Economy Advantage	2

Econ Decline Doesn’t Cause War	3

AT: WWII Scenario	4

US Econ Resilient	5

Econ Bounceback	6

No Recovery for Decades	7

Shipbuilding Industry Strong	8

Job Loss Helps Econ	9

Jobs Kill econ	10

xxxxxxxxxx	11

Hegemony Advantage	12

No Challengers	13

Heg Decline Doesn’t Cause war	14

No Risk of Heg Decline	15

Power Projection High Now	16

Power Projection Irrelevant	18

No Naval Decline	19

Carriers Don’t Project Power	20

Squo solves carriers	21

Can’t Sustain Heg (1/2)	22

Can’t Sustain Heg (2/2)	23

Heg Threats Exaggerated	24

Heg Bad – Generic	25

Heg Bad – Disease	26

Heg Bad – Iran Strikes	27

Heg Bad – China War	28

MultiPol Good – Generic	29

Multipol Now and Inev	30

Economy Advantage

Econ Decline Doesn’t Cause War

Decline doesn’t cause war

Morris Miller, Professor of Administration @ the University of Ottawa, ‘2K

(Interdisciplinary Science Review, v 25 n4 2000 p ingenta connect)

The question may be reformulated. Do wars spring from a popular reaction to a sudden economic crisis that exacerbates poverty and growing disparities in wealth and incomes? Perhaps one could argue, as some scholars do, that it is some dramatic event or sequence of such events leading to the exacerbation of poverty that, in turn, leads to this deplorable denouement. This exogenous factor might act as a catalyst for a violent reaction on the part of the people or on the part of the political leadership who would then possibly be tempted to seek a diversion by finding or, if need be, fabricating an enemy and setting in train the process leading to war. According to a study under- taken by Minxin Pei and Ariel Adesnik of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, there would not appear to be any merit in this hypothesis. After studying ninety-three episodes of economic crisis in twenty-two countries in Latin America and Asia in the years since the Second World War they concluded that:19 Much of the conventional wisdom about the political impact of economic crises may be wrong ... The severity of economic crisis – as measured in terms of inflation and negative growth – bore no relationship to the collapse of regimes ... (or, in democratic states, rarely) to an outbreak of violence ... In the cases of dictatorships and semi-democracies, the ruling elites responded to crises by increasing repression (thereby using one form of violence to abort another).

AT: WWII Scenario

World War II doesn’t prove anything; it’s one exception in 500 years and was just a continuation of World War I

Christopher Chase-Dunn, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside, and Kenneth O’Reilly, Professor of History at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, 1989, in War in the World System, p. 52

Goldstein claims that there has been a misunderstanding of the relationship between economic cycles and war cycles because of the anomalous (for him) case of World War II, which occurred at the beginning rather than at the end of a long-wave upswing. This is the core war that most contemporary theorists think is typical. But Goldstein shows that its timing and severity with regard to the K-wave is the single exception to nearly 500 years of international conflict. He argues that the timing of World War II was influenced by the unresolved hegemonic situation that followed World War I, when the United States refused to take up the role of hegemon. His contention is supported by Wallerstein and others who see World Wars I and II as a single extended conflict.

US Econ Resilient

The US economy is resilient – financial crisis proves

Bowman, 08 (Michael, VOA news. “Bush Economic Advisor: US Economy Remains Resilient” http://voanews.com/english/2008-10-19-voa24.cfm)

President Bush's top economic advisor says the United States is showing remarkable resiliency during a period of enormous financial turmoil. From Washington, VOA's Michael Bowman reports. Recent weeks have seen Wall Street's main stock index lose about a third of its value after the nation's biggest and best-known financial firms either failed or were bought out. A rash of U.S. home foreclosures is continuing amid rising unemployment and declining consumer spending. Economic growth has slowed to a crawl, and the consensus view among economists is that the nation is entering a recession if it has not done so already. The Chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, Ed Lazear, is striking a positive note. "This is an amazingly resilient economy," said Ed Lazear. "We have seen shock after shock [in] the housing market, oil prices going up to near $150 a barrel over the summer, credit markets tighten - all of those things are very difficult to get through, and yet the economy has gotten through it." Lazear was speaking on CNN's Late Edition program. He added that continued tight credit will make for what he termed "difficult months ahead" with higher unemployment. "Some parts of the country have much higher rates of unemployment, and we are seeing what anyone would characterize as a recession in certain parts of the country," he said. "But the hope is that we have taken the steps to get things turned around, and we think we have." Those steps include a massive financial rescue package President Bush signed into law earlier this month. Last week, the president announced the federal government will purchase stock in troubled banks to give them more capital and make it easier for them to lend money so that consumers and businesses can engage in beneficial economic activity. Lazear says there are already signs that banks are willing to lend to each other - the first step in what he hopes will be loosening credit in the country.

Econ Bounceback

Economy shortfalls are natural part of the business cycle, it’ll bounce back

Cooley, 11/25/09- Ph.D. in Economics, Professor of Economics and Dean of New York University's Stern School of Business (Thomas, Financial booms and busts 'are inevitable'; Academic expects the next economic crisis to follow the same path as the one the world is experiencing now and it will involve a similar breakdown in confidence", South China Morning Post, November 25th 2009, December 1st 2009, Lexis Nexis, KONTOPOULOS)

Another financial crisis is inevitable because booms and busts are simply part of the business cycle, a leading academic told a seminar organised by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Dr Thomas F. Cooley, professor of economics and dean of New York University's Stern School of Business, recently spoke at a Global Finance Seminar Series event entitled "The Next Financial Crisis" at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) offices. Edmond Lau, executive director of the HKMA's monetary management department and a board member of the Treasury Markets Association, delivered opening remarks, while Reginald Chua, editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, later moderated a panel discussion between Cooley and K.K. Tse, executive vice-president of State Street Bank and Trust Company. Cooley would not say when he thought the next financial crisis would occur but said it definitely would come because booms and busts were part of the business cycle. He said the next crisis would have the same characteristics and follow the same path as the present one - flowing from a loss of confidence. "History is replete with examples of financial crises and bank panics," he said. "Just in the United States alone, in the 20th century we had the panic of 1907, the stock market crash of 1929 and banking panics of the 1930s. Then we had a long period of relative success and calm, and then we had episodes such as the savings and loan crisis, and the failures of Continental Illinois Bank and Long Term Capital Management. "That's just in the US. In the past two decades we've had financial crises in Asia, Mexico, Chile, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia, so financial crises occur with some frequency, but what they don't do is occur with predictability," he said.

No Recovery for Decades

Economic recovery won’t happen for decades – we are in a post-bubble recession which eliminates any possibility of growth

Gosselin, 09 – National Economics Correspondent for the Los Angeles Times (Peter G., “U.S. economy may sputter for years,” Los Angeles Times, January 19th 2009, May 21st 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/19/business/fi-econ19?pg=1, KONTOPOULOS)

Reporting from Washington — Transfixed by the daily spectacle of dismal economic news and wild Wall Street swings, few Americans have looked up to see what a wide array of economists say lies beyond the immediate crisis. And with good reason: The picture isn't pretty. The sleek racing machine that was the U.S. economy is unlikely to return any time soon despite the huge repair efforts now underway. Instead, it probably will continue to sputter and threaten to stall for years to come. The prospects are so gloomy, according to a recent study, that unemployment may be slightly higher by the time President-elect Barack Obama's first term ends. The damage done by plunging house and stock prices, the failure of other major economies to be independent sources of growth and hidden weaknesses in America's past performance have crippled nearly every actor in the nation's economic drama. None -- save perhaps the government -- retains the power to push the economy back to speeds it regularly achieved during much of the last generation, economists say. The result: An economy that once averaged 3% or better annual growth would be lucky to grow 2% a year during the entirety of the new president's term. "That is going to feel like stagnation" to most people, said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody's Investors Service. "We're in a post-bubble global recession, and post-bubble recessions are lethal for growth," Stephen S. Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, said from Beijing. "It will be a long time before the world experiences anything more than anemic recovery."

