American Exceptionalism Kritik

1NC

1NC American Exceptionalism Kritik

The aff is an attempt to convert non-believers to the
religion of American law of war, eliminating difference and
producing a global American legal consciousness
Mattei 3 (Ugo, Hastings College of the Law; Univ. of Turin, Italy, A Theory of
Imperial Law: A Study on U.S. Hegemony and the Latin Resistance, Global Jurist
Frontiers , Vol. 3 [2003], Iss. 2, Art. 1)
Neo-colonial practices in the Third World are to a great extent originated by the evolution of
advanced capitalism in the United States (what I have referred to as the neo- American model) and by its
diffusion at the periphery within a reactive philosophy of governance that , outside of
effective reactive institutions such as the one developed in the United States, paves the way to
exploitive opportunistic behavior.71 Of course, it would be thoroughly inaccurate to see
colonialism as a vehicle of Americanization. Only post-colonialism can be fairly seen as such.72 The
unfolding of U.S. rule has indeed been a phenomenon that is better captured by the
notion of imperialism than by that of outright colonialism.73 To begin with, imperialism is not limited as
a relationship between developed and developing, or between a colonizing nation-state and colonized

An imperialistic desire attempts the global imposition of its

values and fundamental structures of government and modes of thought
worldwide. In this sense, it is clear that communism has been an imperialistic attempt aiming at final
worldwide success. Imperialism requires an imperial ideal , a stronger ideological apparatus
that can be reached only by means of strong and well-developed ideological
institutions.74 The ideals of a global market, of international human rights, of
freedom throughout the world, and most notably of the rule of law perform this ideological
role.75 Imperialism does not necessarily need to be a conscious effort ,76 nor must
it spell out an imperialistic doctrine, prescribing steps towards a final condition of imperial
hegemony.77 The recent transformation of international law from a decentralized
system of foreign sovereigns to a progressively more centralized legal system
governed by professional elites staffing (international) courts of law is a more or less
conscious reproduction of the reactive philosophy of the U.S. government by courts .
As such, it is reproducing on the world scale a professional legal ideology of
neutrality, democracy, and rule of law, granting legitimacy to the
worldwide exercise of the United Statess unprecedented political strength. Just as
U.S. domestic doctrines of separation of powers, political questions, and
sovereign immunity allow the U.S. government a quite extended and unnoticed
degree of unrestricted power,78 similarly an international law governed by courts
of law (on the Nuremberg model), rather than by negotiation between decentralized
sovereign States, should produce the faade of legitimacy for the exercise
of worldwide hegemony. Of course, the fear of counter-hegemonic use of such an international
people kept under foreign rule.

centralized legal system explains the reluctance of the U.S. government to support the International Criminal
Court.79 The moment is ripe for introducing, within the legal field of international law, the notion of counterhegemony as used in this article.

American exceptionalism allows the spread of ideals in the

name of innocence covering the cloaks of imperialism,
extermination, and racism
Cuadro 11 (Mariela, PhD in IR at the National University of La Plata, BA in Sociology at the University of
Buenos Aires, Master in IR at the National University of La Plata (IRI), Researcher at the Department of Middle East
in International Relations Institute (IRI) at the University of La Plata, Member and researcher at the Center for
International Political Reflection (CERPI), Universalisation of liberal democracy, American exceptionalism and
racism" Transcience Volume 2Issue 2, http://www2.hu-berlin.de/transcience/Vol2_Issue2_2011_30_43.pdf)
The two main ideological tendencies in US -conservatism and liberalism - share the same historical roots:
they both derive from classical liberalism (Rosati, 1993). This explains that, while their conception of domestic
politics differs (liberals defend some kind of state intervention in the countrys economy, conservatives are in favor
of a more laissez-faire economy; liberals encourage individual freedoms, conservatives try to protect the

in terms of Foreign Policy they can find some points in

common. As a current example, we cite the interventionist policies of both George W. Bush and
Barack Obama (of course, with differences that are not taken into account here) destined to protect the
civilian populations of Iraq and Libya, respectively. This is expressed in the moralization of
US Foreign Policy (Rosati, 1993: 394), based on the assumptions of innocence,
benevolence and exceptionalism. The three are extremely intertwined. Indeed, from US
rhetoric, the US Foreign Policy is always aimed at doing good, and acts are carried
out in the name of Humanity. They, therefore, assume that when others damage them
(in one way or another) they have become victims of evil people. This is how the US
denies its power and political involvement in the world, putting their actions and
those of the others outside History. In this sense, the repeated rhetorical question
that George W. Bush asked himself and the Americans about why the terrorist acts
of 9-11 happened had only one possible answer : evil. ...why would this have happened to
traditional institutions e.g., the family-),

America? Why would somebody do this to our country? These attacks are from some people who just are so evil its
hard for me to describe why. Its hard for us to comprehend why somebody would think the way they think, and
devalue life the way they devalue, and to harm innocent people the way they harmed innocent people. Its just hard

Innocence does not just imply not recognizing historical and

political responsibilities, but it also has another effect: prevent critique of the self .
Indeed, innocence can be defined as a constant need to put ones own problems out.
This mechanism generates the closure of the totality, the homogenization of the
We, through the establishment of a difference . It is in this sense that David Campbell argues
that United States foreign policy [is] understood as a political practice central to the
constitution, production, and maintenance of American political identity
(Campbell, 1998: 8) But the most important line uniting liberals and conservatives is the
assumption of American exceptionalism5, which -in order to put the US in the field of history- can
be understood as a fervent nationalism . This assumption, which emerges at specific moments,
has very deep roots, going back to 1630 and arrival of Puritans in North America. Nevertheless, the way
in which they understand this constructed assumption that reified takes the form of a factindicates which political impulse prevails : internationalism or isolationism. Indeed, exceptionalism
for all of us adults to explain.4

can be read in two different ways. On the one hand, it can be understood in terms of uniqueness (this reading
comes from Tocquevilles Democracy in America), in which case America6 is considered a model to be emulated
-the city upon the hill-. On the other hand, exceptional can be understood in the sense of being the best socio-

both readings permit imperialist policies based on

the idea of superiority that underlies American exceptionalism . Indeed, the belief in
being the chosen people that accompanied the Puritans formed the basis of their
right to kill the natives inhabiting the conquered territory. In the same sense, this led to
economic model. From our point of view,

the 19th centurys idea of the manifest destiny to expand democracy from coast
to coast in North America, a discourse which had the effect of conquering Mexican territory, for example. The
meeting of exceptionalism, liberalism and the colossal US military machine
is explosive. Because the idea of exceptionalism (reified as it is, not being criticized)
expresses some sort of superiority that not only gives the US the right of lecturing
other people on how to organize their societies, but also establishes a sort of
hierarchy of life value, at the top of which rest American lives. If we add to this the
disproportionate military apparatus and a liberal discourse affirming US action is
carried out in the name of Humanity and not because of self-interest, the real
possibility to carry out extermination policies towards those who do not
agree with the way of life that is being imposed on them emerges . This is one
way to understand a fundamental US paradox: While it has had the leading role in constructing the most complex

it has, at the same time, constructed a colossal

military machine -without a peer competitor- that cannot be understood solely in terms of defense (of
Humanity). What we are trying to emphasize is the intrinsic linkage between US
democracy and violence and the danger that accompanies it when used in the
name of universality, because it can lead to an exterminating violence. As Benjamin
international legal order to maintain peace,

once said, this violence is not just a conservative one, but can act as a founder one (1995). And this is important
too:

No democracy works without violence and -we do not have to forget- violence is in
the origins of US democracy. Indeed, it was built on the genocide of natives
and slavery. Furthermore, must consider this an open chapter in history: in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Iraq (just
for citing some examples) US is currently exercising founder violence . Whether the
exceptionalism is understood as an example or as a right and a duty to impose
particular values on other people, both meanings shed light on the sense of
superiority that permeates US identity. We can affirm thus that American
exceptionalism is no more than a form of racism. This assertion deserves further
development.

Our alternative is to vote negative to reject the Affirmatives

notion of American exceptionalism its time to step out of our
superpower pedestal
Lifton 3 (Robert Jay, Visiting Professor of Psychiatry @ Harvard Medical School,
Superpower Syndrome, pgs. 190-192)
To renounce the claim to total power would bring relief not only to everyone else, but, soon enough, to
citizens of the superpower itself. For to live out superpower syndrome is to place oneself on a
treadmill that eventually has to break down. In its efforts to rule the world and to
determine history, the United States is, in actuality, working against itself, subjecting itself to constant
failure. It becomes a Sisyphus with bombs, able to set off explosions but unable to cope with its own burden, unable to roll its heavy stone to
the top of the hill in Hades. Perhaps the crucial step in ridding ourselves of superpower syndrome is recognizing
that history cannot be controlled, fluidly or otherwise. Stepping off the superpower
treadmill would enable us to cease being a nation ruled by fear. Renouncing
omnipotence might make our leaders -or at least future leaders-themselves less fearful of
weakness, and diminish their inclination to instill fear in their people as a means
of enlisting them for military efforts at illusory world hegemony. Without the need for
invulnerability, everyone would have much less to be afraid of. What we call the historical process is largely

unpredictable, never completely manageable. All the more so at a time of radical questioning of
the phenomenon of nationalism and its nineteenth- and twentieth-century
excesses. In addition, there has been a general decline in confidence in the nation
state, and in its ability to protect its people from larger world problems such as global warming or weapons of
mass destruction. The quick but dangerous substitute is the superpower , which seeks to fill the void with
a globalized, militarized extension of American nationalism. The traditional nation state, whatever its shortcomings, could at least claim to be

The superpower claims to

represent everyone on earth, but it lacks legitimacy in the eyes of those it
seeks to dominate, while its leaders must struggle to mask or suppress their own
doubts about any such legitimacy. The American superpower is an artificial
construct, widely perceived as legitimate, whatever the acquiescence it coerces in others. Its reign is therefore
inherently unstable. Indeed, its reach for full-scale world domination marks the beginning of its decline. A large task for the world,
grounded in a specific geographic area and a particular people or combination of peoples.

and for the Americans in particular, is the early recognition and humane management of its decline.

Framework

Epistemology Bad

Their epistemology is grounded in flawed notion of U.S.

exceptionalism that is the root of global problems
Everest 12 (Larry, author of Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda, political
writer for Revolution, Confronting American Chauvinism Counterpunch, July 24 th, 2012,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/24/confronting-american-chauvinism/)

Ive covered and opposed U.S. wars and imperialism for yearsfrom Vietnam back in
the day to reporting on Iran s 1979 revolution against the U.S.-backed tyrant and torturer, the Shah;
investigating the poison cloud that spewed from a Union Carbide plant massacring 10,000 to 15,000
people in Bhopal India; seeing the made-in-USA tear gas and rubber bullets used by Israel to
injure and kill Palestinians in Gaza in the 1988-89 Intifada; helping document the murderous impact of
U.S. sanctions on Iraq, which killed over 500,000 Iraqi children in the 1990s; and writing about the
imperialist agenda behind the U.S. war on terror, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and
the current threats against Iran. Over these years, many have protested and spoken
out against U.S. wars and interventions, and there have been some bold stands
against U.S. chauvinism, including raising the Vietnamese National Liberation Front flag during Vietnam War
protests, and standing with the Iranian people and declaring Its not our Embassy! during the 1979-1981 hostage crisis. And
the sentiment that its wrong to value American lives over the lives of
others has spread (although it must be said that far too often opposition to U.S. crimes is framed in terms of the cost
to America and Americans, thus reinforcing the very ideology used to justify these crimes). But because the
capitalist-imperialist system has remained in place, the U.S. continues to rain death
and destruction across the planetvia ecological damage and climate change,
wars, and imperialist-driven impoverishment and dislocation. And with their system
facing new challenges and stresses, the U.S. rulers whether Democrats or Republicansare even
more stridently promoting America No. 1 exceptionalism and the baseless notion
that American lives are worth more than others . Lets be clearthis poisonous idea is one
reason there is way, way too much silence when Obama illegally assassinates
people in Yemen, Pakistan, or Somalia. Or when Afghans are massacred, tortured, or
brutalized by U.S. troops. Why does Mr. Barack change-you-can-believe in Obama end every
major speech with May God bless America? Every issuefrom jobs to manufacturing to the
environmentgets filtered through whats good for America, and how we can keep
America No. 1. All this is sickening and immoral. As U.S. chauvinism grows ever
more hideous, going straight up against the America uber alles mentality and
broadly popularizing the outlook and morality expressed by those two BAsics quotes is right on
time! The quotes plant a radically different pole, and call for a radically different morality and imagination. If you really start thinking
about what putting the world first and not valuing American lives above others actually means, the implications are deep and far

You start thinking in terms of facing and working on the problems of

humanity and the planet as a wholenot just Americas (or your own). You
start thinking about how the vast majority of people around the world billions of people
are forced to live and the unspeakable abuses they suffer . You think about the war
being waged in one form or another on women half of humanity! You follow whats
happening to the planets ecosystems. You learn about and face the fact that a very
reaching.

small handful of people centered in a few powerful imperialist countries are

exploiting and strangling millions upon millions. And you start thinking about what
its really going to take to end these needless nightmaresnot just being sorry or
concerned about them.

American policy has created a state of denial

Ferreri 14 (Allen J., Master of Science in Education from the New York College at Brockport Department of
Education and Human Development, Challenging American Exceptionalism in the 21 st Century Brockport, January
2014, http://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1369&context=ehd_theses)

These policies have created a sense of American denial. Today, Americans are in a
state of denial concerning where their country stands in the world because, like Pei
states, Americans want to look forward and believe that their values and institutions
will carry them onto better pastures. Americans are lulled into a state of trust,
believing that American leaders will make the best decisions for the country, not
just for themselves and their wealthy friends. Recent history may paint a
different picture. The American spirit and the American Dream feed this
denial filled nationalism, as Americans are told as young children that they can
grow up to be whatever they want as long as they work hard and go to school.
Americans are indoctrinated in the idea that they will have a job and be successful
as long as they adhere to the American way of life and work hard. However, there is
an increasing rate of unemployed college graduates, and the next generation of
Americans seems destined to not surpass the accomplishments of their parents and
grandparents generations. Is this brand of American nationalism and foreign
policies of American exceptionalism possibly due for a revision? Could it be that this
nationalist pride and exuberant exceptionalist ideology created an America that
through its actions is not exceptional at all, but is in fact is the complete opposite:
unremarkable at best, Ferreri 13 destined to be remembered as the country that
squandered its moment of greatness?

Roll of the Ballot

Insert your own role of the ballot
Marable 84 (Manning, Director of the Institute for Research in African American
Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University, Speaking Truth to Power:
Essays on Race, Resistance and Radicalism p.198-99)
Black Americans also comprehend that peace is not the absence of conflict. As long
as institutional racism, apartheid, and social class inequality exist, social tensions
will erupt into confrontations. Most blacks recognize that peace is the realization of
social justice and human dignity for all nations and historically oppressed peoples.
Peace more than anything else is the recognition of the oneness of humanity. As Paul
Robeson, the great black artist and activist, observed in his autobiographical work Here I Stand, I learned that the
essential character of a nation is determined not by the tipper classes, but by the common people, and that the

Any people who

experience generations of oppression gain an awareness of the innate commonalty
of all human beings, despite their religions, ethnic, and political differences. In order to
reverse the logic of the Cold War, white Americans must begin to view themselves as a
distinct minority in a world dominated by people of color. Peace between the superpowers
is directly linked to the evolution of democratic rights, economic development, and
social justice in the third world periphery. Black intellectuals, front W.E.B. DuBois to the present,
Common people of all nations are truly brothers in the great family of mankind.

have also comprehended their unique role in the struggle for peace arid social justice. Cultural and intellectual

All art and aesthetics, scientific inquiry, and social

studies are directly or indirectly linked to the material conditions of human beings,
and the existing set of power relationships which dictates the policies of the modern
state. When intellectual artists fail to combat racial or gender inequality, or the
virus of anti-Semitism, their creative energies may indirectly contribute to the
ideological justification for prejudice and social oppression. This is equally the case
for the problem of war and peace. Through the bifurcation of our moral and social
consciences against the cold abstractions of research and value-free social
science, we may console ourselves by suggesting that we play 110 role in the escalation of the Cold
War political culture. By hesitating to dedicate ourselves and our work to the pursuit of
peace and social justice, we inevitably contribute to the dynamics of national
chauvinism, Militarism, and perhaps set the ideological basis necessary for World
War III. Paul Robeson, during the Spanish Civil War, expressed the perspective of the black Peace tradition as a
activity for it is inseparable from politics.

passionate belie in humanity: Every artist, every scientist must decide, now, where he stands, life has no
alternative. There are no impartial observers. The commitment to contest public dogmas, the recognition that we
share with the Soviet people a Community of social, economic, and cultural interests, force the intellectual into the

if the peace consensus of black America

remains isolated from the electoral mainstream, the results may be the termination
of humanity itself.
terrain of ideological debate. If we fail to do so, and

Alternative

Alternative Solvency
Hold America to high skepticism rejection and scrutiny
are best
Greenwald 13 (Grant, J.D. from NYU Law School, B.A. in Philosophy from George Washington
University, 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, former Gaurdian columnist, The premises and
purposes of American exceptionalism Guardian, Februrary 18th, 2013,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/18/american-exceptionalism-north-korea-nukes)
Nobody can reasonably dispute that North Korea is governed by a monstrous regime and that it would be better if they lacked a

What interests me here is that

highlighted claim: that the US "is the greatest country in world history", and
therefore is entitled to do that which other countries are not. This declaration always
nuclear weapons capability. That isn't what interests me about this.

genuinely fascinates me. Note how it's insufficient to claim the mere mantle of Greatest Country on the Planet. It's way beyond that:

The very
notion that this distinction could be objectively or even meaningfully measured is absurd.
But the desire to believe it is so strong, the need to proclaim one's own
unprecedented superiority so compelling, that it's hardly controversial to say it
despite how nonsensical it is. The opposite is true: it has been vested with the
status of orthodoxy. What I'm always so curious about is the thought process behind
this formulation. Depending on how you count, there are 179 countries on the planet. The probability that you will happen
the Greatest Country Ever to Exist in All of Human History (why not The Greatest Ever in All of the Solar Systems?).

to be born into The Objectively Greatest One, to the extent there is such a thing, is less than 1%. As the US accounts for roughly 5%

Those are fairly long odds for the

happenstance of being born into the Greatest Country on Earth. But if you extend
the claim to the Greatest Country that Has Ever Existed in All of Human History,
then the probability is minute: that you will happen to be born not only into the greatest country on earth, but will
be born at the precise historical time when the greatest of all the countries ever to exist is thriving. It's similar to
winning the lottery: something so mathematically improbable that while our intense desire to
believe it may lead us on an emotional level wildly to overestimate its likelihood, our rational faculties should tell
us that it is unlikely in the extreme and therefore to doubt seriously that it will
happen. Do people who wave the Greatest Country in All of Human History flag
engage that thought process at all? I'm asking this genuinely. Given the sheer
improbability that it is true, do they search for more likely explanations for why they
believe this? In particular, given that human beings' perceptions are shaped by the
assumptions of their culture and thus have a natural inclination to view their own
culture as superior, isn't it infinitely more likely that people view their society as
objectively superior because they're inculcated from birth in all sorts of overt and
subtle ways to believe this rather than because it's objectively true ? It's akin to those who
of the world's population, the probability that you will be born into it is 1/20.

believe in their own great luck that they just happened to be born into the single religion that is the One True One rather than

the tendency of the

human brain to view the world from a self-centered perspective should render
suspect any beliefs that affirm the objective superiority of oneself and one's own
group, tribe, nation, etc. The "truths" we're taught to believe from birth - whether nationalistic, religious, or cultural should be the ones treated with the greatest skepticism if we continue to embrace them in
suspecting that they believe this because they were taught to from birth. At the very least,

adulthood, precisely because the probability is so great that we've embraced them because we were trained to, or because our
subjective influences led us to them, and not because we've rationally assessed them to be true (or, as in the case of the British
Cooke, what we were taught to believe about western nations closely aligned to our own). That doesn't mean that what we're taught
to believe from childhood is wrong or should be presumed erroneous.

