possibility of emancipative politics that is thought to be lost along with the loss of universal instances. These instances of invoking a subject in religion as in the political are supposed to guarantee a kind of stability against the difference that is bound to the commodity form, has become arbitrary, and they are seen as the inexorable foundation of all political agency. In this kind of critical perspective, the thinking of Deleuze (and others) is exactly in line with this general loss of the political, reinforcing it instead of opposing it. Conversely, there is a broad reading of Deleuze and Guattari that understands micropolitics as a kind of small scale politics or antiinstitutional politics. This tends to diminish the significance or the effect of the macropolitical. In contrast to this, our endeavor is to show that politics can, first of all, not be reduced to these instances, and secondly that micropolitics understood in this way is not capable of eluding appropriation and passivization. Both positions underestimate albeit for different reasons the struggles in the fields structured by power technologies and gouvernmental knowledge. This article intends to show that hegemony and micropolitics are not mutually exclusive perspectives, but instead refer to one another. If hegemony is understood following the criticisms of 1968 of the normalizing modes of subjectification as an anti-passive revolution, then the micropolitical perspective offers important indications of an emancipatory project beyond fordist social formations.We argue for a hegemony theory reading of the works by Deleuze and Guattari. In our view this enables reading the endeavor of the two authors, in their writing from Anti-Oedipus to What is Philosophy?, as a grand attempt to take up the problematic of Marxism again and reformulate it on the basis of the battles after 1968. A reading of this kind only makes sense, if the concept of hegemony is liberated from its reduction to a simple expansion of the concept of the state. This is a notion that rests on Gramscis formula of the state as hegemony armored with compulsion, because it still allows thinking of the state as something external. This is also how Deleuze statement can be understood, that both of them (not only he) constantly remained Marxists which is also a variation of the assemblage.[4] With a perspective of this kind it could be said that, contrary to a certain reception, concepts

like becoming-minoritarian, micropolitics or deterritorialization specifically do not stand for a thinking that is capable of imagining the flight from capital and state only from the catastrophic perspective of their absolute reterritorialization (their destruction, in other words). This is what the recurrent phrase refers to, a thought that appeals to a people[5]. Yet can a people even emerge from becoming-minoritarian? Like many others, people is also a term borrowed and reinterpreted by Deleuze and Guattari. The fact that becoming-minoritarian is still bound to instances, even if it is not dissolved in them, is exactly the problem that ultimately leads Badiou and iek to their conservative revolutionary intervention and to coupling emancipation with religion or ideology and thus with para-universalism. Instead of thinking of becoming as the absolute other of history, which drops out of history, always threatened by metanarratives that appropriate it, we want to ask how one can imagine historical change and write history without omitting becoming-minoritarian. The question of history principally involves the Deleuzian question of how a new people (that is no longer a people) can be created, if the mass itself speaks, if it is in the process of becoming. It should not be denied that the relations, references and shared problems we postulate are only one side of the coin. Indeed, with our reinterpretation we wish to emphasize this, because they often appear implicit and hidden. The differences, breaks and discontinuities recede more into the background in this article, also for reasons of space. To that extent, our disposition of Deleuze and Guattaris concepts with the problematic of hegemony is only a first step that could yield new difficulties, but also a new productivity. This article should therefore be read more in the sense of a pragmatic framework, which we presume to be capable of triggering productive movements. We seek to achieve a translation of the concepts into one another, not a confrontation of models. If the problem of becoming and history is reformulated in terms of hegemony theory, it could be argued that at the level of a poetics of knowledge[6] the point is to avoid certaiman passivizing intellectual styles (of thinking and writing). What has to be communicated together are narrative strategies of history (history is narrated), social science knowledge (i.e. a knowledge about the material constitution of the multitude), and the problem of democracy (the multitude as changing, becoming subjects). The point is a change of language-body-location, which no only accompanies everyone in the place assigned to them, but also changes the arrangement of the locations themselves, a limitation of certain practices and forms of knowledge and a revaluation of others. This problem, which Rancire sought to grasp with a poetics of knowledge, and which Deleuze and Guattari have also faced since their first collaborative book Anti-Oedipus, is the same one that is also the starting point of Gramscis work. The thesis posed here is thus that the arrangement of knowledge, language and bodies represents the core of the hegemony theory issue. For this kind of reading of the concept of hegemony, hegemony is not a different word for domination, but rather a network of practices of leadership and self-leadership, which in turn builds on a specific division of labor (between intellectual and non-intellectual practices), and which is anchored by standardization and normalization not only in everyday life, but also in the mode of production. It is also in this context that Gramsci develops the concept of the passive revolution, i.e. revolutions that are responsive to demands

from the basis, yet forestall a self-reliant leadership of the subalterns at the same time.[7] In passive revolutions the relations of the political and social division of labor into manual and mental labor are not challenged, but rather modernized or transformed. Passivization leads to a blocking of self-reliant and new institutional forms of state on the part of the subalterns.[8] The question, then, is who leads whom by which (political, mental or economic) means, and how those who are led can liberate themselves from this leadership. Against this background, Gramscis concept of hegemony serves to develop a new practice of politics, which has an anti-passive effect.[9]

2nc impact calc

First is magnitudehegemonic transition wars ensure mass global upheaval and cause challengers to riseensuring global warthats Kagan\ And, peace is a prerequisite to their criticism Elshtain 3 - Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School (Jean Bethke, Just War Against Terrorism, pg. 47) That said, the civic peace that violence disrupts does offer intimations of the peaceable kingdom. If we live from day to day in fear of deadly attack, the goods we cherish become elusive. Human beings are fragile creatures. We cannot reveal the fullness of our being, including our deep sociality, if airplanes are flying into buildings or snipers are shooting at us randomly or deadly spores are being sent through the mail. As we have learned so shockingly, we can neither take this civic peace for granted nor shake off our responsibility to respect and promote the norms and rules that sustain civic peace. Second is probabilityKagan cites empirical examples of both World Wars proving the correlation of weakness and wartheir evidence is based off of warrantless assertions Third is timeframeabandoning our leadership is a beacon for challengers to arm since hegemony is based on perception any perception of weakness collapses our primacyand evaluate timeframe before their impactsyou can only die once and their scenarios have no prink Fourth, theyve conceded a solvency take-outinterrogation of local concerns tradesoff with global solutions and fails to spill-over into any form of material change at home eitherthats Willisthis was cold-droppeddont give the 1AR any new answers to this Fifth, theyre conceding our indict of their methodologyWestern intellectuals forget the necessity of military power because theres no mortal danger in D&Gs Paris coffee housethis means both that their claims are suspect and that theyre so out of touch with society that they cant spilloverthats all Hanson and he was cold-dropped too Sixth, their advocacy cant generate the critical mass to combat oppressiononly hegemony can Willis 95, Professor of Journalism & Director of Concentraion in Cultural Reporting and
Criticism at NYU, 12-19-95 (Ellen, The Village Voice) Yet it's indisputably true that Bosnia has inspired no outpouring of public indignation from American or European intellectuals comparable to that surrounding the Spanish Civil War or Vietnam. Even worse--if one takes seriously the idea that a society ought to be able to

look to its intellectuals to analyze and interpret events, to examine them in a larger historical and political context--in the U.S. at least (I don't know about Europe) there has been far too little discussion of Bosnia that goes beyond superficial, platitudinous handwringing on the one hand, and realpolitikal noodling about strategic options on the other. My purpose in noting this is not to point fingers; while Sontag has earned the right to be righteous, I can't claim that in my own writing and other public activity I've given Bosnia the attention it deserves. In any case, I don't think righteousness gets to the heart of the matter, which is not the flagging of the individual moral conscience but the precarious state of our collective political life. As Sontag recognizes, the Bosnian gap in our public conversation has everything to do with the devolution of politics that has been gathering terrifying speed since 1989. Intellectuals' public embrace of a political issue doesn't come out of nowhere; it reflects a social climate in which a critical mass of people, particularly in the universities and the media, have a sense of urgency about politics in general and the feeling that what they say or do can make a difference.