Shipbuilding Industry Strong

Shipbuilding industry strong now – growing since 2010

Reportlinker No Date (Report linker online resources for reports http://www.reportlinker.com/ci02322/Shipbuilding.html)

The global shipbuilding market is expected to expand at almost 23% yearly through 2013, according to Koncept Analytics. The industry is involved in the construction of ships and floating vessels including tankers and bulk carriers. Drivers of growth in this market include rising demand for oil and an increasingly favorable economic climate. Though the market was hit by a fall off in demand in 2008 and 2009, the industry has been recovering since 2010, with a market rise in new orders. The global shipbuilding market is aggressive, with the competitive edge won by companies showing the highest degree of technical developments, productivity and skilled workforce.

Job Loss Helps Econ

No impact to job loss – it actually helps the economy

AIER, American Institute for Economic Research, ‘8 (http://www.aier.org/research/commentaries/898-unemployment-trends-and-economic-recovery, “Unemployment Trends and Economic Recovery”)

Recent unemployment numbers have conjured up the fear of a coming new Great Depression. A careful look, however, suggests no economy-wide collapse in employment. In addition, some unemployment during an economic downturn is actually essential for a stable economic recovery. The Department of Labor said December 11 that around 573,000 people applied for unemployment insurance payments, up from 515,000 the week earlier. While these initial claims seem large, the job loss occurred in a non-farm U.S. workforce of more than 135 million people, with 4.4 million currently collecting unemployment insurance claims. The vast majority of the working population remains employed and earning a living. In November 2008, non-farm employment was only 1.4 percent below the level of a year earlier, based on Labor Department data. Even subtracting government jobs from this total, private sector non-farm employment was only down 1.8 percent from the previous year. While there has been a decline in employment across much of the economy, it has been far from even. As the table below shows, the highest rates of job loss are clustered in a handful of sectors. At the same time, there have been industries where employment has grown, despite the economic downturn. Not surprisingly, the largest job loss has been in residential housing construction, automobile production, and textile manufacturing. The burst of the housing bubble has sent the home construction industry into a nose dive, with 11.4 percent fewer jobs compared to last year. Employment in the motor vehicle and parts industry has fallen 14.9 percent over the last year. In the auto dealer retail trade, 9.3 percent fewer people are now employed. Most of this decline has been experienced among the Big Three American automakers. The textile mills are employing 13.9 percent fewer workers compared to November of last year. Apparel industry employment has decreased by 8.9 percent. This primarily is the result of the continuing growth of global competition and the cost-efficiencies foreign suppliers provide. With consumers adjusting their budgets to a post-boom environment, other retail businesses such as electronic and appliance stores, and clothing and department stores have reduced the number of workers they employ. These cuts have been far more modest, in the range of 4 and 5.5 percent compared to last November. Other sectors as the data in the table indicate, have reduced the level of employment from a year earlier only in the range of 1 to 3 percent for the most part. Even in the commercial banking sector employment has declined by only 1 percent, according to the Labor Department’s data over the last year. On the other hand, since November of 2007, employment has continued to increase in the oil, gas and coal industries, with employment growing in these sectors in the range of 9.4 to 9.7 percent. This positive employment trend has continued even as energy prices rapidly declined over the last four months. Employment also has continued to grow, perhaps not surprisingly, in government and in those industries that rely heavily on various forms of social welfare spending such as health care and education. Direct government jobs at the local, state and federal levels have grown between 1 and 1.6 percent over the last year. Employment in educational services went up by 3.6 percent and in health care and related services by 2.9 percent. As difficult as it is to experience, unemployment is a necessary and healthy part of an economic recovery process that follows the bursting of the bubbles of an economic boom. The Federal Reserve followed an extremely aggressive monetary policy over the last five to seven years, creating a huge increase in the money supply that artificially lowered interest rates to practically zero and filled the banks with plenty of cash to lend to both the credit and uncredit worthy, as I detailed in an earlier commentary on “The Financial Bubble was Created by Central Bank Policy." The housing and consumer spending booms were bound to end when the inflationary bubbles popped. Investment resources, capital, and portions of the labor force were drawn into employments that could only last for as long as the inflationary boom. When the downturn began, it was inevitable that many of the employments created during the boom would begin to disappear. Where the bubbles were biggest is where, inescapably, the greatest amount of employment would be lost. The task ahead is to ensure a healthy economic recovery by allowing the market to find correct prices, wages, and asset values. This will enable people to discover what things are worth in the post-boom era, and where sustainable employments may be found.

Jobs Kill econ

Full Employment causes massive wage and price inflation- Phillips curve proves

Economy Watch NO DATE

Economy Watch NO DATE “Inflation and Phillips Curve” <http://www.economywatch.com/inflation/phillips-curve.html>

Inflation and Phillips Curve answers all the problems which were contained within the Keynesian Theory. The curve diagrammatically depicts an empirically derived relationship between unemployment and money wage growth. The creation of the curve has helped man	y economists of the post Keynesian period to develop on the Keynesian Theory. The curve diagrammatically displays the inflation theory. It explores the phenomenon of inflation from a perspective of pushing the demands beyond full employment. Contents of the Phillips Curve Phillips Curve explains the inflation phenomenon encompassing two aspects. Those aspects are Demand Pull and Cost Push. The demand pull inflation is caused when an economy faces the pressure created by excess demand as it proceeds towards full employment and beyond. The condition of progression beyond the full employment level of output create that extra pressure on the economy leading to the phenomenon of inflation. In such a situation the output fails to match the demand because of the stringency of full employment. Therefor the only remedy is to clear off the goods in the market and to achieve this goal the prices of the good are raised. The cost-push theory also referred to as the seller's inflation lays down that in an imperfect economy the companies set prices of products that are in accord with the mark-up formula. The formula is: p = (1m) w In the formula p stands for price, m for mark-up and w for wage. When the economy of a country marches towards full employment the strength of labors increases and they are in a position to demand more in terms of wages. In order to keep their profit intact the employers will raise the prices of goods which in turn keeps their mark-up intact. In such a situation the labors would demand for an increased wage rate which would in turn influence the price of goods and the price would rise. The economies policy is an efficient way to combat this kind of inflation. Phillips Curve also depicts in a graphical way the situation in which the unemployment rate would be zero. In such a condition the price inflation(wage inflation) rises. Both the theories are different in nature since one explains about the demand factor and the other explains about the supply factor.

