Off

T
Restrictions must involve outright prohibitions
Caiaccio 94—Kevin T Caiaccio, JD from UGA Law School, JD Candidate at the time of
publication (“Are Noncompetition Covenants Among Law Partners Against Public Policy?”
Georgia Law Review, Spring, 28 Ga. L. Rev. 807, Lexis)
The Howard court began its analysis by examining the California Business and Professions Code, which expressly permits reasonable
restrictive covenants among business partners. 139 The court noted that this provision had long applied to doctors and accountants
and concluded that the general language of the statute provided no indication of an exception for lawyers. 140 After reaching this
conclusion, however, the court noted that, since it had the authority to promulgate a higher standard for lawyers, the statute alone
did not necessarily control, 141 and the court therefore proceeded to examine the California Rules of Professional Conduct. 142 The
court avoided the apparent conflict between the business statute and the ethics rule by undertaking a strained reading of the rule.
In essence, the court held that the word "restrict" referred only to outright prohibitions, and that
a mere "economic consequence" does not equal a prohibition. 143

“In the area” means all of the activities of the area

UN 13—United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty,
http://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/part1.htm
PART I INTRODUCTION Article 1
Use of terms and scope
1. For the purposes of this Convention: (1) "Area" means the seabed and ocean floor and subsoil thereof, beyond the limits of
national jurisdiction; (2) "Authority" means the International Seabed Authority; (3) "activities in the Area" means
all activities of exploration for, and exploitation of, the resources of the Area;

That’s key to limits—they allow the attachment of conditions to executive

power, like wait times, Congressional reporting, cabinet approval, or
international consultation. That unlocks the topic and weakens links to generic
DAs—expands the neg research burden and undermines the development of
creative, in-depth strategies.
 K
Liberal constitutionalism has been a weapon of imperial war for nearly a
century. The aff is a failed attempt to reassert a lost ideal of neoliberal
internationalism that is fundamentally unsustainable and results in unethical
violence.
Bâli & Rana ’18 (Asli, Prof. of Law @ UCLA, Faculty Director, Promise Institute for Human
Rights, Director, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, and Aziz, Prof. of Law @ Cornell U.,
“Constitutionalism and the American Imperial Imagination,” 85 U. Chi. L. Rev. 257)

President Donald Trump's

ascendance to the White House has been understood as signaling a breakdown in
American global leadership. For some, the last year reflects the end of the American century; for others, the combination of the Trump
ad- ministration and Brexit suggests the demise of over two centuries of Anglo-American global leadership. In short, disorienting developments across
the Atlantic in the last year have triggered questions about the stability and sustainability of an international order premised on a particular brand of
American imperium. We argue that while the Trump administration has certainly broken with the decorum and
diplomacy of past American presidential policies, the unraveling of the international order put in place under

American leadership in the postwar period has been more than a quarter century in the
making.

The postwar order that replaced the age of empires was one that reflected the American constitutional
imagination and marked a break from the earlier era of formal colonial dependencies. By contrast with its predecessor, the American-led order,
grounded in constitutional principles, had two international components. The first was a commitment to spreading market-

based capitalist democracy and its correlate, liberal constitutionalism, through American
bilateral and multilateral foreign policy.2 The second was support for a rule-based international
order that was understood as an extension of the American constitutional imagination to the
challenges of global governance. Indeed, the post-war liberal international regime represented a clear expression of American

constitutionalism from the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (tied eventually to an

"International Bill of Rights") and the UN Charter (a "constitution" for world order), to the creation of a tight web of

interlocking institutions governing everything from international monetary policy and global trade to
health, education, and scientific cooperation. As a consequence, the United States served as a global
hegemon in a multilateral framework whose legitimacy depended on legality and a kind of
international social contract that would command consensual participation from the international
community, albeit in a system that still preserved asymmetric benefits for its author. 3 And during the Cold War, as the
self-styled leader of the "free world," America and its commitments to legality and capitalist democracy were contrasted with the authoritarian control
economies of the Soviet sphere.

In this Essay, we explore the degree to which the version of American empire that characterized the postwar project has given way to
competing commitments and preferences that have ultimately eroded basic faith at home and abroad in constitutionalism
itself. The Cold War period was no doubt filled with gross violations of international legality,
antidemocratic overthrows, and support for American-aligned dictatorships. Indeed, in many ways the
defining feature of American Cold War power was the degree to which the promotion of
liberal constitutionalism in actuality produced coercion and widespread violence on the ground. And as we
suggest below, America's departures from its own presumptive constitutional values were in truth

not defections at all. They were instead hard baked into the very structure of how American
policymakers attempted to marry universal claims with efforts to project power , often on highly
racialized terms.
This means that the vision of American imperium that marked the Cold War was always an unstable
one, cyclically breaking down under the internal weight of its own inherent contradictions. But
crucially, even in the context of these tensions – such as during the Vietnam War – the persistent tendency of policymakers

was to revive and defend the ideology of American imperium. The destructive consequences
of US power were justified, time and again, either as aberrations necessitated by the
imperatives of anticommunism or unfortunate transitional developments on the way to full-fledged liberal democracy.
Perhaps most critically, despite these real and damaging consequences, the requirements of offering a credible alternative to the
Soviet example pressed American officials to invest in developmental and reconstructive efforts as well as multilateral institutions
that highlighted the compatibility of the American model with foreign prosperity and mutual constraint. In this way, the default
American postwar order not only remained wedded to constitutional liberal democracy in its self-presentation. Especially during the
heady postwar years of American economic largesse, it also embodied a plausible account both at home and abroad of shared
economic and political security.4

These characteristics of the postwar order were further manifest in what Professor Samuel Huntington memorably framed as the "waves of
democratization" that spread through the international system.5 The end of World War II was marked by American assistance to help postfascist
Western European states resurrect market democracies. Postcolonial independence brought a wave of new states that embraced constitutions-along
with flags and anthems-as markers of self-determination.6 Joining
international human-rights treaties became a rite
of passage as states gained sovereignty and entered the United Nations. In later waves, countries
emerging from military rule in Latin America and postcommunist reforms in Eastern Europe appeared to confirm the
transnational spread of constitutional democracy as an incident of American-led international
order.

This meant that for all the profound violence and real democracy demotion of the Cold War years, liberal constitutionalism as a
"default design choice"7 did diffuse broadly in the decades following World War II. While this earlier era of democratization
depended on many factors, this diffusion was facilitated, on our account, by the background conditions of multilateral order and the presentation of
constitutional democracy as the legitimate domestic political order for countries maintaining good standing in the American-led "free world." Although
it was viewed as a system without ideological competitors by the end of the Cold War, this seemingly "default" framework
nonetheless depended on American commitments that underwrote the postwar international order. While the decline of liberal
constitutionalism may be tied to numerous factors, the gradual American retreat from its own international and domestic model has surely played a
role.

During the Cold War, American leaders commonly regarded the constraints of international institutions as conducive to entrenching the nation's
hegemony. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fact of unipolarity seemed to remove many of the external pressures that had previously
connected national self-interest to international legal restraint.8 Moreover, in the absence of an alternative model as a foil against which the United
States proclaimed its democratic commitments, other strategic priorities gained salience. In particular, counterterrorism
and the
national security state became increasingly central to American governance imperatives. In the
very regions where American analysts awaited the arrival of a "fourth wave" of democracy – notably the Muslim world – these new imperatives not
only displaced constitutional priorities but were in many cases in direct tension with them.9

Certainly, during the Cold War there had always been a tension between democratization and anticommunism, leading to the support of pliable
dictatorships.o But in the post-World War II years, such support was presented as transitional or as still bound to a narrative of shared economic
growth that would in time generate liberal democratic regimes. However, with
the Muslim world styled as an incubator of
terrorist threat and a general American retreat from the domestic and international welfarist
policies that marked the early Cold War, the United States increasingly moved simply to consolidate
executive power abroad.11 This consolidation persisted without any plausible account of political transition or collective economic
improvement- and despite half-hearted invocations of "democracy promotion." In essence, the Cold War's coercive security means became increasingly
disconnected from any credible aspirational ends.

In some ways, the

Trump administration represents the apotheosis of these broad international and
transnational trends. The
Cold War era had been marked by a persistent cycle in which American
policymakers elaborated a framework of constitutional values and norms only to see those
norms break down in political practice. But the post-Cold War era culminating in Trump has now seemingly ended the
cycle. It has produced a final collapse of commitment to the values themselves and , thus, of the basic
justifications for American imperium. 12 At the domestic level, the president shows little deference to
constitutional norms at home-decrying judicial independence when it undermines executive fiat's and setting aside long-standing practices
in areas ranging from conflict-of-interest rules to the treatment of the White House press corps.14 On the international front, Trump entered

office announcing a determination to withdraw from key American commitments in

multilateral agreements from NAFTA to the Paris Climate Agreement, proposed to slash funding to the State Department and other
domestic agencies with foreign policy or foreign aid responsibilities, called into question the country's commitment to NATO, and evinced a

pronounced hostility to the United Nations.15 Trump has also expressed disdain for projects of nation
building and promised to cut support for American foreign policy programs designed to advance
democracy abroad.16 While Trump's intemperate behavior is clearly unusual, his boastful

unilateralism is not. The post-Cold War period, from the Clinton administration through the Obama administration, has
more often been characterized by departures from the rule-based order of twentieth-century
international institutions than support for them.1 In this sense, events of the last year reflect an accumulating momentum
decades in the making rather than the eccentricities of an accidental president. A slow trickle of defections from earlier

multilateral commitments by the United States has gathered into a tidal shift, reducing the
coherence and stability of liberal constitutional design as a default internationally and transnationally. Thus, to
understand the continuities between Trump and earlier administrations requires an appreciation for the complex role liberal constitutionalism and
American exceptionalism have played in both creating and undermining an inter- national social contract premised on US hegemony.

Over the following pages, we lay out this argument in greater detail, emphasizing how as the domestic creedal commitment tying constitutionalism
back to America's founding narrative came under pressure domestically in the post-Cold War era, its imperial correlates-capitalist democratization and
a rule- based international ordering principle-began to lose support. We view this as an explanation for the decline in the spread of liberal
constitutionalism that is consistent with and indeed underlies other hypotheses in the literature, but one that remains underappreciated. We begin
with an analysis of the commitment to con- stitutionalism at the heart of the American century and its rela- tionship to racial and economic policies
pursued by American elites. We then trace how the international dimensions of the constitutional project receded with the end of the Cold War by
tracking key changes to strategies of democracy promotion and multilateral governance under the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies.
Understanding the diffusion of constitutionalism and rule-based international governance as a
means of projecting American power transnationally (as a domestic prescription) and globally
(as an ordering principle) exposes the degree to which empire and constitutionalism have

been deeply imbricated. By extension, we contend that the decline in constitutionalism represents a
crisis in the articulation of American global power in the post-Cold War era in which international order has been
reframed around a Global War on Terror.

I. CONSTITUTIONALISM AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY The American post-World War II vision of global order pulled together a set of arguments that had been percolating among pol- icymakers and political elites for the first half of the twentieth century. In this
Part, we highlight how with the United States' emergence onto the global stage, the language of constitution- alism became central to justifying external power and to ex- plaining the presumptive distinctions between American and European imperium. We also
emphasize the manner in which constitutionalism creatively married notions of universal inclusion and self-government with racial hierarchies about global stewardship ven during the era of decolonization. Finally, we explore perhaps the great paradox of the Cold
War: how American constitutionalism embodied a credible global model that was at the same time constitutively linked on the ground to practices of violence and lawlessness. A. Constitutionalism as the Principle of American Power At the dawn of the twentieth
century, elites who favored an aggressive American role abroad had long found themselves fac- ing a basic dilemma. Policies, ranging from participating in World War I to engaging directly with European power politics to es- tablishing a permanent peacetime
security infrastructure, all faced intense internal opposition and seemed to contradict long- standing isolationist and antimilitarist sentiments. In particular, they cut against popular assumptions that foreign entanglements as well as the creation of a large
professional military would in- evitably undermine republican institutions and self-government. Indeed, a classic tenet of nineteenth-century American foreign policy held that isolation from Europe and its internecine con- flicts sustained domestic tranquility. None
other than Alexander Hamilton had famously argued in Federalist 8 that the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean offered Americans an "insulated situation"18 that did more than anything else to preserve domestic security. These established ideas raised significant popular
doubts about the legitimacy of enhanced American interventionism. In response, defenders of greater international authority began- against the backdrop of American militarism in the Philippines, the Americas, and especially during World War I-to intertwine new
foreign policy commitments with an account of the federal Constitution in national identity. Such political elites increas- ingly placed the Constitution at the center of American exception- alism and viewed the document and the domestic culture it pro- moted as an
implicit justification for emerging American hegemony. According to this view, the feature that most distinguished the American political project from old-world Europe was the Constitution. Whereas European communities were the product of feudalism as well as
political and religious absolutism, the Constitution highlighted the extent to which the American ex- periment had been built from its founding on an effort to fulfill Enlightenment principles. As David Jayne Hill, Republican Party stalwart, ambassador to Germany, and
president of Rochester University, wrote in his 1916 book, Americanism: What It Is, the federal Constitution above all "developed here in America a new estimate of human values, and this has led to a new understand- ing of life."9 Contrasting European monarchical
despotism with American commitments to liberty and self-government, Hill de- clared that the American colonists sought to "prevent forever the recurrence of absolutism in every form, whether official or popu- lar, whether of dominant individuals or of popular
majorities," thereby producing the "original and distinctive contribution of the American mind to political theory .. . that there should be nothing in government that is not governed by law."20 In effect, Hill and others mapped out an early twentieth-century variation
of what Professor Nikhil Pal Singh has called "American universal- ism"21-namely, the idea that what marks out the United States as exceptional is its status as the place where Enlightenment commitments truly took historical root. At stake in such claims was more
than the belief that the Constitution safeguarded liberties at home. It also upheld the view that the Constitution spoke to a special mission abroad. Ac- cording to Hill, European powers sought to divide the world ac- cording to a principle of "imperialism"22 and thus
treated other communities as little more than material spoils. Given these facts, a peaceful and stable international order required a strong American presence. This was because the culture of American constitutionalism was "antithetical to Imperialism, whose
watch- word is unlimited power"23 and thus offered a necessary counter- balance on the global stage. Supposedly in opposition to empire, the constitutional principle meant that American authority was centrally about creating the conditions in foreign, oftentimes
non- European, societies for peaceful self-government. With the world consumed in global conflict and instability, the United States had a responsibility to ensure that the principle of constitution- alism, rather than that of imperialism, dominated the international
order.24 By the 1940s, the war with Nazi Germany and the growing confrontation with the Soviet Union pushed these arguments linking constitutionalism, tutelage, and American power to the political center. In justifying American involvement in World War II,
those in the Roosevelt administration focused on the perceived cultural and political differences between the United States and the country's collectivist or totalitarian foes. In par- ticular, commentators and policymakers once more rallied around the claim that the
United States had been defined from the Founding by neither race nor religion, but rather by a civic faith in fundamental rights, the rule of law, and basic equal- ity-Enlightenment principles that they argued made the coun- try the first truly universal nation. As the
editors of the nascent liberal journal, Common Ground, declared in the fall of 1940: Never has it been more important that we become intelli- gently aware of the ground Americans of various strains have in common; . . . that we reawaken the old American Dream, a
dream which, in its powerful emphasis on the fundamental worth and dignity of every human being, can be a bond of unity no totalitarian attack can break.25 The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal offered perhaps the most seminal popular presentation of these
ideas in An American Dilemma, a formative text on race relations and American identity for mid-twentieth-century political elites. Myrdal contended that the Constitution embodied what he called "the American creed"26 and through t he text "the nation early laid
down as the moral basis for its existence the principles of equality and lib- erty."27 Myrdal argued that, although racist and archaic practices may have continued to persist in pockets-or entire regions--of the country, these practices were incompatible with national
val- ues. "The main trend" in American history was "the gradual real- ization of the American Creed."28 So pure were the country's founding motives that America could be seen, at its core, as not h- ing less than "humanity in miniature."29 Myrdal, along with many
Cold War policymakers influenced by American Dilemma, employed these creedal arguments to then call for a postwar order premised on American preeminence. Pre- cisely because the United States was a nation founded on plural- ism, tolerance, and the rule of
law-embodied concretely in the Constitution-American power internationally stood "warm- heartedly against oppression in all the world."so Given that the country's constitutional values expressed the global community's ideals, pax Americana necessarily involved a
defense of liberal goals against illiberal threats. Such creedal constitutionalism thus gave an account of the justness of American security prerog- atives and provided the ideological foundations for the "American Century." Yet, for all the claims about the opposition
between American constitutionalism and European imperialism, it is essential to ap- preciate the extent to which these notions of American exception- alism rested on background judgments about racial hierarchy and nonwhite dependence. In the early decades of
the twentieth cen- tury, the figure that best embodied this interconnection was none other than President Woodrow Wilson, liberal internationalist and domestic s egregationist. Wilson viewed the world as divided into distinct ethnocultural "peoples" at different
stages in the pro- cess of political evolution.31 European Americans, especially of Anglo-Saxon descent, stood at the forefront of this evolution, due to their long-standing acculturation in the practices of republican freedom. While democratic self-government was a
universal good and all peoples had the potential eventually to enjoy its benefits, only those who had reached political maturity were ready in the pre- sent. "Only a long apprenticeship of obedience can secure" less de- veloped peoples "the precious possession" of
real self-government, Wilson stated, "a thing no more to be bought than given."32 Precisely because the United States had supposedly reached the end stage of ethnocultural development-and was not stained by the absolutism and internecine violence marking
Europe-it had a unique global role to play in shepherding less developed peoples on the path to freedom. In effect, emerging accounts of American universalism, grounded in constitutional experience, reaffirmed rather than undermined white American supervision
and interventionism. Indeed, for this very reason, regardless of American self-presentation the new American imperium often echoed the old European variety. This is perhaps best illustrated by publishing magnate Henry Luce's own famous call in 1941 to "create
the first great American Century."33 For Luce, Americans enjoyed a right to global dominance because they were nothing lessthan"inheritorsofallthegreatprinciplesofWesterncivili- zation."34 In this way, even the language of exceptionalism vis-A- vis other empires
placed US elites and policymakers in a long line of European officials, officials who too justified their nation's global pow er based on special cultural attributes and historic des- tiny. And perhaps most important for those on the receiving end of American power in the
first half of the twentieth century, the new politics of US global authority could seem awfully similar to its European rivals. Critically, even in the post-World War II era of decoloniza- tion, the linking of a constitutionally grounded American univer- salism with racial
hierarchy did not recede. Indeed, it remained essential to justifying the expanding Cold War politics of perma- nent global interventionism. This is most powerfully underscored by how Wilsonian ideas about ethnocultural peoplehood and stages of political
development morphed into perhaps the most dominant discourse of early Cold War foreign policy: moderniza- tion theory. Modernization theorists, both in the American social sciences and in government, routinely described the world as on a relatively linear path
from traditional to modern society.35 While modern societies combined liberal-democratic constitution- alism with economic growth, urbanization, and high educational attainment, traditional societies, as historian Nils Gilman notes, were understood to be "inward
looking, inert, passive toward na- ture, superstitious, fearful of change, and economically simple."36 Moreover, the totality of the non-European world was generally described as "traditional" with the United States depicted as the ideal historical end point of
modernity.37 Not surprisingly, this linking of constitutionally grounded American universalism and racial hierarchy meant that global security and progress required reconstituting defeated powers and newly postcolonial states on American institutional terms. First,
it emphasized the centrality of constitution writing, in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere, as part of the projection of American influence. This was because spreading American influ- ence entailed spreading the political-legal forms of American do- mestic society,
especially those seen as conducive to pluralism, understood in terms of Madisonian checks and balances. Second, it also entailed promoting the idea of constitutionalism itself as a global international principle. And the heart of constitutionalism was not merely
formal legal texts, but above all a commitment to legal restraint and collective decisionmaking. Hence, in con- structing postwar institutions, American policymakers from both political parties focused especially on the proliferation of multilateral international legal
regimes to govern virtually every issue of global significance.38 B. Violence, Constraint, and Shared Prosperity in the American Cold War Model The long-term result was the establishment of a very partic- ular governing global order and Cold War vision, one framed
around constitutional fidelity as well as American exceptionalism and international hegemony. It also, paradoxically, led to a re- markable quality of Cold War politics: the extent to which pro- moting liberal constitutionalism abroad actually required-as a matter of
sustained practice-subverting local self-determination on the ground. If anything, one can tell the story of the Cold War-with its history of overthrows and political assassina- tions-as governed far more by American lawlessness than by le- gal restraint. This was for
two interrelated reasons. First, policymakers persistently argued that American violations of the constitutional principle were the product of the existential threat posed by the Soviet Union.39 This threat was of such a scale that in some cir- cumstances it required
fighting the violence of the Soviet sphere with the counterviolence of coups, assassinations, and covert op- erations.40 Elites conceived of these practices as highlighting the ethical bind facing the United States, an exceptional nation forced against its own actual
preferences to employ dirty political means in a world of violence and disorder. Indeed, the very discomfort Americans supposedly experienced with this harsh reality further underlined the specialness of the national project -it spoke to the extent to which the
country was fundamentally moral in its own ends and self-understanding.41 But alongside this argument from political necessity was a second claim grounded in judgments about ethnocultural limita- tions. Following modernization theories, scholars and officials of-
ten argued that the great threat to transition from traditional to modern society in the Third World was too hasty an embrace of populist majoritarianism. As Gilman notes, American policy- makers worried, against the backdrop of economic underdevelop- ment,
that mass democratic pressure could lead to the "patholog- ical" form of modernity epitomized by the Soviet Union.42 Given this alternative, autocrats who served internally as stewards of modernization-promoting property rights, literacy, and tech- nical and
administrative expertise even if they constrained polit- ical liberty-facilitated the preconditions for mature liberal de- mocracy. All of this meant that during the Cold War, American lawlessness in practice was systematically presented as either ab- errational or the
product of the ethnocultural immaturity of newly independent states in the non-European world. What made such arguments plausible to many elites-both within the United States as well as abroad-was that American police power went hand in hand with a
credible story of global betterment. The specter of the Soviet Union not only justified in- terventionist violence, it also created the need for an achievable account of shared prosperity. Although the Soviet Union was not nearly as wealthy as the United States, it
offered a clear example in the post-World War II years of an impoverished state that had rapidly industrialized. Indeed, this example better approximated the particular circumstances across war-torn Europe and post- colonial Asia and Africa than did American
economic and political history.43 And it led American social scientists and policymakers to argue, in the words of Professor Max Milliken (head of the Center for International Studies at MIT), that "[t]he best counter to Communist appeals is a demonstration that
these same [devel- opment] problems are capable of solution by other means than those the Communists propose."44 All of this meant that American Cold War policymakers rec- ognized the need for international multilateral institutions to pro- vide tangible
material benefits and highlighted to them the link between global constitutionalism and shared economic pro- gress. This was most obviously underscored by the Bretton Woods institutions, which imagined a multilateral and rule- bound framework to manage the
global economy, and by the European Recovery Plan, better known as the Marshall Plan. Both were organized on the principle that the United States as the dominant economic power should guarantee a global financial system aimed at promoting reconstruction
and development and premised on the free flow of American capital. Although this cer- tainly allowed American corporations to penetrate, often exploi- tatively, new markets, it also was tied to a conscious desire to produce practical economic achievements that
could be juxta- posed against the Soviet alternative.45 The result was a remarkable tension in American Cold War imperium. On the one hand, the high tide of the Cold War saw American direct involvement or complicity in truly staggering forms of mass violence
across large swathes of the world, epito- mized most obviously for the domestic audience by the war in Vietnam. In this way, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that American constitutionalism as the principle of global power, ei- ther in terms of the political-legal
institutions promoted abroad or the overall multilateral international order meant to govern economic and security policy, systematically produced illiberal- ism and lawlessness. And as anticolonial critics often contended, such illiberalism seemed undergirded by
the persistence of racialized notions of cultural capacity.46 Yet at the same time, even for many elites in the Third World, the American example remained alluring. To begin with, elites from Turkey to India to Indonesia often internalized judgments about
traditionalism and modernity and so accepted underlying and fundamentally racialized development narratives about the path to prosperity.47 But more critically, both the example of a growing American economy and the commitment of US policy- makers to invest
in multilateral economic and security institu- tions sustained faith that American imperium could actually lift all boats. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said of the importance of financial and technical support for the Third World, which ultimately led to
the establishment of the US Agency of International Development (USAID), the goal was to "use material means to a non-material end."48 For Acheson, the ultimate aspiration was a global community of liberal-capitalist states, constitutionally governed and
committed to providing for the basic social welfare of its citizens. This vision gave both pur- pose to American power and had real appeal as a viable model, even if it went hand in hand in practice with political coercion or economic extraction. II. THE BREAKDOWN IN
CONSTITUTIONAL LOGICS The end of the Cold War produced hopes that the bipolar standoff that had paralyzed much of the postwar international security system centered on the United Nations would give way to a new era of multilateral cooperation under
American leader- ship. The new unipolar moment would be one in which the prin- ciples America had sought to project through the Cold War- democratic governance in domestic political systems and multi- lateral rule-based order internationally-might now be fully
real- ized.49 Moreover, high levels of defense spending in the United States and among its allies could now be reinvested in social pro- grams, paying a peace dividend and enabling new spending on de- velopment and governance goals. The promise that American-
led international order would deliver stability, economic prosperity, and political liberty seemed finally within reach. Instead, the next quarter century witnessed a series of defec- tions from multilateralism by the United States, acting largely uncontested, and an
initial period of expansion was followed by a decline in the spread of constitutionalism and democracy as do- mestic models of governance. In the place of a peace dividend, the 1990s witnessed the dismantling of what remained of the social welfare state and the
emergence of patterns of capital mobility and capital flight that later came to be identified with predatory globalization. T he resulting record has been one of a slow unrav- eling of multilateral ordering principles coupled with a profound crisis in both the plausibility
and perceived legitimacy of the American-backed international order. As American imperial ad- ventures have rewritten rules governing international security, yawning inequalities generated by market capitalism and the failure ofits nation-building projects on the
ground have also tar- nished the appeal of American-branded models of democratic gov- ernance. At the same time, competing models of governance- particularly of managerial authoritarianism-may be gaining traction over the logic of liberal constitutionalism.so In
this Part, we review the history of the post-Cold War pe- riod to examine how and why American international and trans- national commitments unraveled in the absence of the Soviet foil. Critical to this account is a shift in the American approach to con-
stitutionalism. As we have argued, in the Cold War context, the United States routinely defected from constitutional commit- ments for instrumental reasons or as part of arguments about "developmental" dictatorships, but it treated such defections as aberrational
or transitional. In the post-Cold War period, we con- tend that the United States has defected from constitutionalism not simply as a means to realize competing priorities, but because of a deeper ambivalence and indeed fundamental drift in basic global vision. If
anything, as underscored by the Global War on Terror, what is noteworthy about the present moment is that the old coercive means of Cold War security policy have persisted but now occur disconnected from previous aspirational ends. A. From New World Order
to Unilateral Exceptionalism President George H.W. Bush proclaimed the birth of "a new world order"51 led by the United States in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. Echoing ideas of the United States serving as an enlightened hegemon-a view that came to
dominate policy- making in the mid-twentieth century-there was a hope that the spirit of the Marshall Plan would animate American-led efforts to assist Eastern European transitions. At the same time, a newly strengthened UN Security Council would use its
enforcement powers to deter threats to international peace and security. In some ways, the 1991 Gulf War was seen as evidence of the con- struction of such an order with the Security Council authorizing intervention to deter aggression by an erstwhile American
ally. Yet enthusiasm for an intervention to liberate Kuwait gave way to concerns about the enforcement of no-fly zones seemingly with- out clear authorization and the imposition of a sanctions regime with punishing consequences for civilians.52 In fact, the Gulf
War may be remembered as marking a high point of post-Cold War international cooperation in the authori- zation of collective action. But its aftermath-and the Clinton ad- ministration's approach to "muscular diplomacy" with selective reliance on international
frameworks-was far more telling for the international order coming into focus in the 1990s. Despite rhetorical commitment to multilateral ordering principles, the Clinton administration set a series of precedents that signaled American ambivalence toward
internationalism and a willing- ness to act unilaterally without regard for those principles. Examples of instances in which the "new world order" gave way to an American disengagement include the American re- sistance to signing the Land Mines Convention, the
reluctance to sign the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the military campaign in Kosovo.53 In this same period, international-law scholars identified a new trend among American policymakers and academics that came to be
described as the "New Sovereigntists." One scholar studying this form of rising anti-internationalism described its adherents as "re- sist[ing] the incorporation of international norms and drap[ing] the power to do so in the mantle of constitutional legitimacy," which
allowed the government to "pick and choose the interna- tional conventions and laws that serve its purpose and reject those that do not."54 This approach-"internationalism A la carte"-provided cover for the Senate's rejection of the Compre- hensive Test Ban
Treaty, the US failure to submit the Kyoto Protocol for Senate approval, and the failure to accede to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.66 In many of these in- stances, the United States participated in negotiations and helped shape the regimes that it
subsequently rejected.56 Unilateralism in this period also included American use of force without international authorization. President Bill Clinton's decision to bomb Sudan in response to al-Qaeda attacks against US embassies elsewhere in Africa suggests that "the
preemptive and unilateral use of U.S. military power was [already] per- ceived as necessary prior to [George W.] Bush's election."5? An- other Clinton-era doctrine, that of identifying and seeking to iso- late or impose sanctions on "rogue states," also exemplified a
preference for selectively referencing international frameworks to justify far-reaching coercive policies. One scholar notes that the "rogue states" doctrine best encompasses the Clinton approach to international security questions due to its "lack of status in inter-
national law, its declaratory and unilateral nature, its rooting in a realist calculus of US interests, [and] its articulation in terms of a 'warning to enemies."'58 With respect to the hope that the post-Cold War "new world order" might give rise to a Marshall Plan for
Eastern Europe, the investment that did arrive took the form of aggressive privatiza- tion policies backed by the World Bank rather than the earlier New Deal-inflected social-welfarist approach.59 In many ways, the turn to privatization was the product of American
domestic developments that had emerged during the latter part of the Cold War itself. By the 1970s, the early postwar order was showing profound signs of strain. Economic crisis, social rebellion, and the costs of military failure in Vietnam together generated deep
sus- picions among emerging elites in both parties regarding the very economic viability of social welfarism. Beginning during the Carter administration (and becoming common wisdom under President Ronald Reagan), blame for ongoing crises was laid squarely at
the feet of a supposedly bloated government and a corrupt labor movement. Politicians and economists turned to the market and to policies of market liberalization as the solution to all manner of social ill.60 It was not a surprise, then, that by the 1990s what the
United States exported abroad was "shock ther- apy" rather than a global New Deal. The post-Cold War results for Eastern Europe and elsewhere were dire to say the least. Rapid privatization led to massive transfers of public wealth into private hands and the
ensuing cor- ruption and inequality that still mark much of the region from Russia to Hungary.61 A perhaps equally important result was that the attachment of the model of constitutionalism to prescriptions of privatization and market liberalization produced a
Beltway consensus that tied liberalism to what many Eastern Europeans experienced as rapacious forms of capitalism. In a sense, these developments embodied an obvious continuity with th e Cold War connection between capitalist property ar- rangements and
liberal constitutionalism. But recall again that at least during the early Cold War, the social-welfarist principles of American economic policy seemed plausibly to tie American economic interest and foreign development. "Shock therapy" highlighted that as Keynesian
and welfarist commitments de- clined in the United States, especially after the 1970s, the promo- tion of aggressive privatization was no longer tied to actual ma- terial improvements overseas. The development formulas that were embraced as part of the new
consensus-in structuring economies and requiring rule-of-law and governance reforms- largely failed to produce either market-based prosperity or stable political order among recipient states.62 Austerity and wealth transfers ran directly against social needs and the
almost talis- manic focus on these among US policymakers as the only viable economic options created a defense of austerity almost for its own sake. On the one hand, Clinton-era unilateralism produced a precedent in places like Kosovo for American-led coalitions
to use force without legal authorization that presaged over fifteen years of continuous war since 2001. On the other hand, policy prescrip- tions for the post-Cold War transitions in Eastern Europe and beyond tied political liberalization to privatization and markets in
ways that associated constitutionalism with neoliberal economics-but pointedly not with actual shared material betterment.3 The Bush administration doubled down on the unilateralism and neoliberal policy prescriptions of the Clinton administration while
shedding any rhetorical defense of multilateralism. The first few months of the Bush administration signaled a further retreat from multilateral engagements with the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, the "unsigning" of the Rome Statute, the
repudiation of the Kyoto Protocol, and opposi- tion to a draft UN convention to reduce small-arms trafficking.64 Professor Harold Koh described these and other examples, includ- ing the apparent repudiation of the Geneva Conventions, as evi- dence that the United
States had established itself as part of an "axis of non-obedience."65 The disengagement from multilateral- ism even extended to areas in which international cooperation had been a long-standing priority, such as policies regarding nuclear nonproliferation and
weapons of mass destruction (W1VID). The Bush administration distanced itself from the disarmament commitments within the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), repudiated commitments made by the United States at the 2000 NPT Review Conference, and welcomed
India's development of nuclear technologies, eventually concluding a civil nuclear deal with the NPT nonsignatory country.66 In lieu of multilateral agreements like the NPT, the Bush administration developed a flexible ad hoc coalition, the Proliferation Security
Initiative, with a narrow agenda and scope of activities involving coercive interdictions of suspected proliferation activities, without international legal au- thorization.67 Even as the Bush administration went to war in Iraq over WMD concerns, it weakened the
frameworks designed to deter WMD proliferation. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the combination of catastrophic threats, resurgent nationalism, and the sus- pension of most of the remaining legislative checks on the admin- istration's conduct of its
foreign policy, resulted in an open embrace of preemption and unilateralism that is best exemplified in the United States' 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS).68 For the rest of the world, the NSS represented a doctrine of un- fettered use of force and an embrace
of "preventive" war-making.69 This approach extended the earlier "rogue state" doctrine by reference to the threats of WMD and terrorism to a new "Axis of Evil."70 In the place of the "new world order" proclaimed by his father and characterized by multilateral
cooperation, the younger Bush sought to create a selective antiterrorist alliance as part of his declaration of a Global War on Terror. In some ways, especially when considered through the prism of the Iraq war, the Global War on Terror seemed to reboot many
familiar elements of Cold War policy. Officials at times combined a Manichean good-versus-evil worldview with classic Cold War claims about the capacity of American stewardship to transform traditional and violenc e-prone Muslim societies into modern lib- eral
capitalist nation-states. The Iraq war, in particular, was pre- sented as an opportunity to liberate the population from retro- grade authoritarianism and to establish a democratic model for the Middle East. But the failure of the Iraq war quickly collapsed American
expectations of a "domino effect" of democratization in the region as well as the credibility of figures within the Bush administration who emphasized the old transformative account of American power.71 Indeed, the debacle ofthe Iraq intervention and the
devastat- ing sectarianism and civil conflict that followed definitively dis- connected the Global War on Terror from any modicum of liberal aspirations. Instead, familiar Orientalist tropes concerning the Muslim world's irreducible cultural resistance to modernity
increas- ingly gained dominance.72 In this way, previous racial hierarchies persisted in shaping American policy, but only now disconn ected from any faith in progressive and emancipatory change. Instead, a racialized conception of Muslims as implacably hostile to
the West underwrote practices of containment in which counterter- rorism amounted to pacification, with very little of substance to offer besides the stability of a police state. The Global War on Terror was so broadly conceived that it produced a potentially
indefinite armed conflict on what could easily become a global battlefield against a nebulous set of foes comprised of nonstate actors and their alleged state sponsors.73 The combination of the arguments proffered to authorize the Iraq intervention and the conduct
of the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan led some to worry that American exceptionalism and unilateralism had become a threat to a rule-based interna- tional order and undermined the legitimacy of international law and international organizations.74 The
Global War on Terror brought into focus an international order in which American exceptionalism was no longer tied to a commitment to rule-based presumptions. International-law scholarship turned to theorizing the "state of exception" to make sense of the
United States' systematic repudiation of ex- isting legal limits under its new counterterrorism framings.76 While American unilateralism was certainly not unprecedented, the abandonment of the rhetorical commitment to law signaled a retreat from the defense of
the multilateral institutions that had been constitutive of US global governance strategy since the end of World War II. At l east one distinguished American scholar of international law read this change as representing a "system abrogation."76 B. Bush, Obama, and
the Failure of the "Fourth Wave" The American rejection of constitutionalism as the central principle of the international order provided the broader context for the decline itself of liberal constitutionalism as a general model. As the United States shifted focus to
counterterrorism pri- orities, it reduced its funding for democracy, human-rights, and governance programs while the focus of remaining funds often centered on shoring up the security sector among recipients.7' The slowing spread of constitutionalism is also tied
to a set of expec- tations concerning democratization in the postcolonial world that did not materialize. As the Cold War ended, Professor Huntington declared that a "third wave" of democracy had characterized the final quarter of the twentieth century, spanning
Latin America, the Asia-Pacific region, Eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa.78 At the turn of the twenty-first century, there was much anticipation of a "fourth wave" of democratization affecting the Muslim world in particular.7' Yet the Global War on Terror cast
the United States in oppositional terms to much of the Muslim world, even if the Bush administration was at pains to claim that it was not at war with Islam as such. The centrality of the Muslim world as an incubator of terror in the Bush paradigm put paid to the
idea of democracy promotion.80 Indeed, racialized presump- tions about the risks attendant to democracy in the Muslim world-where free elections might empower political Islam- placed a fourth wave at odds with realizing counterterrorism goals. Ultimately, the
Global War on Terror displaced the fourth wave in framing a future trajectory for Muslim-majority states. The Bush administration's antiterrorist alliance not only de- parted from existing international legal constraints on coercive force, but also encouraged its allies
to do the same. The prohibition on torture and arbitrary detention quickly gave way around the world to practices of extraordinary rendition and secret de- tention to facilitate coercive interrogation. Moreover, as the legal sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele observed,
the Global War on Terror was transformed into "an international state of emergency that requires other countries to make exceptions to both interna- tional law and their constitutional orders."81 The spread of liberal constitutionalism, once viewed as the inevitable
correlate of the end of the Cold War, was now supplanted by other priorities. The Bush administration replaced the language of democracy with an emphasis on "moderation," especially among its antiterrorism al- lies in the Muslim world.82 Further, the need for
allies among countries bordering Iraq and Afghanistan meant outright democ- racy demotion where geostrategic interests so required.83 The Global War on Terror also precipitated failed American efforts to translate belligerent occupation into imposed constitu-
tionalism domestically in Iraq and Afghanistan.84 Two key attrib- utes of American efforts to install constitutionalism in these coun- tries tarnished the broader model of liberal constitutionalism. First, constitutionalism was identified quite literally with impe- rial
imposition. By undertaking constitution-drafting exercises under conditions of occupation and using constituent assemblies appointed under the supervision of a foreign occupying force, the United States tarred constitutionalism with the brush of collabo- ration.
Second, the resulting political systems failed to deliver the most basic requirements of effective governance, such as channel- ing the competition for power through electoral institutions or es- tablishing a state capable of exercising a monopoly on force. In short,
American-style imposed constitutionalism was viewed in much of the Middle East and the Muslim world as both normatively unappealing and functionally flawed.86 The sheer management competence and economic performance of alternative models- particularly
the East Asian managerial authoritarianism identi- fied with Singapore and China86-Would have much to recom- mend it against a backdrop of corruption, state violence, and lack of basic services that characterized American nation-building exer- cises, with billions
of dollars spent in ultimately futile bids to shore up failing constitutional orders. The credibility of managerial authoritarianism as an alterna- tive model became even more pronounced following the 2007 global financial crisis precipitated by decades of deregulation
and the predatory lending policies that were rampant under the Bush administration. The recession that followed the crisis laid bare the racialized impact of rapacious capitalism at home87 while devastating the economies of numerous countries tied to the
American-led international financial order. The result was an in- ternational loss of faith in market-driven American economic stewardship, given the centrality of the American banking sector in generating and magnifying the global recession. And in exem- plifying
the failure of the American approach to provide actual material prosperity, the recession further compounded the declin- ing appeal of the country's constitutional model. In fact, to the extent that Chinese foreign investment strate- gies held on to elements of the
American economic model, China's delinking of governance from democratic imperatives spoke to the viability of an alternative that offered stability without constitu- tional corollaries.88 At a deeper level, as illustrated by a decade of Chinese investment in Africa,
Chinese managed authoritarian- ism highlighted the fundamentally contingent relationship be- tween market capitalism and liberal constitutionalism.89Man- aged authoritarianism need not be thought of as transitional; market capitalism and liberal
constitutionalism were not neces- sarily wedded to one another-neither in the present nor in the eventual future. Just as important, for the first time in decades, the financial crisis also systematically punctured faith in market-based solu- tions within the United
States. Policymakers had been promoting these strategies abroad and failing to deliver results, but that rec- ord of incompetence had not reverberated at home. Now even in- ternal elites and domestic publics came to question the value and legitimacy of these
projects.90 The definitive abandonment of Keynesian policies in the middle decades of the Cold War gave way to prescriptions that immiserated populations on the receiving end of American development aid. Eventually, the domestic equivalent of these policies
produced a crisis at home about the relationship between democracy and unregulated capitalism. Following the bellicosity and unilateralism of the Bush ad- ministration, the election of President Barack Obama rekindled international hopes that the American brand
of constitutionalism could still result in competent leadership and commitment to rule- based international order. The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Obama within less than a year of his election was perhaps the clearest example of this hope. The Nobel committee
cited Obama's promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and his fostering of a more constructive climate for international relations through outreach to the Muslim world as the basis for awarding him the Prize.91 Yet Obama showed a marked ambivalence toward
multilateralism, and while he softened the rhetorical approach taken by the Bush administration, he extended the preference for ad hoc coalitions over multilateral institutions. One of his earliest engagements with nuclear policy, for example, was not an effort to
shore up the NPT but rather the convening of a Nuclear Security Summit in April 2010 that was a meeting of an ad hoc and informal coalition of forty-seven states to enter into voluntary commitments relating to safeguarding nuclear materials within their borders.92
The Obama administration also continued policies of forgoing participation in the ICC and the Ottawa Treaty (on land mines) a nd treating multilateralism instrumentally through a selective policy of international cooperation when it suited geo- strategic objectives.93
While Obama restored some measure of American reputational legitimacy, he also preserved the asserted American prerogative to use force in counterterrorism operations around the world. As drone strikes extended to US citizens abroad, some argued that the
American license to kill in the Global War on Terror was undermining not only rule of law as an international matter but also basic constitutional constraints within the United States.94 The discretionary unilateralism of American drone strikes was mirrored by an
increasing reliance on unilateral executive action domestically under the Obama administration. As partisan polarization crippled the ability of the administration to pursue policy preferences with legislative cooperation, Obama found himself relying on theories of
inherent executive power to govern. For example, rather than seek congressional authorization to take part in a coalition bombing campaign in Libya, Obama employed a Justice Department opinion supporting his unilateral authority to make the determination to
join the war in Libya.9> Critics argued that he was continuing the Bush-era practice of using politicized legal advice to evade constitutional constraints and forge an imperial presidency.9< Just as with its predecessors, the new administration had seemingly allowed
the short-term policy payoff of unilateralism both internationally and domestic- ally to obscure the long-term costs of undermining basic rule-of- law values. The Libya intervention looked much like Iraq by 2012-a regime-change military intervention producing chaos
and violence rather than the promise of democratization and constitutionalism. Moreover, by the end of Obama's second term, American constitutionalism itself may have looked less like a model than a problem. Obama's last years in office were largely
characterized by partisan dysfunction and rule by executive orders, as signature policy achievements were increasingly accomplished through unilateral action.97 The concentration of power in the American executive became a new basis for authoritarians around
the world to invoke the US constitutional example in favor of their own practices.8 Obama also exhibited little appetite for returning to democracy promotion.99 Indeed, the Arab uprisings were met, to the disappointment of many scholars, with a renewed emphasis
on mod- eration.100 Once constitution-writing exercises began in Egypt and Tunisia, they won tepid support that fell away, again, when a military coup brought a new authoritarian to power in Egypt.1o1 Else- where, Obama showed the same proclivity for favoring
charismatic leaders over political liberalization as his predecessor.102 In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai prolonged his increasingly authoritarian rule over Afghanistan with US support through the first six years of Obama's presidency. It was no doubt the case
that the Obama administration's wariness about nation-building and democratization efforts reflected clear lessons drawn from the Bush administration's misadventures. But the problem was that as the United States continued to actively intervene in countries
from Libya to Afghanistan, its actions combined aggressive attacks on established state institutions with thin commitments to reconstruction. The results, unsurprisingly, were quite dim for democratization and constitutionalism in the region. Under Bush, American
detention and interrogation practices undermined the prohibition on torture and allowed dictators to point to the US example in defending their own human-rights records.103 In the aftermath of the financial crisis, hyperpartisanship, and a spotlight on racial
inequalities in the United States under Obama, America's brand of constitutionalism itself came to be associated with political and economic dysfunction.104 And across both administrations American interventionism undermined the case for democracy. The Trump
administration's slogan of "America First" augurs a ratcheting up of unilateralism and nativism in the United States that will do little to restore confidence in America's willingness to adhere to rule-of-law principles inter- nationally. Nor will the American record of
democracy demotion do much to shore up liberal constitutionalism abroad as the basic features of the model are called into question domestically by President Trump.o6 In this sense, at least, the character of America's contemporary imperial ambitions represents
an in- creasing constraint on the global appeal of constitutionalism. CONCLUSION