And, intellectual advocacy for hegemony integrates power politics into civil society this both solves all the reasons heg is bad and straight turns their criticism by making hegemony a diverse and multifaceted institution Adolphs and Karakayali 7, Micropolitics and Hegemony, Both Fellows @ European Institute of Progressive Cultural Policies, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0607/adolphs-karakayali/en One could say that the concept of the desiring machine (in analogy to Althusser) functioned in the sense of decentering the state and because of this expansion (in analogy to Gramsci) addresses the problem of how a dissymmetrical politics (politics not leading to taking power) has to be constituted to a bourgeois hegemony. This can only be achieved, however, if one (in analogy to Foucault) includes the non-state power technologies. Against this background, Deleuze and Guattaris version of the microphysics of power is to be read as a transfer of the molecular to the level of societal organization and thus virtually as a radicalization of the hegemony approach. Instead of distinguishing between state and non-state or state and civil society, the two operate with concepts like (hard and soft) segmentation and (over-) coding. A virtuality of countless non-coordinated and contradiction-free, mutually catalysing impulses of desire and markings are inscribed in the societal structure. This a-subjective flow of desire is represented in A Thousand Plateaus as smooth, non-stratified and nonstriated space, which enters into the stratified and striated plan of organization of language, body and subjectivity. In this way, the social structure itself is conceived as movable and mutable; it becomes an assemblage of lines of reterritorialization and deterritorialization, of decoding and recoding. An immanent connection between various practices and structures thus becomes imaginable without having to reduce these to one another. And, even if microfascism is bad, the macrofascism that heg solves is worse it causes material violence and termination of livesand it turns microfascismpolice states and dictatorial regimes create the conditions that allow for the internalization of microfascism

Heg is key to global peace which ensures value to life the alt is a prerequisite to the aff Yoshida 04 (Adam; contributor, The Freedom Institute)Time to Confront China 1/18/04
http://www.adamyoshida.com/2004/01/time-to-confront-china.html

We must declare it openly that it is totally unacceptable that any power other than the United States be a superpower. We must understand that any world system not ruled by the United States, especially one ruled by China, will not be one worth living in. We must know that it is worth dying, and killing, to prevent the Chinese ascent. The rise of China to leader of the world would mean the probable end of Western Civilization and, certainly, the end of human progress as we have known it. It would be the end of our three-thousand year heritage of liberty and the birth of a new, foreign age. The day when a foreign nation comes to be the ruler of the world will be the day on which this world ceases to be worth living in. Any unified and dynamic Chinese polity is, over the long term, destined to power. Therefore, we must seek a solution in Chinas past: warlordism. Even today, beneath the surface, there are major regional differences within China. Our ultimate goal, then, should be to see the present Chinese nation partitioned into a half-dozen or so mutually-hostile and preferably perpetuallywarring states. This would lead to a great expenditure of Chinese resources: financial, natural, and human, in vicious internal conflicts, which would gradually suck the dynamism and strength of the nation. This strategy begins with five areas that are already evident, but then expands into others. First, Taiwan must be defended and held at all costs. While it is true that, as a general rule, nuclear proliferation is a bad idea, I do not believe it to be so in this case. A nuclear-armed Republic of China would drive the Peoples Republic crazy and would be largely invulnerable to attack. Moreover, it could be used as a base for other forms of subversion. Even if a fanatical Chinese government were to ever come to power and determine to seize Formosa, it could not do so without paying a terrible price. Second, extensive aid should be given to prodemocracy activists in Hong Kong, including money and, possibly, weapons to more radical groups. This is not so much because I am interested in bringing about democracy in China (which I, for one, believe to be largely impossible), but because I hope to provoke the Chinese government into acting against the activists. What happened at Tiananmen Square probably set back the Chinese efforts at being fully accepted into the international community by at least a decade. Imagine what those same activists could do with a few hundred million dollars in covertly-supplied money. Third, extensive aid should be supplied to the followers of Falun Gong. Again, I have no great love for the followers of this religion, theres a group of them who line up every morning in the park I walk thought and, quite frankly, I think that theyre little more than another weirdo pseudo-cult. However, they are clearly a powerful force within China itself and aid to them is bound to increase social disorder and alienation from the government. Fourth, Chinas large and growing Christian population should be funded and encouraged to geographically concentrate in areas of potential future value, especially those accessible from the coasts. This will allow these people to provide the nucleus of future pro-Western states in a divided China. Also, an increase in Christianity is likely to provoke an increase in the persecution of Christians which is likely to raise anti-Chinese sentiment in the West. Fifth, extremely covert efforts should be made, through the use of agents placed within Islamist groups, to direct some of the fury of Islam against China. Ideally, with proper encouragement, Moslems in Western China might be incited to launch several terror attacks which, in turn, would hopefully lead to a crackdown on Moslems within China which, finally, would cause al-Qaeda and similar groups to fully add China to its enemies list. After all, while killing the enemies of America is a wonderful thing, getting the enemies of America to kill eachother is truly the Lords work. Naturally, if we

are to truly break Chinese power, much more will have to be done. Cyber-attacks of Chinas emerging electronic infrastructure would, I suspect, have a very strong effect. So might other forms of economic sabotage. Additionally, links will also have to be forged with various malcontent groups in various regions. Of course, we will have to be prepared for economic retaliation. However, at this point such moves would hurt China just as much as it would hurt the United States. If anything, over the long term, China would lose far more in losing access to American markets than vice versa. Military retaliation is also a possible, but less likely, possibility. A firm show of American resolve to confront China should help to curb this. Perhaps the United States could, in concert with some of the other claimants, seize the Spratly Islands. Naturally, this would probably not be an out-and-out US military operation. It would be better to equip Taiwan (who claims the Islands in full as well) to evict the five hundred or so Chinese soldiers stationed on the various little rocks. Presumably this would be done after Taiwan becomes a declared nuclear power under some sort of deal whereby a large percentage of the revenues from the islands (which are believed to have massive oil and gas deposits) would flow to the United States. Some will level various accusations at me for putting forward this plan. Let them. I am fully willing to admit that I consider any outcome which sees the United States cease to be the sole superpower in the world are unacceptable: morally, politically, and militarily. American power is, and must be, eternal. We cannot lose it unless we lack the resolve to keep it. It is America, and only America, that can lead humanity into the stars and its next stage of evolution. It is only America that can carry forward those great traditions of the West, our peculiar heritage, onto eternity. So many have sacrificed and died, that we might be where we are today. Do we truly wish to throw away all of that? Better to die a thousand deaths than to consent to live in such a world.

2nc heg impact cards

Group their no impact args
Empirics prove collapse of hegemony causes global wareven if the transition is peaceful Medieval Europe proves parity ensures miscalculation Kagan 12, Robert, senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution *Why the World Needs America, February 11th,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203646004577213262856669448.html] With the outbreak of World War I, the age of settled peace and advancing liberalismof European civilization approaching its pinnaclecollapsed into an age of hyper-nationalism, despotism and economic calamity. The once-promising spread of democracy and liberalism halted and then reversed course, leaving a handful of outnumbered and besieged democracies living nervously in the shadow of fascist and totalitarian neighbors. The collapse

of the British and European orders in the 20th century did not produce a new dark agethough if Nazi Germany and imperial Japan had prevailed, it might havebut the horrific conflict
that it produced was, in its own way, just as devastating. Would the end of the present American-dominated order have less dire consequences? A surprising number of American intellectuals, politicians and policy makers greet the prospect with equanimity. There is a general sense that the end of the era of American pre-eminence, if and when it comes, need not mean the end of the present international order, with its widespread freedom, unprecedented global prosperity (even amid the current economic crisis) and absence of war among the great powers. American power may diminish, the political scientist G. John Ikenberry argues, but "the underlying foundations of the liberal international order will

survive and thrive." The commentator Fareed Zakaria believes that even as the balance shifts against the U.S., rising powers like China "will continue to live within the framework of the current international system." And there are elements across the political spectrumRepublicans who
call for retrenchment, Democrats who put their faith in international law and institutionswho don't imagine that a "post-American world" would look very different from the American world. If all of this

sounds too good to be true, it is. The present world order was largely shaped by American power and reflects American interests and preferences. If the balance of power shifts in the direction of other nations, the world order will change to suit their interests and preferences. Nor can we assume that all the great powers in a post-American world would agree on the benefits of preserving the present order, or have the capacity to preserve it, even if they wanted to. Take the issue of
democracy. For several decades, the balance of power in the world has favored democratic governments. In a genuinely postAmerican world, the already protect