We may get lucky and be trained from

the start to believe what is actually true. That's possible. But we should at least regard
those precepts with great suspicion, to subject them to particularly rigorous
scrutiny, especially when it comes to those that teach us to believe in our own
objective superiority or that of the group to which we belong . So potent is the subjective prism,
especially when it's implanted in childhood, that I'm always astounded at some people's certainty of their own objective superiority

It's certainly true that Americans are justifiably proud of

certain nationalistic attributes: class mobility, ethnic diversity, religious freedom, large immigrant populations, life("the greatest country in world history").

improving technological discoveries, a commitment to some basic liberties such as free speech and press, historical progress in
correcting some of its worst crimes.

But all of those virtues are found in equal if not, at this point,
greater quantity in numerous other countries. Add to that mix America's
shameful attributes - its historic crimes of land theft, genocide, slavery and racism,
its sprawling penal state, the company it keeps on certain human rights abuses, the
aggressive attack on Iraq, the creation of a worldwide torture regime, its
pervasive support for the world's worst tyrannies - and it becomes not just untenable, but
laughable, to lavish it with that title. This is more than just an intellectual exercise.
This belief in America's unparalleled greatness has immense impact . It is not hyperbole to say
that the sentiment expressed by Cooke is the overarching belief system of the US political and media class, the primary premise

Politicians of all types routinely recite the same claim , and Cooke's tweet
Note
that Cooke did not merely declare America's superiority, but rather used it to affirm
a principle: as a result of its objective superiority, the US has the right to do
things that other nations do not. This self-affirming belief - I can do X because I'm
Good and you are barred from X because you are Bad - is the universally
invoked justification for all aggression. It's the crux of hypocrisy. And most
significantly of all, it is the violent enemy of law: the idea that everyone is bound by the
same set of rules and restraints. This eagerness to declare oneself exempt from
the rules to which others are bound, on the grounds of one's own objective
superiority, is always the animating sentiment behind nationalistic criminality . Here's
shaping political discourse.

was quickly re-tweeted by a variety of commentators and self-proclaimed foreign policy experts from across the spectrum.

what Orwell said about that in Notes on Nationalism: "All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar
sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions
are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage
torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of
civilians which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side . . . The nationalist not only does not
disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

Reject the irony of American exceptionalism

Kirstein 13 (Peter N., Ph.D. and M.A from Saint Louis University, Professor of
History at Saint Xavier, American Exceptionalism is a Racist, Imperialistic Canard
September 26th, 2013, http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein/archives/11159)
The notion of American exceptionalism is a disgrace . The nation is the only industrialised
nation that does not construe health care as a right. The pusillanimous Obamacare maze, while certainly a progressive step toward
socialism, is still placing too many burdens on Americans to purchase health care. Yet hopefully it will reduce the 48-50 million who

The notion of American exceptionalism is perhaps ironically

true. From 1619 to 1865 there was slavery in both British America and the United
States for about a century after the revolution. Then for another century after that,
American apartheid or Jim Crow America emerged as a kind of chattel slavery light.
From 1965 to 2013, there was a brief period of some relief from this exceptionally
long journey into oppression and racism. With the evisceration of the Voting Rights
are still without health insurance.

Act in Shelby County v Holder, I wonder if poll taxes and literacy tests can be far behind
despite Constitutional proscription of the former. The notion of American
exceptionalism overlooks the evil that this nation represents in recent world history.
The inventor and only nation to use the atomic bomb, no apology has emerged for
the unprovoked and utterly unnecessary utilization of this weapon of mass
destruction. Forget chemical and bio weapons, nuclear weapons, trust me, are the authentic
weapon of mass destruction. The United States then committed savage and
monstrous war crimes in Vietnam with the death of about two to three million Vietnamese. Not one trial,
not one senior official in the US was ever sentenced or even indicted. An exceptional nation
would not despite its usual bluster and lecturing to the world, remain mute and utterly silent in its toleration of an Israel nuclear
deterrent while seeking to starve or even threaten war to prevent Iran from pursing its legitimate nuclear exercises. An exceptional
nation does not submit to cowardice and a refusal on the part of even one State Department official or West Wing elitist to even
state what everyone knows: that Israel has nuclear weapons and faces no threat from Iran. Not a word due to racism and Zionism.
An exceptional nation that threatens war against Syria if it does not disarm and ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention, has not
uttered a word or a phrase that only Israel, its sacred, white- European ally, along with Myanmar, and the Democratic Peoples
Republic of Korea (North Korea) has not ratified the C.W.C. This is a reflection of a hypocritical, ethnocentric diplomacy that was so

The
notion of American exceptionalism cries out for justice. The numbers of incarcerated
exceeds any other nation. Most are political prisoners or economic victims of
American capitalism who try to sell a little weed there, or a little smack here and
boom, in jail. The real criminals, the Clintons, the Bushes, the Rices, the Dimons, the
Rummies, the N.S.A beasts walk the earth with security details and lovely isolated
lives from the real world. No American exceptionalism is a form of execrable
ethnocentrism that I am determined in my teaching and writing to unmask and
replace it with an accurate, objective depiction of our past and present!
vividly on display when President Obama addressed the U.N. Security Council in New York on Tuesday, September 24.

We must criticize America in order to break hypocrisy the

affirmative is grounded in exclusion and closes the door
for change
Greenwald 13 (Grant, J.D. from NYU Law School, B.A. in Philosophy from George Washington
University, 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, former Gaurdian columnist, The premises and
purposes of American exceptionalism Guardian, Februrary 18th, 2013,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/18/american-exceptionalism-north-korea-nukes)

Preserving this warped morality, this nationalistic prerogative, is , far and away, the
primary objective of America's foreign policy community, composed of its political offices, media
outlets, and (especially) think tanks. What Cooke expressed here - that the US, due to its objective superiority, is not
bound by the same rules as others - is the most cherished and aggressively guarded
principle in that circle. Conversely, the notion that the US should be bound by the
same rules as everyone else is the most scorned and marginalized. Last week, the
Princeton professor Cornel West denounced Presidents Nixon, Bush and Obama as
"war criminals", saying that "they have killed innocent people in the name of the
struggle for freedom, but they're suspending the law, very much like Wall Street
criminals". West specifically cited Obama's covert drone wars and killing of innocent
people, including children. What West was doing there was rather straightforward: applying the same
legal and moral rules to US aggression that he has applied to other countries and
which the US applies to non-friendly, disobedient regimes. In other words, West did exactly that
which is most scorned and taboo in DC policy circles. And thus he had to be attacked, belittled and dismissed as irrelevant. Andrew
Exum, the Afghanistan War advocate and Senior Fellow at the Center for New American Security, eagerly volunteered for the task:

Note that there's no effort to engage Professor West's arguments. It's pure ad hominem (in the classic sense of the logical fallacy):

It's a
declaration of exclusion: West is not a member in good standing of DC's Foreign
Policy Community, and therefore his views can and should be ignored as Unserious
and inconsequential. Leave aside the inane honorific of "national security professional" (is there a licensing agency for
that?). Leave aside the noxious and pompous view that the views of non-nationalsecurity-professionals - whatever that means - should be ignored when it comes to
militarism, US foreign policy and war crimes. And also leave aside the fact that
the vast majority of so-called "national security professionals" have been
disastrously wrong about virtually everything of significance over the last decade at
least, including when most of them used their platforms and influence not only to persuade others to support the greatest crime
"who is "Cornell [sic] West" to think that anything he says should be even listened to by "national security professionals"?

of our generation - the aggressive attack on Iraq - but also to scorn war opponents as too Unserious to merit attention. As Samantha
Power put it in 2007: "It was Washington's conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of US
foreign policy. The rush to invade Iraq was a position advocated by not only the Bush Administration, but also by editorial pages, the
foreign policy establishment of both parties, and majorities in both houses of Congress." Given that history, if one wants to employ

The key
point is what constitutes West's transgression. His real crime is that he tacitly
assumed that the US should be subjected to the same rules and constraints as all
other nations in the world, that he rejected the notion that America has the right to
do what others nations may not. And this is the premise - that there are any legal or moral
constraints on the US's right to use force in the world - that is the prime taboo thought in the circles of
DC Seriousness. That's why West, the Princeton professor, got mocked as someone
too silly to pay attention to: because he rejected that most cherished American
license that is grounded in the self-loving exceptionalism so purely distilled by
Cooke. West made a moral and legal argument, and US "national security professionals" simply do not
recognize morality or legality when it comes to US aggression. That's why our foreign policy discourse so
rarely includes any discussion of those considerations . A US president can be a "war
criminal" only if legal and moral rules apply to his actions on equal terms as all
other world leaders, and that is precisely the idea that is completely anathema to everything "national security
ad hominems: one should be listened to more, not less, if one is denied the title of "national security professional".

professionals" believe (it also happens to be the central principle the Nuremberg Tribunal sought to affirm: "while this law is first
applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other

US foreign policy analysts are permitted to

question the tactics of the US government and military (will bombing these places succeed in the
goals?). They are permitted to argue that certain policies will not advance American
interests (drones may be ineffective in stopping Terrorism). But what they are absolutely barred from
doing - upon pain of being expelled from the circles of Seriousness - is to argue that there are any legal or
moral rules that restrict US aggression, and especially to argue that the US is bound by the same set of rules
nations, including those which sit here now in judgment").

which it seeks to impose on others (recall the intense attacks on Howard Dean, led by John Kerry, when Dean suggested in 2003 that
the US should support a system of universally applied rules because "we

won't always have the strongest

military": the very idea that the US should think of itself as subject to the same
rules as the rest of the world is pure heresy ). In 2009, Les Gelb - the former Pentagon and State
Department official and Chairman Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations: the ultimate "national security professional" - wrote
an extraordinary essay in the journal Democracy explaining why he and so many others in his circle supported the attack on Iraq.
This is what he blamed it on: unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to
support wars to retain political and professional credibility." That someone like Les Gelb says that "national security professionals"
have career incentives to support US wars "to retain political and professional credibility" is amazing, yet clearly true. When I
interviewed Gelb in 2010 regarding that quote, he elaborated that DC foreign policy experts - "national security professionals" know that they can retain relevance in and access to key government circles only if they affirm the unfettered right of the US to use

They can question tactics, but never the supreme

prerogative of the US, the unchallengeable truth of American exceptionalism . In sum,
force whenever and however it wants.

think tank "scholars" don't get invited to important meetings by "national security professionals" in DC if they point out that the US
is committing war crimes and that the US president is a war criminal.

They don't get invited to those

meetings if they argue that the US should be bound by the same rules and laws it
imposes on others when it comes to the use of force. They don't get invited if they
ask US political officials to imagine how they would react if some other country were
routinely bombing US soil with drones and cruise missiles and assassinating
whatever Americans they wanted to in secret and without trial . As the reaction to Cornel West
shows, making those arguments triggers nothing but ridicule and exclusion .
One gets invited to those meetings only if one blindly affirms the right of the US to do whatever it wants, and then devotes oneself

The culture of
DC think tanks, "international relations" professionals, and foreign policy
commenters breeds allegiance to these American prerogatives and US power
centers - incentivizes reflexive defenses of US government actions - because, as Gelb says,
to the pragmatic question of how that unfettered license can best be exploited to promote national interests.

that is the only way to advance one's careerist goals as a "national security professional". If you see a 20-something aspiring
"foreign policy expert" or "international relations professional" in DC, what you'll view, with some rare exceptions, is a mindlessly
loyal defender of US force and prerogatives. It's what that culture, by design, breeds and demands. In that crowd, Cooke's tweets

This belief in the

unfettered legal and moral right of the US to use force anywhere in the world for
any reason it wants is sustained only by this belief in objective US superiority, this
myth of American exceptionalism. And the results are exactly what one would
expect from an approach grounded in a belief system so patently irrational .
aren't the slightest bit controversial. They're axioms, from which all valid conclusions flow.

Vote negative allows us to interrogate the epistemological

framework of imperialism in order to break it down
McLaren and Kincheloe in 5 (Peter Professor of Education, Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies @ UCLA and Joe, professor and Canada Research
Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Third Edition, Eds Norman Denzin and
Yvonna Lincoln)
In this context, it is important to note that we understand a social theory as a map
or a guide to the social sphere. In a research context, it does not determine how we
see the world but helps us devise questions and strategies for exploring it. A critical
social theory is concerned in particular with issues of power and justice and the
ways that the economy; matters of race, class, and gender; ideologies; discourses;
education; religion and other social institutions; and cultural dynamics interact to
construct a social system (Beck-Gernsheim, Butler, & Puigvert, 2003; Flccha,
Gomez, & Puigvert, 2003). Thus, in this context we seek to provide a view of an
evolving criticality or a reconceptualized critical theory. Critical theory is never
static; it is always evolving, changing in light of both new theoretical insights and
new problems and social circumstances. The list of concepts elucidating our
articulation of critical theory indicates a criticality informed by a variety of
discourses emerging after the work of the Frankfurt School Indeed, some of the
theoretical discourses, while referring to themselves as critical, directly call into
question some of the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Thus, diverse
theoretical traditions have informed our understanding of criticality and have
demanded understanding of diverse forms of oppression including class, race,
gender, sexual, cultural, religious, colonial, and ability-related concerns. The
evolving notion of criticality we present is informed by, while critiquing, the postdiscoursesfor example, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. In

this context, critical theorists become detectives of new theoretical insights,

perpetually searching for new and interconnected ways of understanding power and
oppression and the ways they shape everyday life and human experience. In this
context, criticality and the research it supports are always evolving, always
encountering new ways to irritate dominant forms of power, to provide more
evocative and compelling insights. Operating in this way, an evolving criticality is
always vulnerable to exclusion from the domain of approved modes of research. The
forms of social change it supports always position it in some places as an outsider,
an awkward detective always interested in uncovering social structures, discourses,
ideologies, and epistemologies that prop up both the status quo and a variety of
forms of privilege. In the epistemological domain, white, male, class elitist,
heterosexist, imperial, and colonial privilege often operates by asserting the power
to claim objectivity and neutrality. Indeed, the owners of such privilege often own
the "franchise" on reason and rationality. Proponents of an evolving criticality
possess a variety of tools to expose such oppressive power politics. Such
proponents assert that critical theory is well-served by drawing upon numerous
liberatory discourses and including diverse groups of marginalized peoples and their
allies in the nonhierarchical aggregation of critical analysts {Bello, 2003; Clark,
2002; Humphries, 1997). In the present era, emerging forms of neocolonialism and
neo-imperialism in the United States move critical theorists to examine the wavs
American power operates under the cover of establishing democracies all over the
world. Advocates of an evolving criticality argueas we do in more detail later in
this chapterthat such neocolonial power must be exposed so it can be opposed in
the United States and around the world. The American Empires justification in the
name of freedom for undermining democratically elected governments from Iran
(Kincheloe, 2004), Chile, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to Liberia (when its real purpose
is to acquire geopolitical advantage for future military assaults, economic leverage
in international markets, and access to natural resources) must be exposed by
critical-ists for what it isa rank imperialist sham (McLaren, 2003a, 2003b; McLaren
& Jaramillo, 2002; McLaren & Martin, 2003). Critical researchers need to view their
work in the context of living and working in a nation-state with the most powerful
military-industrial complex in history that is shamefully using the terrorist attacks of
September 11 to advance a ruthless imperialist agenda fueled by capitalist
accumulation by means of the rule of force (McLaren & Farahmandpur,2003).
Chomsky (2003), for instance, has accused the U.S. government of the "supreme
crime" of preventive war (in the case of its invasion of Iraq, the use of military force
to destroy an invented or imagined threat) of the type that was condemned at
Kuremburg. Others, like historian Arthur Schlesinger (cited in Chomsky, 2003), have
likened the invasion of Iraq to Japan's "day of infamy'' that is, to the policy that
imperial Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor. David G. Smith (2003) argues
that such imperial dynamics are supported by particular epistemological forms. The
United States is an epistemological empire based on a notion of truth that
undermines the knowledges produced by those outside the good graces and
benevolent authority of the empire. Thus, in the 21 st century, critical theorists
must develop sophisticated ways to address not only the brute material relations of
class rule linked to the mode and relations of capitalist production and imperialist
conquest (whether through direct military intervention or indirectly through the

creation of client states) but also the epistemological violence that helps discipline
the world Smith refers to this violence as a form of "information warfare" that
spreads deliberate falsehoods about countries such as Iraq and Iran. U.S. corporate
and governmental agents become more sophisticated in the use of such epistoweaponry with every day that passes. Obviously, an evolving criticality does not
promiscuously choose theoretical discourses to add to the bricolage of critical
theories. It is highly suspiciousas we detail laterof theories that fail to
understand the malevolent workings of power, that fail to critique the blinders of
Eurocentrism, that cultivate an elitism of insiders and outsiders, and that fail to
discern a global system of inequity supported by diverse forms of ideology and
violence. It is uninterested in any theoryno matter how fashionablethat does not
directly address the needs of victims of oppression and the suffering they must
endure. The following is an elastic, ever-evolving set of concepts included in our
evolving notion of criticality. With theoretical innovations and shifting Zeitgeists,
they evolve. The points that are deemed most important in one time period pale in
relation to different points in a new era.