Ultimately, what we have argued in the preceding parts is that the

most common way of thinking about the
relationship between constitutionalism and empire fundamentally misunderstands how
American power has operated during and after the Cold War. The tendency of scholars is to imagine these
as opposed categories , or at least in tension, with the collapse of the constitutional principle creating the conditions in domestic and
international life for discretionary imperial ambition. But what these arguments fail to appreciate is the extent to

which constitutional ideology and the twentieth-century rise of pax Americana have been deeply
interpenetrated. Indeed, constitutionalism may well be understood as the definitive language of
American international police power and primacy. This means that discourses of constitutional
commitment have been a critical foundation for justifying and expanding the sphere of American
influence. It also means that the current decline in the appeal of constitutionalism speaks to a crisis in the articulation of American global power.
Again, none
of this is to say that constitutionalism actually systematically constrained security
excess at home or abroad during the peak of American Cold War identity. In fact, as discussed earlier, constitutionalism
was a central ideological tool in the service of both foreign intervention and the expansion of
the state's national security infrastructure. Constitutionalism was the defining language and
legitimating ideology of American violence. Exceptionalist discourses and constitutional
attachment were routinely leveraged not just to defend particular foreign adventures, but also
to underwrite the overall justness of a growing security apparatus and global military footprint. This
was because, for Cold War political elites, preserving constitutional values-given the presumption about international instability and Soviet threat-
required projecting American power and safeguarding the constitutional state from all perceived dangers wherever they may occur.

In this way, constitutionalism and American global hegemony are perhaps best seen as operating in
tandem and giving sustenance to one another. Moreover, this suggests that rather than aberrations from the
constitutional ideal, the modes of violence and rights violation that were endemic to Cold
War American imperium were essential to the policymaking vision itself -despite talk to the
contrary of hypocrisy or political necessity. Still, it is key to appreciate how the creedal and constitutional presentation of the country
nonetheless gave ethical meaning and purpose to American power. It may have sanctioned coercion, but it also established the terms for what
responsible global action consisted in (multilateralism as well as transnational promotion of democracy, economic development, and constitution
writing) and it pro- vided a language both within the United States and internationally about why American authority-whatever the destructive
implications-might be legitimate.

Thus, what distinguishes that earlier period of American imperial ambition from the present is not primarily about means or security practices. The

Global War on Terror and the Cold War were both marked by racialized logics and heightened degrees
of violence. It is rather that the US retreat as a matter of basic principle from its own organizing frameworks has generated an

imperial politics devoid of coherent justification. When the current president refuses to
recognize a qualitative or ethical distinction between American and Russian politics and voices on
both the left and right emphasize accelerating economic inequality and de- cline, we have reached a point at which it is no longer merely
foreign critics or domestic dissidents that challenge the idea that American power is
exceptional , constrained, or necessarily tied to shared material prosperity. These presumptions , and with them the link between
empire, constitutionalism, and market-based growth that shaped the Cold War imagination, have become so eroded that they
seem increasingly unsustainable even as a matter of internal self-perception.
Perhaps this is most typified by the fact that whatever "model" defines the Trump presidency, President Trump and those around him hardly seem to
be political innovators. Rather, as numerous commentators have noted, the Trump administration appears to be riding a wave of resurgent right-wing
populism, from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbin to the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and so drawing from a well-worn global
authoritarian playbook.106 Thisinversion, whereby ruling elites import authoritarian repertoires in
place of the American exceptionalism they once projected, has profound implications. On the one
hand, there is no doubt that constitutional logics pro- vided a cover for acts of security violence at

home and abroad. But on the other hand, it is nonetheless true that these logics also provided the conceptual

language to challenge those very practices as hypocritical and to undergird the basic institutions of a multilateral global order.
To the extent that the appeal both for US policymakers and foreign actors of American-styled constitutionalism is in decline, this means that American
power itself faces a clear crisis in legitimacy. The
point is not that American economic or military might will simply
disappear or recede before other global competitors. But rather, as the basic logics justifying American power
break down, the question of why the United States should enjoy preeminence becomes ever
more acute.

The global community finds itself subject to the whims of a preeminent state power whose
principal actors have step-by-step over the last three decades seemingly lost clarity about that
state's objectives and overarching global vision. If the American imperial project-as an expression of American exceptionalism and
constitutional commitment-seems less and less plausible, the question is what will take its place. In a sense, the global com- munity

now encounters a moment of increased political openness, with real uncertainty about what
will fill the vacuum.
The pessimistic worry is that for all the many flaws of constitutional imagination, if a future order is premised ideologically on the United States' or
some other state's raw power, the space for self-constraint and rule-based limitations will continue to re- cede. But that is not the only possibility.

There may also be new space for alternative orderings to emerge in an international system
defined by multipolarity or one in which numerous competing hegemons dominate their own regional spheres. As the aspirational ambitions of an
American-led liberal international order recede, so too do the legitimating frames that have often served to validate or obscure acts of real violence.
Trump's ascendance has made plain the nature of what has for decades been the American orientation to the world, an orientation guided by
neoliberal commitments, national security presumptions, and unilateral coercion. The
silver lining may be that in the absence
of credible American global leadership, other powers or global civil-society movements, acting
singly or in concert, may yet embrace the aspirational potential of a new international order. Although
such an order might not speak the language of American constitutionalism, it also might not be weighed down by US geostrategic constraints and
coercive imperatives.
Neoliberal internationalism relies on an ontology of violent intervention and
imperial expansion. International liberal democracy masks and relies on an
unending psychic desire for enemy-creation and extermination. The resulting
anxiety drives an existential global war against perceived threats to “order.”
This anxiety is the underlying affective force upholding a security state led by a
boundless unitary executive.
Mbembe 16—Achille Mbembe, Ph.D. in history at the University of Sorbonne, member of the
staff at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the
Witwatersrand, annual visiting appointment at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke
University (“The society of enmity,” Radical Philosophy, 200, November/December 2016,
Translated by Giovanni Menegallenotes, originally appeared as chapter 2 of Politiques de
l’inimitié by Achille Mbembe, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-society-of-
enmity#fn4)

nowhere on earth has a ‘universal democracy of humanity’ ever existed; that, with
It’s equally possible that

the earth divided into states, it is within such states that one seeks to realize democracy , that is, in
the last instance, a politics of the state which, by clearly distinguishing between its own citizens – those who are seen to belong – and the rest,

keeps at a firm distance all those who are not seen to belong. [3] At any rate, the contemporary era is
undoubtedly characterized by forms of exclusion, hostility, hate movements, and , above all, by the struggle

against an enemy . As a result, liberal democracies – already considerably ground down by the forces of
capital, technology and militarism – are now being drawn into a colossal process of inversion. [4]
The disturbing object

The term ‘movement’ necessarily implies the setting into motion of a drive, which, even if impure, is composed of a fundamental energy. This energy is
enlisted, whether consciously or not, in the pursuit of a desire, which is ideally a master-desire [désir-maître]. This master-desire – at once comprising a
field of immanence and a force composed of multiplicities – is invariably directed towards one or several objects. ‘Negro’ [Nègre] and ‘Jew’ were once
favoured names for such objects. Today, Negroes and Jews are known by other names: Islam, the Muslim, the Arab, the foreigner, the immigrant, the
refugee, the intruder, to mention only a few.

Desire (master or otherwise) is also that movement through which the subject – enveloped on all sides by a specific phantasy
[fantasme] (whether of omnipotence, ablation, destruction or persecution, it matters little) – seeks to turn back on itself in the hope of

protecting itself from external danger , while other times it reaches outside of itself in order to
face the windmills of the imagination that besiege it. Once uprooted from its structure, desire then sets out to capture the
disturbing object. But since in reality this object has never existed – does not and will never exist – desire must

continually invent it . An invented object, however, is still not a real object. It marks an empty yet bewitching space, a hallucinatory zone, at once enchanted
and evil, an empty abode haunted by the object as if by a spell.

The desire for an enemy , the desire for apartheid, for separation and enclosure, the phantasy
of extermination , today all haunt the space of this enchanted zone. In a number of cases, a wall is enough to express it. [5]
There exist several kinds of wall, but they do not fulfil the same functions. [6] A separation wall is said to resolve a problem of excess numbers, a surplus of presence that some
see as the primary reason for conditions of unbearable suffering. Restoring the experience of one’s existence, in this sense, requires a rupture with the existence of those whose
absence (or complete disappearance) is barely experienced as a loss at all – or so one would like to believe. It also involves recognizing that between them and us there can be

nothing that is shared in common. The anxiety of annihilation is thus at the heart of contemporary projects of
separation.

the building of concrete walls and fences and other ‘ security barriers ’ is in full swing. Alongside the walls,
Everywhere,

other security structures are appearing: checkpoints, enclosures, watchtowers, trenches, all manner of demarcations that in many
cases have no other function than to intensify the zoning off of entire communities , without ever fully
succeeding in keeping away those considered a threat. Such is the case in those Palestinian towns that are completely surrounded by areas under Israeli control. [7] In fact, the
Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories can be seen to serve as a laboratory for a number of techniques of control, surveillance and separation, which today are being
increasingly implemented in other places on the planet. These range from the regular sealing off of entire areas to limitations on the number of Palestinians who can enter Israel
and the occupied territories, from the regular imposition of curfews within Palestinian enclaves and controls on movement to the objective imprisonment of entire towns. [8]

Permanent or temporary checkpoints, cement blocks and mounds of earth serving as roadblocks, the control of aerial and marine space, of the import
and export of all sorts of products, regular military incursions, home demolitions, the desecration of cemeteries, whole olive groves uprooted,
infrastructure turned to rubble and obliterated, highand medium-altitude bombardments, targeted assassinations, urban counter-insurgency
techniques, the profiling of minds and bodies, constant harassment, the ever smaller subdivision of land, cellular and molecular violence, the
generalization of forms adopted from the model of a camp – every feasible means is put to work in order to impose a regime of separation whose
functioning paradoxically depends on an intimate proximity with those who have been separated. [9]

In many respects such practices recall the reviled model of apartheid, with its Bantustans, vast reservoirs of cheap labour, its white zones, its multiple jurisdictions and wanton

the Israeli separation project. In the first place, this is

violence. However, the metaphor of apartheid does not fully account for the specific character of

because this project rests on quite a unique metaphysical and existential basis . The apocalyptic and

catastrophist elements that underwrite it are far more complex, and derive from a longer
historical horizon than those elements that used to support South African Calvinism. [10]
Moreover, given its ‘hi-tech’ character, the effects of the Israeli project on the Palestinian body are much more formidable that the relatively primitive operations undertaken by

This is evidenced by its miniaturization of violence – its

the apartheid regime in South Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s.

cellularization and molecularization – and its various techniques of material and symbolic erasure . [11] It is also

evidenced in its procedures and techniques of demolition – of almost everything, whether of infrastructures, homes, roads or
landscapes – and its fanatical policy of destruction aimed at transforming the life of Palestinians into a heap of ruins or a pile of garbage
destined for cleansing. [12] In South Africa, the mounds of ruins never did reach such a scale.