balance would shift toward the great-power autocracies. Both Beijing and Moscow dictators like Syria's Bashar al-Assad. If they gain greater relative influence in the future, we will see fewer democratic transitions and more autocrats hanging on to power. The balance in a new, multipolar
world might be more favorable to democracy if some of the rising democraciesBrazil, India, Turkey, South Africapicked up the slack from a declining U.S. Yet not all of them have the desire or the capacity to do it. What about the economic order of free markets and free trade? People assume that China and other rising powers that have benefited so much from the present system would have a stake in preserving it. They wouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Unfortunately, they might not be able to help themselves. The creation and survival of a liberal economic order has depended, historically, on great powers that are both willing and able to support open trade and free markets, often with naval power. If a declining America is unable to maintain its long-standing hegemony on the high seas, would other nations take on the burdens and the expense of sustaining navies to fill in the gaps? Even if they did, would this produce an open global commonsor rising tension? China and India are building bigger navies, but the result so far has been greater competition, not greater security. As Mohan Malik has noted in this newspaper, their "maritime rivalry could spill into the open in a decade or two," when India deploys an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean and China deploys one in the Indian Ocean. The move from American-dominated oceans to collective policing by several great powers could be a recipe for competition and conflict rather than for a liberal economic order. And do the Chinese really value an open economic system? The Chinese economy soon may become the largest in the world, but it will be far from the richest. Its size is a product of the country's enormous population, but in per capita terms, China remains relatively poor. The U.S., Germany and Japan have a per capita GDP of over $40,000. China's is a little over $4,000, putting it at the same level as Angola, Algeria and Belize. Even if optimistic forecasts are correct, China's per capita GDP by 2030 would still only be half that of the U.S., putting it roughly where Slovenia and Greece are today. Although the Chinese

have been beneficiaries of an open as an autocratic society, their priority is to preserve the state's control of wealth and the power that it brings. They might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs because they can't figure out how to keep both it and themselves alive. Finally,
international economic order, they could end up undermining it simply because, what about the long peace that has held among the great powers for the better part of six decades? Would it survive in a postAmerican world? Most commentators who welcome this scenario imagine that American predominance would

be

replaced by some kind of multipolar harmony. But multipolar systems have historically been neither particularly stable nor particularly peaceful. Rough parity among powerful nations is a source of uncertainty that leads to miscalculation . Conflicts erupt as a result of fluctuations in the delicate power equation. War among the great powers was a common, if not constant, occurrence in the long periods of multipolarity from the 16th to the 18th centuries,
culminating in the series of enormously destructive Europe-wide wars that followed the French Revolution and ended with Napoleon's defeat in 1815. The 19th century was notable for two stretches of great-power peace of roughly four decades each, punctuated by major conflicts. The Crimean War (1853-1856) was a mini-world war involving well over a million Russian, French, British and Turkish troops, as well as forces from nine other nations; it produced almost a half-million dead combatants and many more wounded. In the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), the two nations together fielded close to two million troops, of whom nearly a half-million were killed or wounded. The peace that followed these conflicts was characterized by increasing tension and competition, numerous war scares and massive increases in armaments on both land and sea. Its climax was World War I, the most destructive and deadly conflict that mankind had known up to that point. As the political scientist Robert W. Tucker has observed, "Such stability and moderation as the balance brought rested ultimately on the threat or use of force. War remained the essential means for maintaining the balance of power." There is little reason to believe that a return to multipolarity in the 21st century would bring greater peace and stability than it has in the past. The era of American predominance has shown that there

is no

better recipe for great-power peace than certainty about who holds the upper hand. President Bill Clinton left office believing that the key task for America was to "create the world we would like to live in when we are no longer the world's only superpower," to prepare for "a time when we would have to share the stage." It is an eminently sensible-sounding proposal.
But can it be done? For particularly in matters of security, the rules and institutions of international order

rarely survive the

decline of the nations that erected them. They are like scaffolding around a building: They don't hold the building up; the building holds them up. Many foreign-policy experts see the present international order as the inevitable
result of human progress, a combination of advancing science and technology, an increasingly global economy, strengthening international institutions, evolving "norms" of international behavior and the gradual but inevitable triumph of liberal democracy over other forms of governmentforces of change that transcend the actions of men and nations. Americans certainly like to believe that our preferred order survives because it is right and justnot only for us but for everyone. We assume that the triumph of democracy is the triumph of a better idea, and the victory of market capitalism is the victory of a better system, and that both are irreversible. That is why Francis Fukuyama's thesis about "the end of history" was so attractive at the end of the Cold War and retains its appeal even now, after it has been discredited by events. The idea of inevitable evolution means that there is no requirement to impose a decent order. It will merely happen. But international order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over othersin America's case, the domination of free-market and democratic principles, together with an international system that supports them. The present order will last only as long as those who favor it and benefit from it retain the will and capacity to defend it. There was nothing inevitable about the world that was created after World War II. No divine providence or unfolding Hegelian dialectic required the triumph of democracy and capitalism, and there is no guarantee that their success will outlast the powerful nations that have fought for them. Democratic progress and liberal economics have been and

can be reversed and undone. The ancient democracies of Greece and the republics of Rome and Venice all fell to more
powerful forces or through their own failings. The evolving liberal economic order of Europe collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s. The better idea doesn't have to win just because it is a better idea. It requires great powers to champion it. If and when American power declines, the

institutions and norms that American power has supported will decline, too. Or more likely, if history is a guide, they may collapse altogether as we make a transition to another kind of world order, or to disorder. We may discover then that the U.S. was essential to keeping the present world order together and that the alternative to American power was not peace and harmony but chaos and catastrophe which is what the world
looked like right before the American order came into being.

Decline makes us desperate and belligerent in a last-ditch attempt to cling to primacycauses lash-out and global war Goldstein 7, political science professor at Penn, 7 Avery Goldstein, David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations at the University of
Pennsylvania, Associate Director of the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley, 2007 (Power transitions, institutions, and China's rise in East Asia: Theoretical expectations and evidence, Journal of Strategic Studies, Volume 30, Number 4-5, August-October, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Taylor & Francis Online, p. 647-648) Two closely related, though distinct, theoretical arguments focus explicitly on the consequences for international politics of a shift in power between a dominant state and a

peace prevails when a dominant states capabilities enable it to govern an international order that it has shaped. Over time, however, as economic and technological diffusion
rising power. In War and Change in World Politics, Robert Gilpin suggested that proceeds during eras of peace and development, other states are empowered. Moreover, the burdens of international governance drain and distract the reigning hegemon, and

As the power advantage of the erstwhile hegemon ebbs, it may become desperate enough to resort to the ultima ratio of international politics, force, to forestall the increasingly urgent demands of a rising challenger. Or as the power of the challenger rises, it may be tempted to press its case with threats to use force. It is the rise and
challengers eventually emerge who seek to rewrite the rules of governance.

fall of the great powers that creates the circumstances under which major wars, what Gilpin labels hegemonic wars, break out .13 Gilpins argument logically encourages pessimism about the implications of a rising China. It leads to the expectation that international trade, investment, and technology transfer will result in a steady diffusion of American economic power, benefiting the rapidly developing states of the world, including China. As the US simultaneously scurries to put out the many brushfires that threaten its far-flung global interests (i.e., the classic problem of overextension), it will be unable to devote sufficient resources to maintain or restore its former advantage over emerging competitors like China. While the erosion of the once clear American advantage plays itself out, the US will find it ever more difficult to preserve the order in Asia that it created during its era of preponderance. The expectation is an increase in the likelihood for the use of force either by a Chinese challenger able to field a stronger military in support of its demands for greater influence over international arrangements in Asia, or by a besieged American hegemon desperate to head off further decline. Among the trends that alarm *end page 647+ those who would look at Asia through the lens of Gilpins theory are Chinas expanding share of world
trade and wealth (much of it resulting from the gains made possible by the international economic order a dominant US established); its acquisition of technology in key sectors that have both civilian and military applications (e.g., information, communications, and electronics linked with the revolu tion in military affairs); and an expanding military burden for the US (as it copes with the challenges of its global war on terrorism and especially its struggle in Iraq) that limits the resources it can devote to preserving its interests in East Asia.14 Although similar to Gilpins work insofar as it emphasizes the importance of shifts in the capabilities of a dominant state an d a rising challenger, the power-transition theory A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler present in The War Ledger focuses more closely on the allegedly dangerous phenomenon of crossover the point at

when the power gap narrows, the dominant state becomes increasingly desperate to forestall, and the challenger becomes increasingly determined to realize the transition to a new international order whose contours it will define.
which a dissatisfied challenger is about to overtake the established leading state.15 In such cases,

Primacy has resulted in the lowest level of war in history and eliminates incentives for conflictbest statistics prove Owen 11
and the Center of International Studies at Princeton, PhD in international relations from Harvard, February 11, 2011, Dont Discount Hegemony, www.cato-unbound.org/2011/02/11/john-owen/dont-discount-hegemony/] Andrew and his colleagues at the Human Security Report Project are to be congratulated. Not only do they with a striking conclusion,