Impacts

Turns Case
Hegemony inevitably fails due to the myth of American
exceptionalism
Walt 11 (Stephen M., Ph.D. in political science from the University of California-Berkley,
Professor of International Affairs at Harvard, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, Foreign
Policy, October 11, 2011,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/11/the_myth_of_american_exceptionalism)

Over the last two centuries, prominent Americans have described the United States
as an "empire of liberty," a "shining city on a hill," the "last best hope of Earth," the
"leader of the free world," and the "indispensable nation. " These enduring tropes explain why
all presidential candidates feel compelled to offer ritualistic paeans to America's greatness and why President
Barack Obama landed in hot water -- most recently, from Mitt Romney -- for saying that while he believed in
"American exceptionalism," it was no different from "British exceptionalism," "Greek exceptionalism," or any other

Most statements of "American exceptionalism"

presume that America's values, political system, and history are unique and worthy
of universal admiration. They also imply that the United States is both destined and
entitled to play a distinct and positive role on the world stage. The only thing
wrong with this self-congratulatory portrait of America's global role is that it is
mostly a myth. Although the United States possesses certain unique qualities -- from
high levels of religiosity to a political culture that privileges individual freedom -- the conduct of U.S.
foreign policy has been determined primarily by its relative power and by the
inherently competitive nature of international politics. By focusing on their
supposedly exceptional qualities, Americans blind themselves to the ways that
they are a lot like everyone else. This unchallenged faith in American
exceptionalism makes it harder for Americans to understand why others are less
enthusiastic about U.S. dominance, often alarmed by U.S. policies, and frequently
irritated by what they see as U.S. hypocrisy, whether the subject is possession of
nuclear weapons, conformity with international law, or America's tendency to
condemn the conduct of others while ignoring its own failings . Ironically, U.S.
foreign policy would probably be more effective if Americans were less
convinced of their own unique virtues and less eager to proclaim them.
country's brand of patriotic chest-thumping.

America cant behave well if it strives to be the best

Walt 11 (Stephen M., Ph.D. in political science from the University of California-Berkley,
Professor of International Affairs at Harvard, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, Foreign
Policy, October 11, 2011,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/10/11/the_myth_of_american_exceptionalism)

Myth 2 The United States Behaves Better Than Other Nations Do.
Declarations of American exceptionalism rest on the belief that the United States is
a uniquely virtuous nation, one that loves peace, nurtures liberty, respects human
rights, and embraces the rule of law. Americans like to think their country behaves

much better than other states do, and certainly better than other great
powers. If only it were true. The United States may not have been as brutal as
the worst states in world history, but a dispassionate look at the historical record
belies most claims about America's moral superiority. For starters, the United States has
been one of the most expansionist powers in modern history . It began as 13 small colonies
clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, but eventually expanded across North America, seizing Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California

it eliminated most of the native population and confined the

survivors to impoverished reservations. By the mid-19th century, it had pushed Britain out of the Pacific
Northwest and consolidated its hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. The United States has fought
numerous wars since then -- starting several of them -- and its wartime conduct has
hardly been a model of restraint. The 1899-1902 conquest of the Philippines killed some
200,000 to 400,000 Filipinos, most of them civilians, and the United States and its allies did not
hesitate to dispatch some 305,000 German and 330,000 Japanese civilians through
aerial bombing during World War II, mostly through deliberate campaigns against enemy cities. No wonder Gen.
Curtis LeMay, who directed the bombing campaign against Japan, told an aide, "If the U.S. lost the war, we would
be prosecuted as war criminals." The United States dropped more than 6 million tons
of bombs during the Indochina war, including tons of napalm and lethal defoliants
like Agent Orange, and it is directly responsible for the deaths of many of the
roughly 1 million civilians who died in that war . More recently, the U.S.-backed Contra war
in Nicaragua killed some 30,000 Nicaraguans , a percentage of their population equivalent to 2 million
dead Americans. U.S. military action has led directly or indirectly to the deaths of 250,000
Muslims over the past three decades (and that's a low-end estimate, not counting the deaths resulting from the sanctions
against Iraq in the 1990s), including the more than 100,000 people who died following the invasion and occupation of Iraq in
2003. U.S. drones and Special Forces are going after suspected terrorists in at least
five countries at present and have killed an unknown number of innocent civilians in
the process. Some of these actions may have been necessary to make Americans more prosperous and secure. But
while Americans would undoubtedly regard such acts as indefensible if some foreign
country were doing them to us, hardly any U.S. politicians have questioned these
policies. Instead, Americans still wonder, "Why do they hate us?" The United
States talks a good game on human rights and international law, but it has refused
to sign most human rights treaties, is not a party to the International Criminal Court, and has been all too willing
from Mexico in 1846. Along the way,

to cozy up to dictators -- remember our friend Hosni Mubarak? -- with abysmal human rights records. If that were not enough, the
abuses at Abu Ghraib and the George W. Bush administration's reliance on waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, and preventive

Obama's decision to
retain many of these policies suggests they were not a temporary aberration. The
detention should shake America's belief that it consistently acts in a morally superior fashion.

United States never conquered a vast overseas empire or caused millions to die through tyrannical blunders like China's Great Leap

And given the vast power at its disposal for much of the
past century, Washington could certainly have done much worse . But the record is
clear: U.S. leaders have done what they thought they had to do when confronted by
external dangers, and they paid scant attention to moral principles along the way .
The idea that the United States is uniquely virtuous may be comforting to
Americans; too bad it's not true.
Forward or Stalin's forced collectivization.

Conflict Impact
The aff is always reaching for unattainable infinite hegemony
that results in endless conflict
Chernus 6 (Ira, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-director of the Peace and
Conflict Studies Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, 2006, Monsters to
Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin)
The end of the cold war spawned a tempting fantasy of imperial omnipotence on a global scale. The
neocons want to turn that fantasy into reality. But reality will not conform to the fantasy; it wont stand still or keep any

inevitably backfire. Political scientist Benjamin Barber

for it must repeatedly
extend the compass of its power to preserve what it already has, and so is almost
by definition always overextended. Gary Dorrien sees insecurity coming at the neoconservatives in another
way, too: For the empire, every conflict is a local concern that threatens its control. However
semblance of permanent order. So the neocons efforts

explains that a nation with unprecedented power has unprecedented vulnerability:

secure it may be, it never feels secure enough. The [neocon] unipolarists had an advanced case of this anxiety. . . . Just below
the surface of the customary claim to toughness lurked persistent anxiety. This anxiety was inherent in the problem of empire

If the U.S. must control every event

everywhere, as neocons assume, every act of resistance looks like a threat to the
very existence of the nation. There is no good way to distinguish between nations
or forces that genuinely oppose U.S. interests and those that dont . Indeed, change
of any kind, in any nation, becomes a potential threat. Everyone begins to
look like a threatening monster that might have to be destroyed . Its no surprise that a
nation imagined as an implacable enemy often turns into a real enemy . When the
U.S. intervenes to prevent change, it is likely to provoke resistance . Faced with an
and, in the case of the neocons, heightened by ideological ardor.39

aggressive U.S. stance, any nation might get tough in return. Of course, the U.S. can say that it is selflessly trying to serve the
world. But why would other nations believe that? It is more likely that others will resist ,

making hegemony harder

to achieve. To the neocons, though, resistance only proves that the enemy really
is a threat that must be destroyed. So the likelihood of conflict grows, making
everyone less secure. Moreover, the neocons want to do it all in the public spotlight. In the past, any nation that set
out to conquer others usually kept its plans largely secret. Indeed, the cold war neocons regularly blasted the Soviets for
harboring a secret plan for world conquest. Now here they are calling on the U.S. to blare out its own domineering intentions
for all the world to [end page 53] hear. That hardly seems well calculated to achieve the goal of hegemony. But it is calculated to
foster the assertive, even swaggering, mood on the home front that the neocons long for. Journalist Ron Suskind has noted that
neocons always offer a statement of enveloping peril and no hypothesis for any real solution. They have no hope of finding a
real solution because they have no reason to look for one. Their story allows for success only as a fantasy. In reality, they expect
to find nothing but an endless battle against an enemy that can never be defeated. At least two prominent neocons have said it
quite bluntly. Kenneth Adelman: We should not try to convince people that things are getting better. Michael Ledeen: The

This vision of endless conflict is not a conclusion drawn

both the premise and the goal of the neocons fantasy . Ultimately, it
seems, endless resistance is what they really want. Their call for a unipolar world ensures a
permanent state of conflict, so that the U.S. can go on forever proving its military supremacy and promoting the
struggle against evil is going to go on forever.40
from observing reality. It is

manly virtues of militarism. They have to admit that the U.S., with its vastly incomparable power, already has unprecedented
security against any foreign army. So they must sound the alarm about a shadowy new kind of enemy, one that can attack in

They must make distant changes appear as huge imminent

threats to America, make the implausible seem plausible, and thus find new monsters to
destroy. The neocons story does not allow for a final triumph of order because it is not
novel, unexpected ways.

really about creating a politically calm, orderly world. It is about creating a society full of virtuous people who are willing and
able to fight off the threatening forces of social chaos. Having superior power is less important than proving superior power. That
always requires an enemy. Just as neocons need monsters abroad, they need a frightened society at home. Only insecurity can
justify their shrill call for a stronger nation (and a higher military budget). The more dire their warnings of insecurity, the more
they can demand greater military strength and moral resolve. Every foreign enemy is, above all, another occasion to prod the
American people to overcome their anxiety, identify evil, fight resolutely against it, and stand strong in defense of their highest
values. Hegemony will do no good unless there is challenge to be met, weakness to be conquered, evil to be overcome. The
American people must actively seek hegemony and make sacrifices for it, to show that they are striving to overcome their own

weakness. So the quest for strength still demands a public confession of weakness, just as the neocons had demanded two

The quest for

strength through the structures of national security still demands a public declaration of national
insecurity. Otherwise, there is nothing to overcome . The more frightened the public, the more likely
decades earlier when they warned of a Soviet nuclear attack through a window of vulnerability.

it is to believe and enact the neocon story.

Ecocide Impact
The military destroys the environment
Majeed 04 (Ameer Majeed, Physicians for Global Survival (Canada) February
2004, The Impact of Militarism on the Environment: An Overview of Direct &
Indirect Effects BY ABEER MAJEED A research report written for Physicians for
Global Survival (Canada), http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDMQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F
%2Fweaponspollute.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads
%2F2010%2F12%2Fmilitarism_environment_web.pdf&ei=oUXZU8y5Fo2YyATaYGIDQ&usg=AFQjCNGxVfixO01JvhRtH1NBIpIDC1GqDg&sig2=F78xLMxsQ7hzm6jjaL1XA&bvm=bv.71778758,d.aWw DS)
The worlds militaries are a significant contributor to resource depletion with some
sources estimating that they account for 6 percent of all raw materials consumed (Donohoe 2003; Renner 1991;
Shahi and Sidel 1997). In her general review of literature on military production and consumption, Ana Schjolden

there are very few sources that address military consumption. Military
secrecy and scarcity of data are recurring obstacles in attempts to investigate the
impact of militarism on the environment. The military use of land, airspace, oceans, fuel, and nonfuel minerals is discussed below based on available data. 3.1.1 LAND A 1981 estimate places the
global direct military land use in the range of 0.5 to 1% worldwide or roughly
750,000 to 1.5 million km2 , an area roughly larger than the combined surface areas
of France and the United Kingdom (797,000 km2) (Biswas 2000). This area, however, would
be substantially greater if the land used by arms producing enterprises and
indirectly by military forces were also included. In the United States, at least 200,000 km2 or 2%
of total US territory is devoted to military purposes (Renner 1991). In Canada, the Auditor
(2000) notes that

Generals report (2003) notes 18,000 km2 of land, over three times the size of Prince Edward Island, is used for
training and other military activities by the Department of National Defence. The environmental consequences of

Worth noting at present, however, is the

disproportionately high number of habitat for endangered plant and animals often
contained in military lands. In the US, more than 220 federally listed threatened or endangered species
military activities on land are discussed later.

have been confirmed as residents or migrants in and around US military installations and military training ranges
(Dudley and Woodford 2002). Land area that is used for military purposes also prevents it from being used for
alternative and more productive uses such as habitat preservation or agricultural production. In Kazakhstan, for
example, more land is currently reserved for the use of the military than is made available for wheat production
(Biswas 2000). 3.1.2 AIRSPACE The worldwide military use of airspace is not known. Canada, however, may
have the worlds most extensive airspace for military purposes. The zone assigned to Goose Bay air base at the
northeastern coast of Labrador extends over 100,000 km2 (Renner 1991) and in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the
Cold Lake air weapons range stretches over 450,000 km2 (Miller and Ostling 1992). In the US, at least 30% and as
much as 50% of airspace is used by the military (Renner 1991). One of the most contentious issues surrounding
military aviation isthe low-level supersonic flights. Noise levels of up to 140 decibels (at which acute hearing
damage can occur in humans and other mammals) are produced by planes flying at an altitude of 75 meters. In
Nitassinan, near Goose Bay, Labrador, four NATO countries (Canada, Netherlands, Germany, and the United
Kingdom) have yearly performed thousands of low-level flights at the height of 100-250 feet, almost at maximum

As a consequence
of these activities (sonic booms and aircraft emissions), the feeding and migration
behaviour of caribou herds have been disturbed and the livelihoods of the Innu
imperiled. In 1996, Canada renewed the 1986 Multinational Memorandum of Understanding (MMOU) for another
speed (Heininen 1994). The land over which the exercises occur are inhabited by the Innu.

10 year period with the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. The current memorandum allows for up to 15,000 low
level and 3,000 medium/ high level Physicians for Global Survival The Impact of Militarism on the Environment 20
training flights annually (Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Finance 2001). Italy also signed the
memorandum in 2000 while France, Belgium and Norway conducted trial activities at Goose Bay in 2001. 3.1.3

OCEANS The global military use of oceans has not been assessed although the US Navy, is known to
operate in over 765,000 square nautical miles of designated navy sea ranges (Willard
2002). Naval activities, however, can affect ocean ecosystems far beyond their
designated ranges. The military use of the sonar system known as Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System
Low Frequency Active sonar (or LFA),for example, can potentially cover 80% of the planets oceans by broadcasting
from only four locations (Science Wire 2001). The LFA sonar was developed in the 1980s and used by the U.S. Navy
to detect the presence of deep sea Soviet submarines by bombarding them with high intensity, low frequency

species. The frequencies that dolphins and whales

use for hearing, to find food, families and direction fall within the range used by the
military 100 to 500 Hz (Science Wire 2001). Whales send signals out at between 160 and 190 db and the Navy
noise. It has had a profound impact on marine

has tested its sonar signals at levels up to 235 db. In March 2000, four different species of whales and dolphins
were stranded on beaches in the Bahamas after a US Navy battle group used active sonar in the area. A

government investigation found evidence of hemorrhaging around the dead whales

eyes and ears, indicating severe acoustic trauma . Causation was established to the midfrequency sonar used by Navy ships passing through the area (NRDC 2003). Since the incident, the areas beaked
whales population has disappeared. This has led scientists to conclude that

they have either abandoned

their habitat or died at sea. On August 26 2003, a US federal judge ruled that the Navy's plan to deploy a
new high-intensity sonar system is illegal, violating numerous federal environmental laws and endangering whales,

OUTER SPACE Space is considered the ultimate

military high ground and also offers the potential for unsurpassable political and
economic power projection. It has been used for military purposes in the past. Historical as well as
porpoises and fish (NRDC 2003). 3.1.4

ongoing use have been largely passive and include activities such as reconnaisance, communications, and
navigation (Marshall et al. 2003). The Global Positioning System (GPS), for example, provides precision targeting for
military missions, while civilian customers use less accurate frequencies as navigational aids (Wirbel 2002). Military
expenditure on space has consistently outweighed civil spending (Marshall et al. 2003) and despite a UN Outer
Space Treaty enjoining nations to reserve the use of space for peaceful purposes only, the 1996 Vision for 2020
report of the US Space Command reveals plans for offensive space weaponization. Due to limitations imposed by
time, this report is unable to present a detailed analysis of the environmental consequences of intensified use of
space or a space war. However, such an assessment would first requires identifying the weapons that may be used.
Distinct classes of space weapons include: (1) direct-energy weapons such as space based lasers (2) kinetic-energy
weapons against missile targets (3) kinetic-energy weapons against surface targets and (4) conventional warheads
delivered by space-based, or space-traversing, vehicles (Garwin 2003). In addition,

non-space weapons

also need to be considered and include : (1) surface-based anti- satellite (ASAT) weapons such as
high-power lasers, or missiles with pellet warheads, or hit-to- kill vehicles and (2) rapid-response delivery of
conventional munitions by forward-deployed cruise or ballistic missiles, or non-nuclear payloads on inter-continental
ballistic missiles (ICBMs) (Garwin 2003). Physicians for Global Survival The Impact of Militarism on the Environment

The
destruction, for example, of Cosmos, a Soviet anti-satellite interceptor with a mass
of 1,400kg, would triple the population density of the debris in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO).
21 Li Bin (2003) offers an assessment of the space debris that would be created in a potential war.