If all forms of inclusion are necessarily disjunctive, separation can conversely only ever be partial. In South Africa wholesale separation would have
undermined the very survival of the oppressor. Short of exterminating the entire native population from the outset, it was impossible for the white
minority to undertake a systematic ethnic and racial cleansing on the model of other settler colonies. Mass expulsions and deportations were hardly an
option. Once the entwining of different racial segments had become the rule, the dialectic of proximity, distance and control could never reach the
paroxysmic levels seen in Palestine.

In the occupied territories, such proximity is attested by Israel’s continued control over the management of the population register and its monopoly
over the issuing of Palestinian identity cards. This is also the case with nearly all the other aspects of daily life, such as regular transfers, the
authorization of various permits, and the control of taxation. Peculiar to this model of separation is not only that it can be tailored to the demands of
occupation (or abandonment, if need be). [13] It can also, when required, transform itself into an instrument of strangulation. Occupation is in every
respect a form of bare struggle, a kind of combat between bodies in a dark tunnel.

The desire for apartheid and the phantasy of extermination are not new phenomena , however.
They have continued to metamorphose over the course of history, particularly within the old
settler colonies . Chinese, Mongols, Africans and Arabs – in some cases long before Europeans – were responsible for the conquest of vast territories. They
established complex long-distance trade networks across seas and oceans. But it was Europe, perhaps for the first time in modern history, which inaugurated

a new epoch of global resettlement. [14] This resettlement of the world, which occurred between the sixteenth and
the nineteenth centuries, was double faceted: it was at once a process of social excretion (for the migrants who left Europe to found

and a historic tipping point , which, for the colonized, came at the cost of new forms
overseas colonies)

of enslavement.

Over the course of this long period, the re settlement of the world often took the shape of innumerable
atrocities and massacres , unprecedented instances of ‘ethnic cleansing’, expulsions, transfers,
and concentrations of entire populations in camps, and indeed of genocides . [15] The colonial
enterprise was driven by a mixture of sadism and masochism, applied gropingly and in response to largely unexpected
events. As such, it was inclined to smash all forces standing in the way of its drives or inhibit their

course towards all sorts of perverse pleasures. The limits to what it might have considered ‘normal’ were constantly broken, and few
desires were subject to straightforward repression, let alone embarrassment or disgust. The colonial world’s capacity to make do with
the destruction of its objects (natives included) was astonishing. If any object came to be lost, the thought was that it could easily be
replaced with another.

Further still, the principle of separation lay at the root of the colonial project. Colonialism had to a large extent consisted
in a constant effort to separate: on one side, my living body; on the other, all those ‘body-things’ surrounding it – with my human flesh as the fundamental locus through which
all other exterior ‘flesh-things’ and ‘flesh-meats’ exist for me. On one side, therefore, is me – the basic nexus and source of orientation in the world – while, on the other, are the
others with whom, however, I can never completely fuse – others with whom I may relate, yet never genuinely engage in relations of reciprocity or mutual implication.

this constant effort to separate (and thus to differentiate) was partly a consequence of an
In a colonial context,

anxiety of annihilation felt by the colonizers themselves. Numerically inferior but endowed with powerful means of
destruction, the colonizers lived in perpetual fear of being surrounded on all sides by ‘evil objects’
threatening their very survival and existence : natives, wild beasts, reptiles, microbes, mosquitoes, illnesses, the climate, nature as such,
even witches.

The apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe – the latter, though, in an extreme fashion and within a quite
different setting – constituted two emblematic manifestations of this phantasy of separation. Apartheid in
particular openly challenged the possibility of a single body comprehending more than one individual. It presupposed the existence of originary and distinct (already constituted)
subjects, each made of a ‘raceflesh’ or ‘race-blood’ able to evolve according to its own rhythm. It was believed that assigning them to specific territorial spaces would be enough
to neutralize the otherness of one with respect to the others. These originary, distinct, subjects were called upon to act as if their past had never been a past of ‘prostitution’, of
paradoxical dependencies and all manner of intrigues. Such was the phantasy of purity underpinning their existence. [16] Historical apartheid’s failure to secure, once and for all,
impenetrable frontiers between different fleshes can therefore be understood as an a posteriori demonstration of the limits of the colonial project of separation. This is because,

short of total extermination , the Other can never be external to us: it is within us , under the
double figure of the alter ego and the altered ego [l’autre Moi et du Moi autre], each mortally exposed to the other and to itself.

The colonial project drew a great deal of its substance and surplus energy from its basis in all
sorts of instinctual drives , more or less openly acknowledged desires, in the main located below the
conscious I of the agents concerned. In order to exercise a durable project on the native people they had subjugated, and from whom they
wanted to differentiate themselves at all costs, the colonists had to somehow constitute them into various kinds of

physical objects. In this sense, the whole game of representations under colonialism consisted in
turning the natives into a variety of typical or type-images.
These stereotypes largely corresponded to the debris of their real biographies, their primary status preceding their first encounter with the colonizers.
By producing this imagined material, an entirely artificial secondary status of psychic objects came to be fixed onto their primary status as authentic
human persons. For natives within their daily lives, the dilemma thus became how to distinguish between the psychic object they had been asked to
interiorize – and often forced to accept as their true self – and the human part of themselves that they had once been and that was still theirs despite
everything, but which, under colonial conditions, they were now being forced to forget.

Once created, these psychic patterns became constitutive of the colonial self. Their position of exteriority with respect to
the colonial self was thus always, at the same time, one of ultimate dependence. The continued psychic functioning of the colonial order rested on investment in these objects.

Affective, emotional and psychic life under colonialism orbited around such objects and
patterns; without them it would have lost its substance and coherence. It depended for its vitality on permanent
contact with them, and indeed showed itself to be particularly vulnerable to being separated from them. In colonial or para-colonial situations,

the ‘evil object’ (the object that has survived from initial destruction ) can never be thought of as
completely exterior from the self. Divided from the very start, it is always already at once subject and object. Since it depends on me at the same
time as I depend on it, I cannot simply be rid of it through sheer persecution and obstinacy. In the end, I may choose to destroy everything I abhor, but this can never release me
from my link to this other entity – even as I destroy it or separate myself from it. This is because the evil object and I can never be entirely separated. At the same time, however,
we can never be entirely one and the same.

The enemy, that other that i am

The desire for an enemy , for apartheid, the phantasy of extermination , such irrepressible forces can
be seen as shaping the basic line of fire, indeed the decisive struggle, at the beginning of this century. As the
fundamental vectors of contemporary brainwashing, they push democratic regimes everywhere into a kind of vicious

stupor, and, inebriated and reeking, to a life of drunks. As both diffuse psychic structures and generic passionate forces, they are responsible for
the dominant affective tonality of our times and serve to sharpen many contemporary
struggles and mobilizations. These struggles and mobilizations in turn feed on a threatening and anxiogenic vision of the world, privileging a logic of
suspicion where everything must be seen as secret or as belonging to a plot or conspiracy. [17] Pushed to their ultimate consequences, they lead almost

inexorably towards a wish for destruction , one according to which blood (spilt blood) makes law, in an explicit application of the ancient
dictum of retaliation, the eye-for-an-eye or lex talionis of the Old Testament.

the drive , for an enemy is no longer purely a social

In this depressive period within the psychic life of nations, the need, or rather

need. It corresponds to a quasi-anal need for ontology . In the context of the mimetic rivalry exacerbated by the ‘war on terror’,
having an enemy at one’s disposal (preferably in a spectacular fashion) has become an obligatory stage in the
constitution of the subject and its entry into the symbolic order of our times. Indeed, it seems as if the denial
of the enemy were lived, within oneself, in the form of a deep narcissistic wound. To be deprived of an enemy – or to not experience a terrorist attack or

any other bloody acts inflicted by those who hate us and our way of life – means being deprived of the kind of relation of hatred

that would authorize the free exercise of many otherwise forbidden desires . It means, in other words, to be
deprived of that demon without which almost nothing is allowed, even at a time when calls for absolute licence, unbridling, and generalized disinhibition appear to ring out with
great urgency. It is equally to hinder that compulsion to scare oneself, one’s capacity to demonize, and that kind of pleasure and satisfaction one feels when a presumed enemy
is shot down by special forces or when he is captured alive and subjected to endless interrogations, rendered and tortured in one of the many so-called ‘black sites’ that stain
the surface of our planet. [18]

‘the specific political distinction’ from which ‘the political’ as such is

This is an eminently political epoch, since

defined – as Carl Schmitt argued, at least – is that ‘between friend and enemy’ . [19] If our world today is an effectuation of Schmitt’s, then
the concept of enemy is to be understood for its concrete and existential meaning, and not at all as a metaphor or an empty lifeless abstraction. The enemy

Schmitt describes is neither a simple competitor, nor an adversary, nor a private rival whom one might hate or feel antipathy for. He is rather the
object of a supreme antagonism . In both body and flesh, the enemy is that individual whose physical
death is warranted by their existential denial of our own being.
However, to distinguish between friends and enemies is one thing; to identify the enemy with certainty is quite another. Indeed, as a ubiquitous yet
obscure figure, today the enemy is even more dangerous by being everywhere: without face, name or place. If they have a face, it is only a veiled face,
the simulacrum of a face. And if they have a name, this might only be a borrowed name, a false name whose primary function is dissimulation.
Sometimes masked, other times in the open, such an enemy advances among us, around us, and even within us, ready to emerge in the middle of the
day or in the heart of night, every time his apparition threatening the annihilation of our way of life, our very existence.

the political as conceived by Schmitt owes its volcanic charge to the fact that it is closely connected to an
Yesterday, as today,

existential will to power. As such, it necessarily and by definition opens up the extreme possibility of an
infinite deployment of pure means without ends , as embodied in the execution of murder.
Underwritten by the law of the sword, it is the ‘meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice [their] life’ (to kill themselves for others), and, under the aegis
of the state, that in the name of which such men could be ‘authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings’ (to kill others) on the basis of their actual or supposed
belonging to an enemy camp. [20] From this standpoint, the political can be understood as a particular form of association or grouping established with a view to a combat,
which is at once decisive and profoundly opaque. But it is not merely the business of the state, and hence an exercise in delegated death, since it also concerns not only the
possibility of sacrifice – or self-sacrifice, the giving of one’s life – but also, and very literally, the possibility of suicide.

This is because, in the end, suicide serves to brutally interrupt all dynamic of subjection and any possibility of recognition. To willingly relinquish one’s
existence by giving death to oneself is not necessarily to make oneself disappear. Rather, it is to willingly abandon the risk of being touched by the
Other and by the world – a gesture of disinvestment that forces the enemy to confront his own emptiness. The person who commits suicide no longer
wishes to communicate, neither by word nor violent gesture, except perhaps at the moment when, by putting an end to his own life, he also puts an
end to the life of his target. The killer kills himself while killing others or after having killed. Either way, he no longer seeks to participate in the world
such as it is. He disposes of himself, and disposes of some of his enemies as he does so. He thus discharges himself of what he once was and of the
responsibilities that as a living being were once his to attend. [21]

The person who commits suicide – killing his enemies in an act in which he also kills himself – shows the extent to which, as far as the political is
concerned, the true contemporary fracture is the one opposing those who cling onto their bodies, who take their bodies as the basis of life itself, to
those for whom the body can only open the way to a happy life when expunged. The martyr-to-be is engaged in a quest for a joyous life, one that he
believes rests only in God, and that is born of a will to truth in turn converted to a will to purity. There can be no authentic relationship to God other
than through conversion, that act through which one becomes other than oneself, and, in so doing, escapes from the facticity of life – that is, impure
life. By committing to martyrdom, one takes a vow to destroy such impure corporeal life. Usually, nothing is left of the fundamentalist’s body but
debris, scattered among other objects: bloody traces that appear more vivid against other traces, prints, enigmatic fragments such as bullets, guns,
phones, sometimes scratches or marks. Today, however, there is rarely a suicide attack without its technical devices, at the intersection between
ballistics and electronics – chips to unsolder, memory chips to test. In the strict sense of the term, to bring an end to one’s life, to abolish oneself, is
thus to undertake the dissolution of that seemingly simple entity that is one’s body.
The contemporary age can be seen to embody the fundamental character of the political as a
hatred of the enemy , the need to neutralize him, and a generalized desire to avoid the sorts of dangers and contagion he is perceived to bring.
Convinced they now face a permanent threat , contemporary societies have therefore come to
experience their daily lives as a series of ‘small traumas’ – an attack here, a hostage there, first a shoot-out, then a permanent
state of alert, and so on. New technologies have also deepened access to the private lives of individuals.

Thus, secret, invasive and sometimes illegal techniques of mass surveillance are able to target
people’s most intimate thoughts, opinions and movements. Indeed, by heightening and reproducing the affect of fear,
liberal democracies have also gone on to manufacture bogeymen designed to scare their
citizens – today a young veiled woman, tomorrow a terrorist novice returning from the battlefields of the Middle East, lone wolves and sleeper cells hidden away in the
crevices of society, observing us, looking for the right moment to strike.

What about the ‘Muslim’, the foreigner or the immigrant, those about whom one has continued, beyond all reasonable bounds, to weave images that, little by little, have begun

That such images do not match reality matters little. Primary

to connect into vicious chains of association?

phantasies know neither doubt nor uncertainty. As Freud argued, the mass is only ‘excited by
immoderate stimuli . Anyone seeking to move it needs no logical calibration in his arguments, but must paint with the most powerful images, exaggerate, and
say the same thing over and over again.’ [22] The current epoch is marked by the triumph of mass morality. [23] Contemporary psychic regimes

have brought to a maximum level of exacerbation the exaltation of affectivity and, paradoxically, within
an age of digital telecommunications, the desire for mythology, a thirst for mysteries. The increasing expansion

of algorithmic reason – which, as everyone knows, serves as the crucial basis for the financialization of the economy – goes hand in hand
with the emergence of new modes of mytho-religious thinking . [24] Fundamentalism is hence no longer considered as
antithetical to rational knowledge. On the contrary, the one serves as support for the other, as the two are put in the service of a form of visceral experience culminating, among

Convictions and firm certainties acquired at the end of a long

other things, in the notion of a ‘communion of martyrs’.

‘spiritual’ path, punctuated by revolt and conversion, reveal neither feeble fanaticisms nor barbaric madness or ravings, but rather
a type of ‘inner experience’ only shared by those who come to profess the same faith, obey the same law, the same authorities, and the same commandments. Essentially, they
belong to the same community. This community is made up of communicants, the ‘damned of the faith’ who are condemned to testify, by word and act, and to the bitter end if
necessary, to the ‘to-the-bitter-end’ character of divine truth itself.

the divine ( just like the market, capital or the political ) is almost
Within the mytho-religious logic of our times,

always perceived as an immanent and immediate force: vital, visceral and energetic. The paths of faith are
believed to lead to states or acts considered scandalous from the standpoint of simple human
reason, or to risks, apparently absurd ruptures and bloody stirrings – terror and catastrophe in the name of God . One of the
effects of faith and fundamentalism is to arouse a sort of great enthusiasm, the kind of enthusiasm that opens the door to a great decision.

Indeed, there are many today who live purely in wait of such an event; and martyrdom is one of the means used by the damned of the faith to bring an
end to this waiting. Today, such men of faith and enthusiasm seek to make history through a great decision, namely through the enactment of
vertiginous acts of an immediate and sacrificial nature. By means of such acts, the damned of the faith come face to face, and with open eyes, with a
dimension of excess and loss. Animated by a will to totality, they seek to become singular subjects by scoping the depths for disjunctive forces,
daemons of the sacred. Embracing a form of voluntary loss – that which destroys language as much as the subject of discourse – they allow for the
inscription of the divine into the flesh of a world become gift and grace. This is no longer a matter of mere mortification, but of annihilation: a crossing
from the self to God. The ultimate aim of these sacrificial acts is to master neither life nor the outside world, but an interior dimension; to produce a
new morality and, at the end of a decisive (and if need be bloody, and at any rate definitive) battle, to eventually experience an exulting, ecstatic and
sovereign form of affirmation.

The damned of the faith

Mytho-religious thinking is not the exclusive preserve of terrorist groups. In their effort to curb terrorism and complete their transformation into security states, liberal
democracies no longer hesitate to turn to grand mythological schemas . In fact, there are hardly
any today that do not appeal to bellicose enthusiasm, often with the aim of patching back
together their old nationalist fabrics . For every attack that results in casualties a kind of tailor-made mourning is automatically produced. The
nation is summoned to shed its tears of rancour in public and show its defiance against the
enemy. And with each tear, a shining path is traced. Clothed in the rags of international law, human rights,
democracy , or, simply put, ‘civilization’ , militarism no longer needs a disguise. [25] To relight the flame of hatred, old
allies are suddenly transformed into ‘enemies of humanity as a whole’, while might becomes right .

Having only relatively recently counted on dividing humanity into masters and slaves, liberal democracies today still depend for their
survival on defining a sphere of common belonging against a sphere of others ; in other words, friends
and ‘allies’ on the one hand, and enemies of civilization on the other. Indeed, without enemies
they struggle to keep themselves going alone. Whether such enemies really exist matters little. It suffices to create them, find them,
unmask them, and bring them out into the open.

Still, this endeavour became increasingly onerous when one began to believe that the fiercest and most intrepid enemies had lodged themselves in the deepest pores of the

The problem, in this sense, is how to separate the

nation, forming a kind of cyst that would destroy the nation’s most fertile promises from within.

nation from that which gnaws at it without harming its very body (i.e. civil war). Searches, raids, various forms of
control, house arrests, the recording of charges under emergency laws, increases in exceptional measures, extended powers for police and intelligence services, and, if required,
loss of nationality: everything is put to work, and with ever-growing harshness, in order to pin down these evils – yet not onto their true authors, our attackers, but, as if by

accident, onto those who merely resemble them. In doing this, what else is one doing but perpetuating the very thing one claims to oppose? By demanding the
death of all those who are not unconditionally on our side , do we not risk forever reproducing
all that is tragic of a humanity in the grip of hatred and unable to free itself?

Just as in the past, this war against existential enemies is once again framed in metaphysical terms. As a
great challenge, it engages the whole of being, its whole truth. These enemies, with whom no agreement is either possible or desirable, thus appear in the form of caricatures,

this presence only serves to confirm the type of

clichés and stereotypes, granting them a figural sort of presence. In turn,

( ontological ) menace we perceive as confronting us. In an age marked by a re-enchantment of blood and soil as much as increasing

abstraction, the enemy therefore emerges as a spectral figure and a figural presence, while the

cultural and biological elements of enmity are combined to constitute a single dimension.

liberal democracies do not hesitate to feed on all sorts of obsessions

With their imaginations whipped up by hatred,

about the real identity of the enemy. But who is this enemy really? Is it a nation, a religion, a civilization, a culture or an idea?
State of insecurity

Hate movements , groups invested in an economy of hostility, enmity, various forms of struggle against an enemy – all these have contributed, at
the turn of the twenty-first century, to a significant increase in the acceptable levels and types of violence that

one can (or should) inflict on the weak, on enemies, intruders, or anyone considered as not being
one of us. They have also contributed to a widespread instrumentalization of social relations,
as well as to profound mutations within contemporary regimes of collective desire and affect.
Further, they have served to foster the emergence and consolidation of a state-form often referred to as the surveillance or security state.

From this standpoint, the security state can be seen to feed on a state of insecurity , which it participates in fomenting and
to which it claims to be the solution. If the security state is a structure, the state of insecurity is instead a kind

of passion , or rather an affect, a condition, or a force of desire . In other words, the state of insecurity is
the condition upon which the functioning of the security state relies in so far as the latter is ultimately a structure
charged with the task of investing, organizing and diverting the constitutive drives of contemporary human life. As for the war, which is supposedly charged with

conquering fear, it is neither local, national nor regional. Its extent is global and its privileged domain of action is

everyday life itself. Moreover, since the security state presupposes that a ‘cessation of hostilities’ between
ourselves and those who threaten our way of life is impossible – and that the existence of an enemy which endlessly transforms itself is irreducible – it is clear that
this war must be permanent . Responding to threats – whether internal, or coming from the outside and then relayed into the
domestic sphere – today requires that a set of extra-military operations as well as enormous psychic
resources be mobilized. The security state – being explicitly animated by a mythology of freedom, in turn derived from a metaphysics of
 is, in short, less concerned with the allocation of jobs and salaries than with a deeper project of
force –

control over human life in general, whether it is a case of its subjects or of those designated as
enemies.
This freeing of psychogenetic energy can be seen in an increasing attachment to what was once called illusion. In its classic conception, illusion is opposed to reality. Mistaking
effects for causes, illusion empowers the dominance of images and the world of appearances, reflections and simulacra. It draws from a world of fiction that is opposed to a real
world founded in the fundamental fabric of things and of life. The demand of an originary surplus, which has always been necessary for life, today has not only accelerated – it
has become uncontrollable. This imaginary surplus is not perceived as the complement to an existence that would be more ‘real’ because supposedly consonant with Being and
its essence. For many, it is instead experienced as the very motor of the real, the very condition of its plenitude and radiance. The production of this surplus, which was once
administered by religions of salvation, is today increasingly delegated to capital and to all kinds of objects and technologies.

The domain of objects and machines, as much as capital itself, is increasingly presented in the guise of an animistic religion. In this context, everything is put into question up to
and including the status of truth. Certainties and convictions are held as genuine truths. There is no need to employ reason. It is enough to simply believe and surrender oneself
to belief. As a result, public deliberation, which is one of the essential features of democracy, no longer consists in discussing and seeking collectively, under the eyes of all
citizens, the truth and, ultimately, justice. The great opposition no longer being that between truth and falsity, the worst crime becomes doubt. This is because, in the concrete
struggle opposing us to our enemies, doubt hinders the total freeing of voluntarist, emotional and vital energies necessary for the use of violence and, when required, the
shedding of blood.

The reserves of credulity have similarly increased.

Paradoxically, this increase has gone hand in hand with an exponential acceleration of technological development and industrial innovation, the continuing digitalization of facts
and things, and the almost universal advance of what might be called electronic life and its double, or robotically adjusted life. [26] A new and unprecedented phase in the
history of humanity has effectively begun, in which it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish human organisms from electronic flows, the life of
humans from that of processors. Such a phase is made possible by advances in algorithmic computation, leading to an accumulation of know-how through the storage of
enormous data flows, processed at maximum power and speed. This digital-cognitive turn will culminate in a general incorporation of microchips within biological tissues. The
coupling of human and machine, which is already under way, has led not only to the emergence of new mythological conceptions of the technical object. It has also, as an
immediate consequence, put back into question the very status of the modern subject inherited from the humanist tradition.

The other decisive factor in this freeing process is a lifting of inhibitions – a return of the excluded part, of the structures embracing the repressed element – and a multiplication
of enhanced pleasures resulting from this freeing of psychogenetic energies and drives. Such a process also results in an adjournment – if not a wholesale suspension – of the
powers of moral reflection. What gratificatory pleasures might be possible today for those whose inhibitions are lifted and whose moral conscience is withdrawn? What might
explain the contemporary attraction exerted on the multitude by the idea of absolute and irresponsible power? What of many people’s seeming acceptance of the most extreme
actions, their receptiveness to the simplest and most confused arguments? And what of the readiness with which many appear to fall into line, and with which world powers can
be led towards all sorts of crimes simply by acknowledging the force of this idea?

In order to answer these questions one needs to say something about the fundamental mechanisms of affective life under present conditions. [27] The almost total
interconnection between individuals made possible by new technologies has not only given rise to new strategies in the formation of masses. Today, constituting a mass is
nearly the same as constituting a horde. In truth, this is no longer an era of masses. It is rather an era of virtual hordes. In so far as the mass survives, however, it is still only
‘excited by immoderate stimuli’. [28] As Freud argues, the mass ‘respects strength and is only moderately influenced by the good, which it sees simply as a kind of weakness.
What it expects in its heroes is brawn, even a tendency to violence. It wants to be dominated and suppressed and to fear its master.’ [29] Almost everywhere, then, the
traditional field of antagonisms has collapsed. Within national borders, new forms of association and social struggles have emerged. These are motivated less by class identity
than by familial relations and thus by blood. The old friend and enemy distinction is now embodied in the conflict between kin and non-kin, namely between those linked
through blood or origin and those considered to belong to a different blood, culture or religion. According to this vision, these are people who, having come from elsewhere, can
never be considered our fellow citizens and with whom we can have almost nothing in common.

Though they live among us, they can never be one of us. They must therefore be expelled, put back in their place, or simply led back beyond our borders under the aegis of a
new security state that has come to dominate our lives. Domestic pacification, what might be termed a molecular or ‘silent civil war’, mass incarcerations, the decoupling of
nationality from citizenship, extrajudicial executions sanctioned by new legal and criminal powers – all these factors contribute to a blurring of the old distinction between
internal and external security against a background of heightened racist affects.

Nanoracism and narcotherapy

At first sight, the case is clear. Our epoch seems to have finally discovered its truth. It only lacked the courage to declare it. [30] Having reconciled itself with its true side, it can
finally allow itself to proceed naked, free of all inhibition, without any of the old masks and obligatory disguises that had once served as its fig leaves. The great repression (which
never really happened) is therefore followed by a great release. But at what price, for whom, and for how long?

With nothing left to hide, the start of this century stands as if gazing out onto a wide-open expanse: vast salt marshes extending without a shadow towards the horizon. The
barrel has been scraped. All taboos have been broken. Any notion of the secret or the forbidden lies face down, dead on the ground. Everything becomes see-through and called
to its final consummation. The vessels are almost full and twilight cannot be delayed. Whether this ending takes place in a shower of bullets or not, we shall find out soon
enough.

In the meantime, the tide does not stop rising.

Racism – whether in Europe, South Africa, Brazil, the United States, the Caribbean or the rest of the world – will remain with us for the foreseeable future. [31] It will continue to
proliferate not only as a part of mass culture, but also (we would do well not to forget it) within polite society, not only in the old settler colonies, but also in other areas of the
globe, long deserted by Jews and where neither Negroes [Nègres] nor Arabs have ever been seen.

In any case, one had better get used to it: in the past it was games, circuses, plots, conspiracies and gossip that provided the entertainment. As the continent of Europe begins to
turn into a sort of boring iceberg (but also elsewhere), one will soon have to entertain oneself through nanoracism, that form of narcotherapy somewhat resembling a little
woodland owlet: diminutive, cute, but sporting a powerful beak that is hooked and sharp at the point. These are the bromides of our times, soothing and numbing everything
into a kind of flaccid paralysis. Once everything has lost its elasticity, it now appears as if to suddenly contract. Spasms and contractions – that is what we ought to be talking
about. Anywhere one finds cramps, spasms, a general shrinking of the spirit – these are the places where nanoracism treads.

Yet, in the end, what is nanoracism if not that narcotic brand of prejudice based on skin colour and expressing itself in seemingly anodyne everyday gestures, often apropos of
nothing, apparently unconscious remarks, a little banter, some allusion or insinuation, a slip of the tongue, a joke, an innuendo, but also, it must be added, consciously spiteful
remarks, like a malicious intention, a deliberate dig or jab, a profound desire to stigmatize and, in particular, to inflict violence, to wound and humiliate, to degrade those not
considered to be one of us?
Of course, even in an era of shameless nanoracism – where everything comes down to ‘us versus them’, whether expressed in upper or lower case it doesn’t matter – no one
wants to hear about it anymore. They should stay home, people say. Or if they really insist on living next to us, in our home, it should be with their pants down, rears out in the
open. Nanoracism defines an era of demeaning lowest-commondenominator racism, a sort of pocket-knife racism, a spectacle of pigs wallowing in dirt.

Its function is to turn each of us into callous boors. It consists in placing the greatest number of those whom we regard as undesirable in intolerable conditions, to enclose and
marginalize them daily, to continually inflict on them an endless series of racist jabs and wounds, to rob them of all their acquired rights, to smoke them out of their hives and
dishonour them to the point where they have no choice but to self-deport. And, speaking of racist wounds, it should be remembered that these are cuts and bruises endured by
a human subject and thus of a quite specific character: they are painful blows that are difficult to forget because inflicted on the body and its materiality, but also, above all, on
intangible elements such as dignity and self-esteem. Indeed, their traces are mostly invisible and their scars difficult to heal.