[John Owen, Associate professor in the University of Virginia's Department of Politics, recipient of fellowships from the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford,

Mack present a study driven by data, free of theoretical or ideological bias, but they also do something quite unfashionable: they bear good news
why, if people listen to us, things will get better. We do this as if our careers depended upon it, and perhaps they do; for if all is going to be well, what need then for us? Our colleagues at Simon Fraser University are brave indeed. That may sound like a setup, but it is not. I shall challenge neither the data nor the general conclusion that violent conflict around the world has been decreasing in fits and starts

. Social scientists really are not supposed to do that. Our job is, if not to be Malthusians, then at least to point out disturbing trends, looming catastrophes, and the imbecility and mendacity of policy makers. And then it is to say

since the Second World War

. When it comes to

violent conflict among and within countries,

things have been getting better

. (The trends have not been linear Figure 1.1 actually shows that the frequency of interstate wars peaked in the 1980s but

the 65-year movement is clear.) Instead I shall accept that Mack et al. are correct on the macro-trends, and focus on their explanations they advance for these remarkable trends. With apologies to any readers of this forum who recoil from academic debates, this might get mildly theoretical and even more mildly methodological. Concerning international wars, one version of the nuclear -peace theory is not in fact laid to rest by the data. It is certainly true that nuclear-armed states have been involved in many wars. They have even been attacked (think of Israel), which falsifies the simple claim of assured destructionthat any nuclear country A will deter any kind of attack by any country B because B fears a retaliatory nuclear strike from A. But the most important nuclear-peace claim has been about mutually assured destruction, which obtains between two robustly nuclear -armed states. The claim is that (1) rational states having second-strike capabilitiesenough deliverable nuclear weaponry to survive a nuclear first strike by an enemywill have an overwhelming incentive not to attack one another; and (2) we can safely assume that nuclear-armed states are rational. It follows that states with a second-strike capability will not fight one another. Their colossal atomic arsenals neither kept the United States at peace with North Vietnam during the Cold War nor the Soviet Union at peace with Afghanistan. But the argument remains strong that those arsenals did help keep the United States and Soviet Union at peace with each other. Why non-nuclear states are not deterred from fighting nuclear states is an important and open question. But in a time when calls to ban the Bomb are being heard from more and more quarters, we must be clear about precisely what the broad trends toward peace can and cannot tell us. They may tell us nothing about why we have had no World War III, and little about the wisdom of banning the Bomb now. Regarding the downward trend in international war, Professor Mack is friendlier to more palatable theories such as the democratic peace (democracies do not fight one another, and the proportion of democracies has increased, hence less war); the interdependence or commercial peace (states with extensive economic ties find it irrational to fight one another, and interdependence has increased, hence less war); and the notion that people around the world are more anti-war than their forebears were. Concerning the downward trend in civil wars, he favors theories of economic growth (where commerce is enriching enough people, violence is less appealing a logic similar to that of the commercial peace thesis that applies among nations) and the end of the Cold War (which end r educed superpower support for rival rebel factions in so many Third-World countries). These are all plausible mechanisms for peace. What is more, none of them excludes any other; all could be working toward the same end. That would be somewhat puzzling, however. Is the world just lucky these days? How is it that an array of peace-inducing factors happens to be working coincidentally in our time, when such a magical array was absent in the past? The answer may be that one or more of these mechanisms reinforces some of the others, or perhaps some of them are mutually reinforcing. Some scholars, for example, have been focusing on whether economic growth might support democracy and vice versa, and whether both might support international cooperation, including to end civil wars. We would still need to explain how this charmed circle of causes got started, however. And here let me raise another factor, perhaps even less appealing than the nuclear peace thesis, at least outside of the United States. That factor is wh at

American hegemony for the global economy to remain open one powerful country must take the lead The theory is skeptical that international cooperation in economic matters can emerge or endure absent a hegemon
international relations scholars call hegemonyspecifically 1970s in the realm of international political economy. It asserts that for countries to keep barriers to trade and investment low . Depending on the theorist we consult, taking the lead entails paying for global publ ic goods (keeping the sea lanes open, providing liquidity to the international economy), coercion (threatening to raise trade barriers or withdraw military protection from countries that cheat on the rules), or both. . The suggest heresuggest, not testis that American

. A theory that many regard as discredited, but that refuses to go away, is called hegemonic stability theory. The theory emerged in the

distastefulness of such claims is self-evident: they imply that it is good for everyone the world over if one country has more wealth and power than others. More precisely, they imply that it has been good for the world that the United States has been so predominant. There is no obvious reason why hegemonic stability theory could not apply to other areas of international cooperation, including in security affairs, human rights, international law, peacekeeping (UN or otherwise), and so on. What I want to

hegemony might just be a deep cause of the steady decline of political deaths in the world

. How could that be? After all, the report states that United States is the third most war-prone country since 1945. Many of the deaths depicted in Figure 10.4 were in wars that involved the United States

(the Vietnam War being the leading one). Notwithstanding politicians claims to the contrary, a candid look at U.S. foreign policy reveals that the country is as ruthlessly self-interested as any other great power in history. The answer is that U.S.

hegemony might just be a deeper cause of the proximate causes outlined by Professor Mack. Consider economic growth and openness to foreign trade and investment, which (so say some theories) render violence irrational
. American power and policies may be responsible for these in two related ways. First, at least since the 1940s Washington has prodded other countries to embrace the market capitalism that entails economic openness and produces sustainable economic growth. The United States promotes capitalism for selfish reasons, of course: its own domestic system depends upon growth, which in turn depends upon the efficiency gains from economic interaction with foreign countries, and the more the better. During the Cold War most of its allies accepted some degree of market-driven growth. Second, the U.S.-led western victory in the Cold War damaged the credibility of alternative paths to developmentcommunism and import-substituting industrialization being the two leading ones and left market capitalism the best model. The end of the Cold War also involved an end to the billions of rubles in Soviet material support for regimes that tried to make these alternative models work. (

It

also, as Professor Mack notes,

eliminated

the superpowers

incentives to feed civil

violence in the Third World

.) What we call globalization is caused in part by the emergence of the United States as the global hegemon. The same case can be made, with somewhat more difficulty, concerning

the spread of democracy. Washington has supported democracy only under certain conditions the chief one being the absence of a popular anti-American movement in the target statebut those conditions have become much more widespread following

the collapse of communism. Thus in the 1980s the Reagan administration the most anti-communist government America ever had began to dump Americas old dictator friends, starting in the Philippines. Today Islamists tend to be anti-American, and so the Obama administration is skittish about democracy in Egypt and other authoritarian Muslim countries. But general U.S. material and moral support for liberal democracy remains strong.

Prefer meta-level elements of the international system to proximate causesstatistics and support for international initiatives proves its an impact filter on the escalation of every scenario Drezner 5 [Daniel, Gregg Easterbrook, Associate Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, War, and the dangers of extrapolation, may 25+ Daily explosions in Iraq, massacres in Sudan, the Koreas smakestaring at each other through artillery barrels, a Hobbesian war of all against all in eastern Congo--combat plagues human society as it has, perhaps, since our distant forebears realized that a tree limb could be used as a club. But here is something you would never guess from watching the news: War has entered a cycle of decline. Combat in Iraq and in a few other places is an exception to a significant global trend that has gone nearly unnoticed--namely that, for about 15 years, there have been steadily fewer armed conflicts worldwide. In fact, it is possible that a person's chance of dying because of war has, in the last decade or more, become the lowest in human history. Is Easterbrook right? He has a few more paragraphs on the numbers: The University of Maryland studies find the number of wars and armed conflicts worldwide peaked in 1991 at 51, which may represent the most wars happening simultaneously at any point in history. Since 1991, the number has fallen steadily. There were 26 armed conflicts in 2000 and 25 in 2002, even after the Al Qaeda attack on the United States and the U.S. counterattack against Afghanistan. By 2004, Marshall and Gurr's latest study shows, the number of armed conflicts in the world had declined to 20, even after the invasion of Iraq. All told, there were less than half as many wars in 2004 as there were in 1991. Marshall and Gurr also have a second ranking, gauging the magnitude of fighting. This section of the report is more subjective. Everyone agrees that the worst moment for human conflict was World War II; but how to rank, say, the current separatist fighting in Indonesia versus, say, the Algerian war of independence is more speculative. Nevertheless, the Peace and Conflict studies name 1991 as the peak post-World War II year for totality of global fighting, giving that year a ranking of 179 on a scale that rates the extent and destructiveness of combat. By 2000, in spite of war in the Balkans and genocide in Rwanda, the number had fallen to 97; by 2002 to 81; and, at the end of 2004, it stood at 65. This suggests the extent andintensity of global combat is now less than half what it was 15 years ago. Easterbrook spends the rest of the essay postulating the causes of this -- the decline in great power war, the spread of democracies, the growth of economic interdependence, and even the peacekeeping capabilities of the United Nations. Easterbrook makes a lot of good points -- most people are genuinely shocked when they are told that even in a post-9/11 climate, there has been a steady and persistent decline in wars and deaths from wars. That said, what bothers me in the piece is what Easterbrook leaves out. First, he neglects to mention the biggest reason for why war is on the decline -- there's a global hegemon called the United States right now. Easterbrook acknowledges that "the most powerful factor must be the end of the cold war" but he doesn't understand why it's the most powerful factor. Elsewhere in the piece he talks about the growing comity among the great powers, without discussing the elephant in the room: the reason the "great powers" get along is that the United States is much, much more powerful than anyone else. If you quantify power only by relative military capabilities, the U.S. is a great power, there are maybe ten or so middle powers, and then there are a lot of mosquitoes.[If the U.S. is so powerful, why can't it subdue the Iraqi insurgency?--ed. Power is a relative measure -- the U.S. might be having difficulties, but no other country in the world would have fewer problems.] Joshua Goldstein, who knows a thing or two about this phenomenon, made this clear in a