In addition to the interceptors themselves, those satellites targeted by them would constitute another source of

process of collisional cascading may set in (collisional fragments trigger

further collisions) and could eventually form a debris barrier that would prevent
the stationing of any new stations or other space activities in Low Earth Orbit (Bin 2003). Other
debris. A

defensive counter- space measures such as the use of microsatellites (space mines) and nuclear detonation in

Energy and Fuel Resources

The worlds militaries depend on petroleum products for nearly three quarters of
their energy use and consume approximately 25% of all global jet fuel (Renner 1991).
space would also severely impact upon the space environment. 3.1.5

The global petroleum consumption for military purposes is almost one-half of the total consumption of all
developing countries combined (Biswas 2000). The Pentagon is considered the single largest domestic consumer of

worldwide
military-related carbon release could be as high as 10% of the global total (Renner
oil and quite possibly the largest worldwide (Miller and Ostling 1992). Additionally, it is estimated that

1991). A significant consideration with regards to sustainable use of resources is military diversion of fuel resources
from environmental applications. For example,

the Pentagon uses enough energy in 12 months

to run the entire US urban transit system for almost 14 years (Renner 1991). 3.1.6 NonFuel Minerals Available global figures in the absence of reliable data are rough estimates. However, the
worldwide use of aluminum, copper, nickel and platinum for military purposes is
thought to surpass the total consumption of these materials by all developing
countries combined (Biswas 2000). The military is estimated to account for 11% of global copper use, 9% of
iron, and 8% of lead (Renner 1991). Overall, on a global basis, between 2 and 11% of fourteen important minerals is
consumed for military purposes: aluminum, chromium, copper, fluorspar, iron ore, lead, manganese, mercury,
nickel, platinum, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc (Biswas 2000). The manufacture of a single F-16 jet requires 5,000kg
of materials: 2,044kg titanium, 1,715kg nickel, 543 kg chromium, 330kg cobalt, and 267kg aluminum (Renner

Military demand for these minerals contributes to the major and highly visible
environmental damage caused by mining operation s. Ponting (1991) cites 70% of the worlds
1991).

ore (95% in the US) is obtained by the most environmentally destructive of all methods open cast mining.
Durning (1990) explores the potentially powerful effects that military demand for minerals can have on the
environment. In an assessment of apartheids environmental toll in South Africa, broad land areas were revealed to
have been deeply scarred by reckless mining to finance the military superstructure that upheld minority rule

The connections between natural resources, armed conflict, state

oppression, and mining corporations are examined later in the report.
(Durning 1990).

Environment Impact
Well win two external impacts: environment and structural
violence exceptionalism creates an ideological filter that
pushes an American environmental agenda, causing global
overconsumption and flawed conservation policy it also
filters out structural violence produced by US-driven conflict as
collateral damage
Nixon 11(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of WisconsinMadison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 33-36)
There are signs that the environmental humanities are beginning to make some tentative headway toward
incorporating the impact of U.S. imperialism on the poor in the global South-Vitalis's book America's Kingdom:
Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2008) is an outstanding instance, as are powerful recent essays by
Elizabeth DeLoughrey on the literatures associated with American nuclear colonialism in the Pacific, Susie
O'Brien on Native food security, colonialism, and environmental heritage along the U.S-Mexican border, and
Pablo Mukherjee's groundbreaking materialist work on Indian environmental literatures,'? Yet despite such vitally
important initiatives, the environmental humanities in the United States remain skewed toward nation-bound
scholarship that is at best tangentially international and, even then, seldom engages the environmental fallout

What's at stake is not just disciplinary parochialism but, more broadly,

what one might call superpower parochialism, that is, a combination of American
insularity and America's power as the preeminent empire of the neoliberal age to
rupture the lives and ecosystems of non- Americans , especially the poor, who may live at a
of U.S. foreign policy head on.

geographical remove but who remain intimately vulnerable to the force fields of U.S. foreign policy. To be sure,
the U.S. empire has historically been a variable force, one that is not monolithic but subject to ever-changing
internal fracture. The U.S., moreover, has long been-and is increasingly-globalized itself with all the attendant

to argue that the United States is subject to

globalization-through, for example, blowback from climate change-does not belie the
disproportionate impact that U.S. global ambitions and policies have exerted over
socioenvironmental landscapes internationally. Ecocritics-and literary scholars more broadlyinsecurities and inequities that result. However,

faced with the challenges of thinking through vast differences in spatial and temporal scale commonly frame
their analyses in terms of interpenetrating global and local forces. In such analyses cosmopolitanism-as a mode
of being linked to particular aesthetic strategies-does much of the bridgework between extremes of scale.

What critics have subjected to far less scrutiny is the role of the national-imperial
as a mediating force with vast repercussions , above all, for those billions whom Mike Davis
calls "the global residuum.'?" Davis's image is a suggestive one, summoning to mind the remaindered humans,

the compacted leavings on whom neoliberalism's inequities bear down most

heavily. Yet those leavings, despite their aggregated dehumanization in the corporate
media, remain animate and often resistant in unexpected ways ; indeed, it is from such
leavings that grassroots antiglobalization and the environmentalism of the poor have drawn
nourishment. As American writers, scholars, and environmentalists how can we attend more imaginatively
how can we attend more imaginatively to the outsourced conflicts inflamed by
our unsustainable consumerism, by our military adventurism and unsurpassed
arms industry, and by the global environmental fallout over the past three decades of American-led
neoliberal economic policies? (The immense environmental toll of militarism is particularly burdensome: in
2009, U.S. military expenditure was 46.5 percent of the global total and exceeded by 10 percent the
expenditure of the next fourteen highest-ranked countries combined.)" How, moreover, can we engage the
impact of our outsized consumerism and militarism on the life prospects of people who are elsewhere not just
geographically but elsewhere in time, as slow violence seeps long term into ecologies-rural and urban-on which

How, in other words, can we rethink the

standard formulation of neoliberalism as internationalizing profits and
the global poor must depend for generations to come?

externalizing risks not just in spatial but in temporal terms as well, so that we
recognize the full force with which the externalized risks are out sourced to the
unborn? It is a pervasive condition of empires that they affect great swathes of the planet
without the empire's populace being aware of that impact -indeed, without being aware
that many of the affected places even exist. How many Americans are aware of the continuing
socioenvironrnental fallout from U.S. militarism and foreign policy decisions made three or four decades ago in,

The imperial gap

between foreign policy power and on-the-street awareness calls to mind George
say, Angola or Laos? How many could even place those nation-states on a map?

Lamming's shock, on arriving in Britain in the early 1950s, that most Londoners he met had never heard of his

superpower
parochialism has been shaped by the myth of American exceptionalism and by a
long-standing indifference-in the U.S. educational system and national media-to the foreign,
especially foreign history, even when it is deeply enmeshed with U.S. interests. Thus, when considering
the representational challenges posed by transnational slow violence, we need to ask what role
American indifference to foreign history has played in camouflaging lasting
environmental damage inflicted elsewhere. If all empires create acute disparities between global
power and global knowledge, how has America's perception of itself as a young , forwardthrusting nation that claims to flourish by looking ahead rather than behind exacerbated the difficulty of
socioenvironmental answerability for ongoing slow violence?" Profiting from the asymmetrical
native Barbados and lumped together all Caribbean immigrants as Jamaicans.'?' What I call

relations between a domestically regulated environment and unregulated environments abroad is of course not

the United States has wielded an unequalled power to

bend the global regulatory climate in its favor . As William Finnegan notes regarding the
Washington Consensus, "while we make the world safe for multinational corporations, it
is by no means clear that they intend to return the favor ."? The unreturned favor
weighs especially heavily on impoverished communities in the global South who
must stake their claims to environmental justice in the face of the Bretton Woods
institutions (the World Bank, the IMF), the World Trade Organization, and the G8 (now G20) over which
the United States has exercised disproportionate influence. That influence has been
exercised, as well, through muscular conservation NGOs (the Nature Conservancy, the World
Wild- life Fund, and Conservation International prominent among them) that have a long history of
disregarding local human relations to the environment in order to implement
American- and European-style conservation agendas. Clearly, the beneficiaries of such
power asymmetries are not just American but transnational corporations, NGOs,
and governments from across the North's rich nations, often working hand-in-fist
with authoritarian regimes.
unique to America, But since World War II,

Racism DA
American exceptionalism creates saving life from
danger in order to continue its conquest and imperialistic
policies universality is one of the oppressor and doesnt
account for the Other and causes a cultural racism
between Us and Them
Cuadro 11 (Mariela, PhD in IR at the National University of La Plata, BA in Sociology at the University of
Buenos Aires, Master in IR at the National University of La Plata (IRI), Researcher at the Department of Middle East
in International Relations Institute (IRI) at the University of La Plata, Member and researcher at the Center for
International Political Reflection (CERPI), Universalisation of liberal democracy, American exceptionalism and
racism" Transcience Volume 2Issue 2, http://www2.hu-berlin.de/transcience/Vol2_Issue2_2011_30_43.pdf)

It is important to note that, understood this way racism appears not as an

ideological question, but as a mechanism linked with a determined technology of
power (biopolitics). It is what permits establishing a separation inside the realm of life (that is,
in the realm that power has absorbed and put under its administration) between what can live and what must die.
The distinction between races and its organization into a hierarchy is, thus, a
manner of fragmenting the field of the biological . In a few words, racism is the means of introducing a cut in the
realm of life that power took in charge: the cut between what must live and what must die (Foucault, 2008: 230). This is understood by Foucault as the
first function of racism: the function of fragmentation. It is important to withhold this fact: the first function of racism is the fragmentation of a realm that
is understood as being biological and universal (thus, non political). Therefore, when talking about racism we talk about a racist discourse constituted by a
dominant logic of construction of identities and otherness that tends to the production and consequent negation of differences. Indeed, we are thinking
about a logic that enables the possibility of extermination and exclusion (or hierarchical inclusion). So, this logic, this discourse, is articulated through

Hence, we talk about cultural racism

different specific languages.

. If we assert that there is a US cultural racism is
because the function of fragmentation works through cultural lines. With Etienne Balibar, we are talking about a racism without race (Balibar, 1991a). If
the concept of human race does not work anymore as such, racism as a mechanism defined as we did, continues validating the sovereign right of killing

We are stressing the existence of a structure that works

through two functions, articulated around different (biological, national, class, religious, etc.) languages.
In Balibars words: Racism is a social relation and not a simple delirium of racist
subjects (1991b: 69). The second function that completes the Foucauldian notion of racism is that of what we call life
improvement. Basically, what this function establishes is a relationship between the
own life and the life of the other. It is a positive relationship that proposes not just
the survival of the warrior relationship -that is, the fact that in war I have to kill in
order to not being killed-, but the improvement of the own life through the killing of
the other that appears as dangerous . If we are talking about a universalistic racism, the own life does not present itself as
being particular, but as being the life. All particularities are put on the Other . In Foucaults words, The
death of the other does not simply coincide with my life, considered as mi
personal security; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the
inferior race (or of the degenerate or the abnormal) is what will make that life in general be
healthier; healthier and purer (Foucault, 2008: 231; italics are our own). This mechanism is able
to function because the others are not understood as adversaries or political
enemies, but as dangers for the population. We add to this Arendts thinking. For the author,
particularly in IR, racism has another function: to serve as a bridge between
nationalism and imperialism (1958). If nationalism refers by definition to a particularity and, in contrast, imperialism has to
around other elements: cultural elements.

be accompanied by some sense of universality of this particularity, this passage is only possible through racism, that is, through the idea of imposing a
superior law upon the barbarians (Arendt, 1958: 126).

In that case, the national interests of

imperialist policies are invisibilised and the power acts in the name of
universality. In this sense, racism as discourse entails other elements: the idea of own
superiority (developed when dealing with exceptionalism) paradoxically combined with the fear of the
other understood as danger for the population 12, and a specific relationship between particularity and universality.
Indeed, racism is theorized by Hanna Arendt as a bridge between nationalism and imperialism because it has a complex relation with both. As Balibar
argues, Racism appears at the same time in the universal and in the particular (1991b: 89). Racism is understood as a structural process of otherness

We considered not as
a particular identity but as universality. In other words, starting from a strong
particular identity, the racist discourse denies it and transforms it into a universal
one. Thus, it establishes a universal and non-historical norm, through which the others are evaluated, constructing, therefore, a hierarchy of
construction that works fragmenting an imaginary homogeneity, in order to encourage the improvement of a

particularities. The universal from which it starts does not enter in this hierarchization, because it is considered the standard (the good, the white, the
correct, the natural), from which the other particularities have deviated or to which they have not arrived yet. As we have said, many authors sustain that
in a biopolitical world talking about identities and otherness does not have any place, because of the inclusive character of the biopolitical power. When
dealing with the idea of normality, Foucault points out a difference between its construction in a disciplinary society and in a control one (that is to say, in
the interior of a biopolitical technology of power). While in the former the norm is established a priori and from there subjects are divided in normal and
abnormal, in the latter, it is established a posteriori, taking into account all the possible cases, that is to say the normal and the abnormal ones. This is
why Foucault affirms that this is an inclusive technology of power. Nevertheless we coincide with Chantal Mouffe who postulates the impossibility of an ad
infinitum inclusion defended and sponsored by liberal cosmopolitanism theorists. At least in the context of the actual capitalist system, based on a series
of exclusionist practices (starting with the exclusion of the workers from the means of production), some sort of inclusion/exclusion game functions.

This is what explains that Foucault talks of an expansive racism or an inclusive

racism (2002). Furthermore, we do not have to forget that racism is the actualization
of sovereign power into the mechanics of biopower. That is to say that the
binary identity construction characteristic of the former may be developed in the
latter. Indeed, as said, it is what permits that a power which has to make live, can
make die. This is only possible, as said, through racism inscribed in the mechanisms of the
nation-state: a universalistic racism.

Racism is evil and must be resisted for humanity to

survive
Memmi 2k (Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve Martinot, p.
163-165)

The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission , without remission,
probably never achieved. Yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without
surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot
even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a
foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to
diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to
endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we
still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which [person] man is not
[themself] himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the
condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition .

The anti-racist
struggle, difficult though it is. and always in question, is nevertheless one of the
prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity . In that sense, we cannot
fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one's moral conduct only emerges
from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and
its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the

One
cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism
signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and
domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is "the truly
establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy.

capital sin."fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity's spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak,
for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans,
widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such

unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we
have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death Of course, this is debatable.
There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But
no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed, All unjust society
contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat
you with respect. "Recall," says the Bible, "that you were once a stranger in Egypt," which means both that you
ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again
someday.

It is an ethical and a practical appeal -- indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might

the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical
morality. Because, in the end. The ethical choice commands the political
choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual
principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will
be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but
the stakes are irresistible.
be. In short,

Biopolitics DA
Biopolitics DA: Appealing to the improvement of life
creates the biopolitical rationality of giving power to the
subject and stripping it from the object
Cuadro 11 (Mariela, PhD in IR at the National University of La Plata, BA in Sociology at the University of
Buenos Aires, Master in IR at the National University of La Plata (IRI), Researcher at the Department of Middle East
in International Relations Institute (IRI) at the University of La Plata, Member and researcher at the Center for
International Political Reflection (CERPI), Universalisation of liberal democracy, American exceptionalism and
racism" Transcience Volume 2Issue 2, http://www2.hu-berlin.de/transcience/Vol2_Issue2_2011_30_43.pdf)
To start talking about racism in Foucaults terms, we need to make a short reference about the framework in which
Foucauldian racism works: biopolitics. The definition of this technology of power by the French philosopher is done
with the background of sovereign power. Sovereign power has as a fundamental feature the right (belonging to the
sovereign) to make die and let live. As Foucault argues this right is exercised in an unbalanced way, always on the

the sovereign exercises his right over life from the moment in
which he can kill. In other words, the power over life is a passive power, one that
derives from the fact that the sovereign decides not to kill , that is to say, decides not to
exercise its right to make die. Biopolitics radically changes this sovereign power
side of the death. Actually,

(which does not mean we will see it- that this one disappears). Instead of a sovereign having the right to make die

the subject and object of biopolitics is the population , understood as a mass of

And the new technology of power has as object and objective the
life of population this way constructed: it has to make it live . Lets remember that Foucault
and let live,

biological individuals.

does not understand power in economic terms, that is, as something that is possessed and exchanged, but as

when he affirms that biopolitics has the power to

make live, he is saying that it is a power that is exercised only through the
promotion of life. This improvement of life which is the main feature of biopolitics
supposes a different understanding of Foreign Policy in relation of that designed by
the governmental rationality of the reason of state (raison d Etat), hinge between the
sovereign power and the new technology . Indeed, it supposed a balance of power that entailed the
something that can be only exercised. So,

coexistence of a plurality of states (which would be nostalgically remembered by Carl Schmitt) based on an

This way, the state had a

limited objective in relation of its foreign policy, whose other side was an unlimited
domestic policy (the police state).
understanding of international politics as a zero sum game (the realist thesis).

Truth DA
Truth is partisan and universal for conqueror that allows
the state to continue to kill
Cuadro 11 (Mariela, PhD in IR at the National University of La Plata, BA in Sociology at the University of
Buenos Aires, Master in IR at the National University of La Plata (IRI), Researcher at the Department of Middle East
in International Relations Institute (IRI) at the University of La Plata, Member and researcher at the Center for
International Political Reflection (CERPI), Universalisation of liberal democracy, American exceptionalism and
racism" Transcience Volume 2Issue 2, http://www2.hu-berlin.de/transcience/Vol2_Issue2_2011_30_43.pdf)
In Society must be defended, Foucault (2008) establishes an important distinction between the noblesse war of

the noblesse racism was a

discourse that underlined particularities. It was a binary war-like discourse which
affirmed that there existed two races fighting for power. The winner of that fight was the
one who wrote History. That way, there was not only one big Truth: truth was the result of
a battle and, thus, it was a partisan one. In other words, it was a historical-political
discourse that assumed its particularity. This discourse changes with the advent of
liberal bourgeois historical narrative and the establishment of the nation-state. The
new racist discourse is an universalistic one: a discourse of a combat that does
not have to be fought between two races, but from a race given as the real and only
one, which possesses power and is the norm holder, against those who deviate from
it, and those who constitute many other dangers to the biological patrimony (Foucault,
2008: 65). Thus, war is not thought anymore as a constitutive element of society;
instead, it is considered as an instrument to protect and conserve society as a
whole (defending society). In effect, in the search of making a unity of the conquered state,
the notion of nation played a fundamental role because it searched to subsume
differences and postulated a homogenous state. Now it is not a particular race
which has to be saved of destruction, but the whole society: it is a universalistic
racism. That is why Foucault argues that while the noblesse racist discourse is a conservative one, the liberal
bourgeois discourse is an expansive one (2002). What is the function of racism in the new
technology of power? If biopower has the mandate of making live, if it has life as its
object and objective, Foucault asks himself how does it exert the sovereign power, the
power to kill. The answer is racism, inscribed in mechanisms of the state. Therefore,
liberal discourse effected a rewriting of the war of races discourse that substituted
the historical war for a fight for life and a binary society for a biologically monistic
society. At the same time, discourse about the unjust state is substituted for a state not considered as the
races discourse and that of the liberal bourgeoisie. According to the author,

instrument of one race against the other, but as the protector of the integrity, the superiority and the purity of the
only one race: human race. Liberal humanitarianism is born.