Speaking also of cuts and bruises, it is now clear that on this iceberg continent of Europe – as well as in America, South Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and elsewhere – those who
suffer daily racist injuries must today be counted in the hundreds of thousands. They constantly run the risk of letting themselves be touched in the most intense manner by
someone – an institution, a voice, a public or private authority – asking them to justify who they are, why they are here, where they come from, where they are going, why they
don’t go back to where they came from; in other words, a voice or authority which deliberately seeks to cause them a large or small shock, to irritate them, to hurt them, injure
them, to get them to lose their cool and self-composure as a pretext to violate them, to slander and debase without restraint that which is most private, most intimate, and
vulnerable, in them.

With regard to this sort of constant abuse, it should be added that nanoracism is not the exclusive preserve of narrow-minded ‘white people’, that subaltern group of individuals
tormented with resentment and rancour, who hate their own condition profoundly but who would nonetheless never commit suicide, whose nightmare is to one day wake up in
the garb of a Negro or with the brown skin of an Arab, not far away in some colony, but right here at home in their own country – the worst of all nightmares.

Nanoracism has become the obligatory complement to hydraulic racism – that of microand macro-juridical, bureaucratic and institutional apparatuses – the racism of the state
machine, one which eagerly shuffles stowaways and illegals around, which continues to confine the rabble within urban peripheries like a mass of jumbled objects, which in fact
multiplies the number of undocumented people, fencing off its territories and electrifying its borders, sometimes content with merely observing the shipwrecks at high seas; a
state which controls every aspect of transportation, buses, airport terminals, underground trains, streets, unveiling Muslim women and handling them as it sees fit, multiplying
detention centres and transit camps, investing lavishly in deportation techniques; a state, therefore, which practises discrimination and segregation under the full light of day
while swearing to the neutrality and impartiality of the secular Republican order – ‘indifferent to difference’, as the saying goes – and still talking nonsense about that putrefying
miasma of ‘the rights of man and the citizen’, so-called against all good sense, and despite the fact that for today’s state they are hardly the hard-on fodder of yesteryear.

Nanoracism is racism turned culture, a kind of all-pervading breath in its banality and capacity to infiltrate into the very pores and veins of society at a time of generalized
brainwashing, automated stupidity and mass stupor. The great visceral fear is that of the Saturnalia, the moment when today’s jinns, which are very much like those of the past
– in other words, Negroes, Arabs, Muslims, and, never far away, Jews too – like the scattered droppings of a Pan-god, take the place of their masters and transform the nation
into an immense dump, Muhammad’s dump.

Still, the distance that separates the phobia of the dump from the camp has always been very short. Refugee camps, camps for the displaced, migrant camps, camps for
foreigners, waiting areas for people pending status, transit zones, administrative detention centres, identification or expulsion centres, border crossings, welcome centres for
asylum-seekers, temporary welcome centres, refugee towns, migrant integration towns, ghettos, jungles, hostels, migrant homes, the list goes on, as observed in a recent study
by Michel Agier. This endless list serves to capture not only an ever-present (though often largely invisible, not to say all-too-familiar and perhaps banal) reality. The camp has
not only become a structural feature of our globalized condition. It has also ceased to scandalize. Or, rather, the camp is not just our present. It is our future, namely our solution
for ‘keeping away what disturbs, for containing or rejecting all excess, whether it is human, organic matter or industrial waste’. [32] In short, it is a form of government of the
world.

Unable to face up to the basic fact that what once belonged to the exception is now the norm (the fact that liberal democracies, like any other regime, are capable of
incorporating criminality into their system), we find ourselves plunged head-deep into an endless racket of words and gestures, symbols and language, delivered with increasing
brutality like a long series of blows to the head. There are mimetological blows too: secularism and its mirror image, fundamentalism. All this, every blow, delivered with perfect
cynicism. For, let’s face it, all the surnames have lost their first names, as it were, and there are no more names to name the outrage, no more language to speak the
unspeakable. Almost nothing stands up any longer, except in the form of a kind of viscous and rancid snot, draining from the nostrils without even a single sneeze. Everywhere,
appeals to good sense, to common sense, appeals to the good old Republic – as we watch it bend over, bearing the weight and grinning while its spine cracks – appeals to our
old friend the humanism of cowards, and appeals to a specific type of degenerate ‘feminism’ for which the term ‘equality’ translates as duty-to-makethe-veiled-muslim-girl-
wear-a-thong-and-shave-thebearded-man. [33]

Just as in the colonial era, the disparaging interpretation of how blacks and Muslim Arabs treat ‘their women’ draws on a combination of voyeurism and envy – the envy of the
harem. The instrumentalization of questions of gender for racist ends, highlighting the Other’s tendency towards modes of masculine domination, is almost always aimed at
obscuring the existence of phallocracy at home. The overinvestment of virility as a symbolic and political ingredient belongs not only to the so-called ‘new barbarians’. All forms
of power, including our democracies, sit on a continuum in which such symbolic investments can be seen to correspond with a gain in speed and force. Power is always in some
sense a mode of confrontation with the statue [la statue], while investment in femininity and maternity serve to orient sexual pleasure towards a politics of rapture, whether
secular or not. Yet, to be taken even remotely seriously, it is important at some point to show that one has balls. The fact is that as part of our hedonistic culture the father is still
conferred the role of first planter, and it’s the man who is supposed to sow the first seeds. In a culture haunted by the figure of the incestuous father, driven by a desire to have
sex with his own virgin daughter or son, the notion of annexing the woman to one’s body as a complement to man’s defective statue has become utterly banal. One should
therefore forget all these charred mythologies with no muscle, and move on without hesitation. But to what exactly?

Despite all the horrors of the slave trade, colonialism, fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and other massacres and genocides, Western nations especially, even with their bowels
distended by a whole variety of gases, continue to mobilize racism in the service of all manner of wacky and murderous histories. These are histories that are as new as they are
old: those of foreigners, hordes of migrants in whose face our doors must be shut, barbed wire that must be hastily erected lest we be swamped by a tide of savages, histories of
borders that must be established as if they had ever gone away, histories of nationals including some from very old colonies still labelled with the epithet of immigrants,
intruders that must be banished, enemies that must be eradicated, terrorists who are after us because of our way of life, who must be targeted from high altitude and from a
distance by drones, histories of human shields transformed into the collateral damage of our bombardments, histories of blood, slaughter, soil, fatherland, traditions, identity,
pseudo-civilizations besieged by barbarian hordes, histories of national security, and all kinds of euphemistic, coarse histories, frightful histories that turn everything as black as
soot, endless histories that are continuously recycled in the hope of pulling the wool over the eyes of the most gullible.

In fact, having fomented misery and death far away – far from the gaze of their own citizens – Western nations now dread the return of the law of the sword, that brand of pious
vengeance demanded under the old lex talionis. In order to protect themselves from these vengeful drives, they employ racism like a hooked blade, the poisoned supplement to
a beggar’s nationalism now reduced to its last rags, as the true centres of decision-making are denationalized, wealth is offshored, the majority become disenfranchised from
real power, debt accumulates, and whole territories are zoned off while entire populations suddenly become superfluous.

But if racism has become so insidious , it is also because it has now become a part of the constitutive
drives and economic subjectivity of our times. It has not only become a product to be
consumed alongside other goods, objects and commodities. In this epoch of salaciousness, it is also the fundamental basis for the
kind of ‘society of the spectacle’ described by Guy Debord. In many cases it has acquired an almost sumptuary status. It is something
that one allows oneself not because it is unusual, but because it provides an answer to the
general call to lust and abandon launched by neoliberalism . Out with the general strike. In
with brutality and sex . In an epoch so dominated by a passion for profit, this mixture of lust, brutality and sexuality gives rise to a process in which racism
comes to be incorporated into the ‘society of the spectacle’ and molecularized by the structures of contemporary consumption.

It is practised without one being conscious of it. This explains our amazement when the other draws our attention to it or when the other calls us out
on it. It feeds our hunger for entertainment and allows us to escape the surrounding boredom and monotony. We pretend that it is just a matter of
harmless acts that do not possess all the meanings some would like to assign to them. We take offence when the police of another country deprive us
of our right to laugh, of the right to a humour that is never directed against ourselves (self-derision) or against the powerful (satire), but always against
those weaker than ourselves – the right to laugh at the expense of those we wish to stigmatize. A kind of hilarious, utterly moronic, almost dishevelled
form of nanoracism that takes pleasure in wallowing in ignorance and that claims a right to stupidity and to the violence it serves to sanction – herein
lies the spirit of our times.

We should fear that the switchover has not already happened. That it is not too late. That the dream of a decent society has not been reduced to a
mirage. We should fear a violent return to an era in which racism did not yet belong to only the ‘shameful parts’ of society, which one merely seeks to
hide without eradicating. In such a scenario, a hearty and bold brand of racism would become a kind of habit, and the muted rebellion against society
would become increasingly open and virulent, at least on the part of the recluse.

The question of belonging still remains un answered. Who is from here and who is not? Those who should not be here: what are they doing in our
home? How do we get rid of them? And, in any case, what do ‘here’ and ‘there’ mean in a world that is both networked and re-balkanizing? If the
desire for apartheid is really one of the characteristics of our times, then in reality Europe, for its part, will no longer be as it once was – that is,
monochrome. In other words, there will no longer be (if it was ever the case) a unique centre of the world. From now on, the world will be conjugated
in the plural. It will experience itself as plural and there is absolutely nothing one can do to reverse this new condition. It is irreversible, irrevocable.
One of the consequences of this new condition is the reactivation in many places of the phantasy of annihilation.

This phantasy is present in every context where the social forces tend to conceive of the
political as a struggle to the death against unconditional enemies . Such a struggle is then
called existential . It is a struggle without the possibility of mutual recognition, and even less of reconciliation. It opposes distinct essences, each possessing a
quasi-impenetrable substance, or a substance that can be possessed only by those who – under the law of blood and soil – are said to belong to the same kin. The political
history as much as the history of philosophy and metaphysics of the West are in fact permeated by this problematic. As everyone knows, the Jews paid its price at the very heart
of Europe. Before that, Negroes [Nègres] and indigenous peoples, especially in the New World, were first to embark on this bloody Way of Sorrows.

This conception of the political can be understood as the almost necessary completion of Western metaphysics’ time-honoured obsession with the
question of Being and its supposed truth, on the one hand, and the ontology of life, on the other. According to this myth, history is seen as the
unfolding of the essence of Being. In Heideggerian terminology, ‘Being’ is opposed to ‘beings’. Moreover, the West is the crucial site of Being’s
disclosure since it alone could have developed this capacity to disclose an experience of repeated inception, the reactivation of existential origins.
Everything else is just beings. Only the West could have developed this capacity to disclose an experience of repeated inception since it is the crucial
site of Being. That is what makes it universal. As a result, its meanings must be valid unconditionally, beyond all topographical specificity, namely in all
places, all times, independently of all language, history, indeed any condition whatsoever. With respect to the history of Being and the politics of Being,
however, one could argue that the West has never properly thought its own finitude. It has always posited its own horizon of action as something
inevitable and absolute, and this horizon has always been intended as being by definition planetary and universal. Such a conception of the universal
does not necessarily correspond to something that would be valid for all humans as humans. Neither is it synonymous with a broadening of my own
horizons or a care for the conditions of my own finitude. The universal here is the name given to the truth of the victor, or, rather, to the violence of the
victor, to his wars, which are always predatory conflicts. These predatory conflicts are also and above all onto-historical conflicts, since it is through
them that a history of truth is staked out in its destinal unfolding.

Pushed to its logical conclusion, the phantasy of annihilation or destruction envisions not only the bombing
of the planet, but also the disappearance of humans, their outright extinction . This is not an apocalypse as
such, if only because the notion of the apocalypse presupposes the survival, somewhere, of a witness whose task it is to recount what they see. It is a form of
annihilation conceived not as a catastrophe to be feared, but rather as a sort of act of
purification by fire. However, it remains the case that this purification would be the same as an annihilation of
present humanity. Such an act of annihilation is supposed to open the way to another beginning, the inception of another history without today’s humanity. It is,
in this sense, a phantasy of ablation.

the clues of a return to the question of ontological difference are all there.
In these anxiogenic times,

Under the auspices of the ‘war on terror’ , and through aerial bombardments, extrajudicial
executions (preferably with the help of drones), massacres , attacks and other forms of slaughter, which constitute the overall
tone of this new era of warfare, the idea of the West as the only province of the world capable of
understanding and instituting the universal can be seen to resurface. The division of humanity into native and
foreign peoples is far advanced. If the fundamental demand was once that of finding the enemy and bringing him out in the open – as Schmitt and Heidegger believed – today it
suffices to create him in order to stand up to him, to confront him with the prospect of total annihilation and destruction. For, indeed, these are enemies with whom no
communication is either possible or desirable. No understanding is possible with those who lie beyond the confines of humanity.

Can one truly come to presence in the world, dwell in the world, or traverse it, on the basis of this impossibility of sharing it with others, this impassable distance? Is it enough to
shoot down enemies and expel foreigners to be truly rid of them, to doom them to eternity, to forget them for all time? This attitude demands that such acts of death and

The task of disfigurement and erasure is

banishment succeed in erasing the face (its living substance) that gives the enemy his humanity.

almost a precondition for any execution under the contemporary logic of hatred. Within societies that
continue to multiply structures of separation and discrimination, the relation of care towards the other has been replaced

with a relation without desire. Explaining and understanding, knowledge and recognition, are no longer necessary requirements. Hospitality
and hostility have never been so opposed, a factor that serves to explain the interest in
returning to those intellectual figures for whom the misery of men and the suffering of enemies were
never mere ‘silent remainders of politics’. [34] Instead, they were always combined with a demand for recognition, notably in contexts
where the experience of being unrecognized, humiliated, alienated and mistreated was the norm.

International capitalism is economically, politically, and ecologically

unsustainable, and it’s the root cause of the environmental apartheid and a
violently reactionary presidency. The alt commits to international anti-capitalist
movements for equity and environmental justice.
Ecological burden is decided by the balance of power between capital, the state, and
progressive social movements.

Faber 18—Daniel Faber, professor of sociology at Northeastern University and director of the
Northeastern Environmental Justice Research Collaborative, Ph.D., Sociology, University of
California at Santa Cruz (“Global Capitalism, Reactionary Neoliberalism, and the Deepening of
Environmental Injustices” Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 29, No. 2, June 14th, pages 8-28)

The systemic crisis of neoliberal capitalism is not only economic and ecological in nature, as is manifest
in the explosive growth in global economic and ecological inequalities, but is also witnessed as a growing crisis of legitimacy for

traditional political parties and ruling power structures that have long controlled the system. The political
manifestations of this crisis can be seen everywhere, especially in the U nited S tates with the
election of Donald Trump to the Presidency (Faber et al. 2017 ). It is also witnessed by the rise of
authoritarian and proto-fascist forces in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific ; the growing
power of racist, anti-immigrant parties in Italy, and northern and east-central Europe; and the
weakening legitimacy of European labor and social democratic parties (and the challenges to the European
Union itself, as seen in UK ’ s Brexit). The larger, system-wide crisis of global capitalism is spawning a new
subjective political voice in the form of reactionary populism . Termed xenophobic authoritarianism by Inglehart
and Norris, reactionary populism discourse typically

favors mono-culturalism over multiculturalism, national self-interest over international cooperation and development
aid, closed borders over the free flow of people, ideas, labor and capital, and traditionalism over progressive and liberal
social values. Hence Trump ’ s rhetoric seeks to stir up a potent mix of racial resentment, intolerance of multiculturalism,
nationalistic isola- tionism, nostalgia for past glories, mistrust of outsiders, traditional misogyny and sexism, the appeal of
forceful strong-man leadership, attack-dog politics, and racial and anti-Muslim animus. (Inglehart and Norris 2016 ,7)

As such, Trump’s presidency represents the ascendancy of an even more hard-nosed brand of
capitalism .
The rise of rightwing populism is a response to the failures of what Nancy Ingehart and Norris ( 2017 ) terms “
progressive ” neoliberalism to provide adequate economic security to broad swaths of the
world’s working and middle classes. In the United States progressive neoliberalism was predicated in
good part on an uneasy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic Party , and many of the more
mainstream organizations within new social movements working on feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, antiracism, and
LGBTQIA issues. This uneasy alliance revolved around an economic agenda for the deregulation of the

banks and financialization of the economy, free trade agreements, a rollback of the welfare
state and some environmental measures, and the projection of U.S. military power abroad . Both the
Clinton and Obama administrations famously co-opted mainstream environmentalists and engaged in
preemptive “containment” of costly and far-reaching environmental policy proposals. Both administrations sought accommodation
with the environmental and environmental justice (EJ) movements by allowing limited victories in specific instances of high-profile public mobilization.
In exchange the polluter- industrial complex would be rewarded with weaker regulations, generous subsi- dies and access to energy and other natural

concessions to industry often came at the

resources on federal lands, and other forms of economic compensation. These

expense of other battles being waged by grassroots environmental organizations around the
country.
The strategy of the Clinton/Obama neoliberals was to enlist the support of the business-friendly organizations in the ecology movement around a
number of highly symbolic policy proposals, and thus give Democrats the appearance of being pro-environment. The actual progressive segments of
the movement were split off. For instance, President Clinton ’ s Council on Sustainable Develop- ment was stacked with executives from some of the
worst polluters in the country, along with conservative environmentalists such as Jay Hair of the National Wild- life Federation, Fred Krupp of the
Environmental Defense Fund, John Sawhill of the Nature Conservancy, and John Adams of the Natural Resources Development Council. All are noted
for their cooperation with industry and support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which most of the environ- mental and EJ
movements opposed. By
manipulating the pro-corporate elements of the movement, the Clinton and
Obama administrations operated in concert with a conservative Congress and the polluter-industrial
complex to introduce more flexible, market-oriented and “ cost-effective ” neoliberal policy
approaches over the “ command and control ” typical of the liberal regime of regulation.
Trump is now rewriting these rules of engagement. Under a progressive neo- liberal regime of environmental regulation, tackling
climate change would require an alliance between the state and the environmental movement in supporting the adoption of carbon trading and the

commodification of pollution. But Under Trump and a reactionary neoliberal regime of environmental
deregulation , the state now acts in opposition to the movement, denies the science of climate
change, and pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords, at least in the United States. Similarly, under a progressive neoliberal regime,
meritocratic policy approaches could be adopted ensuring that “ talented ” women, racial and ethnic minorities, and members of the LGBTQIA
community are not discriminated against in labor markets, or even murdered, and can rise into higher class status hierarchies based upon their abilities.

a full frontal assault is initiated on the rights and status of these same
In a reactionary neoliberal policy regime,

groups in order to protect the privileges of white males. It is therefore no accident that the greatest support of
rightwing populism is grounded in older generations, men, the less educated, ethnic majorities, wealthy suburbanites and the petty bourgeoisie, and to
a lesser degree among those class strata experiencing greater unemployment — populations that are susceptible to the rightwing propa- ganda
machines that present women, immigrants, and minorities as the primary threats to their economic security (Inglehart and Norris 2016, 4; and Faber et

al. 2017 ). Only by restructuring the policy aims of new social movements into more meritocratic
and market-oriented policy approaches compatible with the restruc- turing of American
capitalism could the more harmful economic impacts (especially on labor) of progressive neoliberalism
be initiated (Fraser 2017 , 3). Under Trump, these movements are now on the outside of the reactionary neo- liberal hegemonic power bloc
currently in control of the state, and are the subjects of attack and ridicule.

Now that he is in office, Trump has largely abandoned the more populist econ- omic dimensions of his campaign platform (the imposition of
tariffs on steel and some other imports aside), and has instead embraced a more hyper-reactionary neoliberal

politics . Reactionary neoliberalism aims to continue to expand the power and profits of not only finance capital, but also the polluter- and mili-
tary-industrial complexes. It is fundamentally about deepening the redistribution of wealth to the
owners , managers and — to a minimal degree — the workers, of the big banks on Wall Street, defense contractors such as General
Dynamics and Raytheon, the Koch Brothers and petrochemical giants. Former CEOs, lobbyists, and policymakers from these sectors of

American business now dominate the Trump administration on every level. Facilitated by renewed calls for big expan- sions

in funding for the military and Homeland Security ( militarization ), greater rollbacks of governmental
regulatory “ interference ” with business practices ( deregulation ), further takeovers of former public services and state
agencies by domestic and/or transnational capital ( privatization ), reductions in social welfare and environmental budgets at
the state and federal levels (fiscal conserva- tism), and rollbacks of civil liberties and human rights (political repression), the
reactionary neoliberal agenda currently being advanced by the Right is at the heart of an unprecedented frontal assault on the past gains and goals of
environ- mentalists, EJ and climate justice activists, and other social movements.

This attack is being echoed in other parts of the world, and is accelerating the appropriation of nature by capital
on a global scale . World labor forces, natural resources and energy supplies , technology and machinery,
genetic material and biosystems, and other “ productive inputs ” are becoming economically integrated into the

circuits of global capital and the organizational structures of transna- tional corporations and banks. The heightened geographic mobility
of global capital grants polluting corporations the capacity to locate production facilities in virtually every corner of the planet and take advantage of
the less stringent environmental regulations and more profitable business climate afforded by this reactionary neoliberal agenda (Li and Zhou 2017). As

a result, climate change and the global ecological crisis are getting worse . And in the new world economy,
because the widespread adoption of Export-Oriented Industrialization (EOI), economic programs throughout the world and the increased mobility of
capital have rendered domestic and world export markets more competitive. Cost minimization strategies lie at the heart of global business strategies
for profit maximization , and are rendering the anti-ecological dynamics of capital accumulation more acute.

Generally speaking, from the United States perspective there

are two mechanisms related to the ecological crisis —
one domestic, the other international — by which capital is reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and

facilitating capital accumulation . First of all, in the United States and the global North, capital is responding
to threats posed by the growth of low-cost imports from foreign com- petitors, as well as the need to
boost the competitiveness of its exports abroad, by reducing the costs of doing business inside their home countries. Along with labor costs,
environmental protection measures are considered by many “ dirty ” indus- tries to be some of the most
burdensome . Companies therefore seek to protect profits not only by “ downsizing ” the labor force but
also by cutting “ unproductive expenditures ” on pollution control equipment, environmental conservation, and worker
health and safety. Simply put, the key to cost containment lies in processes of capital restructuring that enables corporations to extract greater value
from labor power and nature in less time and at a lower cost (i.e. to increase the rate of exploitation of labor and nature). Under the reactionary
neoliberal regimes this
entails launching a renewed domestic political assault on the EJ movement,
trade unions, environmentalists, and other progressive social movements in order to contain wages and
benefits, cut back on worker and public health and safety laws, dump more pollution into the environment, engage in more destruc- tive and “ extreme
” forms of dirty energy and natural resource extraction, con- tinue to burn fossil fuels and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and place
cancer-causing chemicals in our food, water, and consumer products.

But not all people are equally impacted by these social and ecological costs of capitalist accumulation. In order to bolster profits and competitiveness,
capital and the neoliberal state embrace various strategies for displacing negative environmental “ externalities ” that are simultaneously the most
economically effi- cient and politically expedient . Most citizens see the act of releasing dangerous toxins into the air and water as a form of anti-social
behavior, a violation of their most fundamental human rights to a clean and healthy environment. Resi- dents will seldom “ choose ” to see their family
members or neighbors poisoned by industrial pollution, especially if they are aware of the dangers. In fact, the suc- cessful imposition of such public
health dangers is symptomatic of a lack of democracy and the ideological hegemony of the polluter-industrial complex. Once aware of the dangers,
affected residents are likely to oppose the offending operation. As a result, capital
adopts more cost-effective practices for
exploiting natural resources and disposing of pollutants that offer the path of least political
resistance.

Following the path of least resistance often means targeting the most disempowered communities in
society for the most ecologically hazardous industrial facilities, toxic waste sites, and destructive forms of natural resource extraction and energy
development. The less political power a community of people pos- sesses; the fewer resources (time, money, education) the people in that commu-
nity have to defend themselves from potential threats; the lower the level of community awareness and mobilization against potential ecological
threats, the more likely they are to experience arduous environmental and human health pro- blems. The weight of the ecological
burden upon a community depends upon the balance of power between capital, the state,
and social movements responding to the needs and demands of the populace. In capitalist countries
such as the United States, it
is working-class neighborhoods, ethnic minorities, and poor commu- nities
of color that most often experience the worst problems. Environmental inequality is now
increasing faster than income inequality in the United States (Boyce, Zwickl, and Ash 2014 ).
Similar to the “ domestic ” strategy of reducing production costs by displacing ecological and public health hazards onto poor people of color and the
white working class inside the United States and other countries of the global North, corporations also reduce costs by adopting
the “ international ” strategy of exporting ecological hazards outside America ’ s national boundaries (Pellow 2007;
Faber 2008 ). The worsening ecological crisis in the global South is directly related to an international system of
economic and environmental stratification in which the U nited S tates and other advanced
capitalist nations are able to shift or impose the environmental burden on weaker states (Adeloa 2000; Li
and Zhou 2017). In fact, one of the primary aims of the neoliberal agenda is to facilitate the displa- cement of externalities by capital onto poorer
nations.

The export of ecological hazards to the global South reflects the economic logic of neoliberal
policymakers aligned with the interests of transnational corporations , which deems human life in the global South
worth much less than in the North. If the poor and underemployed masses of Africa become sick or die

from exposure to pollution produced by domestic capital or exported from the North, it will have a much smaller
impact on the profits of international capital . Aside from the higher costs of pollution-abatement in the advanced capi-
talist countries, if highly skilled and well-compensated workers in the global North fall prey to environmentally related health problems, the expense to
capital and the state can be significant. Similarly,
if African Americans living in Flint, Michigan are so devalued
that their “premature deaths” do not constitute a cost to the capitalist system, neoliberal
policymakers will remain indifferent to the public health abuses inflicted on the community by lead poisoning
Although morally reprehensible , under the global capitalist system it pays for
(Pulido 2016 , 2).

business to shift pollution onto poor communities and countries. And this is precisely the goal of neoliberals
dominating global power structures.

Given the willingness of neoliberal governments in the global South to trade- off environmental protection in favor of capital investment and

accumulation, the growing mobility of capital (in all forms) is facilitating the export of ecological
problems from the advanced capitalist countries to the global South and sub-per- ipheral states. This export of ecological hazard
from the United States and other Northern countries to the less-developed countries takes place as the following: (1) in the

money circuit of global capital, in the form of foreign direct investment ( FDI ) in domestically owned
hazardous industries , as well as destructive invest- ment schemes to gain access to new oil fields, forests, agricultural
lands, mining deposits, and other natural resources; (2) in the productive circuit of global capital , with the

relocation of polluting and environmentally hazardous production processes and polluting facilities owned by
transnational capital to the global South; (3) in
the commodity circuit of global capital , as witnessed in the
marketing of more profitable but also more dangerous foods, drugs, pesticides, technologies, and other
consumer/capital goods; and (4) in the “ waste circuit ” of global capital , with the dumping in the global

South of toxic wastes, pol- lution, discarded consumer products, trash, and other commodified and non- commodified forms of “ anti-
wealth ” produced by Northern industry. In effect, international capital is appropriating ecological carrying

capacity for the core by transferring ( “ distancing ” ) externalities to the global South (Frey 2003 ). As in the United States,
it is the poorest and most politically repressed people in the South that bear the greatest brunt of the global ecological crisis.
A global transition away from neoliberal trade policies is coming, and crisis is
inevitable – the aff delays the transition and culminates in total collapse.
Gaiya ‘18 (Abel, African Finance and Economics Association, Phd Student in Economics @
Rhodes U., “Global Turbulence, Global Deliberation, and the ‘New’ New International Economic
Order,” pp.)
3. The Neoliberal Performance: The Future

Given the past and present adverse structural and policy features of the neoliberal order, the future of the world under it seems
bleak.

First, inthe Global North, particularly in the Liberal Market Economies (LMEs), the disembedding included a political
and ideational backlash against labour unions and a promotion (passively through the forces of globalization and
technological change, and actively through policy action) of labour flexibility. This, itself was partly a response to the crisis of profitability
which hit the U.S. from the 1970s as a result of the over-production of products which arose due to the industrial catch-up of Japan and Germany
(Brenner, 2002). The repressive
actions against labour partly undermined the strength of the link
between real wages and productivity (Streeck, 2014, pp. 52-53) thereby leading to a decline in the labour
share of national income around the world (Karabarbounis and Neiman, 2014). The ILO (2012) found that in 16 developed countries with
available data, the adjusted labor share declined from an average of 75% in the mid-1970s toabout65%just before the global financial and economic
crisis. Greater inequality has also been observed (as profits rose while real wages remained stagnant) income and wealth. These have greatly
undermined the sustainability of the aggregate demand regime, and have led to “secular stagnation”.