Inflation destroys the economy

Robbins 09

Ron Robbins the founder and analyst of Investing for the Soul and maintains the blog, Enlightened Economics, “Interest Rate Manipulation and Loose Money Promote Economic Collapse,” http://monetarycurrent.com/commentaries/53-philosophy/691-interest-rate-manipulation-and-loose-money-promote-economic-collapse.html

Economies with excessively loose monetary policies and who force interest rates to ultra low levels for extended periods of time eventually succumb to a massive top-heavy debt structure which at some point 'topples over.' These countries then suffer either a deflationary debt implosion/depression in which much of the debt is liquidated, or the country's central bank instigates a huge inflationary push to reduce the value of all credit market debt in the country by vastly increasing the amount of currency and the expansion of its money supply. A big inflationary push frequently leads to a lack of confidence in the country's currency and hence the possibility of 'hyper-inflation' occurring as everyone unloads the country's currency for real goods or other currencies. Argentina earlier this decade and Zimbabwe recently, are examples of central bank sponsored inflation that led to no confidence in their currencies, resulting in hyper-inflation. The inflationary approach is what appears to be favoured by the American, Japanese and British central banks. From an Enlightened Economics perspective, the actions of manipulating down interest rates and the over printing of money by central banks fall under a terrible fallacy: the belief that we can resolve our short-term economic problems by going more into debt and not concern ourselves with the long-term consequences. A global consciousness has to arise which understands that manipulating markets, most especially interest rates and money supply, leads to highly unstable economies which in time either implode or explode!

xxxxxxxxxx

Hegemony Advantage

No Challengers

No challengers

S. Brooks and W. Wohlforth, IR @ Dartmouth, ‘8

(World Out of Balance, Chapter 1, http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8784.pdf)

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE SOVIET UNION marked the emergence of historically unprecedented U.S. advantages in the scales of world power. No system of sovereign states has ever contained one state with comparable material preponderance.1 Following its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the United States loomed so large on the world stage that many scholars called it an empire,2 but the costly turmoil that engulfed Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 quieted such talk. Suddenly, the limits of U.S. power became the new preoccupation. Many analysts began to compare the United States to Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century—an overstretched, declining, “weary Titan” that “staggers under the too vast orb of his fate.”3[Footnote Begins] 1 This point has been stressed by political scientists, historians, and policymakers. Political scientist G. John Ikenberry observes that “since the end of the Cold War, the United States has emerged as an unrivaled and unprecedented global superpower. At no other time in modern history has a single state loomed so large over the rest of the world.” “Is American Multilateralism in Decline?” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2003): 533. Historian Paul Kennedy stresses: “A statistician could have a wild time compiling lists of the fields in which the US leads. . . . It seems to me there is no point in the Europeans or Chinese wringing their hands about US predominance, and wishing it would go away. It is as if, among the various inhabitants of the apes and monkeys cage at the London Zoo, one creature had grown bigger and bigger—and bigger—until it became a 500lb gorilla.” “The Eagle Has Landed: The New U.S. Global Military Position,” Financial Times, February 1, 2002. And former secretary of state Henry Kissinger maintains, “The U.S. is enjoying a preeminence unrivaled by even the greatest empires of the past. From weaponry to entrepreneurship, from science to technology, from higher education to popular culture, America exercises an unparalleled ascendancy around the globe.” Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 17.[Text Continues] What accounts for this sudden shift in assessments of American power? For most observers, it was not new information about material capabilities. As Robert Jervis observes, “Measured in any conceivable way, the United States has a greater share of world power than any other country in history.”4 That statement was as accurate when it was written in 2006 as it would have been at any time after 1991, and the primacy it describes will long persist, even if the most pessimistic prognostications about U.S. economic, military, and technological competitiveness come true. For most scholars of international relations, what really changed after 2003 were estimates of the political utility of America’s primacy. Suddenly, scholars were impressed by the fact that material preponderance does not always translate into desired outcomes. For many, theories of international relations (IR) that explain constraints on the use of power were vindicated by American setbacks in Iraq and elsewhere. For more than three decades, much IR scholarship has been devoted to theories about how the international environment shapes states’ behavior. 5 Applying them to the case at hand, scholars have drawn on each of the main IR theories—realism, institutionalism, constructivism, and liberalism—to identify external (or “systemic”) constraints that undermine the value of the United States’ primacy, greatly restricting the range of security policies it can pursue. Scholars emphasize a variety of elements in the international system that constrain U.S. security policy: international institutions, balancing dynamics, global economic interdependence, and legitimacy. The upshot is simple but portentous for the contours of international politics in the decades to come: the political utility of U.S. material primacy is attenuated or even negated by enduring properties of the international system. The purpose of this book is to undertake a systematic evaluation of the external constraints that scholars have highlighted and thereby gain a better understanding of the United States’ global role. This entails answering four questions: Does the United States face the imminent prospect of having its power checked by a balancing coalition of other great powers? As it has become increasingly exposed to the international economy, has the United States become more vulnerable to other actors’ attempts to influence its security policies? Is the United States tightly bound by the need to maintain a good general reputation for cooperation in international institutions? Does the United States need to adhere to existing rules to sustain legitimacy and thus maintain today’s international institutional order? Our answer to each of these questions is no—a finding that overturns the scholarly conventional wisdom, according to which these factors strongly constrain U.S. security policy. On the contrary, the unprecedented concentration of power resources in the United States generally renders inoperative the constraining effects of the systemic properties long central to research in international relations.

Heg Decline Doesn’t Cause war

Decline doesn’t cause war

Geller and Singer, 99 – *Chair of the Department of Political Science @ Wayne State University

(Daniel S and Joel David, Nations at war: a scientific study of international conflict, p. 116-117)

No Risk of Heg Decline

No risk of heg decline

William Wohlforth Olin Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale and Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth, “Unipolar Stability,” Harvard International Review, Spring 2007 (http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/print.php?article=1611)

US military forces are stretched thin, its budget and trade deficits are high, and the country continues to finance its profligate ways by borrowing from abroad—notably from the Chinese government. These developments have prompted many analysts to warn that the United States suffers from “imperial overstretch.” And if US power is overstretched now, the argument goes, unipolarity can hardly be sustainable for long. The problem with this argument is that it fails to distinguish between actual and latent power. One must be careful to take into account both the level of resources that can be mobilized and the degree to which a government actually tries to mobilize them. And how much a government asks of its public is partly a function of the severity of the challenges that it faces. Indeed, one can never know for sure what a state is capable of until it has been seriously challenged. Yale historian Paul Kennedy coined the term “imperial overstretch” to describe the situation in which a state’s actual and latent capabilities cannot possibly match its foreign policy commitments. This situation should be contrasted with what might be termed “self-inflicted overstretch”—a situation in which a state lacks the sufficient resources to meet its current foreign policy commitments in the short term, but has untapped latent power and readily available policy choices that it can use to draw on this power. This is arguably the situation that the United States is in today. But the US government has not attempted to extract more resources from its population to meet its foreign policy commitments. Instead, it has moved strongly in the opposite direction by slashing personal and corporate tax rates. Although it is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and claims to be fighting a global “war” on terrorism, the United States is not acting like a country under intense international pressure. Aside from the volunteer servicemen and women and their families, US citizens have not been asked to make sacrifices for the sake of national prosperity and security. The country could clearly devote a greater proportion of its economy to military spending: today it spends only about 4 percent of its GDP on the military, as compared to 7 to 14 percent during the peak years of the Cold War. It could also spend its military budget more efficiently, shifting resources from expensive weapons systems to boots on the ground. Even more radically, it could reinstitute military conscription, shifting resources from pay and benefits to training and equipping more soldiers. On the economic front, it could raise taxes in a number of ways, notably on fossil fuels, to put its fiscal house back in order. No one knows for sure what would happen if a US president undertook such drastic measures, but there is nothing in economics, political science, or history to suggest that such policies would be any less likely to succeed than China is to continue to grow rapidly for decades. Most of those who study US politics would argue that the likelihood and potential success of such power-generating policies depends on public support, which is a function of the public’s perception of a threat. And as unnerving as terrorism is, there is nothing like the threat of another hostile power rising up in opposition to the United States for mobilizing public support. With latent power in the picture, it becomes clear that unipolarity might have more built-in self-reinforcing mechanisms than many analysts realize. It is often noted that the rise of a peer competitor to the United States might be thwarted by the counterbalancing actions of neighboring powers. For example, China’s rise might push India and Japan closer to the United States—indeed, this has already happened to some extent. There is also the strong possibility that a peer rival that comes to be seen as a threat would create strong incentives for the United States to end its self-inflicted overstretch and tap potentially large wellsprings of latent power.