Links

Arctic Link
Construction of the arctic as a threat allows for America to
spread itself in
Dittmer et al 11 -- Professors in the Departments of Geography at University College London,
University of Oulu, University College London, and Royal Holloway, respectively (Jason Dittmer, Sami Moisi, Alan
Ingrama, Klaus Dodds, Political Geography, 2011, Have you heard the one about the disappearing ice? Recasting
Arctic geopolitics, http://www.uta.fi/jkk/jmc/studies/courses/reading1%20+%20arctic%20+%20moisio.pdf)

The idea of the Arctic as an open e or opening e and uncertain space also calls forth
future-oriented imaginative techniques, notably scenario analysis and the booming trade in Arctic
futures (Anderson, 2010). The rhetorical orientation of such exercises inevitably
reproduces and gives free rein to divergent conceptualizations of the future . Thus, on
the one hand are dystopian imaginations of the Arctic as a locus of social, political,
economic, cultural and ecological disaster. While during the 1990s Arctic space was infused
with political idealism and hope as the end of the Cold War seemed to open the possibility of a less explicitly

current interventions in Arctic space raise

the spectres of conflict, environmental degradation and the resource curse
(Emmerson, 2010). The notion of the Arctic as an open, melting space is thus
represented as posing a multi-faceted security risk. Scott Borgerson (2008) published
a notably neo-realist intervention in Foreign Affairs which considered this kind of
scenario in more detail; he argued that the decrease in sea ice cover is directly
correlated to evidence of a new scramble for resources in the region, involving the five Arctic
Ocean coastal states and their national security interests. According to Borgerson (2008: 65), the Arctic
region could erupt in an armed mad dash for its resources. More generally,
melting ice is correlated with enhanced accessibility and hence opportunities for
new actors ranging from commercial shipping to illegal migrants and terrorist groups to migrate within and
beyond the Arctic. At the most extreme, neorealists have contended that Arctic installations
such as pipelines or terminals might be potential targets for terrorist organizations
hell-bent on undermining North American energy security (Byers, 2009). At the same time, the Arctic is also
framed as a space of promise: the locus of a potential oil bonanza, new strategic trade routes and huge
fishing grounds (Powell, 2008a). No wonder then that the Arctic possibilities have resulted in a
number of scenarios on the relationship between Arctic resources and Arctic
geopolitical order. Lawson Brigham, a well known Arctic expert, has imagined an Arctic race,
a scenario in which high demand and unstable governance set the stage for a no
holds barred rush for Arctic wealth and resources (described in Bennett, 2010, n.p.). This vision,
which is opposite to Arctic saga, can be regarded as a liberal warning message. Accordingly, without new
governance structures based on new international agreements, high demand in the Arctic region
could lead to political chaos which could also jeopardize Arctic ecosystems and
cultures. The emphasis on the economic potential of the Arctic maritime areas further highlights the dominance
of future over present in contemporary geopolitical discourses. The image of disaster (as epitomised by
the Exxon Valdez sinking in 1989) thus forms a counterpoint to the image of a treasure chest
(the Russian flagplanting in 2007).We suggest that these assertions of Arctic disaster are used
to justify a strengthened military presence in Arctic waters in the name of
national security along with a range of futuristic possibilities (Jensen & Rottem, 2009). Here
neo-realism feeds off the idea of the Arctic as opening, shifting and potentially
territorialized governance regime (the Arctic Council),

chaotic space. It thus has an affective as well as descriptive quality e invoking a mood change and associated
calls to arms (Dodds, 2010). This theme of fearing the future has emerged periodically within
Canadian political discourse, with Stephen Harpers famous use it or lose it dictum traceable
through previous governments, which have emphasized the threat of incursion by the Soviets or the United States

The disaster argumentation (Berkman & Young, 2009)

also underwrites liberal calls for a new multilateral Arctic legal agreement which would
set out rules, for example, on how to exploit Arctic resources. In these representations,
multilateralism denotes peace, prosperity, stability and environmental rescue
whilst national control and interest denote increasing tension, environmental
degradation and conflict. Arctic openness is central to the performance of
Arctic geopolitics, enabling sabre-rattling by the five Arctic Ocean coastal states. The regions coding
as a feminine space to be tamed by masculine exploits provides an arena for
national magnification. The remoteness and difficulty of maintaining permanent
occupation of the far north also makes it a space where overlapping territorial claims and
competing understandings of access to transit passages can (at the moment) co-exist
with relatively little chance of actual combat (Baev, 2007). As we shall see, this is particularly true
of the US/Canadian arguments over the legal status of the NorthWest Passage. In this way the discursive
formation of Arctic geopolitics is also bound up with neo-realist ideas about the
inherent tendencies of states towards conflict over resources, sovereignty and
so on e ideas that have been subject to extensive critical deconstruction in IR and
political geography, but which are being rapidly reassembled in relation to the
Arctic. The Arctic is thus a space in which the foundational myths of orthodox
international relations are being reasserted. It might be said that it is not just the Arctic
(Dodds, in press; Head, 1963; Huebert, 2003).

climate that is changing, with knock on effects for state politics and international relations, but rather that the
region is being reconstituted within a discursive formation that renders it amenable to neo-realist understandings
and practices inconceivable for other, more inhabited regions. A ccepting

the premises of Arctic

geopolitics risks both obscuring the liveliness of Arctic geography (Vannini, Baldacchino,
Guay, Royle, & Steinberg, 2009) and enabling the sovereign fantasy that coastal states and their
civilian and military representatives have previously enjoyed security via effective
territorial control and may establish it once again .

China Link
The threat of China is an excuse for American
counterbalancing in order to preserve hegemony
Chengxin PAN IR @ Australian Natl 4 The China Threat in American SelfImagination: The Discursive Construction of Other as Power Politics Alternatives 29
p. 314-315
the discursive construction of China as a threatening other cannot be
detached from (neo)realism, a positivist. ahistorical framework of analysis within
which global life is reduced to endless interstate rivalry for power and survival. As
many critical IR scholars have noted, (neo) realism is not a transcendent description of global
reality but is predicated on the modernist Western identity , which, in the quest for
scientific certainty, has come to define itself essentially as the sovereign territorial
nation-state. This realist self-identity of Western states leads to the constitution of
anarchy as the sphere of insecurity, disorder, and war . In an anarchical system, as (neo) realists
In this sense,

argue, "the gain of one side is often considered to be the loss of the other,"''5 and "All other states are potential

these
realist claims represent what R. B. J. Walker calls "a specific historical articulation of
relations of universality/particularity and self/Other."^^ The (neo) realist paradigm has
threats."'^ In order to survive in such a system, states inevitably pursue power or capability. In doing so,

dominated the U.S. IR discipline in general and the U.S. China studies field in particular. As Kurt Campbell notes,
after the end of the Cold War,

a whole new crop of China experts "are much more likely to

have a background in strategic studies or international relations than China itsel f.
""^^ As a result, for those experts to know China is nothing more or less than to
undertake a geopolitical analysis of it, often by asking only a few questions such as
how China will "behave" in a strategic sen se and how it may affect the regional or global balance of
power, with a particular emphasis on China's military power or capabilities . As Thomas J.
Christensen notes, "Although many have focused on intentions as well as capabilities, the most prevalent
component of the [China threat] debate is the assessment of China's overall future military power compared with
that of the United States and other East Asian regional powers."''^ Consequently, almost by default, China emerges

The (neo) realist emphasis on

survival and security in international relations dovetails perfectly with the U.S. selfimagination, because for the United States to define itself as the indispensable
nation in a world of anarchy is often to demand absolute security. As James Chace and Caleb Carr note, "for over
as an absolute other and a threat thanks to this (neo) realist prism.

two centuries the aspiration toward an eventual condition of absolute security has been viewed as central to an

this self-identification in turn leads to the definition of

not only "tangible" foreign powers but global contingency and uncertainty per se as
threats. For example, former U.S. President George H. W. Bush repeatedly said that "the enemy [of America] is
effective American foreign policy."50 And

unpredictability. The enemy is instability. "5' Similarly, arguing for the continuation of U.S. Cold War alliances, a
high-ranking Pentagon official asked, "if we pull out, who knows what nervousness will result? "^ 2Thus

understood, by its very uncertain character, China would now automatically

constitute a threat to the United States. For example, Bernstein and Munro believe that "China's
political unpredictability, the always-present possibility that it will fall into a state of domestic disunion and factional
fighting," constitutes a source of danger.s^ In like manner, Richard Betts and Thomas Christensen write: If the PLA
[People's Liberation Army] remains second-rate, should the world breathe a sigh of relief? Not entirely. . . . Drawing
China into the web of global interdependence may do more to encourage peace than war, but it cannot guarantee
that the pursuit of heartfelt political interests will be blocked by a fear of economic consequences. . . . U.S. efforts to
create a stable balance across the Taiwan Strait might deter the use of force under certain circumstances, but
certainly not all.54 The upshot, therefore, is that

since China displays no absolute certainty for

peace, it must be, by definition, an uncertainty, and hence, a threat . In the same way, a
multitude of other unpredictable factors (such as ethnic rivalry, local insurgencies, overpopulation, drug trafficking,
environmental degradation, rogue states, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and international terrorism)
have also been labeled as "threats" to U.S. security. Yet, it seems that in the post-Cold War environment, China
represents a kind of uncertainty par excellence. "Whatever the prospects for a more peaceful, more democratic,
and more just world order, nothing seems more uncertain today than the future of post-Deng China,"55 argues

And such an archetypical uncertainty is crucial to the enterprise of U.S.

self-construction, because it seems that only an uncertainty with potentially global
consequences such as China could justify U.S. indispensability or its continued world
dominance. In this sense, Bruce Cumings aptly suggested in 1996 that China ( as a threat) was basically
"a metaphor for an enormously expensive Pentagon that has lost its bearings and
that requires a formidable 'renegade state' to define its mission (Islam is rather vague, and
Samuel Kim.

Iran lacks necessary weights)."56

Democracy/Freedom Link
Democracy and freedom are excuses for intervention
Cuadro 11 (Mariela, PhD in IR at the National University of La Plata, BA in Sociology at the University of
Buenos Aires, Master in IR at the National University of La Plata (IRI), Researcher at the Department of Middle East
in International Relations Institute (IRI) at the University of La Plata, Member and researcher at the Center for
International Political Reflection (CERPI), Universalisation of liberal democracy, American exceptionalism and
racism" Transcience Volume 2Issue 2, http://www2.hu-berlin.de/transcience/Vol2_Issue2_2011_30_43.pdf)

The advent of liberalism would change this conception and postulate a game where
sum is different from zero. That is to say that liberalism conceived the improvement
of one state (the state-centered objective of the reason of state remained the same) as linked to the
improvement of the others. Neoliberalism, for its part, adds to this the necessity of
intervention. Kants Perpetual Peace fit in this context. Following the German author, perpetual peace would be
guaranteed by the globalization of commerce. During the decade of 1990s a similar thesis took force: The socalled Democratic Peace Theory postulated that perpetual peace could be
achieved via the globalization of democracy. George W. Bush administration would take
this thesis as its own and argue that imposing democracy (on Iraq) would make the
world safer and more peaceful, implicitly arguing that US democracy is the best
socio-political model. Finally, such voices would also be specially heard during the first weeks of the still
ongoing Arab uprising. Homologated with freedom, liberal democracy appears (mainly in liberal
powers discourses, but not just there) as a universal claim of people all over the world,
thereby becoming a necessity of history (claimed once by Fukuyama), and
justifying, once more, interventionist policies in its name. Democracy, Human Rights
and Freedom, as we will see, have been homologated . Clearly different and Western
notions have been thus mixed, confused and universalized . Freedom, as a
governmental technique, is at the center of the liberal practice . Indeed, liberalism
-understood not as an ideology, but rather as a technology of power- is characterized as a
freedom-consuming practice. That is to say that it can only function if some liberties
exist 7. In consequence, if liberalism has a need of freedom , then, it is obliged to produce
it, but, at the same time, to organize it. In other words, it is not only a producer of
freedom, but also an organizer of it: its administrator. This administration of
freedom leads to the necessity of securing those natural phenomena (i.e.: population)
and, with that objective, to interventionist practices. The fact that the police device be dismantled,
Foucault asserts, does not mean that governmental intervention ceases to exist. On the contrary, this is an
essential feature of liberal government.

Disease Link
Disease creates a common enemy the U.S. tries to combat in
order to spread itself international
MacPhail 2009 (Theresa, medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley The Politics of
Bird Flu: The Battle over Viral Samples and Chinas Role in Global Public Health, Journal of language and politics,
8:3, 2009)

the health development strategies of international organizations are judged as

significant in reinforcing the role of the state in relation to the production of primary
products for the world market, thereby perpetuating international relations of
dominance and dependency. Soheir Morsy, Political Economy in Medical Anthropology In July of 2007,
former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona appeared before a congressional committee and
testified that during his term in office he had been pressured by the Bush administration to
suppress or downplay any public health information that contradicted the
administrations beliefs and/or policies. Gardiner Harris of the New York Times noted that Dr. Carmona
was only one of a growing list of present and former administration officials to charge that politics often
trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan government
health and scientific agencies (Harris 2007). Dr. Carmona testified that he had repeatedly faced
In fact,

political interference on such varied topics as stem cell research and sex education. Two days later, an editorial in
the Times bemoaned the resultant diminution of public health both its reputation as non-biased and the general
understanding of important public health issues in the eyes of the same public it was meant to serve (2007). In
the wake of Dr. Carmonas testimony, it would appear that these are grave times for public health. And yet, public
health concerns and international measures to thwart disease pandemics have never been more at the forefront of
governmental policy, media focus and the public imagination. Dr. Carmonas testimony on the fuzzy boundaries
between science and state, health and policy, is in line with a recent spate of sensational stories on the dangers of
drug-resistant tuberculosis and the recurrent threat of a bird flu outbreak all of which belie any distinct
separation of politics and medical science and highlight the ever-increasing commingling of the realms of public

Until recently, the worlds of public health and politics have

generally been popularly conceptualized as separate fields . Public health, undergirded by
health and political diplomacy.

medicine, is primarily defined as the science and practice of protecting and improving the health of a community

Disease prevention and care

is typically regarded as neutral ground, a conceptual space where governments can
work together for the direct (or indirect) benefit of all . Politics, on the other hand, is usually
(public health 2007), regardless of political borders on geographical maps.

referred to in the largely Aristotelian sense of the word, or politika, as the art or science of government or
governing, especially the governing of a political entity, such as a nation, and the administration and control of its
internal and external affairs (politics 2007). If we take to be relevant Clausewitzs formulation that war is merely

the recent wars on

disease specifically the one being waged on the ever-present global threat of bird
flu are merely a continuation of politics by different means ? In an article written for the
the continuation of policy (or such politics) by other means, might we then argue that

U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), two health professionals suggest that the flow of influence works optimally
when an unbiased science first informs public health, with public health then influencing governmental policy

politics directly informs public health,

eventually constraining or directing scientific research, has the potential to create a
situation in which ideology clouds scientific and public health judgment, decisions
go awry and politics become dangerous (Koplan and McPheeters 2004: 2041). The authors go on to
decisions. The other potential direction of influence, wherein

argue that: Scientists and public health professionals often offer opinions on policy and political issues, and
politicians offer theirs on public health policies, sometimes with the support of evidence. This interaction is

the
interaction provides an opportunity for inappropriate and self-serving commentary,
for public grandstanding, and for promoting public anxiety for partisan political
purposes. (ibid.) The authors, however, never suggest that pure science, devoid of any political consideration, is
appropriate and healthy, and valuable insights can be acquired by these cross-discussions. Nevertheless

a viable alternative to an ideologically-driven disease prevention policy. What becomes important in the constant
interplay of science, politics and ideology, is both an awareness of potential ideological pitfalls and a balance
between official public health policy and the science that underlies it. The science/ public health/politics interaction
is largely taken for granted as the foundation of any appropriate, real-world policy decisions (Tesh 1988: 132). Yet

the political nature of most health policies has , until recently, been overshadowed in
popular discourse by the ostensibly altruistic nature of health medicine . Yet as Michael
Taussig reminds us of the doctor/patient relationship: The issue of control and manipulation is concealed by the
aura of benevolence (Taussig 1980: 4). Might the overt goodwill of organizations such as the WHO, the CDC, and
the Chinese CDC belie such an emphasis on politics? Certainly there is argumentation to support a claim that public
health and medicine are inherently tied to politics. Examining the hidden arguments underlying public health
policies, Sylvia Noble Tesh argues: disease prevention began to acquire political meaning. No
longer merely ways to control diseases, prevention policies became standard-bearers for the contending political
arguments about the form the new society would take (1988: 11). Science is a reason of state in Ashis Nandys
Science, Hegemony and Violence (1988: 1). Echoing current battles over viral samples, Nandy suggests that in the

science was used as a political plank within the United States in the
ideological battle against ungodly communism (1988: 3). Scientific performance is linked to
political dividends (1988: 9), with science becoming a substitute for politics in many
societies (1988: 10). What remains novel and of interest in all of this conflation of state and
medicine is the new politics of scale of the war on global disease, specifically its
focus on reemerging disease like avian influenza . As doctor and medical anthropologist Paul
Farmer notes: the WHO manifestly attempts to use fear of contagion to goad wealthy
nations into investing in disease surveillance and control out of self-interest an agelast century

old public health ploy acknowledged as such in the Institute of Medicine report on emerging infections (Farmer
2001: 5657). What Farmers observation underlines is that public health has transformed itself into a savvy,
political entity. Institutions like the WHO are increasingly needed to negotiate between nations they function as
the new diplomats of health.

Modern politics, then, have arguably turned into health

politics. In 2000, the UN Security Council passed a resolution on infectious diseases. The resolution came in
response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and was the first of its kind issued (Fidler 2001: 80). What started as a
reaction to a specific disease, AIDS, has since developed into an overall concern
with any disease or illness which is seen as having the potential to lay waste to
global health, national security, or economic and political stability . In other words, disease
and public health have gone global. But, as law and international disease scholar David Fidler points out, the
meeting of realpolitik and pathogens that he terms microbialpolitik is anything but new (Fidler 2001: 81).