Two ways by which an effective demand crisis was averted under the neoliberal order has
been the expansion of private debt – what Crouch (2009 by the Reagan era financial deregulation of the 1980s –, and the
recurrence of asset price bubbles) calls “privatized keynesianism” – fostered (O'Hara, 2003) - what Brenner (2006) calls asset-price
Keynesianism - to fuel aggregate demand. Yet this panacea of financialization (by financial deregulation and

liberalization) is unsustainable as it breeds financial instability (Keen, 2009; OECD, 2012; IMF, 2017) and does not

oversee an expansion of long-term capital investment (Samans et al. 2017, p. 5). In other words, there is
real/structural unsustainability which is intimately linked to greater financial instability.
Abdelal and Ruggie (2009, p. 158) argue that due to past experiences with short-term, speculative cross-border capital flows and the
wave of financial crises that hit emerging economies in the 1990s and, the 2008 financial crisis, there is a growing realization that
capital regulation may be necessary and marks the way forward for capitalism. This realization would likely strengthen if economic
instability culminates in a crisis.

In the developing world, there is an elusiveness of substantive structural transformation and

diversification (Sundaram, Schwank and von Arnim, 2011, p. 5; UN-HABITAT, 2016), amid pressures for premature
industrialization (Rodrik, 2015), a shrinking development policy space (Wade, 2003), and an increasingly
narrowing chance for building manufacturing capabilities and reaping mass employment gains
due to growing automation in production (Hallward-Driemeier and Nayyar, 2017). This adverse combination of factors limits the

developing world’s development potential and locks them into an adverse international
division of labour under which they are disproportionately vulnerable to external shocks and macroeconomic volatility.

Trade liberalization also has the potential to limit growth-enhancing structural change in The
developing world. For example, the Economic Partnership Agreement between the EU and African

countries presents the danger that the EPA will “lock African countries into their current patterns of production
i.e. low levels of manufacturing capacity” (South Centre, 2010, p. 2). This means that they would have less access to the productivity, spillover and
dynamic nature of manufacturing production, and hence their potential for structural transformation diminishes over time as integration into the world
system continues. This is supported by Rodrik (2015) who finds that developing countries are prematurely de-industrializing and having narrower
possibilities for substantive industrialization and structural transformation due to the forces of globalization and technological change. Moreover, a

sustained economic crisis in the Global North would prove detrimental to the developing
world’s economic growth and development through its effect on export prospects and
through economic growth; this is more so likely if a slowdown in China and other emerging economies occur.

The next source of instability lies within the policy sphere. The pressures to substantively
reform the system after the Global Financial Crisis had receded due to the effectiveness of massive
monetary, fiscal, and modest regulatory state interventions (Stockhammer, 2012, p. 5). Yet, with the
substantial decline in interest rates to near-zero levels globally – falling into a liquidity trap –,
and the fall in the marginal effectiveness of monetary policy imply that when other crises or
recessions come, monetary policymakers may be unable to have much effectiveness , thereby
prolonging recoveries. With public debt levels shooting upward, amid tax competition, fiscal
policy to compensate for monetary policy‟s declining effectiveness has become more
politically sensitive. In other words, the standard policy tools permissible under the neoliberal
paradigm have reached their limits (Michl, 2010, p. 31) – i.e. near-zero interest rates, exorbitant public debt-to-GDP ratios, tax
cuts, etc. All these suggest policy response instability.

Another form of instability is socio-political. Abdelal and Ruggie (2009) and Beck (2000, p. 4) argue that the political
sustainability of markets depends upon their ability to gain social legitimacy. Just as the disembedding of
markets in the first era of globalization had been politically unsustainable (Abdelal and Ruggie, 2009, p. 152), there is a high risk that the present

neoliberal era is increasingly becoming so, given the economic instabilities aforementioned. Without social legitimacy, counter-
movements against the neoliberal order are likely to emerge (Friedman, 2006, p. 17). Secular
stagnation (of economic growth), secular dispersion (of incomes and wealth), increased export competition,
technological change, and pressures against the welfare state are likely to spur counter-
movements – in the form of anti-capitalist movements, protectionism, isolationism and nationalism. Scepticism
against the neoliberal order is already on the rise (Abdelal and Ruggie, 2009, p. 162). In fact, Nolke (2017) argues
that there is a countermovement against liberal capitalism that was triggered by the 2008 economic crisis,
manifest in phenomena such as Brexit, Donald Trump‟s election, the rise of right-wing populist
parties in Continental Europe, and the erosion of global liberal institutions. At the other end of the
political spectrum are the popularity of Bernie Sanders' electoral campaign in America, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of

Britain's Labour Party, and the rise of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain (Jackson, 2017, p. 39).
Regarding the U.S., the political success of Trump‟s narrative partly reflects the failures of the neo-liberal policy regime in place
since the Reagan era (for example, adjustment costs that were not offset, industrial policies that were not adopted, inequality that
grew out of control, and a dollar that was allowed to become overvalued) (Blecker, Moreno-Brid and Salat, 2017, p. 2). Moreover, all
this is occurring in an era when macroeconomic policies have shifted in many countries toward "a greater focus on price stability and
balanced budgets than on full employment and economic growth" (Blecker, Moreno-Brid and Salat, 2017, p. 5).

Griebel and Heinrich (2017, p. 19) argue that the

nationalist countermovement expressed in the Brexit vote against neoliberalism
does not reflect a crisis of neoliberalism, but a crisis in it. Yet one could argue that if another economic
crisis , brought about by economic instability and worsened by policy instability, hits , these counter-movements would likely
intensify and a true crisis of neoliberalism would emerge as the need for embedded liberalism increases in recognition, and
heterodox ideas are given greater audience, especially as orthodox neoliberal policy prescriptions prove ineffective (as the solutions to the structural
problems lie beyond neoliberalism's boundaries). Bandelj, Shorette and Sowers (2011, p. 817) subtly similarly propose that only the aftermath of the
crisis will tell to what extent efforts to discipline the global free- market and find alternatives to neoliberal globalization will be successful, and resulting
in more labor protection.

It is important to note that the

welfare state is under increasingly massive stress throughout Europe. The
bulk of social legislation introduced in recent years is intended to reduce the role of the state in welfare
(Kwiek, 2007 p. 148) due to the fiscal stress caused by the simultaneous and contradictory pressures from opposite directions: an aging population,
rising demand for education and training, rising unemployment and the citizens‟ expectations that social progress will involve higher standards of
service press for higher spending. Yet, concern about the impact of globalization, the logic of liberalism and fears of tax revolt (an anti-tax bias) demand
the contraction of provision (Bonoli, George and Taylor-Gooby 2000, p. 2). Therefore, the
combination of secular stagnation
and stagnant median incomes, increasing precarity of work, and welfare state retrenchment
undermine the social legitimacy of the present global economic order and serve as risk factors
for a countermovement whose scale and diversity would likely grow rapidly if an economic crisis
hits which orthodox policy tools are unable to adequately address.

In the developing world, the persistence of absolute poverty and youth unemployment,
increasing informality and precarity of work, and narrowing potential for robust structural
change and industrialization may fuel increasing discontent about the international economic
regime and the international division of labour. With this discontent intensifying if a protracted
economic crisis hits the Global North and a slump strikes emerging economies, counter-movements across the Global South
are also likely to emerge, with rhetoric and populism of self- sufficiency and industrial policy
rising. Already, one consequence of the 2008 crisis has been the rise of a new round of
discussions about industrial policy (Birdsall and Fukuyama, 2011, p. 49), and this would likely be propelled by a
future of global stagnation or crisis.

In summary, real/structural instability and financial instability would likely foster Western economies' culmination in
a crisis or series of crises. Policy response instability means that recovery would likely prove elusive
by orthodox methods within the neoliberal paradigm. And therefore the crisis would likely be protracted. The

instabilities yield the current incipience and high risk of increasing/intensifying counter-
movements against dis-embedded liberalism, and would cause them to mature with the
realization of a protracted crisis. This triad makes up global turbulence.

Reversing the national and global neoliberal trend towards extreme inequality and other
instabilities will require, "at the most abstract level, a new re-embedding of capitalism within
society and a rebalancing of capitalism and democracy within new circumstances." (Jackson, 2017, p. 37). The
superficial attempts at „neoliberal embedding‟ of markets into particular domestic norms via
a New Financial Architecture (Best, 2003), Global Social Compact (Ruggie, 2003), liberal
environmentalism (Bernstein, 2012), Global Development Architecture (Weber, 2001), and other band-aids
for neoliberalism’s social legitimacy – that is „residual social compacts‟ – are inadequate. Kahn (2007, p. 40) notes that
“we have seen from experience that concerted global action usually only comes when we are already in a crisis (...) it is only when we find ourselves in
a real systemic crisis that we tend to move towards global solutions”. Thus, to prevent further recourse to protectionism and nationalism among
advanced countries, global governance is needed to build a new social compact (Ortega, Otero-Iglesias and Steinberg, 2018). Bandelj, Shorette and
Sowers (2011, p. 817) had argued that only the aftermath of the [protracted] crisis will tell to what extent efforts to discipline the global free-market
and find alternatives to neoliberal globalization will be successful, and resulting in more labor protection. This paper argues that while the aftermath of

the crisis raised some counter-movements and heterodoxy, the inherent instability of the neoliberal order would
breed subsequent economic crises out of which the intensification of counter-movements and of
the perceived necessity of re-embedding capitalism would occur.
 ESR
The President should issue a binding unilateral directive declaring that it will
not enact tariffs on automobile imports from the Republic of Korea.

The Supreme Court of the United States should rule that reversing an executive
order requires congressional authorization.

Executive self-restraint solves enforcement better than external restrictions

and avoids circumvention
Metzger 9— Gillian E. Metzger, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School (“The Interdependent
Relationship between Internal and External Separation of Powers,” 59 Emory L.J. 423 (2009))

A separate question about internal separation of powers mechanisms concerns their

effectiveness, particularly as measures aimed at constraining Executive Branch aggrandizement. Are they actually able to constrain excessive
presidential assertions of authority and other abuses? Or are they, in the end, little more than "parchment barriers' 61that are largely ineffective and,

worse, may obscure the extent of accumulated presidential power? The case in favor of internal mechanisms is in part
comparative . Real limitations exist on the ability of traditional external constraints,
specifically Congress and the courts, to check the power of the Executive Branch. The
fundamental impediments for Congress are internal ones, in particular its need to proceed via the arduous process
of bicameralism and presentment and the additional obstacles created by the operation of congressional committees and rules.62 The ordinary
burdens of the legislative process are intensified in contexts involving efforts to check presidential authority given the frequent need to overcome a
presidential veto.63 Congress does wield important investigatory and oversight powers and has other tools that may give it leverage over the President,
such as control over spending or the ability to add contentious measures to must-pass legislation.64 But
the political reality of party
allegiance dominating institutional interests, along with greater ideological cohesion among
political parties in Congress, undermines these techniques and makes rigorous congressional
constraints on presidential actions unlikely except in the context of divided government. 6 5
Moreover, even if Congress is willing to actually engage in oversight, its ability to do so may be
significantly hampered by the Executive Branch's non-cooperation or intransigence, often in
the form of assertion of executive privilege or failure to 66 inform Congress of contentious
activities. Courts, in turn, face jurisdictional barriers that limit their ability to review 67
Executive Branch actions. Such barriers have recently resurfaced in litigation challenging the government's expansion of domestic
wiretapping without complying with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; the Sixth Circuit held that the plaintiffs' claims of injury from the program
were too speculative to provide a basis for standing to challenge the program.68 Even when actions are justiciable, the courts' effectiveness as a check
can be significantly curtailed by their deference to reasonable Executive Branch policy determinations, particularly in the area of national security. 69
Courts are also reluctant to intervene to correct general failures in administration or prompt 70 Executive Branch action. Another
major
impediment is delay. Courts must wait for cases to come to them, and challenges to
presidential action or policy are likely to be appealed, postponing final resolution of the
underlying claims.71 This is not to say that deference and delay necessarily undermine judicial checks; the Supreme Court's rejection of the
Bush Administration's refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusettsv. EPA72 and recent decisions rebuffing broad presidential
assertions of power regarding the Guantanamo Bay detainees73 are important testaments to the contrary. Yet even in these contexts, the limits of
judicial constraints are evident. For example, although the EPA proposed regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act in response to the
Massachusetts decision, the White House refused to act on the proposal and no formal action toward regulating greenhouse gases was taken in the
remaining year and a half of the Bush Administration.7 4 The ongoing, multi-year saga of habeas challenges involving the Guantanamo Bay detention

center demonstrates even more vividly that it can be years before judicial review forces a change in Executive Branch behavior.75 Several
bases exist for thinking that internal separation of powers mechanisms may have a
comparative advantage . First, internal mechanisms operate ex ante, at the time when the
Executive Branch is formulating and implementing policy, rather than ex post. As a result, they
avoid the delay in 76 Second, internal mechanisms often operate continuously, rather than being
limited to issues that generate congressional attention or arise in the form of a justiciable
challenge.77 Third, internal mechanisms operate not just at the points at which policy proposals originate and are implemented but also at higher
managerial levels, thus addressing policy and administration in both a granular and systemic fashion. In addition, policy

recommendations generated through internal checks may face less resistance than those
offered externally because the latter frequently arise after executive officials have already
decided upon a policy course and are more likely to take an adversarial form.78 Internal
mechanisms may also gain credibility with Executive Branch officials to the extent they are
perceived as contributing to more fully informed and expertise-based decisionmaking.
 Midterms
Dems win now on a campaign of restraining Trump- the aff flips the script and
kills their chances
NPR 9-12-18 “Poll: Midwest Abandons Trump, Fueling Democratic Advantage For Control Of
Congress” https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/646816285/poll-midwest-abandons-trump-fueling-
democratic-advantage-for-control-of-congress

In a troubling sign for Republicans less than two months before November's elections, Democrats'
advantage on the question of
which party Americans are more likely to vote for in November is ballooning , according to a new
NPR/Marist poll. The gap has widened to 12 percentage points, up from 7 in July — and it is largely
because of voters in the Midwest. They have swung 13 points in Democrats' direction since
July. That Midwestern shift is consistent with what Marist has found in statewide polls
conducted for NBC in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota that showed President Trump's
support there starting to erode . "Every way we are looking at the data, the same general pattern is
emerging," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the poll. " The Midwest is an area
that is getting restless about what they hoped was going to occur and what they feel is not
occurring." Trump has waged trade wars with several countries, aiming to renegotiate deals and has instituted
tariffs on imports that have been met with retaliatory tariffs on exports. Many of those have taken a toll on Midwestern

farmers, for example. And some automakers have come out against Trump's moves on car imports,
hitting Trump with some tough headlines. And that appears to be sticking to the GOP now.
"Republicans have not only been fairly silent in opposition to the president," Miringoff said, "but they've
been driving very hard in the Senate when it comes to his Supreme Court nominee. Congressional Republicans are buying
into Trump for November . In terms of brand, they look totally in lockstep with the president
— and that has become extremely clear to voters." Overall in the poll, half of voters (50 percent)
said they are more likely to vote for the Democrat in their congressional district over the
Republican (38 percent). In July, the Democratic edge was 47 percent to 40 percent. It's the largest gap on this question,
known as the congressional ballot, since December 2017 when Marist showed Democrats with a 13-point

advantage. The lead is also similar to Democrats' advantage on the question in 2006, the last time they took back the House. Trump approval
dangerously low Trump's approval rating is below 40 percent in the poll . Just 39 percent said they

approve of the job the president is doing. The rating is unchanged from the last Marist poll in July. But it's the third poll this
week to show Trump below 40 percent amid the release of an explosive new book from journalist Bob Woodward detailing chaos in the Trump White
House and an op-ed in The New York Times from what the paper describes as a senior official who writes that there is a "resistance" within the Trump

administration to save the country from the president. The GOP's and the president's weaknesses continue to be
in the suburbs and now with Midwestern voters . They retain advantages in rural areas, the South and with white, non-
college-educated voters and white evangelicals. But even in rural areas and small towns, there has been some

slippage from July. "It's not that Democrats are going to carry rural America," Miringoff stressed, "but
[Republicans are] not performing the way the president needs them to." In small towns, for
example, there was an 11-point swing toward Democrats, and there was a 6-point drop-off

among rural voters on the congressional ballot. The president's approval rating in the suburbs
is just 34 percent. And in those same suburbs, Democrats enjoy a whopping advantage (56 percent
to 34 percent) over Republicans on whom Americans are more likely to vote for. That is particularly

problematic for Republicans, because many of the key races for control of the House run
through the suburbs. There is also a massive gender gap. Men approve of the job Trump is doing, a 50 percent to 42 percent margin. But
women, who are fueling Democratic hopes in these midterm elections, disapprove of his job, 62 percent to 28 percent. In the 2016 presidential
election, Trump won 41 percent of women, according to exit polls. "This is an election about gender," Miringoff said, pointing out that party
identification and race are still major factors, but the gender numbers are much bigger than might be expected after 2016. What happens when
approval slips The NPR/Marist poll was conducted Sept. 5 through Sunday. It surveyed 777 registered voters and has a margin of error of 4 percentage
points. The two
other polls out this week that showed the president slipping below 40 percent were
CNN and Quinnipiac. CNN had Trump at 37 percent and Quinnipiac 38 percent. Slightly earlier polls that meet NPR's polling standards —
from Gallup, YouGov (43 percent), Ipsos (42 percent) and Selzer (43 percent) — had Trump at or slightly above 40 percent.

Dem win blocks deregulation.

Steven Law, 4/5/2018. President of the Senate Leadership Fund and American Crossroads and was deputy
secretary of labor under President George W. Bush. “If Democrats Win Big in November.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/democrat-midterm-victory-could-cripple-trump-agenda/.

What if they succeed? What if they manage to switch out the “Minority” in their titles to “Majority”? What can
America expect?¶ In a word: obstructionism — on an unprecedented scale .¶ A few months ago,
conservatives were calling Pelosi and Schumer “do-nothing Democrats” for refusing to sit
down with the president to negotiate a budget to keep the government open. That was just a warm-up
act for the obstructionism to come if they get control of one or both houses of Congress.¶ Here are
five things we can expect if the Dems win big in the midterm elections.¶ 1) We will get no new conservative or
constitutionalist judges. ¶ Should a Supreme Court vacancy arise in the next two years, Democrats will make sure
it has zero chance of being filled. They will see it as payback for the Senate Republican blockade of President
Obama’s nominee to fill the vacancy left by Justice Scalia’s death.¶ But they won’t stop there. Democrats will also
refuse to confirm any lower-court nominees they don’t care for — and that will be most of them. The Trump
administration, working closely with Senate Republicans, has been remaking the federal courts, shifting away from
judicial activism and toward an emphasis on the rule of law. If Democrats succeed this November, that process will
grind to a halt.¶ 2) No substantive legislation will be approved. ¶ Despite being briefly courted by President
Trump, Schumer and Pelosi have shown little interest in “doing deals” with him. If they get control of
either House of Congress, they will probably put off major legislative priorities until 2021 — when they hope one of their own will
occupy the White House. And if they make any exceptions to cutting deals with Trump, the
bills they put on his desk
will not be to the liking of conservatives.¶ 3) House and Senate committees will be militantly
focused on investigations and oversight. ¶ If Democrats get their hands on the gavels of
congressional committees, they will spend little time on productive legislating — why give President
Trump any bipartisan accomplishments? Instead, they will devote their power and resources to methodically
investigating the president, his staff, and his agency appointees.¶ This will result in near-
paralysis for the administration. Rather than working on the president’s agenda, the already-thin political
leadership in the federal agencies will find itself under siege from Capitol Hill . Agency leaders
will be constantly on defense, parrying committee document requests, subpoenas, and
congressionally instigated inspector-general investigations. Executive-branch efforts to
advance a right-of-center agenda will feel like trying to organize a softball league at Verdun .¶
4) Executive-branch confirmations will slow to a trickle . ¶ Senate Democrats have already perfected the art of
using every procedural trick in the book to slow the confirmation process and keep the federal government understaffed. If
Democrats pick up a majority of Senate seats, expect them to double down on this strategy. If
they allow an occasional nominee to get through, they will extract steep policy concessions
and other tradeoffs in return.¶ The result? Entrenched bureaucrats (some of them Obama
appointees who burrowed into career positions) will effectively be put in control . The president’s own
appointees in each agency will be undermined from within as they try to implement his
policies.¶ 5) Democrats will use legislation to block Trump’s deregulatory agenda .

Extinction.
Michelle Chen, 6/12/2018. Contributing writer for The Nation. “A Third of the World’s ‘Protected’ Areas Are
Under Threat.” https://www.thenation.com/article/third-worlds-protected-areas-threat/.

Globally, the real-life footprint of habitat loss is spreading—more than half the areas designated over the
past quarter century have seen increased human pressure. Overall, researchers warn we may be vastly

underestimating both the ecological damage that’s already taken place, and the threats
looming on the horizon .¶ The “protected” designation covers everything from rain forests to
grasslands to icy tundras. As a political instrument, the protected designation serves as the
last line of defense in the effort to conserve nature and maintain biod iversity in an era when human
societies are intermeshing with nearly every terrain around the planet. ¶ Though the study doesn’t go so far as to suggest the label of
“protected” is useless, it’s a call to environmental authorities to incorporate more extensive data mapping into their environmental
monitoring to gain a more realistic picture of the nature and scale of surrounding environmental threats.¶ Though
the United
States has historically been a leader in wildlife conservation efforts, the Trump administration and
EPA chief Scott Pruitt have steamrolled Clean Air and Clean Water Act regulations, while championing
policies to spur the commercialization of public lands. The administration has directly attacked wilderness
areas by working to strip protections from national monuments, such as the Bears Ears and Grand Escalante sites in Utah—which
cover several million acres of iconic Western landscapes—while conservative lawmakers last year moved to promote oil drilling on
the coastal plain of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Trump
is mirroring the assault on protected
areas now trending across the globe: a steady creep of commercialization and deregulation,
promoted by governments that seek to exploit and privatize whatever land has not yet been
consumed.¶ The gap between formal maps and the actual landscape suggests that current laws
and regulations are wildly out of sync with what’s happening on the ground. This is in part because of
arbitrary, widely varying legal definitions of protection across national and regional borders. Moreover, the study’s analysis does not
include longer term trends influencing the terrain, including human-induced climate change or conflict, which might have even more
extreme long-term environmental impacts.¶ Yet, in
every area impacted by humans, local air and water
quality could be undermined by the sprawl of industry and transportation and the
overarching pressures of continuous population growth. The impact of a single road’s cutting
into a forested area could have a profound impact on soil and pollution levels. Even settling a small
town could eliminate crucial range lands that grazing species rely on. Razing forests for farmland could displace critical species and
stifle local biodiversity. When food chains are disrupted, animal and plant life could be devastated ,
and the consequences eventually reverberate in human communities, destabilizing societies and
economies locally and then globally .¶ According to researcher and co-author of the study Kendall Raward Jones of
University of Queensland, “The
impacts we are finding are in many cases not sustainable—we’re
talking about cities, massive road and railway projects, industrial agriculture, etc.” Often these
are government-supported infrastructure projects aimed at boosting economic development, and their conflict
with regional ecosystems attests to the challenges of sustainable development in areas where populations keep
demanding more space, resources, and transit networks.¶ It may be too late to turn back the clock on human development, but
researchers hope the new data help governments chart a course toward a more sustainable regulatory regime. The more accurate
data authorities have on the real human impact in protected lands, the better equipped society is to restructure
environmental protections to place appropriate limitations on industrial and social activity in
conservation areas dynamically, not just on a piece of paper.¶ According to Jones, regulators need to take a
more three-dimensional approach to assessing the level of human activity on an area designated for official conservation: “I don’t
think that human encroachment is inevitable. We know that protected areas, when well-
funded and well-managed, can be very effective at stopping human activities which threaten
biodiversity. The problem is that by focusing mainly on the size of the area under ‘protection,’ global conservation targets
allow nations to get away with designating land as ‘protected’ while not actually following through with the

regulations and enforcement needed to make these areas effective .”

 Impeach
Text:
- The United States federal government should amend the Presidential
Succession Act to establish former presidents and vice presidents in
reverse chronological order as next in the line of succession upon
removal of the President and Vice-President.
- The United States Congress should impeach, convict, and remove
President Trump and Vice-President Pence.
Former Presidents ensure continuity of government
Albert 11 Richard, Assistant Professor, Boston College Law School; The Constitutional Politics
of Presidential Succession, 39 Hofstra L. Rev. 497

That is precisely why the

current line of succession is no safer than playing presidential roulette. The
line of succession should therefore be amended in the interest of proven leadership and
competence. We can conceive any number of creative institutional arrangements to serve these interests. But the task I have
given myself in these pages is to propose and defend one alternative in particular. I have chosen this approach for two reasons. First,
I believe the succession model I will propose below is the best alternative to the current succession regime. Second, even if readers
disagree with my suggestion, the larger purpose of this project nevertheless remains achievable: to probe the values that currently
shape presidential succession and to invite reflection about whether they are the right ones for our time. What should replace the
current presidential succession sequence? Here is what I suggest: the
solution is to revise the order of succession
to insert former living Presidents-in reverse chronological order of service, beginning with former
Presidents of the same party as the unavailable president-into the line of succession and to concurrently remove the Speaker of the
House and the Senate President pro tempore. Under this new presidential succession sequence, a
former President will
serve only temporarily until a special election is held to elect a new head of state. Former
Presidents are the only ones equipped with the proven competence, domestic repute, and
foreign stature needed to pull the United States out of the depths of disaster . Moreover, they are
known quantities seen as motivated by the public interest and not driven by political
posturing. Unlike the Speaker of the House, Senate President pro tempore, and Cabinet secretaries, former Presidents
have deliberated on weighty matters of state in the White House, presided over national
security meetings in the ultra-secure situation room, and observed our dangerous world from
the unique perspective of the presidency. With a former President at the helm during a
national crisis, no longer would presidential succession be like a game of presidential roulette.
Instead, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist strike, the nation would be secure in competent hands and resolute on its march
toward rebuilding the nation and its institutions.
 Circumvention
Trump reacts to the plan by circumventing restrictions—Constitutional
ambiguity and broadening executive authority enables an imperial President
beyond reproach
Heer 17 (Jeet, 8/12/17, staff writer at Real Clear Politics and at the New Republic. " Don’t Just
Impeach Trump. End the Imperial Presidency." https://newrepublic.com/article/144297/dont-
just-impeach-trump-end-imperial-presidency)

Much has been made of Trump’s manifest authoritarian tendencies: that he sees
politics only in terms of domination, his habit of praising extrajudicial violence, and
his proclivity for breaking norms. Yet Trump’s authoritarian tendencies would not
get him very far without a mechanism for enacting his wishes, and his nuclear
threats make clear what that mechanism is: the Imperial Presidency . The powers of the
office are not just those enumerated in the Constitution, but the extra-constitutional
powers the presidency has acquired over the decades—especially the ability to start wars at whim. It’s
taken someone as frightening as Trump to make plain that Congress must act to restrain not just the sitting president, but the office
itself.

Historians and political scientists often use the term “Imperial Presidency” to refer to the fact that the
American
president, at least since the dawn of the Cold War in the 1940s, has war-making powers closer to that of
an absolute monarch than an officeholder in a republic who is bound by the rules of
law. If we are worried about Trump inflicting great harm on the world, it’s the powers of the Imperial Presidency that enable him to
do the most damage.

The Imperial Presidency rests on an ambiguity in the Constitution . In theory, the president is coequal
to Congress and to be held in check by it. But in times of war, the requirement of national unity almost always leads Congress to defer
to the president. As Alexander Hamilton noted in “The Federalist 8,” “It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense
of the legislative authority.” Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the American political system seesawed: in times
of war, the presidency was dominant; in times of peace, Congress was.