Power Projection High Now

Power projection high now – no other nation is even close

Boot ’10 (Max Boot Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations May 21, 3010 “America is still the best guarantor of freedom and prosperity” LATimes http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/31/opinion/la-oe-boot-20100531/2)

Much nonsense has been written in recent years about the prospects of American decline and the inevitable rise of China. But it was not a declining power that I saw in recent weeks as I jetted from the Middle East to the Far East through two of America's pivotal geographic commands — Central Command and Pacific Command. The very fact that the entire world is divided up into American military commands is significant. There is no French, Indian or Brazilian equivalent — not yet even a Chinese counterpart. It is simply assumed without much comment that American soldiers will be central players in the affairs of the entire world. It is also taken for granted that a vast network of American bases will stretch from Germany to Japan — more than 700 in all, depending on how you count. They constitute a virtual American empire of Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses and gyms. There is an especially large American presence in the Middle East, one of the world's most crisis-prone regions. For all the anti-Americanism in the Arab world, almost all the states bordering what they call the Arabian Gulf support substantial American bases. These governments are worried about the looming Iranian threat and know that only the United States can offer them protection. They are happy to deal with China, but it would never occur to a single sultan or sheik that the People's Liberation Army will protect them from Iranian intimidation. In the Far East, a similar dynamic prevails. All of China's neighbors happily trade with it, but all are wary of the Middle Kingdom's pretensions to regional hegemony. Even Vietnam, a country that handed America its worst military defeat ever, is eager to establish close ties with Washington as a counter to Beijing. What of America's two most important allies in Northeast Asia — South Korea and Japan? Not long ago, relations with Seoul were frosty because it was pursuing a "sunshine policy" of outreach to North Korea that the George W. Bush administration (rightly) viewed as one of the world's most dangerous rogue states. More recently, relations with Japan became strained after the election of the Liberal Democratic Party in 2009 on a platform of cozying up to China, rethinking the 50-year-old alliance between the U.S. and Japan, and moving U.S. bases out of Okinawa. Now Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has had to undertake an embarrassing U-turn by agreeing to an earlier plan that would move a U.S. Marine Corps air base from one part of Okinawa to another but keep it on the island. In justifying his reversal, Hatoyama said that "we cannot afford to reduce the U.S. military deterrence" because of "political uncertainties remaining in East Asia." There is no shortage of such uncertainties with the Chinese navy becoming increasingly assertive in moving into Japanese waters and with North Korea, which has missiles that can easily hit Japan, sinking a South Korean naval ship with the loss of 46 sailors. The latter incident naturally has focused attention in Seoul and served to accelerate the reaffirmation of close American-Korean ties that had already begun with the election of the more conservative President Lee Myung-bak in 2008. The anti-Americanism that had been prevalent in South Korea only a few years ago has all but disappeared, and it is not only (or even mainly) because of President Obama's vaunted charm. It is largely because South Korea has tried detente and found that it did nothing to moderate the aggressive behavior of the North Korean regime. China is South Korea's largest trade partner by far, but Beijing shows scant interest in reining in Kim Jong Il. The greatest fear of Chinese leaders is that North Korea will collapse, leading to a horde of refugees moving north and, eventually, the creation an American-allied regime on the Yalu River. Rather than risk this strategic calamity, China continues to prop up the crazy North Korean communists — to the growing consternation of South Koreans, who can never forget that Seoul, a city of 15 million people, is within range of what the top U.S. commander in South Korea describes as the world's largest concentration of artillery. South Korea knows that only the U.S. offers the deterrence needed to keep a nuclear-armed North Korea in check. That is why the South Koreans, who have one of the world's largest militaries (655,000 activity-duty personnel), are eager to host 28,000 American troops in perpetuity and even to hand over their military forces in wartime to the command of an American four-star general. Under an agreement negotiated during the Bush administration, operational control is due to revert to the South Koreans in 2012, but senior members of the government and military told us they want to push that date back by a number of years. South Korea's eagerness to continue subordinating its armed forces to American control is the ultimate vote of confidence in American leadership. What other country would the South Koreans possibly entrust with the very core of their national existence? Not China, that's for sure. And yet South Korea is not so unusual in this regard. The Persian Gulf emirates also entrust their continued existence to America's benign power. The Kurds, whom we visited in Irbil, are eager to host an American base, because they know that all of the gains they have made since 1991 have been made possible by American protection. Even Arab Iraqi politicians, who traffic in nationalist slogans while running for office, are quietly talking about renegotiating the accord that would bring the U.S. troop presence in Iraq down to zero by the end of 2011. They know what Kosovars, Kuwaitis and countless others have learned over many decades: American power is the world's best guarantor of freedom and prosperity.

Power Projection Irrelevant

US leadership is irrelevant. No one’s following

Victor 08 - Professor on International Law and Relations @ University of California, San Diego (David G. Victor, “Blowhard in Chief”, Newsweek, May 1, 2008, pg. http://www.newsweek.com/2008/04/30/blowhard-in-chief.html>)

Leadership matters when it comes to greenery because solving most environmental issues requires a change in direction. Leaders can send signals and forge new paths. But in the area where the world thinks a single leader towers above all—namely the choice of the next American president—leadership actually matters a lot less. America's president is powerful, to be sure, but American politics has been fragmenting over the last few decades. Alone, the president often has a weak impact on real American policies that affect the environment. The U.S. record on international environmental issues is highly uneven for reasons that have little to do with George W. Bush's leadership. His administration has been tarred across the planet for reckless leadership on international environmental issues. (Its actual record, while dreadful, is not a uniform failure. It has done useful things in a few areas, such as a thoughtful initiative to help conserve forests in the Congo Basin.) But the signature of Bush's reckless foreign policy in this area, his decision to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty barely three months after taking office, actually has its roots in the Clinton administration. Clinton was highly committed to environmental issues and his vice president, Al Gore, was an even more passionate leader. Their zealous diplomats negotiated a treaty that was larded with commitments that the United States never could have honored. The promise to cut U.S. emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels is a good example. Because actual emissions were rising steadily, it would have been impractical to turn them around in time to meet the 2012 Kyoto deadline. The U.S. Congress never could have passed the requisite legislation, and no leader in the White House could have changed that voting arithmetic. The U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol was inevitable. What does this mean for America's credibility in the world? When the American president promises, should anyone listen? Increasingly, other countries are learning that the answer is no—because American leaders have a habit of promising a lot more than they can deliver. Environmental issues are particularly prone to overpromising, and not just by the United States. Europe, too, is fresh with unrealistic claims by political leaders. The European Union, for example, has launched negotiations for the post-Kyoto agreement by claiming that Europeans will cut greenhouse-gas emissions 20 percent to 30 percent by 2020—an outrageous goal considering that most of Europe (with the exception mainly of Britain and Germany) will fail to meet their existing targets, and emissions are actually rising. Europe as a whole would blow through its Kyoto targets if not for its generous use of a scheme that lets them take credit for overseas investment in low-carbon technologies—despite mounting evidence that many of those overseas credits don't actually deliver real reductions in emissions. Smart politicians know that the benefits lie mainly in the promising today and not in the delivery long in the future.