Microbialpolitiks is as old as international commerce, wars, and diplomacy . Indeed, it

was only the brief half-century respite provided by antibiotics, modern medicine and the hope of a disease-free
future that made the coupling of politics and public health seem out-of-date. But now we have (re)entered a world
in which modern public health structures have weakened, thus making a return to microbialpolitiks inevitable. As
Fidler argues: The

reglobalization of public health is well underway, and the

international politics of infectious disease control have returned (Fidler 2001: 81). Only
three years later, Fidler would write that the predicted return of public health was triumphant, having emerged
prominently on the agendas of many policy areas in international relations, including national security, international
trade, economic development, globalization, human rights, and global governance (Fidler 2004: 2). As Nicholas

the resurgence of such microbialpolitiking owes much to the discourse

of risk so prevalent in todays world. The current focus on risk, as it specifically
pertains to disease and its relationship to national security concerns, has been
constructed by the interaction of a variety of different social actors: scientists, the
media, and health and security experts ( King 2004:62). King argues: The emerging diseases
campaign employed a strategic and historically resonant scale politics, making it
attractive to journalists, biomedical researchers, activists, politicians, and public
health and national security experts. Campaigners identification of causes and consequences at
King suggests,

particular scales were a means of marketing risk to specific audiences and thereby securing alliances; their
recommendations for intervention at particular scales were a means of ensuring that those alliances ultimately
benefited specific interests. (2004: 64) King traces this development to the early 1990s, specifically to Stephen
Morses 1989 conference on Emerging Viruses. Like the UN Security Council resolution on emerging infections, the

conference was in the wake of HIV/AIDS. In Kings retelling, it was Morses descriptions of the causal links between
isolated, local events and global effects that changed the politics of public health (2004: 66). The epidemiological
community followed in Morses footsteps, with such luminaries as Morse and Joshua Lederberg calling for a global
surveillance network to deal with emerging or reemerging diseases such as bird flu or SARS. However, although
both the problem and the effort were global by default, any interventions would involve passing through
American laboratories, biotechnology firms, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and the information science experts
(King 2004: 69). Following the conference, disease became a hot topic for the media. Such high -profile

authors as Laurie Garrett (The Coming Plague) and Richard Preston (The Hot Zone)
stoked the emerging virus fires, creating what amounted to a viral panic or viral
paranoia (King 2004: 73). Stories of viruses gone haywire, such as Prestons account of Ebola, helped reify the
notion that localized events were of international importance. Such causal chains having been formed in the
popular imagination, the timing was ripe for the emergence of bioterrorism concerns. In the aftermath of 9/11, the
former cold war had been transformed, using scalar politics, into a hot war with international viruses (King 2004:

all of this can be tied into the Foucaultian concept that knowledge is by
its very nature political. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault outlines the ways in which medicine is
connected to the power of the state. For Foucault, medicine itself becomes a task for the nation
(Foucault 1994: 19). He argues that the practice of medicine is itself political and that the
struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government (Foucault
76). Of course,

1994: 33). In an article on the politics of emerging diseases, Elisabeth Prescott has echoed Foucaults equation of

a nations capacity to combat both old and

newly emergent diseases is a marker not of just biological, but of political, health .
disease with bad government. She suggests that

She argues that the ability to respond [is] a reflection of the capacity of a governing system (2007: 1). Whats
more, ruptures in health can lead to break-downs in effective government or in the ability of governments to inspire
confidence. Prescott suggests: Failures in governance in the face of infectious disease outbreaks can result in
challenges to social cohesion, economic performance and political legitimacy (ibid.). In other words, an outbreak of
bird flu in China would equate to an example of Foucaults bad government. In the end, there can be no doubt that
the realms of medicine and (political) power are perpetually intertwined. Foucault writes: There is, therefore, a
spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirement of political ideology and those of medical
technology (Foucault 1994: 38). In other words, we should not be overly surprised by Richard Carmonas testimony
or by debates over bird flu samples. Politics and health have always arguably gone hand-in-hand

Energy Consumption Link

Energy consumption is an excuse for militarization
Ciuta 10 -- Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Centre of
European Politics, School of Slavonic and East European Studies @ University
College London, UK (Felix, 2010, "Conceptual Notes on Energy Security: Total or
Banal Security?" Security Dialogue 41(123), Sage)
energy is a security issue because it is
either a cause or an instrument of war or conflict. Two different strands converge in this logic
of energy security. The first strand focuses on energy as an instrument: energy is what states fight their
current wars with. We can find here arguments regarding the use of the energy weapon by supplier states
Even casual observers will be familiar with the argument that

(Belkin, 2007: 4; Lugar, 2006: 3; Winstone, Bolton & Gore, 2007: 1; Yergin, 2006a: 75); direct substitutions in which

energy is viewed as the equivalent of nuclear weapons (Morse & Richard, 2002: 2); and
rhetorical associations that establish policy associations, as exemplified by the panel Guns and
Gas during the Transatlantic Conference of the Bucharest NATO Summit. The second strand comes from the
literature on resource wars, defined as hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab valuable resources (Victor,
2007: 1). Energy is seen as a primary cause of greatpower conflicts over scarce energy resources (Hamon & Dupuy,
2008; Klare, 2001, 2008). Alternatively, energy is seen as a secondary cause of conflict; here, research has focused
on the dynamics through which resource scarcity in general and energy scarcity in particular generate socioeconomic, political and environmental conditions such as population movements, internal strife, secessionism and
desertification, which cause or accelerate both interstate and intrastate conflict (Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1994, 2008;
Solana, 2008; see also Dalby, 2004). As is immediately apparent, this logic draws on a classic formulation that
states that a nation is secure to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes

The underlying
principle of this security logic is survival : not only surviving war, but also a generalized quasiDarwinian logic of survival that produces wars over energy that are fought with
energy weapons. At work in this framing of the energy domain is therefore a definition
of security as the absence of threat to acquired values (Wolfers, 1952: 485), more recently reformulated as
survival in the face of existential threats (Buzan, Wver & de Wilde, 1998: 27). The defining
to avoid war, and is able . . . to maintain them by victory in such a war (Lippmann, 1943: 51).

parameters of this traditional security logic are therefore: (1) an understanding of security focused on the use of
force, war and conflict (Walt, 1991: 212; Freedman, 1998: 48); and (2) a focus on states as the subjects and objects
of energy security. In the war logic,

energy security is derivative of patterns of international

politics often captured under the label geopolitics (Aalto & Westphal, 2007: 3) that lend their supposedly
perennial attributes to the domain of energy (Barnes, Jaffe & Morse, 2004; Jaffe & Manning, 1998). The struggle
for energy is thus subsumed under the normal competition for power, survival, land,
valuable materials or markets (Leverett & Nol, 2007). A key effect of this logic is to arrest
issues usually not associated with war, and thus erase their distinctive characteristics.
Even the significance of energy qua energy is abolished by the implacable grammar of conflict: energy
becomes a resource like any other, which matters insofar as it affects the distribution of
capabilities in the international system. As a result, a series of transpositions affect most of the
issues ranked high on the energy security agenda. For example, in the European context, the problem is not
necessarily energy (or, more precisely, gas, to avoid the typical reduction performed by such accounts).
The problem lies in the geopolitical interests of Russia and other supplier states, whose
strength becomes inherently threatening (Burrows & Treverton, 2007; Horsley, 2006). Energy
security policies become entirely euphemistic, as illustrated for example by statements that equate
avoiding energy isolation with beating Russia (Baran, 2007). Such geopolitical understanding
of international politics also habituates a distinct vocabulary. Public documents, media reports and
academic analyses of energy security are suffused with references to weapons,

battles, attack, fear, ransom, blackmail, dominance, superpowers, victims and

losers. It is therefore unsurprising that this logic is coterminous with the widely
circulating narrative of the new Cold War. This lexicon of conflict encourages
modulations, reductions and transpositions in the meanings of both energy and security. This
is evident at the most fundamental level , structuring encyclopaedic entries (Kohl, 2004) and key
policy documents (White House, 2007), where energy security becomes oil security (security
modulates energy into oil), which becomes oil geopolitics (oil modulates security into geopolitics).
Once security is understood in the grammar of conflict, the complexity of energy is
abolished and reduced to the possession of oilfields or gas pipelines. The effect of this
modulation is to habituate the war logic of security, and also to create a hierarchy
between the three constitutive dimensions of energy security (growth, sustenance and the environment). This
hierarchy reflects and at the same time embeds the dominant effect of the war logic , which is the
militarization of energy (Russell & Moran, 2008), an argument reminiscent of the debates surrounding
the securitization of the environment (Deudney, 1990). It is of course debatable whether this is a new phenomenon.
Talk of oil wars has been the subject of prestigious conferences and conspiracy theories alike, and makes the
headlines of newspapers around the world. A significant literature has long focused on the relationship between US
foreign policy, oil and war (Stokes, 2007; in contrast, see Nye, 1982). The pertinence of this argument cannot be
evaluated in this short space, but it is worth noting that it too reduces energy to oil, and in/security to war. The key

logic changes not only the vocabulary of energy security but also its
political rationality. As Victor (2008: 9) puts it, this signals the arrival of military planning to
the problem of natural resources and inspires a logic of hardening, securing and
protecting in the entire domain of energy. There is, it must be underlined, some resistance to the
point is that this

pull of the logic of war, as attested for example by NATOs insistence that its focus on energy security will not
trigger a classical military response (De Hoop Scheffer, 2008: 2). Yet, the same NATO official claims that the

global competition for energy and natural resources will re-define the relationship between
security and economics, which hints not only at the potential militarization of
energy security policy but also at the hierarchies this will inevitably create . New
geographies of insecurity will thus emerge if the relationship between the
environment, sustenance and growth is structured by the militarized pursuit of
energy (Campbell, 2005: 952; Christophe Paillard in Luft & Paillard, 2007).

Economy Link
Economics are the driving force in imperial conquest-distinct
from domination, this force is a coercive politics that leaves
populations socially immobile and marginalized
(Grard Dumnil and Dominique Lvy 04, managers in the Dynamics of Social
Change Ouvrir and French economists, The Economics of US Imperialism at the
Turn of the 21st Century Source: Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 11,
No. 4, Global Regulation (Oct., 2004), http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177517, DS)
capitalism entered into a new phase called
neoliberalism. Indeed, it is possible to refer to a neolib- eral ideology, the apology of
free markets (nationally and internationally) and the corresponding disengagement of the
state from economic affairs, but neoliberalism fundamentally defines a new stage of capitalism. Some
At the transition between the 1970s and 1980s,

among the main components of this new phase do relate to free markets (nationally and internationally) and the
corresponding disengagement of the state from economic affairs, but neoliberalism fundamentally defines a new
stage of capitalism. Some among the main components of this new phase do relate to free markets, notably the
imposition of global free trade, the freedom on the part of enterprises to hire and fire, and the free international
circulation of capi- tal. This does not mean, however, that the intervention of the state, in the broad sense of the

in particular monetary policy, the power of state

institutions was increased. In all coun- tries, states were the agents of the imposition of
the neoliberal order.3 In- ternationally, institutions, such as the International Monetary
Fund, play a quasi-state role in the imposition of the neoliberal order to the planet .
Everywhere, a new discipline was imposed on workers and management to the
benefit of shareholders; interest rates were raised to the benefit of lenders. Neoliberalism is
actually a new social configuration in which the power and income of ruling classes
was reestablished after a few decades of partial repression in the wake of the Great
Depression and World War II. After the war, the concentration of wealth among a minority of rich families
term,2 was diminished. In some respects,

and the inequalities in the distribution of income were considerably diminished.4 The structural crisis of the 1970s,
with rates of interest hardly superior to inflation rates, low dividend payout by corporations, and depressed stock
markets, further encroached on the income and wealth of the wealthiest. In the early 1980s, neoliberalism reversed

neoliberalism was a sweeping

success, in par- ticular in the United States. The cost was huge in terms of
unemployment and misery around the globe. In a system where the ownership of the means of
the pattern of comparative decline of these classes. In this sense,

production and man- agement are separated, capitalist ownership is expressed through the hold- ing of securities
(stock shares, bonds, bills, etc.) and the power of capital- ists is largely transferred to their financial institutions

the domination of ruling classes pos- sesses

a stronglyfinancial character. We denote the upper fraction of capital- ist owners and their financial
institutions, as finance.5 Finance as such must be distinguished from the financial industry: The power and
control of fi- nance concern all sectors of the economy, financial as well as
nonfinancial. The distinction between financial capital and industrial capital
conserves some relevance, but is not central, due to the large integration of
economic relations under the aegis of finance in the above definition . By 'imperialism', we
(financial holdings, funds, etc.). For these two reasons,

do not mean a particular stage of capitalism, but one of its constant features since its earliest stages (in particular,

Imperialism, itself, goes through various stages, but the

common, continuous, trait that defines imperialism as such is the economic advantage taken by the most advanced and dominating countries
over less developed or vulnerable regions of the world . The violence exin the sphere of trade).

erted by imperialist countries is simultaneously the expression - within combinations

which would be difficult to disentangle - of straightforward economic constraint,
such as the mere opening of commercial frontiers be- tween countries of very
different levels of development, and all categories of immediate violence. Obviously,
imperialism does not necessarily imply the outright domi- nation of other countries as in colonialism, one form of

The crucial factor is to impose, within the dominated countries, a

government prone to the development of economic relations favorable to
the inter- est of dominating countries. This can be achieved by all means:
collab- oration with local ruling classes, subversion, or war. Such
domination is compatible with what is called 'democracy'6 or dictatorship,
depending on circumstances. States are, indeed, crucial, both within
dominating and dominated countries.
imperialism.

Whether the economy is strong or not, US economic policy is

imperialist
(Grard Dumnil and Dominique Lvy 04, managers in the Dynamics of Social
Change Ouvrir and French economists, The Economics of US Imperialism at the
Turn of the 21st Century Source: Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 11,
No. 4, Global Regulation (Oct., 2004), http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177517, DS)
It is not easy to provide a comparative assessment of the situation of the US economy at the turn of the 21st

the domination of the United States on the world economy and

its political and military preeminence appear even stronger in the early 2000s than in
century. On the one hand,

the late 1970s. On the other hand, the sudden contraction of the growth rates at the end of 2000, the ensuing
recession, and the collapse of the stock market suggest a new, less favorable, course than during the second half of
the 1990s. Even more importantly, the growing disequilibria of the US economy - notably the external debt, and the
debt of households and of the state - raise doubts concerning the capability of this country to maintain its unrivalled

the question is whether the US economy can be

deemed strong or weak in the early 2000s. This assessment is crucial in the
discussion of the arrogance of the inter- national strategy of US imperialism . Is it the
leadership. To put the matter very simply,

expression of the consolidation of the power of the United States after a quarter of a century of neolib- eralism? Not

this phase of capitalism saw a comparative setback of Europe, stagnation

in Japan, and recurrent crises in countries of the periphery in the wake of their
opening to international capital. On the contrary, is it a reaction to a declining capability to rule the
globe on 'mere' economic grounds? The main thesis in this paper is that su ch uncertainties and the
corre- sponding diverging interpretations are rooted in the ambiguous situation of
the US economy at the turn of the century, domestically and internation- ally, strong
in some respects, weak in others: - In a sense, the global domination of the US
economy is very strong. The grasp of its nonfinancial transnational corporations
on other countries is tight; the power of US financial institutions is probably larger
than ever; huge and growing flows of income are drawn from the world and
contribute to the remuneration of capital in the country . In these respects, US
imperialism is, indeed, in great shape. - The problems lie in the 'internal' trajectory asserted in the
country, and their consequences on external disequilibria. The continuing and strengthening
imperial hold on the world economy coincided with the constant decline of domestic
savings - the expression of a grow- ing propensity to consume . This movement was a
coincidentally,

consequence of the growing income and wealth of the richest fraction of households, a fun- damental characteristic

the capability to spend of the country became

thoroughly dependent on the import of goods, and opened new opportunities to the
of neoliberalism. It reached such degrees that

financial investment of foreigners. This foreign capital must also be remunerated,

drawing important income flows out of the country. The direction of causation
between these two aspects of the US economy, power on and dependency on
foreign countries, is obviously difficult to establish, and the relationship is, indeed,
reciprocal.

Economics is inherently manifested in imperialism

contradictions of capitalism are the driving factor
Nbete 12- PHD. In philosophy (Alubabari Ogoni as an Internal Colony: A
Critique of Imperialism
[http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_2_No_10_Special_Issue_May_2012/6.pdf]
Imperialism is a broad term; it manifests in different forms ranging from literature
and culture to politics and economy, but economic drives usually constitute its most
crucial initial impetus. This partly explains why much of the existing literature on
the concept tends to either omit or downplay other manifestations of it, such as
cultural imperialism. Our present work, in suchlike manner, acknowledges its variety
of forms but dwells more on its economic and institutional aspects. It is in this
context that we find much of the causal connection between it and the phenomenon
of internal colonialism or domestic colonialism (or, as Ken Saro-Wiwa also calls it
when it occurs within black countries, black colonialism). Claude Ake defines
imperialism as The economic control and exploitation of foreign lands arising from
the necessity for counteracting the impediments to the accumulation of capital
engendered by the internal contradictions of the domestic capitalist economy.5
There are, according to Ake, about five contradictions of capitalism which tend to
lead to imperialism. One of them arises as the drive for maximization of surplus
value leads, necessarily, to the expansion of production. This occurs because
capitalist production goes on in a context in which capitalists compete among
themselves for the market. At the same time, increase in production or output tends
to create excess of supply over demand, which leads to disequilibrium.