The permanent emergency of the Cold War created an unrelieved wartime footing
in which presidents entered America into large conflicts, like the Korean War and the Vietnam War,
without a formal congressional declaration. The emergence of nuclear weapons further centralized power in
the hands of the president. Under the nuclear deterrence theory that America adopted in the 1950s, a president had to be prepared to
launch an attack immediately, which meant no time to consult Congress.

The consequence, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in his classic study The
Imperial Presidency (1973),
was “the all-purpose invocation of ‘national security,’ the insistence on executive secrecy, the
withholding of information from Congress, the refusal to spend funds appropriated by Congress, the attempted intimidation of the
press, the use of the White House as a base for espionage and sabotage directed against the political opposition—all signified the
extension of the imperial presidency from foreign to domestic affairs.” The end result was “by the early 1970s the
American
President had become on issues of war and peace the most absolute monarch (with the
possible exception of Mao Tse-tung of China) among the great powers of the world.”

Schlesinger was writing during the Watergate scandal. The Nixon presidency was both the height of the Imperial Presidency and also
the beginning of its decline, at least for a few years. In the wake of Nixon’s abuses, Congress pushed back. In 1973, over Nixon’s
veto, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, which limited a president’s war-making ability, requiring the White House to
notify Congress about the use of force and forbidding deployment beyond 90 days without a congressional authorization for use of
military force. Other measures of the period include The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act (1974) which
reasserted congressional control of spending.
Writing in The Wilson Quarterly in 2002, Donald R. Wolfensberger, then director of the Congress Project at the Wilson Center, listed
other examples of Congress rolling back the Imperial Presidency:

The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 was supposed to eliminate the taint of big money from presidential politics.
Subsequent years witnessed a spate of other statutes designed to right the balance between the branches. The National
Emergencies Act (1976) abolished scores of existing presidential emergency powers. The Ethics in Government Act (1978)
authorized, among other things, the appointment of special prosecutors to investigate high-ranking executive branch
officials. The Senate, in 1976, and the House, in 1977, established intelligence committees in the wake of hearings in 1975
revealing widespread abuses; and in 1980 the Intelligence Oversight Act increased Congress’s monitoring demands on
intelligence agencies and their covert operations.

restraints on the Imperial Presidency were only partial and

As Wolfensberger noted, these
often ineffectual, as post-Nixon presidents found ways to work around them. The Reagan
administration, with the pretext of a renewed Cold War, tried to undermine
congressional limits on aid to the Contras by using funds from secret arms sales to Iran. President George H.
W. Bush tried to finesse the issue by getting congressional authorization for the Gulf
War, but also saying that it wasn’t necessary. President Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo with
support from a Senate resolution that failed in the House of Representatives.

Whatever limits there might have been on presidential power ended with 9/11. After President George W. Bush delivered a stirring
speech in the weeks after the attack, presidential historian Michael Beschloss cheered on television that “ the imperial
presidency is back . We just saw it.” Under the auspices of the unitary executive theory promulgated by Vice President
Dick Cheney, the U.S. entered the era of warrantless wireless searches, the kidnapping and torture of terrorist suspects held
indefinitely in secret prisons, and an undefined and undeclared global war on terror.

While President Barack Obama might have tried to bring some semblance of legality to
Bush’s expansion of presidential power, there was no real curtailment of it. Instead, with
his use of drones and assassination of Osama Bin Laden, Obama’s goal was to act as a more
efficient and focused Imperial President. As Alex Emmons noted earlier this year in The Intercept,
Obama left behind a presidency with vast, unchecked powers that could easily be
abused by Trump. “President Obama has spent much of his time as commander in chief
expanding his own military power, while convincing courts not to limit his detention,
surveillance, and assassination capabilities,” Emmons wrote. “Most of the new constraints on
the security state during the Obama years were self-imposed, and could easily be
revoked.”

Domestic restrictions cause Trump to lash out with nuclear weapons against
North Korea
Heer 17 (Jeet, 8/12/17, staff writer at Real Clear Politics and at the New Republic. " Don’t Just
Impeach Trump. End the Imperial Presidency." https://newrepublic.com/article/144297/dont-
just-impeach-trump-end-imperial-presidency)
President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda is a shambles, and his administration is besieged by scandal. He has been badgering
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell all week for failing to repeal and replace Obamacare, a futile exercise in browbeating. The
good news is that, as Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer noted recently, institutions have proven willing to stand up
to Trump, ranging from the military (which won’t carry out his ban on transgender people serving) to the Senate (which defended
Attorney General Jeff Sessions from Trump’s attempt to elbow him out of office) to the Boy Scouts (which criticized the president for
politicizing his appearance at their annual jamboree). “The
institutions of both political and civil society are
holding up well,” Krauthammer wrote. “Trump is a systemic stress test. The results are good, thus far.”
But the more ineffectual Trump is in domestic politics, the louder and scarier he is on the
international stage. Even if we accept Krauthammer’s contention that the “guardrails” of political
and civil society are preventing Trump from fundamentally damaging American society, Trump still enjoys

enormous unchecked power abroad . Perhaps precisely because he is thwarted at home, Trump is
now more prone than ever to lash out against foreign foes . This week, he used the incongruous
setting of a photo op at Trump National Golf Course in New Jersey to threaten North Korea with nuclear
annihilation. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” he warned. “They will be met with fire and
fury like the world has never seen.” He doubled down on those remarks on Friday, tweeting:

Military solutions are now fully in place,locked and loaded,should North Korea act
unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!

What makes these words terrifying, even if we make every allowance for Trump’s bluster, is that he has the
power to make them true. America’s nuclear chain of command grants a president absolute
authority to launch preventive nuclear strikes whenever desired. In 1974, as his presidency was capsizing, Richard
Nixon reflected that, “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead.” Trump
enjoys that same power.
Case – KORUS
 Disease
No extinction, burnout and variation check
York 6/4/14 (Ian, Virologist, “Why don't diseases completely wipe out species?”,
http://www.quora.com/Why-dont-diseases-completely-wipe-out-species)

But mostly diseases don't drive species extinct. There are several reasons for that. For one,
the most dangerous diseases are those that spread from one individual to another. If the
disease is highly lethal, then the population drops, and it becomes less likely that individuals
will contact each other during the infectious phase. Highly contagious diseases tend to burn
themselves out that way.
Probably the main reason is variation. Within the host and the pathogen population there will
be a wide range of variants. Some hosts may be naturally resistant. Some pathogens will be
less virulent. And either alone or in combination, you end up with infected individuals who
survive.
 Alliance
Alliance is locked-in and resilient
Schoff, Senior Associate, Asia Program – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 7/16/’15
(James, “Strengthening U.S. Alliances in Northeast Asia”,
http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/07/16/strengthening-u.s.-alliances-in-northeast-asia/idhr)

Overall, the U.S.-Japan and U.S.-ROK alliances are in good shape today, thanks in part to
consistent bipartisan support from the U.S. government over the years and careful attention
paid most recently by both the Bush and Obama administrations. Polls show broad support on
each side of these two alliances, and political change (back and forth) in all three countries over
the last two decades has not disrupted their relationships.1 In fact, the alliances are arguably
as strong as they have ever been .

Quick and robust U.S. support for Japan in the aftermath of its 2011 tsunami and nuclear crisis
was the right thing to do not only from a humanitarian perspective, but also from a U.S.
strategic standpoint and as a close friend. Although current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
often remarks that his party’s return to power in late 2012 helped “repair” U.S.-Japan relations,
the fact is that alliance cooperation was solid during the last two years the Democratic Party of
Japan was in power, and this emerging “bipartisan” support for the relationship in Japan should
be celebrated. It is a long-term asset for the alliance.

Acrimonious trade battles are largely a thing of the past (though not extinct), which has
strengthened a sense of partnership. U.S.-Japan cooperation initiatives in a variety of fields—
including energy, the environment, health, science and technology, and development aid
(including the recently established U.S.-Japan Development Dialogue2)— have been a staple of
the post-Cold War period and deliver value to the allies and to the world. Bilateral defense
cooperation continues to broaden and deepen in an evolutionary manner, amidst a
deteriorating security environment.

In recent years the allies have conducted more frequent and complex military exercises,
updated bilateral planning, collaborated in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR)
operations including Pacific Partnership and Operation Damayan in the Philippines (among
others), established the Extended Deterrence Dialogue (EDD) to consider alliance responses to
nuclear threats, and announced new Guidelines for Bilateral Defense Cooperation in 2015 to
adapt to modern security threats.3 In addition, the U.S. and Japanese governments agreed on a
plan to reduce the U.S. Marine presence in Okinawa and relocate the Futenma Marine Corps Air
Station for a more politically sustainable posture, receiving permission from the local governor
to initiate the project (although this relocation faces delays due to local political opposition and
a new opposition-backed governor).

The U.S.-ROK alliance has weathered numerous North Korean acts of belligerence and
attempted intimidation in recent years, often emerging stronger for the experience. The allies
approved in 2013 a new coordinated plan to respond to future North Korean provocations
(enhancing deterrence) and added new bilateral working groups in the areas of cyber and space
security policy.4 Another important bilateral initiative— the Extended Deterrence Policy
Committee —began in 2010 for the same reason as the U.S.-Japan EDD (i.e., to discuss alliance
options with regard to the growing North Korean nuclear threat), and it has been an important
tool for facilitating bilateral communication on the topic and reassuring Seoul of U.S. intentions
and capabilities. The realignment of U.S. forces in Korea has faced delays and hurdles in
implementation— much like the situation in Japan— but progress is being made and the allies
signed a new agreement last year on sharing the costs for maintaining the U.S. presence
through 2018 .5

Most notable about the U.S.-ROK alliance, however, is its expanding relevance beyond the
Korean Peninsula and in areas other than hard security, a development foreshadowed by a Joint
Vision statement issues by Presidents Obama and Lee in 2009.6 Adjusting and passing the
Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) in 2011 has helped to expand bilateral trade in
certain FTA-covered areas and provides a foundation for further trade liberalization in Asia.7 In
addition, the allies are beginning to leverage their talents and resources more effectively in
areas of nuclear nonproliferation, HA/DR, development assistance, and environmental
protection and climate change.8

The aforementioned are all positive trends for the two alliances , reflecting mutual recognition
of their ongoing value and a mature alliance management infrastructure that strives proactively
to minimize policy differences and expand bilateral cooperation when possible. For both Japan
and South Korea, public and government support for their alliances with the U nited S tates
remains strong, and they recognize the alignment of our national interests with the agenda of
stability, openness, and access.9
 Food
They can’t solve fundamental distribution issues.
FAO 2008 (Food and Agriculture Organization, yes, that one, “How to Feed the World in
2050”,
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/expert_paper/How_to_Feed_the_Worl
d_in_2050.pdf)
By 2050 the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion, 34 percent higher than today.
Nearly all of this population increase will occur in developing countries. Urbanization will
continue at an accelerated pace, and about 70 percent of the world’s population will be
urban (compared to 49 percent today). Income levels will be many multiples of what they
are now. In order to feed this larger, more urban and richer population, food production
(net of food used for biofuels) must increase by 70 percent. Annual cereal production
will need to rise to about 3 billion tonnes from 2.1 billion today and annual meat
production will need to rise by over 200 million tonnes to reach 470 million tonnes.
This report argues that the required increase in food production can be achieved if the
necessary investment is undertaken and policies conducive to agricultural production are
put in place. But increasing production is not sufficient to achieve food security. It
must be complemented by policies to enhance access by fighting poverty, especially
in rural areas, as well as effective safety net programmes.
Total average annual net investment in developing country agriculture required to deliver
the necessary production increases would amount to USD 83 billion. The global gap in what
is required vis-à-vis current investment levels can be illustrated by comparing the required
annual gross investment of US$209 billion (which includes the cost of renewing
depreciating investments) with the result of a separate study that estimated that developing
countries on average invested USD 142 billion (USD of 2009) annually in agriculture over
the past decade. The required increase is thus about 50 percent. These figures are totals for
public and private investment, i.e. investments by farmers. Achieving them will require a
major reallocation in developing country budgets as well as in donor programmes. It will
also require policies that support farmers in developing countries and encourage them and
other private participants in agriculture to increase their investment.
In developing countries, 80 percent of the necessary production increases would come from
increases in yields and cropping intensity and only 20 percent from expansion of arable
land. But the fact is that globally the rate of growth in yields of the major cereal crops has
been steadily declining, it dropped from 3.2 percent per year in 1960 to 1.5 percent in 2000.
The challenge for technology is to reverse this decline, since a continuous linear increase in
yields at a global level following the pattern established over the past five decades will not
be sufficient to meet food needs. Although investment in agricultural R&D continues to
be one of the most productive investments, with rates of return between 30 and 75 percent,
it has been neglected in most low income countries. Currently, agricultural R&D in
developing countries is dominated by the public sector, so that initially additional
investment will have to come from government budgets. Increasing private sector
investment will require addressing issues of intellectual property rights while
ensuring that a balance is struck so that access of smallholder farmers to new technologies
is not reduced.
Hunger can persist in the midst of adequate aggregate supplies because of lacking
income opportunities for the poor and the absence of effective social safety nets.
Experience of countries that have succeeded in reducing hunger and malnutrition shows
that economic growth does not automatically ensure success, the source of growth matters
too. Growth originating in agriculture, in particular the smallholder sector, is at least twice
as effective in benefiting the poorest as growth from non-agriculture sectors. This is not
surprising since 75 percent of the poor in developing countries live in rural areas and their
incomes are directly or indirectly linked to agriculture. The fight against hunger also
requires targeted and deliberate action in the form of comprehensive social services,
including food assistance, health and sanitation, as well as education and training;
with a special focus on the most vulnerable.

No risk of resource wars---historical evidence all concludes neg---

cooperation is way more likely and solves
Jeremy Allouche 11 is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. "The sustainability and resilience
of global water and food systems: Political analysis of the interplay between security, resource scarcity, political systems and global trade" Food PolicyVolume 36,
Supplement 1, January 2011, Pages S3-S8 Accessed via: Science Direct Sciverse

Water/food resources, war and conflict

The question of resource scarcity has led to many debates on whether scarcity
(whether of food or water) will lead to conflict and war. The underlining reasoning behind most of these

discourses over food and water wars comes from the Malthusian belief that there is an imbalance

between the economic availability of natural resources and population growth since
while food production grows linearly, population increases exponentially. Following this reasoning, neo-Malthusians

claim that finite natural resources place a strict limit on the growth of human
population and aggregate consumption; if these limits are exceeded, social breakdown, conflict
and wars result. Nonetheless, it seems that most empirical studies do not support any of these
neo-Malthusian arguments. Technological change and greater inputs of capital
have dramatically increased labour productivity in agriculture. More generally, the neo-
Malthusian view has suffered because during the last two centuries humankind
has breached many resource barriers that seemed unchallengeable. Lessons from history:
alarmist scenarios, resource wars and international relations In a so-called age of uncertainty, a number of

alarmist scenarios have linked the increasing use of water resources and food
insecurity with wars. The idea of water wars (perhaps more than food wars) is a dominant
discourse in the media (see for example Smith, 2009), NGOs (International Alert, 2007) and within international organizations (UNEP, 2007).
In 2007, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared that ‘water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflict’ (Lewis,

this type of discourse has an instrumental purpose; security and conflict

2007). Of course,

are here used for raising water/food as key policy priorities at the international level. In the
Middle East, presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers have also used this
bellicose rhetoric. Boutrous Boutros-Gali said; ‘the next war in the Middle East will
be over water, not politics’ (Boutros Boutros-Gali in Butts, 1997, p. 65). The question is not whether the
sharing of transboundary water sparks political tension and alarmist declaration,
but rather to what extent water has been a principal factor in international
conflicts. The evidence seems quite weak . Whether by president Sadat in Egypt or King Hussein in Jordan, none of
these declarations have been followed up by military action. The governance of transboundary water has
gained increased attention these last decades. This has a direct impact on the global food system as water allocation agreements determine the amount of water
that can used for irrigated agriculture. The likelihood of conflicts over water is an important parameter to consider in assessing the stability, sustainability and

resilience of global food systems. None of the various and extensive databases on the causes of war
show water as a casus belli. Using the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set and
supplementary data from the University of Alabama on water conflicts, Hewitt,
Wolf and Hammer found only seven disputes where water seems to have been at
least a partial cause for conflict (Wolf, 1998, p. 251). In fact, about 80% of the incidents relating to water were limited purely to
governmental rhetoric intended for the electorate (Otchet, 2001, p. 18). As shown in The Basins At Risk (BAR) water

event database, more than two-thirds of over 1800 water-related ‘events’ fall on
the ‘cooperative’ scale (Yoffe et al., 2003). Indeed, if one takes into account a much longer
period, the following figures clearly demonstrate this argument. According to studies by the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), organized political bodies signed between the year 805

and 1984 more than 3600 water-related treaties, and approximately 300 treaties dealing with water management
or allocations in international basins have been negotiated since 1945 ([FAO, 1978] and [FAO, 1984]). The fear around water wars

have been driven by a Malthusian outlook which equates scarcity with violence,
conflict and war. There is however no direct correlation between water scarcity
and transboundary conflict. Most specialists now tend to agree that the major issue is not scarcity per se but rather the allocation of
water resources between the different riparian states (see for example [Allouche, 2005], [Allouche, 2007] and [Rouyer, 2000]). Water rich countries have been
involved in a number of disputes with other relatively water rich countries (see for example India/Pakistan or Brazil/Argentina). The perception of each state’s
estimated water needs really constitutes the core issue in transboundary water relations. Indeed, whether this scarcity exists or not in reality, perceptions of the

amount of available water shapes people’s attitude towards the environment (Ohlsson, 1999). In fact, some water experts have argued that scarcity
drives the process of co-operation among riparians ([Dinar and Dinar, 2005] and [Brochmann and Gleditsch,
2006]). In terms of international relations, the threat of water wars due to increasing

scarcity does not make much sense in the light of the recent historical record.
Overall, the water war rationale expects conflict to occur over water, and appears
to suggest that violence is a viable means of securing national water supplies, an
argument which is highly contestable. The debates over the likely impacts of climate change have again popularised the idea
of water wars. The argument runs that climate change will precipitate worsening ecological conditions contributing to resource scarcities, social breakdown,
institutional failure, mass migrations and in turn cause greater political instability and conflict ([Brauch, 2002] and [Pervis and Busby, 2004]). In a report for the US
Department of Defense, Schwartz and Randall (2003) speculate about the consequences of a worst-case climate change scenario arguing that water shortages will

Despite growing concern that climate change will

lead to aggressive wars (Schwartz and Randall, 2003, p. 15).

lead to instability and violent conflict, the evidence base to substantiate the
connections is thin ([Barnett and Adger, 2007] and [Kevane and Gray, 2008]).
 1NC ILO Collapse Inevitable
The decline of the liberal international system is inevitable—domestic politics
make the liberal order unsustainable, and its underlying architecture lacks an
international consensus.
Danforth 18—Nick Danforth, Senior Policy Analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center, PhD in
Turkish history at Georgetown University (“What’s So Disordered About Your World Order?”
War on the Rocks, June 20th, https://warontherocks.com/2018/06/whats-so-disordered-about-
your-world-order/)

It seems that the liberal international order , a system of rules and institutions that brought peace and prosperity to the
world in the aftermath of World War II, is now “being challenged as never before in its 70-year history.”

Examples of this unprecedented challenge can be seen around the globe: Trump is threatening
to destroy NAFTA. Russia is resurgent , annexing Crimea and menacing the Baltic states. Democratic values
are on the decline in Eastern Europe, with Poland and Hungary slipping toward autocracy. China flouts the
rules of the World Trade Organization and Britain is on the verge of leaving the European
Union. Worst of all, in the Middle East a brutal dictator uses chemical weapons with impunity.

As these examples make clear, though, the international order at risk today isn’t quite as old as we think . As
late as 1988, there was no NAFTA. Ukraine and the Baltic states were firmly under Russian control. Poland and Hungary were
communist dictatorships. China hadn’t joined the World Trade Organization and what is now the European Union had yet to adopt
such key features as a common currency and visa free travel. Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons not just with impunity
but with tacit American support.

And even in the last three decades, the liberal international order was not as robust as we’d
like to imagine. For example, the ongoing humanitarian tragedy in Syria has generated poignant
laments for a vanished era when such horrors wouldn’t have been permitted. By this standard,
though, the golden age of the international order lasted just a few years, from Washington’s successful 1999 intervention in Kosovo
to its unsuccessful 2003 intervention in Iraq. Or, measured differently, from the time Bill Clinton sincerely apologized for not
stopping the genocide in Rwanda up until the moment it became clear George W. Bush wasn’t prepared to stop the genocide
unfolding in Darfur.

Of course, even its most ardent admirers would readily admit that the liberal international order was always
more of an aspiration than a consolidated, 70-year-old achievement. And the optimism that
accompanied the end of the Cold War has been widely derided for some time now. Yet there was
still a surprisingly hardy assumption that up until recently the world was moving, however slowly or erratically, in the right direction.
If nothing else, there appeared to be a trajectory toward greater order that has now become impossible to discern.

This in itself is excellent cause for alarm. If the liberal order was always an arduous and incremental work in progress, it is all the
more likely that progress could come apart. Similarly, if what order exists today only came about through the efforts of successive
presidential administrations, the arrival of a president without the desire or competence to sustain this achievement is even more
frightening. And gratuitously alienating allies is never a good idea.

Butit would be a mistake to react to this rising alarm with nostalgia for an era of global order
that never was. Watching the president abandon the rhetoric and ambition that, however imperfectly, sustained
American policy seems to have led observers to double down on historical myths. The
temptation to invoke romanticized history in an effort to avert disaster is entirely
understandable. But it comes at the expense of accurately diagnosing the contradictions of
the previous policy consensus and having a candid discussion of how we got where we are today. Which then makes it
harder to build something stronger in the aftermath of the crises we are experiencing.

In fact, many of the questions up for debate today are the ones policymakers debated in the 1990s – when U.S. power and the
In championing the liberal order , U.S. politicians
optimism for a new international order were at their peak.
were always loath to admit that there were ever trade-offs between America’s interests and
the world’s, or that they had sometimes broken the very rules they promoted . Yet beneath this
rhetoric there were still real arguments that now risk being lost in the nostalgia: Would the liberal order be American-led or
American-dominated? Would America follow the rules or make them? How could countries like China and Russia be convinced to
accept the terms of an American order? And out of what combination of idealism and self-interest would the American people be
convinced to support this whole endeavor anyway?

Well before Trump, U.S. foreign policy had to navigate between rival critiques, from Americans insisting that the international order
was a hopelessly idealistic project with little in it for them and foreign critics who saw it as a euphemism for American hegemony.
Partisan debates aside, past presidents never received an outpouring of popular support when
contemplating intervention in the Balkans, or Syria , or anywhere else where they couldn’t articulate a clear
threat to American security. Similarly, there was never a consensus, even in Washington, on how to
respond to Russian aggression against non-allies situated on the periphery of Western
institutions, whether Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2014.
It was, in other words, far from clear that voters were willing to shoulder the cost of compelling countries like Russia to accept the
version of the international order that the United States was offering them. In
pushing confidently ahead with a
geopolitical project that saw its success peak in the year 2000, policymakers were bound to
run into trouble eventually . Appeals to an idealized past serve to bolster the argument that if
only the president – Obama, Trump, or both, depending on your politics – had not abandoned America’s
commitment to global leadership the world’s current crises could have been avoided. The
implicit premise is that were Washington to recommit to its previous foreign policy vision, the
world would fall in line. Difficult disagreements about matching America’s geopolitical
ambitions to its resources would resolve themselves without any insurmountable objections from voters or foreign
leaders. Syria’s civil war could be resolved like Bosnia’s eventually was, rather than any one of the
countless other civil wars Washington couldn’t, or didn’t ever attempt to, solve.

One need not know the solutions to these challenges to see that they won’t be found in
recreating a short-lived moment of post-Cold War confidence . Figuring out what comes next
requires looking at the recent past as a cautionary tale as well as a template. And recognizing that,
whatever solutions emerge, they will almost certainly prove more compelling – both at home and
abroad – presented as a revised vision for a more stable and just world than as a return to an era
whose virtues are more apparent to op-ed writers than anyone else.
Case – NK
 1NC AT NK War
Material and situational constraints prevent a nuclear war with North
Korea. Trump and Kim can’t overcome these constraints and start a war.
Horowitz and Saunders 18—Michael C. Horowitz, professor of political science and the
associate director of Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth N. Saunders,
associate professor of political science at George Washington University (“Why nuclear war with
North Korea is less likely than you think,” Washington Post, May 24th,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/03/why-nuclear-war-with-
north-korea-is-less-likely-than-you-think/?utm_term=.98624820ab22)
On Tuesday night, in response to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s claim to have a nuclear button on his desk, President Trump
tweeted, “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

This is not the first time that things have gotten personal in the U.S.-North Korea standoff. Much
of the rhetoric between the two leaders and media commentary about the risk of war focuses on the leadership of Trump and Kim
— or “Little Rocket Man,” as Trump has called the North Korean leader.

But how much could these two singular leaders really propel us to a nuclear war? Trump’s tweets and
other actions certainly can increase the risk of conflict — consistent with our research on how the decisions of individual leaders
affect military conflict.

However, in this case, other

factors, including geography and military capabilities , will matter more
than tweets or the characteristics of leaders. And these factors reduce the likelihood of war.
Leaders can be important for international conflict

For the past few generations, political scientists who write about the outbreak of conflict mainly argued that leaders were irrelevant,
focusing instead on international factors such as great power relations or domestic political factors such as whether the two
countries involved had democratic institutions.

But more and more scholarship suggests that leaders make a large difference in determining whether and how countries go to war.
And it’s not just in dictatorships such as that of North Korea; even more constrained leaders, such as U.S. presidents, matter.
Leaders’ beliefs and experiences before coming into office can be critical in determining whether a country goes to war and what
military strategy will be used in the event of war.

But structural forces are strong in this case

Even if leaders have discretion, they are constrained by material and situational constraints .
No U.S. or North Korean leader can realistically change or avoid some of these constraints.

One constraint stems from the two sides’ formidable military capabilities, which mean that a
general war with North Korea would be devastating , as Barry Posen argued last year. Even before North
Korea acquired a nuclear capability, its artillery put tremendous pressure on South Korea. Add
to that its missile arsenal — which, as nuclear experts have chronicled, can now probably deliver an intercontinental
ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead against the United States.

A second unavoidable constraint is geography , which may make war less likely . North Korean artillery points directly
at Seoul, just 35 miles from the demilitarized zone (DMZ). South Korea may oppose a war, which could
influence U.S. behavior. North Korea also borders China, a powerful country whose economic support
keeps North Korea afloat.
But China faces its own geographic reality with respect to North Korea, and China is increasingly frustrated with
North Korea’s behavior . In the event of war, China does not want refugees flooding across the
border into China. Yet China also does not want a unified Korean Peninsula with U.S. troops on its border.

Indeed, in
the Korean War, the United States tested geographic constraints by pushing beyond
the prewar dividing line, the 38th parallel, in an attempt to unify Korea. China intervened to
prevent such an outcome, and the conflict stopped where it started.

All sides know that a war would be a huge and difficult military and political problem . So there
are strong incentives to try to deter the other side, rather than escalate .
U.S. and North Korean leaders have reason to make war even less likely

Although the focus on Trump

and Kim almost always suggests that their behavior increases the risk of war, they actually
have strong incentives to reduce the prospect of war .

Despite rhetoric about North Korea’s irrationality, Kim’s pursuit

of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles
was rational. He wants to stay in power, and nuclear weapons constitute invasion insurance.
But a war probably would spell the end of the regime , giving North Korea little reason to start a war.

On the U.S. side, few wars probably have been war-gamed more than a conflict on the Korean Peninsula. U.S. decision-makers know
how costly a war might be. Knowledge of these costs makes war less likely.

No China draw-in
Knodell 15 [Kevin Knodell, Reporter for The Week, China has turned against North Korea,
8/10/15, http://theweek.com/articles/570485/china-turned-against-north-korea]

Kim Jong Un, on the other hand, has done next to nothing to court the Chinese. He has largely
ignored Beijing's delegations to the country — usually sending low-level party members to
greet them — and has showed little interest in resuming the six-party talks.

"It's been an easy decision to work with the Koreans that will work with them," Cathcart
explains.