No Naval Decline

No naval decline

Robert D. Kaplan, Senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, ‘8

(Washington Post, 12/17, “A Gentler Hegemony”)

Declinism is in the air. The latest conventional wisdom is that the combination of the disastrous Iraq war, the military and economic rise of Asia, and the steep recession in the West has chastened America, ending its period of dominance in world affairs. It is time for us to be humble.

There is a lot of truth to this, but it goes too far. For decline itself -- as a concept -- is overrated. Britain's Royal Navy went into relative decline beginning in the 1890s, even as Great Britain remained powerful enough to help save the West in two world wars over the next half-century.

The proper analogy may be the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and 1858, after the orientalists and other pragmatists in the British power structure, who wanted to leave traditional India as it was, lost sway to Evangelical and Utilitarian reformers who wanted to more forcefully Christianize India -- to make it in a values sense more like England. The reformers were good people: They helped abolish the slave trade and tried to do the same with the hideous practice of widow-burning. But their attempts to bring the fruits of Western civilization, virtuous as they were, to a far-off corner of the world played a role in a violent revolt against imperial authority. Yet the debacle did not signal the end of the British Empire, which expanded for nearly another century. Rather, it signaled a transition away from an ad hoc imperium fired occasionally by an ill-disciplined lust to impose its values abroad -- and to a calmer, more pragmatic and soldiering empire built on trade, education and technology. That is akin to where we are now, post-Iraq: calmer, more pragmatic and with a military -- especially a Navy -- that, while in relative decline, is still far superior to any other on Earth. Near the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had almost 600 ships; it is down to 280. But in aggregate tonnage that is still more than the next 17 navies combined. Our military secures the global commons to the benefit of all nations. Without the U.S. Navy, the seas would be unsafe for merchant shipping, which, in an era of globalization, accounts for 90 percent of world trade. We may not be able to control events on land in the Middle East, but our Navy and Air Force control all entry and exit points to the region. The multinational anti-piracy patrols that have taken shape in the Strait of Malacca and the Gulf of Aden have done so under the aegis of the U.S. Navy. Sure the economic crisis will affect shipbuilding, meaning the decline in the number of our ships will continue, and there will come a point where quantity affects quality. But this will be an exceedingly gradual transition, which we will assuage by leveraging naval allies such as India and Japan. Then there are the dozens of training deployments around the world that the U.S. military, particularly Army Special Forces, conducts in any given week. We are all over Africa, Asia and Latin America with these small missions that increase America's diplomatic throw-weight without running the risk of getting us bogged down. Aside from Iraq and Afghanistan, our military posture around the world is generally light, lethal and highly mobile. We have been quietly reducing land forces in South Korea while compensating with a more effective air and naval presence. In Colombia, platoon-size numbers of Green Berets have been instrumental in fighting narco-terrorists; in Algeria, such training teams have helped improve our relationship with that formerly radical Arab country. Such stripped-down American military deployments garner no headlines, but they are a formula that works. The Marines, after becoming virtually desert forces since 2001, will return to their expeditionary roots aboard amphibious ships in the Greater Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. American military power is not going away. But instead of being in-your-face, it will lurk just over the horizon. And that will make all the difference. In sum, we may no longer be at Charles Krauthammer's "Unipolar Moment," but neither have we become Sweden. Declinism of the sort being preached will go immediately out of fashion at the world's next humanitarian catastrophe, when the very people enraged at the U.S. military because of Iraq will demand that it lead a coalition to save lives. We might have intervened in Darfur had we not been bogged down in Iraq; after Cyclone Nargis, our ships would have provided large-scale relief, had Burma's military government allowed them to proceed. As world population rises, and with vast urban areas with tottering infrastructures in the most environmentally and seismically fragile zones, the opportunities for U.S. military-led disaster relief will be legion. The American military remains a force for good, a fact that will become self-evident in the crises to come. Of course we are entering a more multipolar world. The only economic growth over the next year or two will come from developing nations, notably India and China. But there are other realities, too. We should not underestimate the diplomatic and moral leverage created by the combination of the world's most expeditionary military and a new president who will boast high approval ratings at home and around the world. No power but the United States has the wherewithal to orchestrate an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, and our intervention in Iraq has not changed that fact. Everyone hates the word, but the United States is still a hegemon of sorts, able to pivotally influence the world from a position of moral strength.

Carriers Don’t Project Power

Carriers don’t project power.

David Isenberg, Research Analyst – Center for Defense Information, ‘90

(http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=994&full=1)

Even a 28-carrier fleet would not ensure the success of wartime operations involving carriers. The navy's scenarios for those operations are unrealistic. For example, they fail to allow for degradation of carriers' defensive capabilities as hits accumulate, imperfect weather conditions, conflicts between the power projection and air defense missions, and potential changes in the composition of Soviet bomber and submarine forces.

At any rate, a fleet of 28--or even 21--carriers is clearly not in the offing. Even during the early years of the Reagan administration, which were halcyon years for the navy, the number of carriers to be acquired was based on what the United States could afford, not what the navy claimed to need. Given the current political and fiscal realities, and the likelihood that there will be reductions in the number of carriers, it seems only prudent for U.S. policymakers to reject the Maritime Strategy, especially the portion of it that calls for engaging the Soviets in their homeland in the event of a war. Two additional Nimitz carriers, which would have a total of fewer than 100 offensive aircraft, would be unlikely to make a difference if the United States sought to carry a war directly to the Soviet Union. They would also be unlikely to affect the outcome of Third World contingencies such as the peacetime presence missions that presidents are so fond of. A single carrier can project only a small amount of power, as noted above, but even with a 14- or 15-carrier fleet, assembling a multicarrier battle group in peacetime would strain U.S. resources. And the military environment in which carriers would have to operate is becoming increasingly hostile. A former carrier commander observed, There are a number of areas of the world where large aircraft carriers do not steam. It is not that they cannot go there but simply that it is too risky to expose them in such areas. . . . The station ship carriers are becoming more the "presence pawns" of international politics than the "fighting ladies" we would like them to be.(45)

Squo solves carriers

Too far ahead – even our worst carrier can already crush any challenger’s.