Christian Science Monitor op-ed three years ago: We probably owe this lull to the end of the cold war, and to a unipolar world order with a single superpower to impose its will in places like Kuwait, Serbia, and Afghanistan. The emerging world order is not exactly benign Sept. 11 comes to mind and Pax Americana delivers neither justice nor harmony to the corners of the earth. But a unipolar world is inherently more peaceful than the bipolar one where two superpowers fueled rival armies around the world. The long-delayed "peace dividend" has arrived, like a tax refund check long lost in the mail. The difference in language between Goldstein and Easterbrook highlights my second problem with "The End of War?" Goldstein rightly refers to the past fifteen years as a "lull" -- a temporary reduction in war and war-related death. The flip side of U.S. hegemony being responsible for the reduction of armed conflict is what would happen if U.S. hegemony were to ever fade away. Easterbrook focuses on the trends that suggest an ever-decreasing amount of armed conflict -- and I hope he's right. But I'm enough of a realist to know that if the U.S. should find its primacy challenged by, say, a really populous non-democratic country on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, all best about the utility of economic interdependence, U.N. peacekeeping, and the spread of democracy are right out the window. UPDATE: To respond to a few thoughts posted by the commenters: 1) To spell things out a bit more clearly -- U.S. hegemony important to the reduction of conflict in two ways. First, U.S. power can act as a powerful if imperfect constraint on pairs of enduring rivals (Greece-Turkey, India-Pakistan) that contemplate war on a regular basis. It can't stop every conflict, but it can blunt a lot of them. Second, and more important to Easterbrook's thesis, U.S. supremacy in conventional military affairs prevents other middle-range states -- China, Russia, India, Great Britain, France, etc. -- from challenging the U.S. or each other in a war. It would be suicide for anyone to fight a war with the U.S., and if any of these countries waged a war with each other, the prospect of U.S. intervention would be equally daunting. 2) Many commenters think what's important is the number of casualties, not the number of wars. This is tricky, however, because of the changing nature of warfighting and medical science. Compared to, say, World War II, wars now have far less of an effect on civilian populations. Furthermore, more people survive combat injuries because of improvements in medicine. These are both salutory trends, but I dunno if that means that war as a tool of statecraft is over -- if anything, it makes the use of force potentially more attractive, because of the minimization of spillover effects. 2,000 years of history prove deterrence is truebecause status-based competition is inevitable only hegemony solves Wolforth et. al 11 (William is the Daniel Webster Professor at Dartmouth College, where he teaches in the Department of Government. Edited by Michael Mastanduno, Professor of Government and Dean of Faculty at Dartmouth College, and G. John Ikenberry, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, Unipolarity, status competition, and great power war International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity pg. 48-49) BW General patterns of evidence Despite increasingly compelling findings concerning the importance of status seeking in human behavior, research on its connection to war waned some three decades ago. Yet empirical studies of the relationship between both systemic and dyadic capabilities distributions and war have continued to cumulate. If the relationships implied by the status theory run afoul of wellestablished patterns or general historical findings, then there is little reason to continue investigation them. The clearest empirical implication of the theory is that status competition is unlikely to cause great power military conflict in unipolar systems. IF status competition is an

important contributory cause of great power war, then, ceteris paribus, unipolar systems should be markedly less war-prone than bipolar and multipolar systems. And this appears to be the case. As Daniel Geller notes in a review of the empirical literature the only polar structure that appears to influence conflict probability is unipolarity. In addition, a larger number of studies at the dyadic level support the related expectation that narrow capabilities gaps and ambiguous or unstable capabilities hierarchies increase the probability of war. These studies are based entirely on post-sixteenth-century European history, and most are limited to the post-1815 period covered by the standard data sets. Through the systems coded as unipolar, nearunipolar, and hegemonic are all marked by a high concentration of capabilities in a single state, these studies operationalize unipolarity in a variety of ways, often very differently from the definition adopted here. An ongoing collaborative project looking at ancient interstate systems over the course of 2,000 years suggests that historical systems that come closest to the definition of unipolarity used here exhibit precisely the behavioral properties implied by the theory. As David C. Kangs research shows, the East Asian system between 1300 and 1900 was an unusually stratified unipolar structure, with an economically and military dominant China interacting with a small number of geographically proximate, clearly weaker East Asian states. Status politics existed, but actors were channeled by elaborate cultural understandings and interstate practices into clearly recognized ranks. Warfare was exceedingly rare, and the major outbreaks occurred precisely when the theory would predict : when Chinas capabilities waned, reducing the clarity of the underlying material hierarchy and increasing status dissonance for the lesser powers. Much more research is needed, but initial exploration of other arguably unipolar systems for example Rome, Assyria, the Amarna system appears consistent with the hypothesis.

2nc perm block

Group the perms Firsttheres no net benefit articulated in the 2ACthis means any risk that the perm fails means you default negdont allow new 1AR extrapolation because that makes it a rigged game for the aff when the debate starts that late and it kills block strategy Secondit still linksthe perm still includes a component of inward analysis that directly trades off with our foreign policy strategy Thirdloyalty to hegemony requires pure intentions of strengthening the U.S. the perm is deception and betrayal
Hanson, 3 (Victor Davis, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor Emeritus at California University, Fresno, Ph.D. from Stanford, Loyalty, How Quaint. National Review Online. Novem.ber 24. http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson112403v55iss.html) Critical to this cynicism is the reductio ad absurdum, where the extreme and rare case is cited first, not last-and as the primary, not the last-resort, reason to deprecate loyalty: "How can I support a country that promotes racism? A military that bombs children? A president that was not really elected?" And when deliberately targeting civilians in a time of peace is simplistically equated to injuring civilians while bombing enemy soldiers during war-death being the common denominator that trumps all considerations of circumstance, chance, intent, and result-how can I pledge my support to America in Afghanistan? The relativist further proclaims "Not in my name" to armed defense, but still expects that same government to ensure that hijacked airliners do not vaporize him at work. Yet loyalty demands confidence in some ability of the state to determine right and wrong, which is then the fountainhead for requisite action under difficult circumstances. It is always easier to slur unabashed loyalists as unthinking Neanderthals (conjuring up Vietnam-era slogans like "My country right or wrong") than to identify those who are sophisticated and disloyal as simple traitors. Historical revision has done its part as well in destroying the old virtue of national loyalty. If we teach our youth that World War II was mostly the Japanese internment camps (never mentioning the context of a liberal governor and president, hand-in-glove, panicking amid wartime hysteria) and Hiroshima (always apart from the fear of a blood-bath when hitting the shores of the Japanese mainland)-while ignoring the Rape of Nanking, Guadalcanal, or MacArthur's postbellum creation of a liberal Japanese societythen how can the citizen look to the past to galvanize his confidence in the present? Yet to the classical mind it was never a question of whether an Athenian or Roman was free from error. Rather the only rub was whether his country was at least better than the alternative. For example, how often do American schools really discuss the debate over women's rights or integrating the military after World War II in the context of how much worse the world outside the United States was at the time? Do we remind our students of the horrendous and bloody landscape between 1930 and 1950 beyond our shores-the mass murdering of races and religions in fascist Europe and Japan, the millions butchered in the Soviet Union and China, the tribal butchery and mayhem in Africa and India, and the iron-clad rule of dictators in Latin America? If one is taught, instead, that the United States has been the prime historical nexus of gender, race, and class pathology, then why should one feel any loyalty to it in the here and now? Finally, the most recent manifestation of internationalism has done its part to contribute to the demise of loyalty and patriotism. This idea of being a citizen not of the United States but