Chinese officials and business leaders have tried to encourage reform in North Korea. But their
efforts have stalled under Kim Jong Un. In 2013, North Korea executed Jang Sung-taek, a leading
reformer in Pyongyang who had helped court Chinese investment.

In the past, Chinese troops concentrated in Manchuria and along the border with North Korea,
ready to aid Pyongyang in wartime. But in recent years, the Chinese army's priorities have
changed. During a flare-up in tensions between North and South Korea last year, Chinese
troops mobilized not for combat, but for disaster relief and the evacuation of Chinese
nationals.

The Chinese "trust the South Koreans not to start an incident with the North," Cathcart says.
"They don't trust the North Koreans — and are very suspicious of North Korean military
adventurism."
The Chinese crave stability. North Korea, which once served as a comfortable buffer between
China and the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and Japan, is anything but stable.
Case – Middle Power
 1NC AT Democracy Solves
Democracy doesn’t solve war – peace theory studies too short a period of time,
nationalism outweighs, and democracy promotes war because it popularizes
winning overseas conflict
Larison 12 (Daniel Larison, senior editor at The American Conservative, 4-17-2012,
"Democratic Peace Theory Is False," American Conservative,
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/democratic-peace-theory-is-false/) //jackH

Fabio Rojas invokes democratic peace theory in his comment on Rachel Maddow’s new book,
Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (via Wilkinson): The idea is simple – for whatever reason,
democracies almost never fight each other. Of course, democracies go to war against non-democracies. But for some reason,
democracies just don’t fight each other. What’s the policy implication of all this? First, the sorts of rules that Maddow proposes are
useless. People will just ignore the rules when they want to when they want war. Second, you have to reduce the population of non-
democracies. Thus, if the Federal government wants to protect the United States by preventing war, the best, and cheapest, way to
do it is to provide support and assistance for indigenous movements for democracy and tolerance. Once people have a genuine
democracy at work, they just don’t want to fight with each other. They just don’t. Rojas’
claim depends entirely on the
meaning of “genuine democracy.” Even though there are numerous examples of wars
between states with universal male suffrage and elected governments (including that little dust-up known as
WWI), the states in question probably don’t qualify as “genuine” democracies and so can’t be used

as counter-examples. Regardless, democratic peace theory draws broad conclusions from a short
period in modern history with very few cases before the 20th century. The core of democratic
peace theory as I understand it is that democratic governments are more accountable to their
populations, and because the people will bear the costs of the war they are going to be less willing to support a war
policy. This supposedly keeps democratic states from waging wars against one another because of the built-in electoral and
institutional checks on government power. One small problem with this is that it is rubbish. Democracies

in antiquity fought against one another. Political equality and voting do not abolish conflicts
of interest between competing states. Democratic peace theory doesn’t account for the effects of
nationalist and imperialist ideologies on the way democratic nations think about war.
Democratic nations that have professional armies to do the fighting for them are often enthusiastic
about overseas wars. The Conservative-Unionist government that waged the South African War (against two states with
elected governments, I might add) enjoyed great popular support and won a huge majority in the “Khaki” election that followed. As
long as it goes well and doesn’t have too many costs, war
can be quite popular, and even if the war is costly it
may still be popular if it is fought for nationalist reasons that appeal to a majority of the public. If
the public is whipped into thinking that there is an intolerable foreign threat or if they believe that their country can gain something
at relatively low cost by going to war, the type of government they have really is irrelevant. Unless a
democratic public
believes that a military conflict will go badly for their military, they may be ready to welcome the outbreak of a
war that they expect to win. Setting aside the flaws and failures of U.S.-led democracy promotion for a moment, the
idea that reducing the number of non-democracies makes war less likely is just fantasy .
Clashing interests between states aren’t going away, and the more democratic states there are
in the world the more likely it is that two or more of them will eventually fight one another.
 1NC SK Middle Power Ineffective
South Korean middle power diplomacy isn’t effective – they overhype their
capabilities.
Rozman ‘15 [Gilbert Rozman, Associate Faculty member in the East Asian Studies Princeton,
6/11/2015, “Option 5: Rethinking Middle Power Diplomacy”
http://www.theasanforum.org/option-5-rethinking-middle-power-diplomacy/]

South Koreans have tended to exaggerate their diplomatic opportunities . Take the example of Russia.
After cutting a favorable deal at the end of Gorbachev’s tenure in office, they assumed over nearly
a decade that Seoul would marginalize Pyongyang since it had the economic wherewithal of
vital importance to Moscow and to its aim of developing the Russian Far East. They should have been shocked in 1997
with the sharp deterioration in bilateral relations, as Russians expressed disappointment in the deal they had made, but
reinvigorated pursuit of Russia under the new strategy of the Sunshine Policy obviated any
need to reexamine the past . Over the following decade Russia left the impression that it was just grateful
to be part of the Six-Party Talks and would be looking ahead to their successful resolution for opportunities to link its economy through North Korea
to South Korea. Although Moscow’s pursuit of Pyongyang at times seemed too ardent to be explained by such modest ambitions and from about 2004 its outlook on the

confidence in Seoul’s ability to manage Russian

resolution of the nuclear crisis should have raised warning flags,

involvement did not appear to be affected. The more assertive Russian posture toward the crisis in 2010—
refusing to brand North Korea the aggressor—, in 2011—conducting a summit with Kim Jong-il despite his conduct—, and from 2012-2013—intensifying its

contacts with Kim Jong-un as part of Putin’s more aggressive foreign policy moves— did not dissuade Park Geun-hye
from launching her Eurasian Initiative. Even in the wake of the Ukraine crisis and the
spreading Russian narrative that a new cold war has begun in Asia too, in which North Korea is a critical part, South Korea seemed to
be optimistic that Moscow remains centered on economic reintegration projects and
denuclearization as the necessary step for them. Little attention is being paid to calls in Russia to bolster
North Korea against the threats to it and to prioritize regional security in a manner
unwelcome in Seoul. Moscow now views Seoul from the angle of a new cold war in which
Seoul sides with Washington—not a basis for optimism.
Block
Cap K
 2NC Sustainability
Conceded financialization warrant in Gaiya—it obviously turns economic
uncertainty—and it causes escalating neo-imperial wars and global destruction
Karatasli and Kumral 13—Sahan Savas Karatsali, comparative-historical sociologist and
assistant research scientist at the Arrighi Center for Global Studies, Johns Hopkins University,
Sefika Kumral, PhD Candidate, JHU (“Financialization and International (Dis)Order: A
Comparative Analysis of the Perspectives of Karl Polanyi and John Hobson,” Berkeley Journal of
Sociology, Vol. 57, Critical Approaches to Financialization, pages 40-73, JSTOR)

Interestingly, however, during the contemporary era of financialization , the terms " imperialism ," "new-
imperialism," and " empire " have also come back to the literature (Go 2011: 206-234; Harvey 2003; John son
2004; Steinmetz 2006; Arrighi 2007). For many, this intensification of imperialist aggression led by the declining
hegemonic power is closely linked to various aspects of financialization (Harvey 2003; Steinmetz 2006; Martin
2007; Arrighi 2007). Giovanni Arrighi (1994; also see Ar righi and Silver 1999) emphasized that during the contemporary
period of financial expansion, as during previous periods of financialization in historical capitalism, profit-making
activities shift from productive to nonproductive sectors, including war-making activities , most
notably the lending of money to states to pay for military buildups and open warfare. David
Harvey has argued that the rise of the neoconservative "new imperialism" in the twenty-first century is
associated with the consequences of neoliberal imperialist policies implemented after the
turn to financialization (Harvey 2003: 183-212). Based on Tim Mitchell's (2002) interpretation of the relationships between
oil and US foreign policy, Steinmetz (2005) suggests that the war in Iraq must be seen as a part of a larger
historical trend toward financialization which is inherently linked to postfordist
neoliberalism .

While it is true that thecontemporary era of financialization is characterized by attempts to establish self-
regulating markets and an increasing commodification of land, labor, and money, it is also characterized by increasing

militarization and interstate warfare . In the literature it is not uncommon to find that scholars who wish to
emphasize both trends often refer to Karl Polanyi side by side with a rich literature on the role of finance capital and imperialism—
including Hobson's Imperialism: A Study. Although such
interpretations are feasible and even useful, especially for
explaining the emergence of vicious cycles of economic, social, and political destruction of
human society in national and international spheres during periods of financialization, the theoretical framework
set up by Polanyi in The Great Transformation does not permit such rea dings. In the Polanyian schema, self-regulating markets
destroy human society, the environment, and production on national levels, where haute finance assumes the role of protecting
global peace and order. That is why a direct adaptation of Polanyi's arguments for the contemporary era of financialization presents
important problems which must be addressed.

Automation, renewables, and the information economy cause economic

collapse and widespread social instability absent the alt. The moment of
superabundance paradoxically causes violent social collapse as populations
become obsolete, aggregate demand contracts, prices signals fail, and both
profits and investment stagnate.
*Falling marginal costs lower prices and profit rates, superabundance destroys the incentive to
invest, stagnates the capital stock.
*Automated communism can provide a world of plenty for everyone – price signals
unsustainable and unnecessary.

*Movements now – palliatives like UBI (or the aff) mask structural contradictions and delay
transition from capitalism.

Booth ‘17 (6/12, Adam, Editor of Socialist Appeal (Present), PhD Student in Building
Technologies & Energy Efficient Cities @ Cambridge U (’09-‘13), “Capitalism’s economic
singularities”, https://www.marxist.com/capitalism-s-economic-singularities.htm)

in numerous areas, from automation to green energy to information technology, we are seeing a validation of Marx's
"Today,

assertion: that society's productive forces at a certain stage come into conflict with the way in
which society is organised. These "economic singularities", as Adam Booth discusses, demonstrate clearly
that the system has broken ." singularity sɪŋɡjʊˈlarɪti noun 1. A point at which a function takes an infinite value, especially in space–time when matter is infinitely dense, such as
at the centre of a black hole. 2. A hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence and other technologies have become so advanced that humanity undergoes a dramatic and irreversible change. "maybe
the singularity just happened, and we didn't notice" “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely
expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into
their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.” (Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface) In this brief passage, Marx summarises the materialist method of analysing history:
the fundamental tenet of which is that the primary driving force in history, in the final analysis, is the need to develop the productive forces - of technology and technique; industry and agriculture; science and

development, however, at a certain point reaches a barrier in terms of the mode of production
culture. This

- that is, with society’s property relations. In other words, our ability to produce comes into conflict with the

way in which society is organised ; with the forms of economic distribution; with the legal laws and
institutions that define property rights and ownership. At such points, as Marx emphasises, a revolution is
required to remove these barriers to society’s development. Today, as we have commented on elsewhere, there is an ever-increasing
recognition in mainstream circles that the capitalist system has reached such a stage as that described by Marx. In particular, the question of automation and

artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a growing concern about the possibility of “technological
unemployment” - of millions consigned to the scrapheap, unable to find work because they
have been made obsolete by modern machinery, robots, and computers. As author Calum Chace writes in his book The Economic Singularity: Artificial intelligence and the death of
capitalism, we are rapidly approaching a point - the titular “economic singularity”- where technology develops at a pace

too rapid for workers to keep up . No amount of education and retraining will help. Humans
will be redundant from the perspective of the capitalist productive process. Chace notes, as Marx did 150 years ago in his magnum opus Capital, that this “economic
singularity” poses a contradiction under capitalism, for it is the wages workers receive in
exchange for their labour power - their ability to work - that ultimately forms the market for the goods that are
produced. If there are no workers (and thus no wages), then where will the demand come
from for the capitalists’ products? Who will buy the abundance of things that our army of
robots are relentlessly churning out? In turn, this economic contradiction creates unbearable
social and political tensions as the wealth in society accumulates into ever fewer hands - the
hands of those at the top who own the technologies and industries in which automation and
machinery are most rife. Hence the zeitgeist appeal to politicians of demands such as the
“universal basic income”, which promise to alleviate the most blatant excesses and
inequalities seen under capitalism, without fundamentally challenging or changing the broken
status quo. At the same time, it is workers’ labour that is ultimately the source of all new value in society
- and thus the source of the capitalists’ profits also. Machinery does not create value, but merely transfers it from the

inputted materials to the outputted product. Without any labour in the productive process, therefore, the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg is killed.
In short, the potential impact of today’s productive forces - to automate away work, vastly reduce

the hours of the working week, and provide a world of plenty for everyone - is being stifled by
the nature of the capitalist system ; a system based on private ownership over the wealth and
technology in society and production for profit. To repeat Marx’s assertion: the material productive forces of society have come into conflict with the
property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. Breakdown The idea of an “economic singularity” aptly describes what is taking place in the most general sense. As the initial

definition provided above explains, in the language of mathematics, a singularity is a point at which certain values in an equation
become infinite, thus causing existing models and established laws to break down. The
economic singularity that Chace describes is the result of society’s productive forces approaching infinity -
that is, the ability to produce what Marx called a “superabundance” of goods. Or to put it inversely, we are reaching an

infinitesimal - a point where the labour time required to produce commodities is rapidly
tending towards zero. In cosmology, it is hypothesised that a singularity of infinitely dense matter exists at the centre of so-called “black holes” - massive stars that have collapsed to
create objects with a gravitational attraction from which even light cannot escape. At this singularity point, it is assumed that all the known laws of physics cease to operate. Similarly, as the

productive forces approach this infinity of superabundance and infinitesimal of full

automation and zero labour time, the laws and dynamics of the capitalist system break down . For the law of value, as
as the labour time required in production tends to zero, so too will the value . But if
explained by Marx, means that

the general value of commodities falls to nothing, then profits - formed from the surplus value generated in production - will
also drop. And if there is no profit to be made, then investment - which under capitalism is only conducted in the pursuit of profit -
will grind to a halt too. The contradictions pile up and the system enters into crisis . Even the
bourgeois economists would accept this assertion; in their own words, as the marginal cost of a
commodity approaches zero, so too will its price - provided there is a free market, in which the forces of supply and demand are free to operate (e.g.
without the existence of monopolies or collusive price-setting). And without price signals, how can the invisible hand of the market
operate? As technology advances, automation and productivity increases, and we approach the potential for superabundance. At the same time, however, the laws of the capitalist market break
down. An increasing number of commentators, such as Chace, are recognising this, as demonstrated by the fears about how to handle the contradiction posed by modern automation under capitalism: that we are

approaching the “economic singularity” - the point at which we could potentially produce all of society’s needs with almost zero labour requirements; and yet within the current
system, this only creates enormous social antagonisms of eye-watering inequality and a race to the

bottom for the 99%. Green energy’s “dirty secret” Automation, however, is not the only example of capitalism’s economic singularities. In a leading article earlier this year, the Economist
magazine - one of the more serious, sober, and sincere bourgeois journals - announced in an article entitled “clean energy’s dirty secret” that, “the renewables revolution is wrecking the world’s electricity
markets”. “It is no longer far-fetched to think that the world is entering an era of clean, unlimited and cheap power,” our esteemed liberal publication proclaims, before going on to pour cold water on any
optimism by stating that, “there is a $20trn hitch, though”. So what’s the catch? “Normally investors like putting their money into electricity because it offers reliable returns. Yet green energy has a dirty secret.
The more it is deployed, the more it lowers the price of power from any source. That makes it hard to manage the transition to a carbon-free future, during which many generating technologies, clean and dirty,
need to remain profitable if the lights are to stay on. Unless the market is fixed, subsidies to the industry will only grow.” What the Economist have accidentally let slip here, however, is not so much green energy’s

energy is
“dirty secret”, but capitalism’s. For in essence, as the main article on this topic (aptly entitled “a world turned upside down”) hints at, the problem facing policymakers and politicians is that

another example of the market failing in the face of capitalism’s economic singularities. The
contradiction is as follows. By definition, the marginal cost of renewable energy is zero: once a wind turbine or solar

panel is in place, the electricity it produces by virtue of the wind and the sun is effectively free .
There are, of course, costs associated with green energy sources - the turbines and panels themselves must be produced and maintained, for example. In addition, there are the costs of distributing the electricity
generated. All of these feed into the price that consumers pay for their energy. Nevertheless, many of these costs are themselves rapidly decreasing, as new manufacturing techniques and economies of scale

the greater the renewable energy supply,

enable solar panels, for example, to be mass produced more cheaply. In this sense, as the Economist highlights above,

the more electricity prices are forced downwards. But as prices tend towards zero, so too do the
profits of the major energy monopolies. And since these big profit-seeking energy suppliers
are only willing to invest in new power generation if they can make money from it, as energy
prices decline , investment in all energy sources - renewable or otherwise - dries up. “Theoretically,” the
author affirms, “if renewables were to make up 100% of the market, the wholesale price of electricity
would fall to zero , deterring all new investment that was not completely subsidised.” This, effectively, is a
tacit admission from the mouthpiece of the capitalist class that the system they defend has failed. “In short,” our capitalist apologists at the Economist magazine conclude, “policyma

MARKED

it is not simply an
kers should be clear they have a problem and that the cause is not renewable energy, but the out-of-date system of electricity pricing.” We would agree, with one caveat:

out-of-date system of electricity pricing that is holding back the green energy technologies’ potential, but an out-of-date
economic system, full stop. The price of everything and the value of nothing Alongside automation and renewable energy,
another clear example of capitalism’s economic singularities is provided by political journalist and writer Paul
Mason, who, in his book PostCapitalism (reviewed here), utilises Marx’s labour theory of value to explain the contradictions implicit within an information-based economy. The world
around us today, Mason contends, is one increasingly based on information . We live in a digital age, where tangible goods have been
superseded in many cases by a string of ones and zeros. CDs have been replaced by MP3s; physical models and machines substituted for software and computer programmes.Technology in chains As Mason

correctly highlights, however, “once you can copy and paste something, it can be reproduced for free. It has, in
economics-speak, a ‘zero marginal cost’...This has major implications for the way the market operates...All this is eroding the very
price mechanism that marginalism describes so perfectly .” (Paul Mason, PostCapitalism, 2015 hardback edition, p117-118 and p163) Once
again, we arise at the contradiction the capitalist market faces as the value of a commodity - its socially necessary labour time -

falls to zero. Price signals fail and profits disappear . The only way for the capitalists in
information-based industries (such as music and media) to survive and make profits, then, is not to play by
the rules of the free market, but to subvert them entirely - to rely not on competition, but on
its opposite: monopoly. “The equilibrium state of an info-tech economy is one where monopolies dominate and people have unequal access to the information they need to make
rational buying decisions. Info-tech, in short, destroys the normal price-mechanism, whereby competition drives prices down toward the cost of production… “With info-capitalism, a monopoly is not just some
clever tactic to maximise profit. It is the only way an industry can run. The small number of companies that dominate each sector is striking…Apple’s mission statement, properly expressed, is to prevent the
abundance of music.” (ibid, p118-119) As with the other “economic singularities” of automation and renewable energy, therefore, the development of information technology has exposed the key contradiction at

In other words, we have the

the heart of the capitalist system: as Mason himself quotes, that “between the ‘forces of production’ and the ‘social relations’”.

productive ability to create superabundance and satisfy a whole range of global needs; but
the ‘social relations’ – the way in which production is owned, controlled, and organised, and
the laws and logic of the system flowing from this – prevent us from doing so. As long as there
is private ownership and production for profit, it is impossible to resolve this contradiction,
and in place of superabundance we see scarcity . Indeed, this contradiction that info-tech highlights so clearly is already seen in the case of many of our
more tangible needs, from food (with supermarkets going to extraordinary lengths to prevent people taking leftover foods from their skips) to medicine (with big pharma companies taking legal action against
drug-producers in the developing world for producing “generic” copies of their patented drugs). Modern technology and automation have opened up a world of possibilities that were previously unimaginable. The
horror and injustice lies in the chasm that exists between these hypothetical – and entirely realisable – possibilities and the dystopian future (and present) that capitalism offers, as Mason stresses in his book:
“Technologically, we are headed for zero-price goods, unmeasurable work, and exponential takeoff in productivity and the extensive automation of physical processes. Socially, we are trapped in a world of
monopolies, inefficiency, the ruins of a finance-dominated free market and a proliferation of ‘bullshit jobs’. “Today, the main contradiction in modern capitalism is between the possibility of free, abundant socially
produced goods, and a system of monopolies, banks and governments struggling to maintain control of over power and information.” (ibid, p144, emphasis in the original) The system has broken. We need a
revolution As the official definition informs us, a “singularity” is “a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence and other technologies have become so advanced that humanity undergoes a dramatic

and irreversible change.” It is clear today - from the examples of automation, renewable energy, and digital
information - that we, as a society, are reaching such a singularity point, where humanity
needs to undergo a “dramatic and irreversible change”. As Marx stated, “from forms of development of the productive forces [capitalist]
relations [have turned] into their fetters”. The motor forces of capitalism - competition and production for profit -

were once a tremendous driver of progress and innovation. Now they have become an
enormous barrier to the development of science and technology . After almost a decade of global capitalist crisis, this
realisation - that the current economic system has reached an impasse - is reflected in the
political polarisation and radicalisation that is taking place in all countries. The old order is
crumbling before our eyes . Workers and youth searching for a way out; for an alternative to
the current future of “secular stagnation”, permanent austerity, and endlessly declining living
standards. “Then begins an era of social revolution.”
 2NC AT Barr – Financialization
Concludes aff – supports supercyclical account of financial crisis
Barr ‘17 (Michael S. Barr – Professor of Law, Faculty Director of Finance, and Professor of Public
Policy @ the University of Michigan, nonresident senior fellow at the Center for American
Profess, JD @ Yale, “Financial Reform: Making the System Safer and Fairer,” 4 January 2017,
http://www.rsfjournal.org/doi/full/10.7758/RSF.2017.3.1.01)

But even as some jurisdictions rightly adopt more stringent capital rules than those required under the Basel
III approach, more
work is needed to strengthen the global capital framework, at least for the
largest firms. Risk-based capital requirements need to be made more transparent and comparable on a cross-border and institution-by-
institution basis, and better substitutes need to be developed for both the discredited credit-rating agencies and the internal models of the regulated

institutions. Additionally, both the global leverage ratio and the SIFI surcharge are simply too low for
either to serve as an effective buffer against asset implosions or liquidity runs or to weigh
effectively against any subsidies to “too big to fail” institutions. Moreover, as the countercyclical capital buffer is
left to national economic circumstances and discretion, national regulators should commit to economic triggers that would increase capital
requirements and use other methods to reduce leverage under specified circumstances. Furthermore, stress testing, which has served a critical role in
bolstering capital oversight in the United States, is in need of further refinement, more transparency, and greater predictability.

Derivatives and Wholesale Funding Markets

G-20 leaders at the 2009 Pittsburgh summit also committed themselves to significant reforms in the OTC derivatives market. They agreed that
standardized OTC derivatives should be moved onto exchange-trading platforms and should be centrally cleared. The leaders also decided that all OTC
derivative trades—including those that remained purely bilateral—should be reported to trade repositories. In 2011, the G-20 further agreed that non-
cleared-derivative contracts should be subject to higher margin requirements. In key jurisdictions, the statutory regimes for central clearing, exchange-
based trading, and trade reporting are now in place, with the frameworks for margin requirements lagging behind. Regulatory implementation has
lagged significantly behind legislation, and persistent technical, liability, and jurisdictional problems with trade reporting and trade repositories have
obstructed regulators and market participants from attaining a comprehensive informational view of global derivatives markets.

Furthermore, global rules for repo and other short-term funding markets remain nascent, with most
jurisdictions only in the earliest phases of proposing rules. More regulatory attention is needed on the issue of hot

money, which continues to pose significant risks to systemic stability , to address weaknesses in foreign
currency markets, and to restore trust and confidence to benchmark global rates such as LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate). In sum, much of the
plumbing of the financial system is still in need of reform (see Duffie 2013).

Structural Reform and Resolution

Globally, much work remains to be done in the area of structural reform and resolution. The United States and the United Kingdom have both embraced the need for ring
fencing and stronger horizontal buffers between retail deposit banks and other, riskier, financial functions, while the European Union has not adopted its expert commission’s suggestions in that regard. In the Volcker Rule, the United States has adopted the
strongest version of these reforms, but significant work still remains to be done on implementation in all three jurisdictions. It is particularly important, too, that ring fencing not be viewed as a panacea; structural reform will only prove effective to the extent it is
integrated with broader changes in supervision, capital, and resolution mechanisms (See Barr and Vickers 2013).

Progress on structural reform is also important because of the linkages between clearer structures for financial conglomerates and ease of resolution. “Living will” requirements, such as those adopted in the United States, can help ease the process of cross-border
resolution by clarifying lines of authority and aligning business risk with organizational form, but these approaches are contingent on regulators’ willingness to execute along the lines of the directives of the will when most needed (see, for example, Levitin 2011). The
United States and the United Kingdom have put in place a memorandum of understanding to facilitate cross-border resolution, and the single-point-of-entry approach, under which a financial conglomerate’s top-tier holding company is placed in resolution while its
operating subsidiaries may continue to function, may make it possible to resolve such firms even in the absence of a formal cross-border mechanism for the resolution of highly complex firms. Only time will tell.

The United States’ “single-point-of-entry” model will facilitate the resolution of the largest financial conglomerates. In 2014, Europe officially adopted its Single Resolution Mechanism, which will be administered by the European Central Bank as part of its new
supervisory authority over the continent’s largest banks and will be funded via contributions from eligible banks, with national assessments assimilated into a communitywide fund over a number of years. The establishment of a European resolution and funding
mechanism will help break the link between a national government’s fiscal position and the health of domestic financial institutions—a link that exacerbated Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. The crisis found many Eurozone countries unable to support troubled banks,
either because the size of the bank exceeded national GDP or because public finances proved too unstable to provide any assistance.

National implementation of more effective resolution mechanisms has also been bolstered by the work of the FSB, which in 2011 released a set of best practices it considers “necessary for an effective resolution regime.” The FSB is also developing a resolvability
assessment process that will be used to evaluate the feasibility and credibility of national resolution mechanisms in the event of a globally systemic firm (G-SIFI) failure. Despite these significant regulatory advances, however, the orderly resolution of systemically
important, highly complex cross-border firms will not be feasible without more global cooperation and a comprehensive transnational approach. Fortunately, the G-20 has recognized the important relationship between structure and resolvability. At the 2013
summit in St. Petersburg the G-20 leadership instructed the FSB, the IMF, and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) to collaborate in assessing “cross-border consistencies and global financial stability implications [of structural
reforms], taking into account country-specific circumstances.”

Overall, the substantive global rules developed and implemented in the post-crisis era are far more robust than their pre-crisis counterparts and provide far fewer opportunities for regulatory arbitrage and evasion. Nonetheless, significant work r emains, as does the
underlying question of whether the current international financial regulatory architecture is sufficient to the task of a truly sound global financial system. Achieving more organizational simplicity and clarity in the financial sector may also require new approaches
altogether. For example, the United States put in place a soft cap (10 percent of total financial liabilities) on the global liabilities of U.S. firms; once the cap is hit, these firms cannot merge with or acquire other financial institutions. A tax on the wholesale liabilities of
financial firms would further reinforce safety in the system by helping to constrain the size and complexity of financial conglomerates; it would also help to offset the costs to society of potential future failures, forcing firms to internalize more of those costs. The
Obama administration proposed such a tax, but it never gained traction in the United States. The IMF endorsed the idea in 2010, but it has received little attention since.

Even as the post-crisis intervention of the G-20 in the global financial architecture has resulted in a harder, more formal system with a clearer hierarchy. More political accountability, and a stronger framework for generating, implementing, and monitoring cross-
border rulemaking variations across domestic regulatory regimes have proliferated, with the leading economies engaged in an ambitious transnational strategy of regulatory competition. Unlike in the pre-crisis era, however, national variation and international
regulatory competition to date have not resulted in widespread races to the bottom and cross-border regulatory arbitrage. Instead, the post-crisis national regulatory strategies have largely resulted in upward deviations from an already more robust global
regulatory floor—a global race to the top.

This new financial architecture means that national variation alone (defined earlier as the tailoring of global standards to individual domestic landscape) can encourage this global race to the top. It also rewards first movers on a national basis, particularly as to the
extraterritorial application of domestic rules. One country can take the lead in developing more robust extraterritorial standards than those required on a global level, and by doing so can effectively push other countries into the adoption of similarly stringent rules.