Robert Farley, Ass. Prof. - Diplomacy and International Commerce, University of Kentucky, ‘7

(The American Prospect, 10/23, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_false_decline_of_the_us_navy)

The United States Navy currently operates eleven aircraft carriers. The oldest and least capable is faster, one third larger, and carries three times the aircraft of Admiral Kuznetsov, the largest carrier in the Russian Navy. Unlike China’s only aircraft carrier, the former Russian Varyag, American carriers have engines and are capable of self-propulsion. The only carrier in Indian service is fifty years old and a quarter the size of its American counterparts. No navy besides the United States' has more than one aircraft carrier capable of flying modern fixed wing aircraft. The United States enjoys similar dominance in surface combat vessels and submarines, operating twenty-two cruisers, fifty destroyers, fifty-five nuclear attack submarines, and ten amphibious assault ships (vessels roughly equivalent to most foreign aircraft carriers). In every category the U.S. Navy combines presumptive numerical superiority with a significant ship-to-ship advantage over any foreign navy.

Can’t Sustain Heg (1/2)

Primacy will be impossible to sustain – dollar, fiscal pressure, rising challengers, overstretch

Layne 10 (Christopher Layne, Professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A&M's George H.W. Bush School of Government & Public Service. "Graceful decline: the end of Pax Americana". The American Conservative. May 2010. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7060/is_5_9/ai_n54223596/)

China's economy has been growing much more rapidly than the United States' over the last two decades and continues to do so, maintaining audacious 8 percent growth projections in the midst of a global recession. Leading economic forecasters predict that it will overtake the U.S. as the world's largest economy, measured by overall GDP, sometime around 2020. Already in 2008, China passed the U.S. as the world's leading manufacturing nation--a title the United States had enjoyed for over a century--and this year China will displace Japan as the world's second-largest economy. Everything we know about the trajectories of rising great powers tells us that China will use its increasing wealth to build formidable military power and that it will seek to become the dominant power in East Asia. Optimists contend that once the U.S. recovers from what historian Niall Ferguson calls the "Great Repression"--not quite a depression but more than a recession--we'll be able to answer the Chinese challenge. The country, they remind us, faced a larger debt-GDP ratio after World War II yet embarked on an era of sustained growth. They forget that the postwar era was a golden age of U.S. industrial and financial dominance, trade surpluses, and persistent high growth rates. Those days are gone. The United States of 2010 and the world in which it lives are far different from those of 1945. Weaknesses in the fundamentals of the American economy have been accumulating for more than three decades. In the 1980s, these problems were acutely diagnosed by a number of writers--notably David Calleo, Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Samuel Huntington, and James Chace--who predicted that these structural ills would ultimately erode the economic foundations of America's global preeminence. A spirited late-1980s debate was cut short, when, in quick succession, the Soviet Union collapsed, Japan's economic bubble burst, and the U.S. experienced an apparent economic revival during the Clinton administration. Now the delayed day of reckoning is fast approaching. Even in the best case, the United States will emerge from the current crisis with fundamental handicaps. The Federal Reserve and Treasury have pumped massive amounts of dollars into circulation in hope of reviving the economy. Add to that the $1 trillion-plus budget deficits that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts the United States will incur for at least a decade. When the projected deficits are bundled with the persistent U.S. current-account deficit, the entitlements overhang (the unfunded future liabilities of Medicare and Social Security), and the cost of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is reason to worry about the United States' fiscal stability. As the CBO says, "Even if the recovery occurs as projected and the stimulus bill is allowed to expire, the country will face the highest debt/GDP ratio in 50 years and an increasingly unsustainable and urgent fiscal problem." The dollar's vulnerability is the United States' geopolitical Achilles' heel. Its role as the international economy's reserve currency ensures American preeminence, and if it loses that status, hegemony will be literally unaffordable. As Cornell professor Jonathan Kirshner observes, the dollar's vulnerability "presents potentially significant and underappreciated restraints upon contemporary American political and military predominance." Fears for the dollar's long-term health predated the current financial and economic crisis. The meltdown has amplified them and highlighted two new factors that bode ill for continuing reserve-currency status. First, the other big financial players in the international economy are either military rivals (China) or ambiguous allies (Europe) that have their own ambitions and no longer require U.S. protection from the Soviet threat. Second, the dollar faces an uncertain future because of concerns that its value will diminish over time. Indeed, China, which has holdings estimated at nearly $2 trillion, is worried that America will leave it with huge piles of depreciated dollars. China's vote of no confidence is reflected in its recent calls to create a new reserve currency. In coming years, the U.S. will be under increasing pressure to defend the dollar by preventing runaway inflation. This will require it to impose fiscal self-discipline through some combination of budget cuts, tax increases, and interest-rate hikes. Given that the last two options could choke off renewed growth, there is likely to be strong pressure to slash the federal budget. But it will be almost impossible to make meaningful cuts in federal spending without deep reductions in defense expenditures. Discretionary non-defense domestic spending accounts for only about 20 percent of annual federal outlays. So the United States will face obvious "guns or butter" choices. As Kirshner puts it, the absolute size of U.S. defense expenditures are "more likely to be decisive in the future when the U.S. is under pressure to make real choices about taxes and spending. When borrowing becomes more difficult, and adjustment more difficult to postpone, choices must be made between raising taxes, cutting non-defense spending, and cutting defense spending." Faced with these hard decisions, Americans will find themselves afflicted with hegemony fatigue.

Can’t Sustain Heg (2/2)

Multiple balancing powers and internal issues make heg collapse inevitable – only abandoning unipolarity solves lashout and great power conflict

John Feffer (co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies)February 2009 “A Multipolar Moment” http://www.fpif.org/articles/a_multipolar_moment

But times have changed, argues FPIF contributor Hannes Artens. "These aren't the golden 1990s, when U.S. power was at its zenith. In this first decade of the 21st century, the capitalist West is facing defeat in Afghanistan and is on the verge of 'the worst recession in a hundred years,' as British minister Ed Balls put it in perhaps only slight exaggeration," he writes in Multilateralism in Munich. "This combination will force the Obama administration to stop cherry-picking issues on which it wants to cooperate and forging ahead on those issues it believes it can still handle alone. Necessity will dictate a more pragmatic multilateralism, in which all sides humbly accept what is realistically possible." Are we thus witnessing the final end of the unipolar moment? China is coming up fast. The European Union's expansion has been accompanied by relatively few growing pains. Several powerful countries in the South (particularly India, Brazil, and South Africa) are quietly acquiring more geopolitical heft. Global problems like climate change and financial collapse require global solutions, so we either evolve multilateral responses or we do a dinosaur dive into extinction. Over here, meanwhile, the Pentagon is still maintaining the world's largest military force — but we have failed to defeat al-Qaeda, we are quagmired in Afghanistan, and all of our nuclear weapons have done little to prevent North Korea from entering the nuclear club. The global recession is hammering the U.S. economy, and we might finally see the end of the dollar's reign as global currency. With the bank bailout, the stimulus package, the bill for two wars plus the Pentagon's already gargantuan budget, the red ink is mounting. Debt has been the gravedigger of many an empire. I can hear the adding machine totting up the numbers. Or is that the sound of dirt hitting a coffin lid?

Heg Threats Exaggerated

Threats are always exaggerated – multiple warrants

Layne, Associate Professor, 1997

(Christopher Layne, Visiting Associate Professor at Naval Postgraduate School, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America’s Future Grand Strategy”, International Security, Vol. 22 Issue. 1 Summer 1997).