"of the world" is, of course, age-old in the West-a common enough, even trite, line from Socrates to Kant. But recent developments have elevated the concept from philosophical speculation to a common tenet of our growing therapeutic culture, as unquestioned as UNICEF cards, Nobel Peace Prize-winning opportunists, and cuddly banalities from a Kofi Annan. Fourthit destroys military morale and societal supportthat kills hegemony Kaplan 7 (Robert D. Kaplan, national correspondent of The Atlantic Monthly, The American Interest. On Forgetting the
Obvious, July-August, vol. 2, no. 6, www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=36&MId=2 AFM) Indeed, the political-military map of Eurasiaone third of the earth's landmassis changing radically. Europe is decreasingly a serious military power. Its own peoples see their respective militaries not as defenders of their homelands, but as civil servants in uniforms. A revitalized, more expeditionary NATO might mitigate this situation, but the overall trend will more likely see Europe devote itself to peacekeeping and disaster-response roles. While

Europe slowly recedes as a military factor, a chain of Asian countriesIsrael, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, India, China and North Korea, to name a fewhave assembled nuclear or chemical stockpiles, aided by ballistic missile delivery systems in more and more cases. The key element in judging the future of national militaries, however, will not be their order of battle or their weaponry. It will be the civilian-military relationship in each particular country. As we have seen, the rise of non-Western militaries will be sustained by the rise of non-Western nationalisms and
beliefs. As for the West, it is divided. European civilians take little pride in their standing armies; in America, however, civilians still do. Iraq, in this respect, has not been like Vietnam.

While Americans may have turned against the Iraq war, they have not turned against the troops there. If anything, in recent years, they have grown more appreciative of them. The upshot is that America has a first-class, professional military that is respected even if it is not reflective of society. But to see that America's circumstances are not as bad as those of the European Union is not the point. The point is to remember what we have forgotten. A military will not continue to fight and fight well for a society that could be losing faith in itself, even if that society doffs its cap now and again
to its warrior class. One man who has not forgotten is Air Force Colonel Robert Wheeler, a combat pilot I met with his B-2 squadron on Guam. Wheeler exemplifies the modern American officer: a Midwesterner with an engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin and post-graduate degrees, including a master of arts in strategic studies from the Naval War College. Wheeler, who has participated in several wars over the course of three administrations and also served as senior adviser to the U.S. Mission for the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, put the matter like this: "Decadence" is the essential condition of "a society which believes it has evolved to the point where it will never have to go to war." By eliminating war as a possibility, "it has nothing left to fight and sacrifice for, and thus no longer wants to make a difference." It is in precisely such a situation that historical memory becomes lost, and forgetfulness obscures the obvious. When pleasure and convenience become values in and of themselves, false ends displace necessary means. It is as Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz said: While

a good society should certainly never want to go to war, it must always be prepared to do so. But a society will not fight for what it believes, if all it believes is that it should never have to fight. The United States is still far from being a decadent country. And you cannot blame the American public from becoming disenchanted with a war that has gone on for so long and been so badly handled. The question is, in what
directionrelative to our current and future adversariesare we headed? Argue the question as we may, one thing is clear: We're fated to find out.

Fifththe whole rationale for voting affirmative is antithetical to the criticismthey advocate an abandonment of goals and a focus on intellectual analysiswe argue that we need to rally behind hegemony

2nc a2 d&g
D&Gs analysis of hegemony is methodologically suspect

Krishna, 93 Prof Poli Sci @ U of Hawaii (Summer, Sankaran, Alternatives, The Importance
of Being Ironic: A Postcolonial View on Critical International Relations Theory, pg. 402 -403) What is particularly compelling about the critique of postmodernist positions on subjectivity that emanates from writers such as Spivak and hooks is the fact that they connect it explicitly to the self-contained view of the West that informs many of these works. Thus, whereas Foucault's meticulous genealogies of the micropolitics of power in discursive practices have had such a tremendous impact, his work itself geopolitically isolates the West and is completely oblivious to a whole history of imperialism that surely has much to do with the very practices that he investigates. In this context, Spivak notes: I am suggesting ... that to buy a self-contained version of the West is to ignore its production by the imperialist project. Sometimes it seems as if the very brilliance of Foucault's analysis of the centuries of European imperialism produces a miniature version of the heterogeneous phenomenon: management of spacebut by doctors; development of administrationsbut in asylums; considerations of the peripherybut in terms of the insane, prisoners and children. The clinic, the asylum, the prison, the universityall seem to screen allegories that foreclose a reading of the broader narratives of imperialism. . . . "One can perfecdy well not talk about something because one doesn't know much about it," Foucault might murmur [Power/Knowledge p. 66]. Yet, we have already spoken of the sanctioned ignorance that every critic of imperialism must chart.40 If these works argue for the necessity of strategically essentializing identity or subjectivity, critical international theorists are by no means completely blind to the issue. It is more a matter of emphasis: focused on a critique of the essentialist conceits and the unitary notion of sovereignty that characterizes international theory, critical theorists seem to underestimate the implications for people interested in retaining a notion of political subjectivity. In this regard, Ashley and Walker note that a political essentializing of subjectivity may be necessary for others in their struggles. They eschew a blanket decrying any notion of subjectivity when they note: It would have been far better to have respected the paradoxical reality of one's local situation, a reality that radically subverts all pretenses that one's situation might be bounded, clearly represented, and represented as a paradigm for the strategic situation of others. Respecting this reality would not lead to any kind of introversion, imperial conceit, or smug indifference to others' circumstances. Least of all would it lead to passivity. It would instead encourage a patient labor of listening and questioning that seeks to explore possible connections between the strategic situations of others and one's own, always sensitive to the problem of expanding the space and resources by which the ongoing struggle for freedom may be undertaken there as well as here.41 Unfortunately, it is a fact that many of the thinkers and authors who have formed the inspirational core of critical international theory can be charged precisely with what Ashley and Walker describe as "introversion, imperial conceit, or smug indifference to others' circumstances." I am thinking here of Baudrillard, Lyotard, Chantal Mouffe, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, and Foucault, as far as their attitudes and statements regarding the Third World are concerned.42 It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate location for an explicit discussion of these imperial conceits than the discipline of international relations.

2nc a2 critical heg bad

Group the heg bad args - Theyve conceded Adolphs and Karakayalihegemony is a multifaceted institution and our alternatives act of combining intellectual forces with power politics allows heg to transcend the traditional binaries of IR to both accept diversity and become more benevolentnone of their evidence assumes our alts reforms The U.S. isnt an empirethey mistake multilateral agreements for U.S. dominance Ikenberry 4, Professor of Geopolitics. G. John Ikenberry. Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004. Is the United States an empire? If so, Ferguson's liberal empire is a more persuasive portrait than is Johnson's military empire. But ultimately, the notion of empire is
misleading -- and misses the distinctive aspects of the global political order that has developed around U.S. power. The United States has pursued imperial policies, especially toward weak countries in the periphery. But U.S. relations with Europe, Japan, China, and Russia cannot be described as imperial, even when "neo" or "liberal" modifies the term. The advanced democracies operate within a "security community" in which the use or threat of force is unthinkable. Their economies are deeply interwoven. Together, they form a political order built on bargains, diffuse reciprocity, and an array of intergovernmental institutions and ad hoc working relationships. This is not empire; it is a U.S.-led democratic political order that has no name or historical antecedent. To be sure, the neoconservatives in Washington have

trumpeted their own imperial vision: an era of global rule organized around the bold unilateral exercise of military power, gradual disentanglement from the constraints of multilateralism, and an aggressive effort to spread freedom and democracy. But this vision is founded on illusions of U.S. power. It fails to appreciate the role of cooperation and rules in the exercise and preservation of such power. Its pursuit would strip the United States of its legitimacy as the preeminent global power and severely compromise the authority that flows from such legitimacy. Ultimately, the neoconservatives are silent on the full range of global challenges and opportunities that face the United States. And as Ferguson notes, the American public has no desire to run colonies or manage a
global empire. Thus, there are limits on American imperial pretensions even in a unipolar era.