Terror Link
American exceptionalism makes terrorism into a global
threat in order to extend itself
Cuadro 11 (Mariela, PhD in IR at the National University of La Plata, BA in Sociology at the University of
Buenos Aires, Master in IR at the National University of La Plata (IRI), Researcher at the Department of Middle East
in International Relations Institute (IRI) at the University of La Plata, Member and researcher at the Center for
International Political Reflection (CERPI), Universalisation of liberal democracy, American exceptionalism and
racism" Transcience Volume 2Issue 2, http://www2.hu-berlin.de/transcience/Vol2_Issue2_2011_30_43.pdf)

The
terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center changed this policy. The
administrations response took the form of a Global War on Terror (GWT) that made possible the
intervention of US all over the world1. However, following Deleuze and Guattari, there is no deterritorialization without a consequent re-territorialization (2004). The GWT thus had its battlefields
When George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency of the United States (US), he did it based on a realist platform.

in the Middle East region. After invading Afghanistan to retaliate against those who had harbored the Al-Qaida suspects of the 9-11

we will use them

as paradigms of the ultimate expression of a global liberal governance of which the
US is its most steely bearer. Indeed, as Foucault argues, American liberalism [. . . ] is not [. . . ] a
terrorist acts, the US policy targeted Iraq. We will not analyze the reasons behind these two invasions, but

mere economic and political election formed and formulated by the government or in the governmental circle. In America, liberalism

is a whole way of being and thinking . It is much more a type of relationship between governors and
governed than a technique of the former destined to the latter (2007: 254). That is why we can hold that
liberalism crosses the entire political spectrum of the US . Actually, we will study the questions of
liberal democracy, US exceptionalism and racism, putting aside existing differences between Democrats and Republicans. Thus
we intend to establish what we call cultural racism not as an ideological matter, but as
a necessary mechanism of the liberal way of global government as general
framework of biopolitics (Foucault, 2007: 40). What the Bush administration criticized about previous forms of power
exercise in the Middle East region (including that of US) was the tolerance of authoritarian governments throughout history, favoring
stability over freedom2. From this point of view, such a situation generated resentment and anger. Therefore, was identified as the
root of terrorism, which it was said fed on the absence of democracy in the region. At this point, US interests and values

to put an end to terrorism, the expansion of freedom was a must (observe

This was accompanied by a construction of
the terrorist enemy not as a political enemy but instead as a danger to the
population, excluding the terrorist subjects from the field of the political. The Bush
administration thus established a linkage between security and freedom/democracy
conflating interests and values and eliminating contradictions between the two. The
US national interest would be achieved through the expansion of US values (constructed
coincided. Indeed,

that this discourse homologated freedom and democracy).

not as particular and historical, but as universal and necessary). Condoleezza Rice (National Security Advisor and Secretary of State)

The GWT thus appeared as a liberal war par

excellence: a war based on values that were presented as universal, making them
non particular, nor political; fought against absolute enemies posed as dangers for
the (global) population; at the center of which were at the same time freedom and
security. If, as said, liberalism is conceived as general framework of biopolitics and,
following Foucaults thought, in a biopolitical technology of power, sovereign power, that is to say the power of
making die, exerts itself through the inscription of racism in states mechanisms,
talking about some sort of liberal racism is actually possible. The unilateral and
aggressive policy of the Bush administration -the demonstration of US absolute
power- made possible its demonization. In fact, there was an attempt to construct it as an exception in the
history of the US. However, we affirm that the universalisation of particular values (e.g., liberal
democracy) has deep roots in the idea of American exceptionalism and can be explained
dubbed this the uniquely American realism (2008).

as a form of racism as a characteristic mechanism of the liberal way of global

government. If we have chosen the Bush administration as our empirical terrain that is because, even as we recognize its
discontinuities with respect to previous administrations, it is our intention to point out regularities and return it to the history of
liberal government.

ATs

A2: Permutation
Their use of modeling and the law is coopted and reproduces
exceptionalism US legal institutions exaggerate nonAmerican components they integrate, bending them to the
assumption of US power and superiority makes violence
inevitable
Mattei 3(Ugo, Hastings College of the Law; Univ. of Turin, Italy, A Theory of
Imperial Law: A Study on U.S. Hegemony and the Latin Resistance, Global Jurist
Frontiers , Vol. 3 [2003], Iss. 2, Art. 1)
Law is a cultural aspect of any society. A spectacular society is likely to produce spectacular law.224 If it is true, as

there is little question

that U.S. law has been capable of exaggerating the fundamental aspects of western
law, making them highly spectacular: judges challenge the political power and re-write the
history of their country; rights are enforced without frontiers; lawyers are portrayed as living
Freud once apparently said, that exaggeration is a key to success and leadership,225

success stories; scholars are engaged in highly creative intellectual exercises with little restraint from the actual
technicalities of the law;226 electoral processes are organized as time-circumscribed displays of personality cults;

there is spectacular assertion of the institutional power of life and death; and the
law is glamorized in movies, best sellers, and television shows featuring glittering and highly
photogenic police cars. All of these are aspects of the law going pop ,227 abandoning the dusty
Kafkian bureaucratic scenarios to be promoted as part of the imaginative domain of the
integrated spectacle. Thus, what becomes global is not so much the effective, binding,
and nitty-gritty American law, but rather its spectacular aspects . It is not
efficiency but the spectacle of efficiency ; it is not the actual organization of justice but the spectacle
of justice.228 Impoverished public institutions of the welfare state, in health care as well as in education, are

proactive
institutions of governance, staffed with underpaid personnel, are depicted as bureaucracies
and become less and less attractive to bright global young people. To be sure, the analysis cannot
remain on the merely technical level of lawyers discourses. The law is an intimate part of the
integrated spectacle and performs a central part in the public political discourse .
De Tocqueville noticed its centrality in America two hundred years ago.230 Today, this discursive practice
of legality is reproduced at the global level and is one of the salient features of
imperial law. There is no issue of global governance from the legality of the war, to legal
compared to private ones using standards that always make public works look worse.229 The

aspects of global intellectual property rights, to the consequences of non-aligned politics by spectacularly portrayed
rough statesthat

is not appraised in legal terms. Such legal terms are of course spectacular,
the
integrated spectacle of course requires antagonists , too. The end of communism makes new
polarizations emerge. Capitalism versus socialism gets transformed in democracy and the rule of
law versus the axis of evil. Comparisons become ideological. Portraits are
offered with strong traits. The legal aspects of the first model are promoted and
emphasized as fair, efficient, natural, and good. The legal aspects of the second are unfair,
medieval, inefficient, obscurantist, unnatural, and bad. The antagonist changes; the strategy
stands still.
vulgarized, simplified, and exaggerated for the needs of media consumption. To be entertaining,

The alt must come first global power relations make an

independent judiciary impossible theyll be shaped by the
demands of an internationalizing legal order
Petras 12(James, Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton
University in Binghamton, New York, Legal Imperialism and International Law:
Legal Foundations for War Crimes, Debt Collection and Colonization, 12.03.2012,
http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=1923)
Clearly in a world imperial system there can be no independent judicial bodies
who abide by universally accepted legal codes. Each set of judicial authorities
reflect and actively promote policies favoring and extending their imperial
prerogatives. There are rare exceptions where a judge will rule against a particular
imperial policy but over the long run imperial law guides judicial opinions Imperial
legal doctrines and judicial decisions set the groundwork for imperial wars and
economic pillage. The empires legal experts redefine assassinations, coercion,
torture and arbitrary arrests as compatible with the constitutional order by
claiming imminent and constant threats to the security of the imperial state. Law is
not simply part of the superstructure reflecting the power of economic or political
institutions: it also guides and directs political and economic institutions committing
material resources to implement imperial doctrines. In this sense, imperial rulers are
not lawless as some liberal critics would argue; they function in accordance with
imperial jurisprudence and are faithful to the legal doctrines of empire building.
It is pointless to argue that most imperial leaders trample on constitutional
guarantees and international laws. If an imperial ruler pursued a constitutional
agenda eroding imperial prerogatives or, even worse, applied international law to
prosecute those carrying out brutal imperial policy, he would be quickly condemned
for dereliction of duty and/or immoral behavior and impeached or overthrown.

A2: Hegemony Good

Exceptionalism makes hegemonic decline inevitable
Jouet 13 (Mugambi, JD from Northwestern, publications include articles for
academic journals, as well as for Salon, The Huffington Post, Guernica Magazine,
Truthout, Colliers Magazine, Slate France, and Le Monde, the French daily
newspaper. His article on the harshness of U.S. criminal justice was notably cited in
a Wall Street Journal blog, author of an upcoming book on American exceptionalism,
Does American Exceptionalism Foster American Decline?, 05 February 2013,
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14252-does-american-exceptionalism-fosteramerican-decline)
Republicans argue that the Obama administration has precipitated the nation's decadence by trying to
Europeanize America. In their view, America is declining because it is becoming less "exceptional." In reality,

features of American exceptionalism

contribute to the country's decline: anti-intellectualism, religious
fundamentalism, and radical anti-governmentalism . These mindsets, which mutually
reinforce each other, are particularly concentrated in the contemporary Republican Party. They foster a
purist, far-right ideology that is hostile to compromise and that impedes rational
problem-solving, as recently illustrated by most House Republicans' refusal to raise taxes even only on
millionaires during negotiations over the "fiscal cliff." Throughout 2012, Republicans continued to
describe the Obama administration's moderate health care reform as a radical
"socialist" plan even though universal health care is widely accepted by both the
right and left in all other Western nations . The latter have considerably lower medical expenses
than America and generally better health levels.[2] Unlike many Americans, other Westerners
simply do not go bankrupt due to medical bills . Nor can they be denied insurance due to
America remains very exceptional and certain

preexisting conditions, a peculiar American practice outlawed by Obamacare. Nevertheless, numerous

Americans are persuaded that they enjoy far better access to health care than people elsewhere in the West.
The fact that scores of Americans accept manifest propaganda about "socialized medicine" and vote squarely

Antiintellectualism has become prevalent in modern-day conservative America , as

against their own economic interest relates to a more fundamental aspect of American decline.

exemplified by the rise of leaders disdainful of intellect, such as George W. Bush and Sarah Palin. As noted by

anti-intellectualism is rooted in the notion that

having "too much" education is both pretentious and useless because all one
really needs is common sense. Consider the words of John Boehner, who proudly argued that being
renowned scholar Richard Hofstadter, [3]

Speaker of the House requires no higher education whatsoever: "Trust me - all the skills I learned growing up are
the skills I need to do my job." Today's Republicans often associate education with the so-called "liberal elite."
Rick Santorum notably accused Obama of being a "snob" for setting the goal of a college education for all

America used to lead the world in the proportion of young

adults holding college degrees. That is no longer the case , yet Republicans are determined
Americans in the 21st century.

to cut funding for education. Anti-intellectualism dissuades people from informing themselves and helps
explain why an exceptionally large share of the US population lacks elementary knowledge. One in three
Americans is unable to name any of the three branches of government. Forty-two percent do not know that
America declared independence in 1776; and 24 percent do not know from which country it gained

the ignorance found in

certain segments of society is an Achilles heel. America may not be able to afford
much longer to have a citizenry whose level of education is not consistent with its
superpower status. The belittlement of education has contributed to the acute polarization of America
independence (Great Britain). While America has an abundance of bright minds,

during Obama's presidency as ill-informed citizens have been inclined to believe anything about the federal

government's "tyranny." Scores of Republicans think that Obama radically raised income taxes during his first
term, whereas he actually cut them for 95 percent of working families as part of his economic stimulus. Even
though the Tea Party has stridently denounced overtaxation, current income tax levels range towards historical
lows. In 2009, Palin convinced a third of the public that Obamacare included "death panels." Conspiracy theories
have far more political weight in America than in other developed countries, as further demonstrated by
persistent claims regarding the supposed "hoax" of global warming or Obama's fake birth certificate. Of
course, American exceptionalism also has many positive dimensions. Neil Armstrong's passing reminded us that
Americans were the first on the moon - a prodigious feat accomplished without the benefits of modern computer
technology. The spectacular landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars equally illustrates the remarkable
contributions of Americans to science. It is therefore a paradox that four in ten Americans reject the theory of
evolution in favor of Genesis-based creationism, a singularly high proportion in the developed world at the dawn
of the 21st century. Religious fundamentalists frequently perceive education and science as obstacles to faith.
Nearly half of US Protestants are unaware that Martin Luther was the main figure behind the Protestant
Reformation.[4] These aspects of modern America stand in sharp contrast with the nation's origins in the
Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers were highly
learned men whose conception of government was influenced by Enlightenment philosophy. They created the
first modern democracy, as the Declaration of Independence of 1776 preceded the French Revolution of 1789.
The Marquis de Condorcet, a leading French philosopher, wrote that due to the American Revolution, people no
longer had to learn about the rights of men from philosophy - they could now learn from "the example of a great
people." [5] It may be that decline is the inevitable fate of any leading society. After all, America's incipient
decline has come at the heels of Europe's own decline. Former European powers like the United Kingdom,
France, Germany, Spain and Portugal are now only shadows of their former selves. Perhaps it is now America's
turn to experience the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations. From the Roman Empire to the Mongol Empire to
European colonial empires, countless dominant societies have gradually faded over the course of history. Yet,

decline is not simply a matter of fate. Leaving aside certain environmental factors
partially beyond human control, the ascent and downfall of civilizations is largely humanmade. America's decline after little more than a century as a superpower seems
far from inevitable at this stage. It remains the world's largest economy. It is a leader
in technology and many other fields. Its universities are widely recognized as among the very best
in the world. It has great thinkers and innovators. In sum, there is much to admire about contemporary America.

Still, the aspects of American exceptionalism mentioned above - antiintellectualism, religious fundamentalism and a visceral suspicion of
government - arguably contribute to the country's decline.

Exceptionalism makes decline inevitable causes economic

stagnation, failure of political innovation, and crushes
alliances globally
Weisberger 13
(Bernard, historian who has been by turns a university professor, an editor of
American Heritage, Taking Exception to Exceptionalism,
http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/18/taking-exception-to-exceptionalism/)
exceptionalism now peddled by tea party fable-makers has already done our
economy noticeable harm. It convinces too many. It turns upside down our supposed
hospitality to innovation by attempts to seal us off from learning anything from
other, younger democracies. Improvements in health care, education,
energy conservation name your cause are dismissed out of hand as
socialism, bent on destruction of the American way. That kind of head-in-thesand obstructionism is what we used to deplore in what we called backward parts of the globe. And what
a useful tool it is for keeping the rich beneficiaries of our current unequal status
quo in the top-dog position! The damage that unique America as Dr. Hyde, fortified by a superThe version of

sized military establishment, has done is huge. Where once we independent-minded Yankees scoffed at heel-

clicking Prussian militarism, the media and political establishments of today brag of our superb armed forces,
while reporters covering Pentagon press conferences, as well as congressional committee members, struggle to

The international
consequences are even worse. At a time when we need the worlds friendship and
cooperation, the exceptionalist mindset licenses administrations of both
mainstream parties to override the sovereignty of other nations in the interests of
our own safety. Think of drones aimed at terrorists (so identified in secret by us alone) in neutral Pakistan
outdo each other in deference to the beribboned generals who appear before them.

or allied Afghanistan that take the lives and homes of nearby or mistakenly targeted civilians. Mere collateral
damage to us, we ignore the scope of their tragic suffering. Think of CIA kidnappings on the streets of foreign
cities under the very noses of their own police forces. Think of the symbolic impact of our refusals to sign
international treaties banning the use of land mines or child soldiers, or of the special exemptions we demand
from prosecution by local law authorities of crimes committed against civilians by our military personnel in the
countries where we have bases established. What kind of self-portrait are we painting ? True,
almost all nations commit offenses against common decency and common sense in the mindless fervor of war.

Were Number One hyper-patriotism

is simply the collective self-admiration of empty minds. Its not what the American
Our country is not the only sinner or possibly the worst. But

Revolution was fought for. Not what Tom Paine and Lincoln had in mind. The Declaration of Independence only
says that we were seeking the separate and equal station among the nations of the earth to which the laws of
Nature and Natures God entitled us.

Aff Answers

Alternative

Alternative Fails
The ideology of imperialism is to deeply entrenched in society
that the State has been corrupted and prevents any
alternative
Van Elteren 3 (Mel, Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Tilburg University,
US Cultural Imperialism Today
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sais_review/v023/23.2elteren.html)
advertising constitutes a pervasive public "art form," however, it has become the
dominant mode in which thoughts and experiences are expressed. This
trend is most evident in U.S. society. While alternative values and
ideologies do exist in this culture, it is harder to find representations for
them. Advertising distorts and flattens people's ability to interpret
complex experiences, and it reflects the culture only partially, and in ways that
are biased toward a capitalist idealization of American culture. 47 At this level,
To the extent that

goods are framed and displayed to entice the customer, and shopping has become an event in which individuals purchase and

The ongoing interpenetration and crossover

between consumption and the aesthetic sphere (traditionally separated off as an artistic
counter-world to the everyday aspect of the former) has led to a [End Page 182] greater
"aestheticization of reality": appearance and image have become of
prime importance. Not only have commodities become more stylized but style itself has turned into a valuable
consume the meanings attached to goods.

commodity. The refashioning and reworking of commoditieswhich are themselves carefully selected according to one's

This provides the

framework for a more nuanced and sometimes contradictory second
order of meaning. The dynamics of cultural change therefore entail both processes
individual tastesachieve a stylistic effect that expresses the individuality of their owner. 48

of "traveling culture," in which the received culture (in this case globalizing capitalist culture) is appropriated and assigned new

a "first order" meaning that dominates and

delimits the space for second order meaningsthus retaining something
of the traditional meaning of cultural imperialism. The latter is, ultimately, a
negative phenomenon from the perspective of self-determination by
local people under the influence of the imperial culture. Traditional critiques of
meaning locally, and at the same time

cultural globalization have missed the point. The core of the problem lies not in the homogenization of cultures as such, or in the
creation of a "false consciousness" among consumers and the adoption of a version of the dominant ideology thesis. Rather,

the problem lies in the global spread of the institutions of capitalist

modernity tied in with the culturally impoverished social imagery discussed
above, which crowd out the cultural space for alternatives (as suggested by critical
analysts like Benjamin Barber and Leslie Sklair). The negative effects of cultural imperialism
the disempowerment of people subjected to the dominant forms of
globalizationmust be located on this plane. It is necessary, of course, to explore in more
detail how the very broad institutional forces of capitalist modernity actually operate in specific settings of cultural contact. The
practices of transnational corporations are crucial to any understanding of the concrete activities and local effects of

A state-centered approach blurs the main issue here, which is not

whether nationals or foreigners own the carriers of globalization, but whether their interests are
driven by capitalist globalization.
globalization.

Imperialism doesnt allow for the space of alternatives to exist

Ali 6 (Tariq, novelist, historian, and commentator on the

current situation in the Middle East, The new imperialists Ideologies of Empire,
Ch 3 Pg 51)

Then came the total collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of a peculiar form of gangster

Did the triumph of capitalism and the defeat of an

enemy ideology mean we were in a world without conflict or enemies?
capitalism in the world.