The security/interdependence nexus results in the exaggeration of threats to American strategic interests because it requires the United States to defend its core interests by intervening in the peripheries. There are three reasons for this. First, as Johnson points out, order-maintenance strategies are biased inherently toward threat exaggeration. Threats to order generate an anxiety “that has at its center the fear of the unknown. It is not just security, but the pattern of order upon which the sense of security depends that is threatened.” Second, because the strategy of preponderance requires U.S. intervention in places that concededly have no intrinsic strategic value, U.S. policymakers are compelled to overstate the dangers to American interests to mobilize domestic support for their policies. Third, the tendency to exaggerate threats is tightly linked to the strategy of preponderance’s concern with maintaining U.S. credibility.

Heg Bad – Generic

Hegemony and increases in military power result in backlash

Fiammenghi 11. (Davide, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Politics, Institutions, History at the University of Bologna. “The Security Curve and the Structure of International Politics.” International Security, Spring 2011.) http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ISEC_a_00037

Beyond a certain point, the gains that a state accrues from further increases in its power will start to diminish. This result stems from a structural disequilibrium between allied relations, on the one hand, and relations with enemies and neutrals, on the other. When the state’s coalition is able to effectively discourage aggression, its allies and that further increases in its power become gradually less useful. Meanwhile, the control that the major partner exercises over its allies becomes stronger. At some point, the game is no longer worth the candle for the allies: the threat posed by their enemies is relatively less significant than the threat of growing control posed by their major partner. In the meantime, neutral states begin to reflect on the costs of their neutrality, especially if one side should defeat the other, leaving them with little choice but submission. Further increases in the major partner’s power will exacerbate differences with its allies, and some will leave the alliance. The flow of defectors encourages the major power’s rivals, which acquire new energy. Neutral states realize that the moment has come to take sides. The situation eventually reaches a tipping point, where further increases in the major state’s relative power no longer compensate for the defection of its allies and the mobilization of neutral states into the enemy coalition. Further increases tilt the balance in favor of the major power’s rivals, leaving the aspiring hegemon less secure than before. A parabola nicely illustrates the relationship between power and security that I have just described. The apex of the parabola corresponds to an implicit concept in realist balance of power theory: the security threshold. This threshold represents the maximum amount of power a state can accumulate before further increases begin to reduce its security. The security threshold corresponds to the quantity of power that Waltz calls “appropriate” for a state to be secure in an anarchic international system. The concept of balancing necessarily implies that there is a maximum amount of power that a state can accumulate to achieve maximum security. Beyond that threshold, power maximization and security maximization become incompatible goals. Classical realists did not make this point explicitly, because they thought in terms of absolute, not relative, power.30 Obviously, there is no amount of absolute power that can guarantee a state’s security once and for all. The concept must be understood in a relative sense, so that it can accommodate the evolution of technology and the eventuality that an arms race could frustrate a state’s expansionist efforts.

Heg Bad – Disease

Preeminence makes solving diseases like bird flu impossible – only multipolarity reduces global resentment enough to allow for responses to pandemics

Weber et. al 7, (Steven, Professor of Political Science at UC-Berkeley and Director of the Institute of International Studies, Naazneen Barma, Matthew Kroenig, Ely Ratner, “How Globalization Went Bad”, January-February 2007, Foreign Policy,)

The same is true for global public health. Globalization is turning the world into an enormous petri dish for the incubation of infectious disease. Humans cannot outsmart disease, because it just evolves too quickly. Bacteria can reproduce a new generation in less than 30 minutes, while it takes us decades to come up with a new generation of antibiotics. Solutions are only possible when and where we get the upper hand. Poor countries where humans live in close proximity to farm animals are the best place to breed extremely dangerous zoonotic disease. These are often the same countries, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, that feel threatened by American power. Establishing an early warning system for these diseases—exactly what we lacked in the case of SARS a few years ago and exactly what we lack for avian flu today—will require a significant level of intervention into the very places that don’t want it. That will be true as long as international intervention means American interference. The most likely sources of the next ebola or HIV-like pandemic are the countries that simply won’t let U.S. or other Western agencies in, including the World Health Organization. Yet the threat is too arcane and not immediate enough for the West to force the issue. What’s needed is another great power to take over a piece of the work, a power that has more immediate interests in the countries where diseases incubate and one that is seen as less of a threat. As long as the United States remains the world’s lone superpower, we’re not likely to get any help. Even after HIV, SARS, and several years of mounting hysteria about avian flu, the world is still not ready for a viral pandemic in Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. America can’t change that alone.

Heg Bad – Iran Strikes

Primacy causes conflict with Iran – extinction

Layne 7 Christopher Layne, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, 2007 ["The Case Against the American Empire," American Empire: A Debate, Published by Routledge, ISBN 0415952034, p. 76-77

Iran Because of the strategy of primacy and empire, the United States and Iran are on course for a showdown. The main source of conflict—or at least the one that has grabbed the lion’s share of the headlines—is Tehran’s evident determination to develop a nuclear weapons program. Washington’s policy, as President George W. Bush has stated on several occasions—in language that recalls his prewar stance on Iraq—is that a nuclear-armed Iran is “intolerable.” Beyond nuclear weapons, however, there are other important issues that are driving the United States and Iran toward an armed confrontation. Chief among these is Iraq. Recently, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, has accused Tehran of meddling in Iraqi affairs by providing arms and training to Shiite militias and by currying favor with the Shiite politicians who dominate Iraq’s recently elected government. With Iraq teetering on the brink of a sectarian civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, concerns about Iranian interference have been magnified. In a real sense, however, Iran’s nuclear program and its role in Iraq are merely the tip of the iceberg. The fundamental cause of tensions between the United States and Iran is the nature of America’s ambitions in the Middle East and Persian Gulf. These are reflected in current U.S. grand strategy—which has come to be known as the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine’s three key components are rejection of deterrence in favor of preventive/preemptive military action; determination to effectuate a radical shake-up in the politics of the Persian Gulf and Middle East; and gaining U.S. dominance over that region. In this respect, it is hardly coincidental that the administration’s policy toward Tehran bears a striking similarity to its policy [end page 76] during the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, not only on the nuclear weapons issue but—ominously—with respect to regime change and democratization. This is because the same strategic assumptions that underlay the administration’s pre-invasion Iraq policy now are driving its Iran policy. The key question today is whether these assumptions are correct.