Ultimately, the empire debate misses the most important international development of recent years: the long peace among great powers, which some scholars argue marks the end of great-power war. Capitalism, democracy, and nuclear weapons all help explain this peace. But so too does the unique way in which the United States has gone about the business of building an international order. The United States' success stems from the creation and extension of international institutions that have limited and legitimated U.S. power. Even if we are an empirewere benevolent
Boot 3 (Neither new nor nefarious: the liberal empire strikes back Max Boot, fellow of the Council of foreign relations, Current History, Vol. 102, Iss. 667; pg. 361 Nov. 2003. Pro Quest)

If the Europeans, with their long tradition of colonialism, have found the price of empire too high, what chance is there that Americans, whose country was born in a revolt against empire, will replace the colonial administrators of old? Not much. The kind of imperial missions that the United States is likely to undertake today are very different. The Europeans fought to subjugate "natives"; Americans will fight to bring them democracy and the rule of law. (No one wants to put Iraq or Afghanistan permanently under the Stars and Stripes.) European rule was justified by racial prejudices; American interventions are justified by self-defense and human rights doctrines accepted (at least in principle) by all signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. European expeditions were unilateral; American missions are usually blessed with international approval, whether from the United Nations, NATO, or simply an ad hoc coalition. Even the US intervention in Iraq this year, widely held to be "unilateral," enjoys far more international support (and hence legitimacy) than, say, the French role in Algeria in the 1950s.

And, theres an empirical and statistical correlation between hegemony and rights Diamond 96, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 1996 (Larry, Why the United States must remain engaged, Orbis, Summer, Volume 40, Number 3)
In the past, global power has been an important reason why certain countries have become models for emulation by others. The global power of the United States, and of its Western democratic allies, has been a factor in the diffusion of democracy around the world, and certainly is crucial to our ability to help popular, legitimate democratic forces deter armed threats to their overthrow, or to return to power (as in Haiti) when they have been overthrown. Given the linkages among democracy, peace, and human rights - as well as the recent finding of Professor Adam Przeworski (New York University) that democracy is more likely to survive in a country when it is more widely present in the region - we should not surrender our capacity to diffuse and defend democracy. It is not only intrinsic to our ideals but important to our national security that we remain globally powerful and engaged - and that a dictatorship does not rise to hegemonic power within any major region.

No alternative can solve genocide or human rights like hegemony can Todd Gitlin, Writer for Mother Jones, an Investigative Activist Organization, 7/14/2003
("Goodbye, New World Order: Keep the Global Ideal Alive" - MotherJones.Com) http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/gitlin/2003/07/we_478_01.html The point is that this would be a terrible time to give up on internationalism. The simple fact that the US proved victorious in Iraq does not alter the following chain of truths: To push the world toward democratic rights, power must be legitimate; it is only legitimate if it is held to be legitimate; it is very unlikely to be legitimate if it is unilateral or close to unilateral; and the wider the base of power, the more likely it is to appear legitimate. Bush may have no doubt that American armed force in the Middle East is legitimate, and right now Americans may agree, but that won't do. Common sense alone should tell us not to overreach. Even with the best intentions in the world -- which hundreds of millions doubt -- the United States is simply not up to the global mission that the Bush administration embraces. This nation hasn't the staying power, the economic strength, the knowledge, the wisdom, or the legitimacy to command the continents. It is sheerest delusion to think otherwise. Meanwhile, it is an irony of the recent past that as the United States has lost prestige, the United Nations has gained it -- at least outside our borders. For all its demonstrable flaws, it retains some credibility -- no small thing in a world growing more anarchic. Even the U. N.'s sharpest critics concede that it learns from its mistakes. Having failed miserably to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda, it started

talking about the need to keep constabulary forces at the ready. Having been assigned much of the world's dirty work -- peacekeeping, public health, refugee and humanitarian aid -- its institutions accumulate the lore of experience. Resolution 1441, which the Security Council passed unanimously last year, might even be interpreted, strange to say, as a step forward in the enforcement of international law, for if the U. S. had been more adroit and patient diplomatically, the French and others could have been nudged into signing onto limited force a few months hence. In the end, the organization failed to prevent war, but its hopes have never been more necessary, its resurrection more indispensable. If internationalism is toothless, right now, that's not an argument against internationalist principle; it's an argument for implanting teeth. If what's left on the East River is nothing but a clunky hulk, there was still enough prestige left in the hulk that George W. Bush, master unilateralist, felt impelled to dally with the Security Council -- however reluctantly, however deceptively -- for months. No less a figure than his father's consigliore and former Secretary of State James W. Baker urged that course upon the president last summer. Going the Security Council route was the tribute George W. Bush paid to internationalism -- before underscoring his contempt for it by going to war on his own schedule. This is not the first time an international assembly of nation-states has failed abjectly to prove its mettle. Indeed, in 1945, the UN itself was built atop the site of an earlier breakdown. The rubble of the collapsed League of Nations, which had failed to arrest blatant aggression by Italy, Japan, and Germany, had to be cleared away before the UN could rise from the ashes. Yet rise it did. And people were inspired -- and frightened -- by it. Even as a spectral presence, the UN was substantial enough to arouse right-wingers to put up billboards urging the US to flee its clutches. Recently, George W. Bush fondly remembered those signs, conspicuous around Midland, Texas, during his early years. To Midland's America Firsters, the U. N. had a reputation as demonic as it was, to this writer, benign. In the General Assembly building, which my friends and I frequented in high school, the ceiling was left unfinished -- to signal, we were told, that world peace was unfinished. What if the symbolism was indeed a pointer toward a different order of things? It is not always easy to tell the difference between dead symbols and promising ones. Push came to shove, and the UN was mainly an intimation -- at most an inspiration. Neither as peacemaker nor peacekeeper was it the world government-in-the-making that some desired and others feared. It was a force in Korea only because the Russians agreed not to play. It was useless in Vietnam. During the endless Israel-Palestine war, it has been bootless. In the 1990s, it failed miserably to stop Serb aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo. It stood by during the Rwandan genocide, too, though its own military commander on the scene, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, pleaded desperately for UN reinforcements. You can see why realists like to smirk and claim it's hopelessly idealistic to think that the UN could ever amount to anything more than a debating society whose main achievement has been to reserve a lot of Manhattan parking spots. Interestingly, Dallaire, who was shattered by UN failure in Rwanda, does not sneer. In retirement, he continues campaigning to strengthen world governance. "You can't on one side, say the UN is screwing it up and we're going to go to war, and on other side not give the UN the resources," he said recently. "It is not the UN that failed [in Iraq]. But it is the permanent five [members of the Security Council] in particular. If they don't want the UN to be effective, it won't be." Pause with this elementary observation a moment. The reasons for the UN's weakness are several, but not the least is that -- no surprise here -- the most powerful nations want it weak. They like the principle of national sovereignty, and then some, as the recent war amply demonstrates. It will take a long, steady, popular campaign to override the inhibitions. Campaigners might start by underscoring some modest successes. For all the impediments thrown in its way -- and not only by the US -- the UN has done constructive work. It helped restore decent governments in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bosnia. It helps keep the peace on