Both Fukuyama and Huntington produced important books as a response to the new situation. Fukuyama,
obsessed with Hegel, saw liberal democracy/capitalism as the only embodiment of the world-spirit that
now marked the end of history, a phrase that became the title of his book.3 The long war was over and the
restless world-spirit could now relax and buy a condo in Miami. Fukuyama insisted that there were no longer

The philosophy, politics, and

economics of the Other each and every variety of socialism/Marxism had
disappeared under the ocean, a submerged continent of ideas that
could never rise again. The victory of capital was irreversible. It was a
universal triumph. Huntington was unconvinced, and warned against
complacency. From his Harvard base, he challenged Fukuyama with a set of theses first published in
any available alternatives to the American way of life.

Foreign Affairs (The Clash of Civilizations? a phrase originally coined by Bernard Lewis, another favourite
of the current administration). Subsequently these papers became a book, The Clash of Civilizations and the

Huntington agreed that

no ideological alternatives to capitalism existed, but this did not
mean the end of history. Other antagonisms remained. The great divisions
among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be
cultural. . . . The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. 4 In
Remaking of the World Order. The question mark had now disappeared.

particular, Huntington emphasized the continued importance of religion in the modern world, and it was this
that propelled the book onto the bestseller lists after 9/11.

What did he mean by the word

civilization? Early in the last century, Oswald Spengler, the German grandson of a miner, had
abandoned his vocation as a teacher, turned to philosophy and to history, and produced a master-text. In
The Decline of the West, Spengler counterposed culture (a word philologically tied to nature, the
countryside, and peasant life) with civilization, which is urban and would become the site of industrial

For Spengler,
civilization reeked of death and destruction and imperialism.
Democracy was the dictatorship of money and money is overthrown
and abolished only by blood.5 The advent of Caesarism would drown it in blood and
anarchy, dooming both capitalist and worker to a life of slavery to the machine-master.

become the final episode in the history of theWest.Had the Third Reich not been defeated in Europe,
principally by the Red Army (the spinal cord of the Wehrmacht was broken in Stalingrad and Kursk, and the
majority of the unfortunate German soldiers who perished are buried on the Russian steppes, not on the
beaches of Normandy or in the Ardennes), Spenglers prediction might have come close to realization. He
was among the first and fiercest critics of Eurocentrism, and his vivid worldview, postmodern in its intensity
though not its language, can be sighted in this lyrical passage: I see, in place of that empty figment of one
linear history, the drama of a number of mighty cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil
of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its
material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and
feeling, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet
discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and
stonepines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves. Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression,
which arise, ripen, decay and never return.6 In contrast to this, he argued, lay the destructive cycle of
civilization:Civilizations

are the most external and artificial states of

which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, death
following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built petrifying world city following
motherearth . . . they are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again. . . .

Imperialism is civilization unadulterated. In this phenomenal form the

destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. . . . Expansionism is a doom,

something daemonic and intense, which grips forces into service and
uses up the late humanity of the world-city stage.7

Permutation

Perm Solves
Perm solves Their absolutist rejection of imperialism is too
dualistic
Angus 4 (Ian, Professor of humanities at Simon Fraser University, Empire, Borders, Place: A Critique of Hardt and Negris Concept of
Empire. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.3angus.html)

how can one find a limit to the

expansive tendency of empire? The inscription of a border and a politics
of place both pertain to the construction of a limit to expansion and
thus to hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges (xii).
While deterritorialization cannot be exactly reversed, it is not true that
this implies that emancipation must lie in further deterritorialization
and that all reterritorializations are perverse, or fundamentalist. They
are artificiala matter of human artificeto be sure. However, it can be argued that the most profound
and effective anti-neoliberal globalization politics in recent years has
been inspired precisely by inventive reterritorializations, localizations
that retrieve that which has been pushed aside by empire and
preserved by borders. It is a politics of limit to empire so that a plurality
of differences can occurdifferences from empire, not the putative
consumer differences that are equalized by exchanges. Leonard Cohen has pointed to
The two critical points that I have made converge on a central issue:

the problem of empire in this fashion. Things are going to slide in all directions. Wont be nothing. Nothing you can measure
anymore.24 How exactly to define limits, draw borders, to open a space where measure can be taken, will take a great deal of
political debate and action in deciding. There is a lot more to be said and done about this, but I doubt whether the perspective

Their concept of abstraction is too

dualistic, their concept of border too one-sided, their concept of history
too uni-linear, their concept of place too shallow, to have much longterm resonance in the anti-neoliberal globalization alliance . I would put my bets on
put forward in Empire will be of much use in this important matter.

the construction of borders that allow Others to flourish, a politics of place and a defence of communities against exchange
value. This is a very different politics whose difference is perhaps now obscured by the common opposition to empire. But it is
different enough that one may expect it to become generally visible before too long.

Impacts

VTL
Always a value to life
Augustine 2k
Keith, Death and the Meaning of Life
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/augustine1.html
These considerations show that we must create our own meaning for our lives regardless of whether or not our lives

Whether our lives are meaningful to us depends on how we

judge them. The absence or presence of greater purpose is as irrelevant as the finality of death. The claim
that our lives are 'ultimately' meaningless does not make sense because there is no
sense in which they could be meaningful or meaningless outside of how we regard them.
serve some higher purpose.

Questions about the meaning of life are questions about values. We attribute values to things in life rather than
discovering them. There can be no meaning of life outside of the meaning we create for ourselves because the
universe is not a sentient being that can attribute values to things. Even if a sentient God existed, the value that he
would attribute to our lives would not be the same as the value that we find in living and thus would be irrelevant.

Representations Good

China Threat
Recognizing conflict as one possible outcome for U.S. China
relations doesnt essentialize Chinese behavior
Andrew LEONARD Senior Technology Writier @ Salon 8-21-9 Hu Jintao is no
Kaiser Wilhelm
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2009/08/21/hu_jintao_is_the_new_kaiser_wilhelm/

I don't think Hu Jintao makes a good Kaiser Wilhelm and I think it is foolhardy to
predict what will happen with the kind of thunderous certainty that is Ferguson's
stock-in-trade. A superpower clash, whether economic or military, between the U.S.
and China is in no one's interest. World War I, of course, wasn't ultimately in
anyone's interest either, but Europe seems to have learned from its 20th century
mistakes, at least so far, so maybe we can too. I'm with James Fallows; just to assert
that a disastrous divorce is inevitable is positively dangerous because it ignores a
world of other possibilities, anhd constricts our freedom to move.
Even historians -- or especially historians -- recognize that world events are shaped
in part by deep economic, demographic, and technical trends , but only in part. Real
human beings make real decisions that have real effects. (Cf: LBJ in 1964, BushCheney in 2001, JFK-Khrushchev in 1962, etc.) If we recognize that a collision with
China is possible, but only one of several possibilities, then we act so as to
reduce that possibility and increase the probability of better outcomes. If we think
breakup is inevitable, as Ferguson is arguing, then the odds of a collision in fact
occurring become higher than they would otherwise be. (Because each side
interprets the other's moves in the darkest way and responds in kind.)

Empiricism Good
Empiricism creates accurate representations our
epistemology is sound
Liu 96
(Xiuwu, Assistant Prof. Interdisciplinary Studies Miami U. Ohio, Western perspectives on Chinese
higher education, p. 22-24, Google Print)
The pervious section goes to some lengths to underscore the plain fact that the studied society exists
independently of studies of it. Constructivists may contend that I missed their point. They may say, for example,
that they never doubted the independent existence of society and that the thrust of their position lies in denying
that we can arrive at the Truth about any aspect of society. Their point about the perspectival nature of knowledge
is well taken, and realist constructivism contains that insight. "Anything goes" is a realist or rationalist caricature of
relativism (Geertz 1984; Putnam 1990; Rorty 1982) just as talk about Truth is a constructivist caricature of the
epistemology of "old-fashioned" scholarship. What I call social ontological realism is part of the general
philosophical position of ontological realism, which asserts the mind-independent existence of reality. It asserts the
study-independent existence of society and, in cross-cultural inquiry, the study independent existence of other
societies. I give it special emphasis for two reasons. First, the concept of social reality has been neglected in recent

Sometimes constructivists imply or even insist that there is no

reality except that which is represented (Lincoln and Guba 198, chap. 3). For example, in her survey
constructivist works.

of feminist methods in social research, Shulamit Reinharz discusses a prevalent attitude of feminist ethnographers

Some feminist researchers continue to reject positivism [referring in this

context to testing or large-scale surveys] as an aspect of patriarchal thinking that
separates the scientist from the phenomenon under study. They repudiate the idea
of a social reality out there independent of the observer. Rather, they think that social
toward positivism.13

research should be guided by a constructivist framework in which researchers acknowledge that they interpret and

This position commits the epistemic fallacy in that it reduces

social reality to what is known about it (Bhaskar 1989; Outhwaite 1987, 76). While scholarly
understanding of social reality is, to use a catchphrase of hermeneutics, always already
interpreted, social reality in itself has its own existence. Because that reality has
its own existence, insufficient attention to it will result in unrealistic representations
of it. Put differently, realist constructivism attends to both ontological and
epistemological aspects of cross-cultural inquiry, redressing the balance brought about by
define reality. (1992, 46)14

constructivist thinking. How this may be done in one area of empirical cross-cultural studies will be shown in my
analyses of Western studies of Chinese education. In the fields of philosophy of science and philosophy of social
science a prevalent position on ontological realism (usually called metaphysical realism) is that it is trivial or banal
(Hesse 1992; McGinn 1995). This is because once the existence of specific entities (class, in social science, for
example) is broached, the discussion becomes theory-laden.15 On the other hand, as Walker and Evers point out,

from the fact that all experience is theory-laden, that what we believe exists
depends on what theory we adopt, it does not follow that all theories are
evidentially equivalent or equally reasonable (1988, 33). To reconcile these two insights for the
present discussion, I suggest that in cross-cultural inquiry, ontological realism is not so trivial as has been deemed
generally, where empirical checks are crucial to producing highly realistic representations of other societies.16 The
objection that it is not so much the fact that another society has an independent existence but how that society
exists that matters to empirical inquiry, though helpful, ignores the fact that the latter assumes the former. My
second reason for emphasizing social ontological realism concerns the requirement that an adequate account of
cross-cultural inquiry satisfactorily explains why some statements are realistic while others are not. As the
remaining chapters of this book aim to show, in most cases the task is not deciding between an account that is
realistic and another that is not. Rather, in actual inquiry, a scholars task amounts to choosing from a limited
number of plausible accounts what she considers to be the most appropriate one. Nevertheless, in those limiting
taken-for-granted cases, social ontological realism does make possible a distinction between realistic statements
and unrealistic ones (unrealistic in the sense that they utterly fail to represent or belie an aspect of social reality
within a given conteExt.). An adequate model for cross-cultural inquiry should account for these limiting cases.

West Is Bed

Imperialism Good
Imperialism prevents war interdependence, institutionbuilding, and democracy promotion
Ikenberry 4 (G. John Ikenberry, Prof. of Geopolitics, 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

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
military empire. But ultimately,

Europe, Japan, China, and Russia cannot be described as imperial, even when "neo" or "liberal" modifies the term.

advanced democracies operate within a "security community" in which the use or

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

threat

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.

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 greatpower 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.
And as Ferguson notes,

Imperialism does more good than bad

Boot 03 (Max, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies,
U.S. Imperialism: A Force for Good May 13, 2003, http://www.cfr.org/iraq/usimperialism-force-good/p5959)
While the formal empire mostly disappeared after the Second World War, the United States set out on another bout
of imperialism in Germany and Japan. Oh, sorry -- that wasn't imperialism; it was "occupation." But when Americans
are running foreign governments, it's a distinction without a difference. Likewise, recent "nation-building"
experiments in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan are imperialism under another name. Mind you, this
is not meant as a condemnation. The history of American imperialism is hardly one of unadorned good doing; there

But, on the whole, U.S.

imperialism has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past
century. It has defeated the monstrous evils of communism and Nazism and lesser
evils such as the Taliban and Serbian ethnic cleansing. Along the way, it has helped
have been plenty of shameful episodes, such as the mistreatment of the Indians.

spread liberal institutions to countries as diverse as South Korea and Panama. Yet,
while generally successful as imperialists, Americans have been loath to confirm that's what they were doing. That's
OK. Given the historical baggage that "imperialism" carries, there's no need for the U.S. government to embrace the

But it should definitely embrace the practice. That doesn't mean looting Iraq of
its natural resources; nothing could be more destructive of the goal of building a
stable government in Baghdad. It means imposing the rule of law, property rights,
free speech and other guarantees, at gunpoint if need be. This will require selecting
a new ruler who is committed to pluralism and then backing him or her to the hilt.
term.

Iran and other neighbouring states won't hesitate to impose their despotic views on Iraq; we shouldn't hesitate to
impose our democratic views.

Imperialism is needed to maintain order

FERGUSON 04 (NIALL, Professor of History at Harvard University, A World
Without Power JULY 1, 2004,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2004/07/01/a_world_without_power?page=full)

If the United States retreats

from its hegemonic role, who would supplant it? Not Europe, not China, not the Muslim world -and certainly not the United Nations. Unfortunately, the alternative to a single superpower is
not a multilateral utopia, but the anarchic nightmare of a new Dark Age. We tend to
Critics of U.S. global dominance should pause and consider the alternative.

assume that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. In the history of world politics, it seems, someone is always the
hegemon, or bidding to become it. Today, it is the United States; a century ago, it was the United Kingdom. Before
that, it was France, Spain, and so on. The famed 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, doyen of the
study of statecraft, portrayed modern European history as an incessant struggle for mastery, in which a balance of
power was possible only through recurrent conflict. The influence of economics on the study of diplomacy only

In his bestselling 1987

work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict
from 1500 to 2000, Yale University historian Paul Kennedy concluded that, like all
past empires, the U.S. and Russian superpowers would inevitably succumb to
overstretch. But their place would soon be usurped, Kennedy argued, by the rising
powers of China and Japan, both still unencumbered by the dead weight of imperial
military commitments. In his 2001 book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, University of Chicago
seems to confirm the notion that history is a competition between rival powers.

political scientist John J. Mearsheimer updates Kennedy's account. Having failed to succumb to overstretch, and
after surviving the German and Japanese challenges, he argues, the United States must now brace for the ascent of
new rivals. "[A] rising China is the most dangerous potential threat to the United States in the early twenty-first
century," contends Mearsheimer. "[T]he United States has a profound interest in seeing Chinese economic growth
slow considerably in the years ahead." China is not the only threat Mearsheimer foresees. The European Union (EU)
too has the potential to become "a formidable rival." Power, in other words, is not a natural monopoly; the

The "unipolarity" identified by some

commentators following the Soviet collapse cannot last much longer, for the simple
reason that history hates a hyperpower. Sooner or later, challengers will emerge,
and back we must go to a multipolar, multipower world . But what if these esteemed theorists
struggle for mastery is both perennial and universal.

are all wrong? What if the world is actually heading for a period when there is no hegemon? What if, instead of a
balance of power, there is an absence of power? Such a situation is not unknown in history. Although the
chroniclers of the past have long been preoccupied with the achievements of great powers -- whether civilizations,
empires, or nation-states -- they have not wholly overlooked eras when power receded. Unfortunately, the world's

Anyone who dislikes

U.S. hegemony should bear in mind that, rather than a multipolar world of
competing great powers, a world with no hegemon at all may be the real alternative
experience with power vacuums (eras of "apolarity," if you will) is hardly encouraging.

to U.S. primacy. Apolarity could turn out to mean an anarchic new Dark Age: an era
of waning empires and religious fanaticism; of endemic plunder and pillage in the
world's forgotten regions; of economic stagnation and civilization's retreat into a few
fortified enclaves.

Rejecting Hegemony Bad

Total rejection of hegemony increases imperialism. The plans
reformation of leadership solves the impact
Christian REUS-SMIT IR @ Australian Natl 4 American Power and World Order
p. 121-123
My preference here is to advocate a forward-leaning, prudential strategy of institutionally
governed change. By `forward-leaning', I mean that the progressive realization of cosmopolitan values should
be the measure of successful politics in international society. As long as gross violations of basic human rights
mar global social life, we, as individuals, and the states that purport to represent us, have obligations
to direct what political influence we have to the improvement of the human
condition, both at home and abroad. I recommend, however, that our approach be prudent rather than
imprudent. Historically, the violence of inter-state warfare and the oppression of imperial
rule have been deeply corrosive of basic human rights across the glob e. The
institutions of international society, along with their constitutive norms, such as sovereignty, non-intervention, self-determination and limits on the use of force, have helped to reduce
these corrosive forces dramatically. The incidence of inter-state wars has declined
markedly, even though the number of states has multiplied, and imperialism and colonialism have moved from
being core institutions of international society to practices beyond the pale. Prudence dictates, therefore, that we
lean forward without losing our footing on valuable institutions and norms.

This means, in effect, giving

priority to institutionally governed change, working with the rules and procedures of
international society rather than against them. What does this mean in practice? In general, I take it to mean two
things. First, it means recognizing the principal rules of international society, and accepting the obligations they
impose on actors, including oneself. These rules fall into two broad categories: procedural and substantive. The
most specific procedural rules are embodied in institutions such as the United Nations Security Council, which is
empowered to 'determine the existence of any threat to peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression' and the
measures that will be taken 'to maintain or restore international peace and security'.28 More general, yet equally
crucial, procedural rules include the cardinal principle that states are only bound by rules to which they have
consented. Even customary international law, which binds states without their express consent, is based in part on
the assumption of their tacit consent. The substantive rules of international society are legion, but perhaps the
most important are the rules governing the use of force, both when force is permitted (jus ad bellum) and how it
may be used (jus in bello). Second, working with the rules and procedures of international society also means
recognizing that the principal modality of innovation and change must be communicative. That is, establishing new
rules and mechanisms for achieving cosmopolitan ends and international public goods, or modifying existing ones,
should be done through persuasion and negotiation, not ultimatum and coercion. A premium must be placed,
therefore, on articulating the case for change, on recognizing the concerns and interests of others as legitimate, on
building upon existing rules, and on seeing genuine communication as a process of give and take, not demand and

Giving priority to institutionally governed change may seem an overly

conservative strategy, but it need not be. As explained above, the established procedural and
take.

substantive rules of international society have delivered international public goods that actually further

Eroding these rules would only

lead to increases in inter-state violence and imperialism , and this would
almost certainly produce a radical deterioration in the protection of basic human
rights across the globe. Saying that we ought to preserve these rules is prudent, not conservative. More
cosmopolitan ends, albeit in a partial and inadequate fashion.

than this, though, we have learnt that the institutions of international society have transformative potential, even if
this is only now being creatively exploited.