Heg Bad – China War

Heg leads to draw-in to Taiwan war – alliance guarantees

Layne 6 Christopher Layne (Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University) 2006 “The Peace of Illusions” p 167-8

Since the cold war, the strategic context affecting extended deterrence has shifted against the United States in other ways. For one thing, during the cold war the respective U.S. and Soviet spheres were demarcated clearly, which reduced the chances for a superpower clash. Moreover, both super-powers exercised considerable control over their major allies and thus were at minimal risk of being chain-ganged into a conflict—that is, getting dragged into a war in which their own interests were not directly implicated because of the actions of an ally or client.27ln contrast, today, instead of the cold war's clearly delineated spheres of influence, East Asia's likely flash-points are contested gray areas, which increases the chances for conflict. In addition, because states increasingly have greater latitude to pursue their own foreign and security policy agendas than was the case during the coldwar, there is a real risk of the United States being dragged into a war because of a protected state's irresponsible behavior. A good illustration is the current Taipei regime's flirtation with declaring the island's independence from China—a move that Beijing says would compel a forcible Chinese re-sponse—which poses a real danger that the United States could be ensnared in a major war by the risk taking behavior of its Taiwanese client state.28 As China's military power—conventional and nuclear—increases, the po-tential risks to the United States of coming to Taiwan's (or Japan's) defensealso are increasing. The spring 1996 crisis between China and Taiwan is illusive. During the crisis—which China provoked by conducting intimidatingmilitary exercises in an attempt to influence Taiwan's presidential elections—a Chinese official said that unlike the Formosa Strait crises during the1950s, China now was a nuclear power, and the U.S. nuclear deterrent there-fore could not prevent Beijing from using force against Taiwan, because U.S.decision makers "care more about Los Angeles than they do about 'Taiwan."29This comment illustrates an important point:: Taiwan matters more to China than it does to Washington (and one hopes Los Angeles matters more to U.S.officials than does Taipei). In a showdown over Taiwan, the United States would be engaged in extended deterrence to prevent China from attacking. Beijing, however, would be engaged in direct deterrence to prevent U.S. intervention in what it regards as an internal Chinese matter. Beijing's 1996 threat was, of course, hollow, but now that China is on the verge of possessing a survivable nuclear retaliatory capability, it is becoming quite real.

China-Taiwan war escalates globally and goes nuclear

Hunkovic, 09 – American Military University (Lee, “The Chinese-Taiwanese Conflict,” http://www.lamp-method.org/eCommons/Hunkovic.pdf)

A war between China, Taiwan and the United States has the potential to escalate into a nuclear conflict and a third world war, therefore, many countries other than the primary actors could be affected by such a conflict, including Japan, both Koreas, Russia, Australia, India and Great Britain, if they were drawn into the war, as well as all other countries in the world that participate in the global economy, in which the United States and China are the two most dominant members. If China were able to successfully annex Taiwan, the possibility exists that they could then plan to attack Japan and begin a policy of aggressive expansionism in East and Southeast Asia, as well as the Pacific and even into India, which could in turn create an international standoff and deployment of military forces to contain the threat. In any case, if China and the United States engage in a full-scale conflict, there are few countries in the world that will not be economically and/or militarily affected by it. However, China, Taiwan and United States are the primary actors in this scenario, whose actions will determine its eventual outcome, therefore, other countries will not be considered in this study.

MultiPol Good – Generic

U.S. withdrawal and a concurrent shift to multipolarity would prevent American involvement in major power wars.

Christopher Layne (Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University) 2006 “The Peace of Illusions” p 170

By devolving full responsibility for their defense to U.S. allies, offshore balancing would take advantage of the unique geostrategic advantages that allow the United States to benefit from multipolarity, exercise a free hand strategically, and avoid being automatically engulfed in Eurasian conflicts because of its alliance commitments. As an offshore balancer, the United States would reap security advantages from a reversion to multipolarity. The United States is far removed from powerful rivals and shielded from them both by geography and its own hard power. Consequently, as an insular great power, the United States is far less vulnerable to the effects of "instability" than are the major powers of Eurasia, and it could—and should—insulate itself from possible future Eurasian great power wars. For the United States, the risk of conflict and the possible exposure of the American homeland to attack, rather than arising from any direct threat to the United States itself; derive directly from the overseas commitments mandated by hegemony's all-encompassing definition of U.S. interests.

Multipol Now and Inev

Multipolarity now and inevitable

Haass ‘8

[Richard. Pres of CFR. “What Follows American Dominion?” The Financial Times, 16 April 08. lexis]

The unipolar era, a time of un-precedented American dominion, is over. It lasted some two decades, little more than a moment in historical terms. Why did it end? One explanation is history. States get better at generating and piecing together the human, financial and technological resources that lead to productivity and prosperity. The same holds for companies and other organisations. The rise of new powers cannot be stopped. The result is an ever larger number of actors able to exert influence regionally or globally. It is not that the US has grown weaker, but that many other entities have grown much stronger. A second reason unipolarity has ended is US policy. By both what it has done and what it has failed to do, the US has accelerated the emergence of new power centres and has weakened its own position relative to them. US energy policy (or the lack thereof) is one driving force behind the end of unipolarity. Since the first oil shocks of the 1970s, US oil consumption has grown by some 20 per cent and, more important, US imports of petroleum products have more than doubled in volume and nearly doubled as a percentage of consumption. This growth in demand for foreign oil has helped drive up the world price from just over $20 a barrel to more than $100 a barrel. The result is an enormous transfer of wealth and leverage to those states with energy reserves. US economic policy has played a role as well. President George W. Bush has fought costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, allowed discretionary spending to increase by 8 per cent a year and cut taxes. The US fiscal position declined from a surplus of more than $100bn in 2001 to an estimated deficit of about $250bn in 2007. The ballooning current account deficit is now more than 6 per cent of gross domestic product. This places downward pressure on the dollar, stimulates inflation and contributes to the accumulation of wealth and power elsewhere in the world. Poor regulation of the US mortgage market and the credit crisis it spawned have exacerbated these problems. Iraq has also contributed to the dilution of American primacy. The conflict has proved to be an expensive war of choice - militarily, economically and diplomatically, as well as in human terms. Years ago, the historian Paul Kennedy outlined his thesis about "imperial overstretch", which posited that the US would eventually decline by overreaching, just as other great powers had. Prof Kennedy's theory turned out to apply most immediately to the Soviet Union, but the US - for all its corrective mechanisms and dynamism - has not proved to be immune. Finally, unipolarity's end is not simply the result of the rise of other states and organisations or of the failures and follies of US policy. It is also a consequence of globalisation. Globalisation has increased the volume, velocity and importance of cross-border flows of just about everything, from drugs, e-mails, greenhouse gases, goods and people to television and radio signals, viruses (virtual and real) and weapons. Many of these flows take place outside the control of governments and without their knowledge. As a result, globalisation dilutes the influence of big powers, including the US. These same flows often strengthen non-state actors, such as energy exporters (who are experiencing a dramatic increase in wealth), terrorists (who use the internet to recruit and train, the international banking system to move resources and the global transport system to move people), rogue states (which can exploit black and grey -markets) and Fortune 500 companies (which quickly move personnel and investments). Being the strongest state no longer means having a near-monopoly on power. It is easier than ever before for individuals and groups to accumulate and project substantial power. All of this raises a critical question: if unipolarity is gone, what will take its place? Some predict a return to the bipolarity that characterised international relations during the cold war. This is unlikely. China's military strength does not approximate that of the US; more important, its focus will remain on economic growth, a choice that leads it to seek economic integration and avoid conflict. Russia may be more inclined towards re-creating a bipolar world, but it too has a stake in co-operation and, in any event, lacks the capacity to challenge the US. Still others predict the emergence of a modern multipolar world, one in which China, Europe, India, Japan and Russia join the US as dominant influences. This view ignores how the world has changed. There are literally dozens of meaningful power centres, including regional powers, international organisations, companies, media outlets, religious movements, terrorist organisations, drug cartels and non-governmental organisations. Today's world is increasingly one of distributed, rather than concentrated, power. The successor to unipolarity is neither bipolarity or multipolarity. It is non-polarity.