the Golan Heights. On a thousand unnoticed fronts, it daily comes to the aid of refugees, the sick, the malnourished. A top UN official recently told me that Secretary General Kofi Annan was inches away from a partition-ending deal in long-suffering Cyprus, only to lose momentum with the distraction of the Bush-Saddam confrontation. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we need not less of the UN, but much more -- more efficient, better led, better funded. Rebuild The Destroyed Nations: Now there's an agenda for a peace movement. But much of the global movement that sprang up to oppose the Iraq war proceeded to subside into easy chants of "US Out" -- an analogue to the right wing's "US Out of the UN." This sort of short-circuit unilateralism begs the tough questions about the uses (as well as abuses) of international intervention. "US Out" resounds more ringingly if you refrain from thinking about what actual Afghans and actual Iraqis need -- constitutional rights, law enforcement, infrastructure. Protest has its time and place, but what's needed now is politics -- politics to plan the unilateralists' exit from office, combined with practical pressure, here and now, to solve practical problems. We must not permit ourselves to retreat noisily into protest's good night. Most of all, internationalism needs more than a nudge here and there -- it needs a jump-start, a riveting proof that multilateral action can change facts on the ground. Here's one idea: What if the UN and Europe decided to take on the toughest assignment? There is no more stringent test for internationalism's future than what seems the world's most intractable trauma: The endless Israel-Palestine war, which has outlasted a thousand manifestos, plans, meetings about meetings. The new postwar situation might just be promising, the Bush administration just possibly susceptible to pressure. Practical, peace-seeking Jews and Palestinians ought to get in on the pressure; so should Europeans looking for payback, not least Tony Blair. And we ought to be thinking of a practical role for a UN, or joint UN-NATO constabulary. As Tony Klug of Britain's Council for Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue has pointed out on openDemocracy.net, the two bloodied, intertwined, myopic peoples need far more than a road map: they need enforcement. Klug's idea is an international protectorate for the West Bank and Gaza. Some combination of the UN, NATO, and various national forces would play various parts. The point would be to supplant the Israeli occupation, relieve the immediate suffering, and guarantee secure borders. Such a scheme would seem to have taken leave of this earth. The U. S. won't permit it....Sharon won't permit it....The Europeans won't pay for it....The Israelis won't trust the UN, or the Palestinians, who won't trust the Israeli. But what is the alternative? More living nightmares? Occupation and massacre in perpetuity? Military enforcement on a global scale has been left to ad hoc coalitions -sometimes with blue helmets, sometimes not. That won't do. To put human rights on the ground, avert genocides to come, and -- not incidentally -- help protect the United States from the more vengeful of empire's resentful subjects (funny, their not understanding how good our power is for them), we need a more muscular global authority -- including a global constabulary. Imagine, say, a flexible force permitted to commit, say, 10,000 troops if a simple majority, eight members, of the Security Council signed on, but expandable to 50,000 if the vote were unanimous. Wouldn't Europe have been in a stronger position to avert Bush's war if such a force had been in readiness to enforce resolutions of the Security Council? A wise superpower would know it needs to share responsibility -- which entails sharing the force that makes responsibility real. Of course such a denouement is scarcely around the corner, nor is there any guarantee that it is destined to come at all. Like the abolition of slavery, or the unity of Europe, it surely will not come without pain or error, nor will it be the work of a single generation. But again, what is the alternative? Tyranny and unilateralism; hubris and mile-high resentment. In the world as it is, effective moral force cannot preclude military force. If internationalists don't press more strongly for international law and multilateralist order, one thing is certain: we shall be left with protests, playing catch-up forever, waiting for "told you so" moments. "No" is not a foreign

policy. Coupled with the properly skeptical "no" must be the transformative "yes" -- not a grudging, perfunctory afterthought, but international law with enforcers; not empire, but human rights with guns.

Inevitableloss of hegemony causes other countries with imperial ambitions to go to war for powereven if heg is imperialist, collapse just means other countries will be even more so Loss of hegemony makes us militantly aggressive
Ikenberry 4, G. John Ikenberry, (Prof of IR at Princeton), March/April 2004, Foreign Affairs, www.globalpolicy.org/empire/analysis/2004/03illusions.htm Two implications follow from the United States' strange condition as "economically dependent and politically useless." First, the United States is becoming a global economic predator, sustaining itself through an increasingly fragile system of "tribute taking." It has lost the ability to couple its own economic gain with the economic advancement of other societies. Second, a weakened United States will resort to more desperate and aggressive actions to retain its hegemonic position. Todd identifies this impulse behind confrontations with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Indeed, in his most dubious claim, Todd argues that the corruption of U.S. democracy is giving rise to a poorly supervised ruling class that will be less restrained in its use of military force against other democracies, those in Europe included. For Todd, all of this points to the disintegration of the American empire. Todd is correct that the ability of any state to dominate the international system depends on its economic strength. As economic dominance shifts, American unipolarity will eventually give way to a new distribution of power. But, contrary to Todd's diagnosis, the United States retains formidable socioeconomic advantages. And his claim that a rapacious clique of frightened oligarchs has taken over U.S. democracy is simply bizarre. Most important, Todd's assertion that Russia and other great powers are preparing to counterbalance U.S. power misses the larger patterns of geopolitics. Europe, Japan, Russia, and China have sought to engage the United States strategically, not simply to resist it. They are pursuing influence and accommodation within the existing order, not trying to overturn it. In fact, the great powers worry more about a detached, isolationist United States than they do about a United States bent on global rule. Indeed, much of the pointed criticism of U.S. unilateralism reflects a concern that the United States will stop providing security and stability, not a hope that it will decline and disappear.

And, prefer our scholarshiptheir authors participate in intellectual groupthink and have no falsifiable evidence
Leonard 6 (Mark, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, Drinking the Kool-Aid: an Anatomy of the Iraq Debacle, Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/13, ebsco)

This latest crop suggests that the quest to rebuild Iraq failed precisely because it remained in the realm of ideas, untarnished by messy reality. Inside Baghdad's Green Zone, where U.S. occupation authorities live and work, the phrase "drinking the KoolAid" is used to describe the collective process of self-delusion, internal spin, and groupthink that has led otherwise effective people to lurch from blunder to blunder in Iraq, bringing the country from liberation to the brink of civil war. You've probably heard the reference to the 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, where the psychotic cult figure Jim Jones and 913 of his People's Temple followers drank a Kool-Aid fruit punch laced with cyanide. These books show just how much ideological Kool-Aid has been

consumed by those who have sought to bring democracy to Iraq. They present the reader with an anatomy of isolation, a forensic dissection of a decision-making process quadruply insulated from reality. And, no risk of their War on Terror examplesregime change was a specific strategythat doesnt indict hegemony overall

Bennis 3 (Director of the Transnational Institute, April,

http://www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/advocacy/protest/iraq/2003/0530global.htm)

Claiming the right of pre-emptive war would not, by itself, be proof of empire. Even launching a war more accurately defined as an aggressive preventive war (since a preemptive attack implies an imminent threat) does not by itself represent such proof. But the eagerness, of Washington's powerful to launch this war, without United Nations authorization and with such reckless disregard for the consequences, with the expressed aim of toppling the government of an independent country, albeit one mortally wounded from war and twelve years of murderous sanctions, may represent just such proof. Certainly one can argue, as Paul Schroeder does, that there is a critical distinction between hegemony and empire. (The History News Network, Center for History and the New Media, George Mason University, 3 February 2003.) "Hegemony," he writes, "means clear, acknowledged leadership and dominant influence by one unit within a community of units not under a single authority. A hegemon is first among equals; an imperial power rules over subordinates. A hegemonic power is the one without whom no final decision can be reached within a given system; its responsibility is essentially managerial, to see that a decision is reached. An imperial power rules the system, imposes its decision when it wishes." Schroeder concludes that the US "is not an empire-not yet." Writing some weeks before Washington's invasion of Iraq, he describes the US as "at this moment a wannabe empire, poised on the brink. The Bush Doctrine proclaims unquestionably imperialist ambitions and goals, and its armed forces are poised for war for empire-formal empire in Iraq through conquest, occupation, and indefinite political control, and informal empire over the whole Middle East through exclusive paramountcy." The rapid overthrow of the Iraqi regime, with its attendant moments of exhilaration and long hours of horror for tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, has pushed Bush administration officials over that brink. Their smug "other Middle Eastern governments better learn their lesson" attitude indicates an even fortified sense of self-righteousness and the justice of their cause. If Washington has not yet consolidated its global empire, the drive towards it is now undeniable. Ultimately though, what is key is less the debate over whether the US today is an aggressive hegemon or an imperial center bound for global domination, than understanding the political significance and consequence of this historical moment. US tanks control the Euphrates valley and US troops occupy the sites of the earliest recorded history of humanity. But US policymakers willing to look out beyond their own euphoria will see not only a devastated and dishonored Iraq facing at best an uncertain and difficult future; not only an Iraqi population whose largest components are calling equally for "No to Saddam Hussein" and "No to the US" in their street protests; but as well a humiliated and enraged Arab world; a shattered system of alliances; and a constellation

of international opposition growing that includes Washington's closest allies and an emerging global people's movement saying no to Washington's war, and no to Washington's empire. If war in Iraq were the only clear imperial thrust of the Bush administration, it would be tempting to reduce it to the resource-grabbing of an oil industry administration, the actions of an irresponsible hegemony soon to be taken to task by the rest of the global community of units. Opposition to the war could indeed be reduced to the demand of "no blood for oil." But when taken in the context of even longer-standing, and more visionary efforts to reshape regional and global power relations, the Iraq war emerges far more as exemplar of a broad and entrenched pattern, than as an isolated proof of US intent. Andno alternativesabsent heg, therell be international anarchythats Kagan all their evidence assumes a transition to multipolarity, not a transition to nothing