For instance, many countries are requiring firms to hold even more capital than the global minimum set by Basel III. In the United States, the supplemental leverage ratio for banks and thrifts is set at 6 percent, double the Basel III–required leverage ratio, and at 5
percent at the bank–holding company level. Even Switzerland, a non-G-20 nation and a traditional “offshore” banking center, has set tougher requirements than required under Basel III standards. For larger banks, Switzerland set higher capital requirements, up to
19 percent for the two largest (UBS and Credit Suisse)—the so-called “Swiss Finish,” meaning a Swiss-specific addition to global standards.
In addition to regulatory variation across jurisdictions, some countries—including, most notably, the United States—have also adopted aggressive extraterritorial strategies designed to force reform upward on a global basis. For instance, the Federal Reserve Board of
Governors has finalized new rules for foreign banking organizations (FBOs) operating in the United States. Under these rules, large FBOs are required to place non-branch assets under a U.S. intermediate holding company structure subject to consolidated
supervision by the Federal Reserve. In many circumstances, FBOs will also now need to meet U.S. capital and liquidity rules and prudential standards with respect to their U.S. operations, in addition to the rules they must meet under their home country’s laws.

These rules are prudent measures to reduce systemic risk and improve the safety and soundness of the U.S. financial system. Strong capital and liquidity rules will make these firms more robust against failure and less subject to debilitating runs in a crisis. Moreover,
they help to make supervision and resolution of foreign firms operating in the United States substantially more feasible, if such resolution is required. In many ways, the rules are consistent with (or better than) the principle of national treatment, putting large FBOs
and domestic banking organizations on similar footing. Nevertheless, they have also engendered significant controversy because of their extraterritorial reach, the potential to reduce the efficiency of the capital and liquidity allocation of the consolidated firm
globally, and the significant structural reforms they require from firms operating in the United States that are headquartered beyond U.S. borders. It remains to be seen what effect the aggressive approach embodied in these new rules will have on the regulatory
positions of foreign jurisdictions; some fear retaliation, but in my judgment, similar rulemaking by other jurisdictions would advance the aim of more effective regulation on a cross-border basis and should, ideally, contribute to an evolving global race to the top.

A similar strategy has taken hold between the United States and European Union during the development of domestic cross-border derivative regimes. The United States moved first, with strong reforms under the Dodd–Frank Act, followed by the release, by the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), of a muscular proposed set of rules with significant extraterritorial reach. The rules drew significant criticism from foreign banking organizations, international swap dealers, and the European Commission, each of
which understood the rules to effectively limit market participants who traded with U.S. parties to U.S. exchanges, in the absence of real reforms elsewhere, thus triggering significant fears over market fragmentation. As the CFTC considered these concerns and
negotiated with the European Commission, in 2013 it issued an exemptive order delaying the effective date of the rules for several months. Not until the evening before this exemptive order lapsed were the CFTC and the European Commission able to agree on a
“common path forward” (Barr 2014, 1014–15).

This common-path agreement embraced “equivalence,” whereby the United States will consider European market participants and exchanges in compliance with b oth European and U.S. rules. Nevertheless, even as the CFTC’s strategy of extraterritoriality has
resulted in stronger European rules and reduced the potential for arbitrage, it has also increased transatlantic tensions. Ideally, implementation of extraterritorial rules would involve closer regulatory coordination between domestic and foreign jurisdictions—
particularly where, as here, there is a high degree of parallelism between the European Union and the United States. Although the tensions between the United States and the European Union over cross-border derivatives rules are not likely to scuttle cooperation
over other dimensions of the global-reform agenda, the possibility for transnational enmity and the need for cooperation will both grow as the global political commitment to reform wanes. The post-crisis experiences with national variation and extraterritorial
strategy to date suggest that the G-20 should avoid the adoption and implementation of rigid, detailed rulemaking on a cross-border basis and should instead play the role of shepherd—working through the FSB to produce rigorous, robust prudential standards;
correcting downward national deviations but otherwise encouraging strong domestic regimes that exceed minimum standards; and intervening wher e necessary to minimize transnational tensions.

FUTURE RISKS
Despite the enormous progress to date, we cannot afford to be complacent, and we need to keep pushing for reform. The next section focuses on five
types of risk the financial system faces going forward—five ways it might fail next time. Of course, economists don’t know precisely how the risk in the
system will evolve. It is important to be humble about our ability to understand new risks and predict financial crises. That is why the most important
step economists and policymakers can take is to build a system that is more resilient to the uncertain risks we face.

Amnesia

The first source of risk that could lead to another financial crisis is a kind of amnesia: the danger that financial
institutions,
regulators, lawmakers, and the public will forget the lessons of the financial crisis and let the
system slip back into the practices that caused the last financial crisis. This amnesia is likely to
occur as the crisis fades from memory and the financial system begins to feel safe again. No
actor in the financial system is immune from such amnesia . Within financial institutions, risk managers, who are
responsible for monitoring and managing a financial institution’s risk, can grow complacent during good times. In addition, managers and executives
may push back against risk managers who raise concerns about risky but profitable practices and activities. In the lead-up to the last crisis, some risk
managers who urged firms to exercise caution or recommended that firms place limits on certain activities and investments were demoted or fired.

Regulators are also susceptible to amnesia . Regulatory discretion is essential to effective

financial regulation, but it also allows regulators to soften their stance over time. We saw this
before the last crisis. The public can also quickly forget the lessons of the financial crisis and
the need for reform. Public attention to the financial system wanes as reporting on the
financial system decreases and the fallout from the crisis fades from memory. Unfortunately, when
public attention wanes, lawmakers and regulators may feel that the public will be less likely to hold

them accountable in the event of a future crisis and as a result will feel less pressure to pass
and implement meaningful reforms (Coffee 2011). Frankly, the financial sector can and does seek to
“buy” amnesia through lobbying and campaign contributions (Roe 1996). With public pressure off,
the industry can work behind the scenes—in Congress, in the federal rule-writing agencies, and in the courts—to roll back reforms
and prevent any further restrictions (Coates 2015).

Financialization and credit accumulation make economic collapse inevitable

Durand 17 (Cédric, Prof of Economics and Development Theories @ U of Paris 13, Fictitious
Capital: How Finance is Appropriating Our Future, p. 27-39)

Credit growth is capitalism’s Achilles heel . James Tobin1 What went wrong? The short answer: Minsky was right. Martin
Wolf2 The simmering financial crisis boiled over in 2007. On 18 August the Wall Street Journal invoked the name of an economist it would now become
rather attached to: The recent market turmoil is rocking investors around the globe. But it is raising the stock of one person: a little-known economist
whose views have suddenly become very popular. Hyman Minsky, who died more than a decade ago, spent much of his career advancing the idea that
financial systems are inherently susceptible to bouts of specula- tion that, if they last long enough, end
in crises. At a time when many economists were coming to believe in the efficiency of markets, Mr. Minsky was considered somewhat of a radical
for his stress on their tendency toward excess and upheaval. Today, his views are reverber- ating from New York to Hong Kong as economists and
traders try to understand what’s happening in the markets.3 Indeed, the post-Keynesian’s name had already been circulating for some months among
bank economists. In March, George Magnus published a study for UBS asking: ‘Have we reached a Minsky moment?”4 The Financial Times, the
Guardian, and Le Mamie diplomatique each devoted articles to the Levy Institute economist’s analyses. Following this, heterodox economists invoked
Minsky’s name to try to defend their own interpretation of the crisis, as against the dominant tendencies in the discipline. To understand this craze for
Minsky — but also to identify the limits of his approach — we must first outline his financial instability hypotheses. THE INTRINSIC INSTABILITY OF
FINANCE Finance markets radically differ from markets for goods and services. Whereas in normal
times rising prices weaken demand in the real economy, the opposite is generally true of
financial securities: the ‘more prices increase, the more these securities are in demand. The same
applies the other way around: during a crisis, the fall in prices engenders fire sales, which translate into

the acceleration of the price collapse. This peculiarity of financial products derives from the
fact that their purchase — dissociated from any use-value — corresponds to a purely speculative rationale;
the objective is to obtain surplus-value by reselling them at a higher price at some later point. Blinded to
the disaster of the inevitable reverse, agents take on more and more debt in order to buy the assets that the

bubble is forming around. Moreover, the self-sustaining price rise fuelled by agents’ expectations is further exaggerated by credit.
Indebtedness increases prices, and since the securities can serve as the counterpart to fresh loans, their increasing value
allows agents to take on more debt. We find this same mech- anism in most speculative
episodes, from the seventeenth-century Netherlands to the subprime crisis. In the former case, the
speculation was on tulip bulbs; in the latter case, on residential properties. The financial instability hypothesis allows us to inscribe these speculation
dynamics in an understanding of economic cycles. Minsky sets out from the recognition that capitalist
economies experience
periods of acceleration and inflation and periods in which they are caught in deflationary
spirals in which debts become unsustainable. The 1960s and 1970s corresponded to the first
dynamic and the 1930s (paradigmatically so) to the second, as described by the economist Irving Fischer in 1933. The latter
dynamic comes about when economic agents trying to meet the deadlines on their debt repayments are forced to sell what they have at discounted
prices. This brings a general down- ward movement in prices and diminished revenues, and ultimately leads to a growth
in the weight of
debt relative to income. This in turn unleashes a self-sustaining movement toward depression,
which only state intervention can interrupt . According to Minsky, this alternation of cycles cannot be
explained by the play of real macroeconomic relations alone. Following Michal Kalecki, the post-Keynesian
tradition supposes that, at the macro- economic level, companies’ profits flow from their own investment decisions (‘the capitalists earn what they
spend’). Minsky himself adopts this hypothesis, but suggests that it must be complicated by taking financial relations into account.6 The past, present
and future are linked not only by accumulated capital and labour power, but also by credit: the inherent instability of capitalism is due to the way
profits depend upon investment, the validation of business debts depends upon profits, and investment depends upon the availability of external
financing. But the availability of financing presupposes that prior debts and the prices that were paid for capital assets are being val- idated by profits.
Capitalism is unstable because it is a financial and accumulating system with yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows! Credit relations are far from simple,
for bankers and financial inter- mediaries are capitalists like any other: since they are in competition with one another and seek to make profits, they
must constantly innovate. The result is a complex web of financial mechanisms that separate the ultimate owners of wealth from the managers of the
enter- prises that control and exploit this wealth. Finance’s tendency toward increased sophistication leads to
three possible systems of relations between income and debts. The first corresponds to a situation in which economic actors’ incomes cover their
repayment obligations: thus financial relations are solid and pose no problems to the overall reproduction of the economy. The second possibility is the
establish- ment of speculative relations in which some economic units keep their debt rolling (they can only repay the interest, but not the principal).
Such a configuration produces vulnerability, and the slightest cojunc- tural difficulty risks tipping the situation into the third possibility: the

development of Ponzi structures, where income flows are insufficient to repay either the
principal or the interest on the debt. The conse- quence is that indebtedness can only
increase, ultimately leading to bankruptcies. The stability of economies is largely dependent on the respective weights of
these three types of financing relations. Minsky enjoys a certain posthumous renown because he emphasised that across periods of

prolonged prosperity, economies gradually evolve toward a financing structure that makes
the system unstable . Starting from a sit- uation where financial relations covered by incomes are predominant, they move on to a situation
in which speculative financial activities, and then Ponzi systems, become increasingly important, to the point that the insolvability of a

small number of agents will end up provoking a collapse in asset prices. As Figure 2 shows, during
periods of rela- tive stability, the quest for profit leads to the development of financial
innovations that accelerate credit circulation and reduce the quality of securities, which
inevitably results in financial crisis or even a crisis in the real economy. Falling asset prices and
the contraction of credit feed one another: agents in financial distress are forced to sell their holdings a whatever price they
can; companies which are no longer able to obtain credit lay off staff, cut wages and lower the prices of their products; deflation leads to a growth in
the weight of debts relative to less sustainable and threatens agents whose euphoric period becomes ever less sustainable and threatens agents whose
economic situation had up till then seemed solid. THE PARADOX OF PUBLIC INTERVENTION Financial crises do not always result in economic collapses
like those of the 1930s.8 Since the Second World War, the public
authorities in the main capitalist countries have succeeded in
avoiding a fresh Great Depression. They have done so by playing with two levers: on the one hand, the
central bank acts as a lender of last resort, so as to limit chain-reaction bankruptcies and stabilise the financial markets; on the
other hand, the state allows soaring public deficits and supports demand in order to offset the fall in investment
and consumption — and, therefore, the fall in profits. Certainly, in recent decades, eco- nomic performance in the rich countries — taken as a whole, in
terms of growth and employment rates — has been far from marvellous; 2009 saw the first contraction in the wealth produced worldwide since the
Second World War. Europe even saw another fall in 2012–13. None- theless, economic policies have undeniably succeeded in their effort to keep the
collapse under control: all the postwar financial crises — including the major shock of 2007–8 — have been contained. There has been no generalised
depression as brutal as that of the 1930s. Economic fluctuations are not, therefore, only the product of capi- talist economies’ internal dynamics,
whether real or financial. They are also affected by the public authorities’ intervention mechanisms. On the one hand, state action greatly reduces the
risks of profits falling. on the other hand, it encourages expansionary phases.9 Moreover, the authorities contribute to defining the control and

organisation of the financial markets. Crucially,

however, the regulator is not immune to the excessive
optimism that economic actors can sometimes get caught up in. The relaxation of rules of
caution makes it possible for the rate of financial innovations to accelerate. The result is that
the longer the period of stability is, the greater the risks that are taken, and the greater the
weakening of regulatory foolproofs .10 The interaction of the two levels of public intervention — the man- agement of currency
and budgetary expenditure, and the regulation and supervision of finance — allows us better to understand the onrush of financialisation that we have
seen in recent decades. Indeed, the public authorities are all the more disposed to strip away financial
regulations the more confident they are in central banks’ and state budgets’ capacity to
contain financial crises. Meanwhile, for their part, financial operators are all the more inclined to take
risks the more they know that the central bank will do everything to prevent a systemic risk
becoming reality. Figure 3 represents the paradox of government intervention. The effects of ‘learning-by-doing’ contribute to
amplifying systemic risk. The memory of the Great Depression becomes ever more distant as capacities for crisis-management improve
and financial actors as well as regulators become more optimistic. These expectations encourage financial innovation and

looser regulation, both of which lead to an increasingly complex financial system. This growing sophistication allows the
expansion of credit, at the cost of degrading the quality of securities. This, in turn, leads to small crises
which are rapidly over- come thanks to the improved capacity to handle them. This cumulative

dynamic produces a financial supercycle through which the accumulated risks become
increasingly large — that is, the relative weight of speculative finance and Ponzi finance constantly increases — whereas, with
each financial crisis, the public authorities have to devote even greater efforts to countering
the depression spiral (Figure 4). THE CONTEMPORARY FINANCIAL SUPERCYCLE If we look at its narrowly financial logic, the great crisis of
2007–8 can be interpreted as the outcome of a financial supercycle. This is the argument supported by James
Crotty in the Cambridge Journal of Economics: although problems in the US subprime mortgage market triggered the current financial crisis, its deep
cause on the financial side is to be found in the flawed institutions and practices of the current financial regime … [This] New Financial Architecture
refers to the integration of modern day financial markets with the era’s light government reg- ulation. After 1980, accelerated deregulation
accompanied by rapid financial innovation stimulated powerful
financial booms that always ended in crisis.
Governments responded with bailouts that allowed new expansions to begin. These in turn ended in
crises, which trig- gered new bailouts. Over time, financial markets grew ever larger relative to the
nonfinancial economy, important financial products became more complex, opaque and illiquid, and system-

wide leverage exploded. As a result, financial crises became more threatening. This process
culminated in the current crisis, which is so severe that it has pushed the global economy to the
brink of depression. Fear of finan- cial and economic collapse has induced unprecedented government rescue efforts.11 The development
of the finance markets since the 1970s thus results from the mutual reinforcement of two dynamics; on the one hand, the confidence placed in the self-
regulation of the financial sector has opened the floodgates to financial innovation; on the other hand, the experiences of the 1980s debt crisis in the
countries of the global South, the 1987 market crash in the US, the 1994 Mexican crisis, the Asian and Russian crises of 1998 and the 2001 crisis in the
new econo- mies have fed the sentiment that the authorities will be able to contain catastrophes. The actions of Alan Greenspan, FED president from
1987 to 2007, did much to give credence to this belief. The measures taken to save LTCM in 1998, and then the heavy interest rate cuts following the
bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2001, comforted market actors in their conviction that the FED would always intervene to contain their losses. This
idea has also been associated with the concept of a ‘Green- span put’. The notion of the ‘put’ — borrowed from the vocabulary of option contracts —
emphasises an
implicit central bank support for financial values, equivalent to a ‘put’ option: that is, a guarantee
that the price of financial assets cannot fall beneath a certain level. Indeed, in reducing
interest rates, the FED supported asset prices: with lower interest rates, investors could take on more debt, at less cost, and
invest in the stock markets. Moreover, returns on financial securities became more advantageous relative to the interest rate. This
asymmetrical monetary policy — which limits the fall in stock prices but places no barriers to
their rise — has led financial actors to take greater risks. This is all the truer when it is
combined with an active budgetary policy. Figures 5 and 6 show how monetary and budg- etary policies have come to the aid
of stock prices and, in the 2000s, of real estate. They show how these policies helped prices to recover rapidly in the few years following the financial
collapse. If the budget deficit fell as the markets took off at the end of the 1990s, monetary policy, conversely, remained accommodating; in the 2000s,
both of these levers were pulled simultaneously, indeed forcefully so after the 2001 crash, encouraging not only market recovery but also the expan-
sion of the real-estate bubble. The belief in the robustness of the financial system grew at a similar pace - all the more so given that the proliferation of
exotic financial products seemed to promise a better dispersion of risks. Symptomat- ically, in July 2007, even as the first manifestations of the crisis
were appearing, some proclaimed that There [would] be no Big Crash because ‘the finance industry has undergone genuine revolutions since the late
1990s: its resistance against trend turnarounds has improved, reducing systemic risks’.12 The 2007–8 crash saw the adoption of public crisis-
containment policies operating on an unprecedented scale. In the United States, interest rates were reduced to zero and the
budget deficit rose to close to 12 per cent of GDP in 2009. Budgetary and monetary policies in the other developed countries also developed in a similar
direction, although they were generally rather less energetic. Given the extent of the threat posed, other instruments were also mobilised, such as the
recapitalisation and partial or total national- isation of banks and insurance companies, as well as new channels facilitating and expanding the supply of
liquidity across different banks. Monetary policy also ventured into unknown territories: for example, the
quantitative easing first implemented by the Bank of England and the FED led these institutions to buy hundreds of bil- lions of dollars’
worth of government bonds and mortgage products in order to keep overall interest rates at very low levels (see also Chapter
6). These policies may not have brought about any major recovery in the real economy, but they did halt the fall in real-estate prices and allowed a
strong rise in stock prices: in 2013 US equities caught up with their pre-crisis level. Moreover, low interest rates encouraged
investors to purchase riskier securities (like bonds issued by fragile companies, or even the public debt of developing countries)
in order to achieve a return. In short, the policies adopted in response to the crisis certainly did
limit financial losses, but they also contributed to increasing risk-taking, and thus to
heightening the systemic risk, in turn preparing the ground for the next financial catastrophe .
Neoclassical literature has grasped this problem by mobilising the notion of the ‘meta-moral hazard’ 13 or ‘systemic moral hazard’.14 This

generalises the ‘too big to fail’ principle to all the actors involved in the system. In this reading, not
only major institutions but financial actors in general tend to take excessive risks because they
know that the public authorities will intervene to limit their losses. The belief that the public authorities will
take effective action when catastrophes occur is not mutually exclusive with the hypothesis that exaggeratedly optimistic forecasts will lead to an
underestimation of risks.15 Moreover, we do not have to imagine a set of hyper-rational and opportunist economic agents taking advantage of implicit
state guaran- tees in order to understand the cumulative effects when over-optimistic
forecasts combine with the
obligation on the authorities to intervene to avert systemic collapse. This was why Minsky’s contribution
proved fundamental to understanding the properly financial dynamic that led to the crisis of 2007-8. THE INSTRUMENTAL USE OF MINSKY Some of
Minsky’s works proved remarkably prophetic. Such was the case with a 1987 note of his devoted to securitisation. In this text, he showed that this
financial technique ‘implies that there is no limit to bank initiative in creating credit’ and that the forces of financial globalisation could connect with the
forces of the mortgage market.16 Nonetheless, he did not draw from this the full set of conclusions that ought to have led him to revise his theoretical
framework. Indeed, the surge in speculation did not take place where his canonical model supposed it would (that is, in the disproportion- ate
extension of credit to non-financial firms engaging in ultimately unprofitable investments). As we shall see in Chapter 4, the historical sequence in rich
countries was characterised not by booming invest- ment, but, on the contrary, by its decline, except during a short period in the second half of the
1990s which ended with the bursting of the dotcom bubble. Spiralling
indebtedness appeared not in the productive sector but in
households, states, and above all in the financial sector itself. This is a blindspot of Minsky’s analysis, in large part flowing from the
historical context in which it took form. A second problem - perhaps a more serious one, and in any case a more political one — is the use to which
Minsky’s works have been put in handling the crisis.17 To the extent that a financial crisis manifests itself through a drastic reduction in liquidity (that
is, the lack of buyers for financial securities), the only two means of halting the crisis are, on the one hand, exceptional refinancing by the central bank,
or, on the other hand, an increase in the government bonds in circulation (indeed, these can be used as collateral for new loans and thus encour- age a
credit revival). These two mechanisms require that the central bank and the government ‘validate’
the structure of the liabilities gen- erated by financial innovations and boom-era speculation
in order to prevent a depression. While this policy did indirectly contribute to halting the rise
in unemployment, its more immediate effect was to accelerate the rise in inequalities, thanks to
the rebound in stock values and the rise in the salaries and bonuses linked to firms’ now drip-fed profits. Thus, in the United States, the richest 1

per cent hoarded some 95 per cent of profits between 2009 and 2012; in the same period, the incomes of the 99
per cent stagnated (+0.4 per cent) whereas the 1 per cent’s incomes jumped 31.4 per cent.18 Even if Minsky’s
intention was not to defend the enrichment of finance at the expense of the rest of society, he did nonetheless provide it with a comfortable means of
extracting itself from the debacle it had inflicted on itself, without having to take responsibility for it. This helps us understand why financial
commentators were so enthusiastic about his analyses when they needed to justify the exorbitant salvation plans. The crisis
solutions
superficially inspired by Minsky led to the social- isation of the costs of the financial collapse — indeed, on

a scale never previously imagined — without the working classes or the unemployed ever
feeling the supposed benefits of this ‘communism for capital’. We should remember the significant sums involved: between autumn
2008 and the beginning of 2009, the total amount that states and central banks in the advanced countries

committed to supporting the financial sector (through recapitalisation, nationalisation, repurchasing assets, loans,
guarantees, injections of liquidity) has been evaluated at some 50.4 per cent of world GDP !19
 2NC Link/Sustainabiilty—Liberal Peace
The commitment to a liberal international security arrangement relies on
coercive world-ordering and violent intervention. The hegemonic agenda has
failed to prevent coercive conquest and has engendered a proclivity to
continuous war-making. That turns the case—the inevitable consequence of
this American-led order is an unchecked imperialist project.
A contradiction of the liberal world order is between the hypothetical commitment to self-
determination and the strategic need to impose certain values on countries via coercion and
imperial invasion. E.g. the invasion of Iraq was clearly an illiberal violation of Iraqi sovereignty
but it was required by liberal principles in order to introduce democratization/economic
liberalization.

Porter 18—Patrick Porter, professor of international security and strategy at the University of
Birmingham (“A World Imagined: Nostalgia and Liberal Order,” Cato Institute, Policy Analysis No.
843, June 5th, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/world-imagined-nostalgia-
liberal-order#_idTextAnchor005)
The Hard Edge of the Liberal World Order

Lamentations for the end of the liberal order are also heard in the realm of “hard” security.
The U.S. hegemon, nostalgists warn, is losing (or has lost) the political will to underwrite the
international system through a commitment to permanent alliances and to intervene to bring
order out of chaos. Part of the current intellectual confusion flows from the conflation of liberalism,
which is supposedly peaceable, consensual, and benign, with the process of “world ordering.” It is here that defenders

of the old order present their most misleadingly anodyne account of history . A review of the actual
experience of the past 70 years suggests that the process of “world ordering” must at times be coercive . For all the
attractions of American hegemony abroad, there has also been resistance and imposition.

To understand how the superpower met that resistance and imposed itself, we
must go beyond the romanticized postwar
moment of Trumanite internationalism in the late 1940s. Consider both ends of the chronology as it is usually
presented, from 1945 until the recent past. Admirers trace the restructuring of international life in that first

year to the visionary institution building that President Truman oversaw amid World War II, such as
the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco and its main creation, the UN Charter. In this rendering, the founders

conceived the liberal order through a collaborative process of institution building. The narrative is strikingly nonviolent .

In fact , to create the conditions for that visionary world making, the liberal order was conceived in blood . Only months
later, the same U.S. president launched two atomic strikes on Imperial Japan, immolating and
irradiating two of its cities after blockade, firebombing, and starvation had not broken its will. He did so to put down an adversary that
had been brutally pursuing a rival vision for an Asian order of its own. In order to create an order, Washington swept aside a

competitor by introducing a genocidal weapon into the world . There are powerful arguments that this was the
“least bad” choice available.52 Tellingly, though, in panegyrics for a dying liberalism, the words “Hiroshima” and

“Nagasaki” hardly appear.

If there were liberal principles that underpinned the UN as it was founded in 1945, they were at first self-determination and sovereignty rather than
democracy and human rights. The world order was hardly born “liberal” in the sense implied today: recall that two of the permanent five members of
the UN Security Council were totalitarian communist states, and two of the democracies were managing colonial empires that they would not
relinquish for decades. Then and now, modern liberalism is antithetical to the grave exertion of state power still practiced in 58 countries, the death
penalty. To be sure, the
birth of the post-1945 world order did advance some liberal ideas broadly.
The general norm against imperial aggression was one. This , however, was not strong enough to
prevent or dislodge China’s seizure of Tibet, the bids of Turkey and Greece to grab Cyprus, Israel’s
occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, India’s occupation of Kashmir and annexation of Goa,
Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, or indeed the Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Europe.
At the other end of the chronology, the present moment, consider that the U.S. hegemon has been waging
a “war on terror” against Islamist jihadi groups since the 9/11 attacks of 2001. In pursuing the liberal
cause of democratization as an antidote to terror , Washington entered the age of “enhanced
interrogation” and preventive war. Now, with new weapons (drones) at hand, Washington conducts a
sustained campaign of extrajudicial assassinations , often without the consent of host countries and without seeking
formal permission or mandates. It has conducted renditions of suspected terrorists without trial. Reluctant to
deal with live captives in indefinite detention, a more liberal president from 2009 increasingly avoided the dilemma by killing them. Meanwhile,

whatever benefits it has wrought, American

unipolarity was not peaceful or liberalizing for the unipolar
power. The first two decades of the unipolar Pax Americana after 1989, which made up less than 10 percent of
America’s history, generated 25 percent of the nation’s total time at war. That period is more bellicose by an order of
magnitude than the preceding eras of bipolarity and multipolarity, in terms of frequency if not intensity.53
Whether in Iraq and Libya, or now with U.S. assistance to Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate
bombardment of Yemen, this proclivity to continuous war making has not created a “liberal”
condition of peaceful order. At home, there is a continuous state of alarm and vigilance , whereby
“normality” is permanently suspended by an unending state of exception . This, combined with an
encouraged state of paternalism where citizens are encouraged to be passive consumers of events, has helped weaken the checks

and balances of the republican Constitution.54 Detention without trial, secret, warrantless surveillance, unauthorized wars,
torture, covert “black sites” — these are not the obvious features of a robust liberal constitutional order. If large parts of the world

have not accepted liberalism in major areas of civic life, neither has the United States.
Instead of a full reckoning with diplomatic history, nostalgists frame history around the positive creation of new architectures and schemes. Thus the
Marshall Plan (1948-1961) figures centrally in America’s postwar historic mission, based on, as Benn Steil puts it, “the moral primacy of democratic
government and free economic exchange.”55 This
absolute, almost platonic account of the past has little room
for other, less-celebrated events from the same era, such as the British- and U.S.-backed
overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, deposed despite his
commitment to national independence and secular democracy. In this picture, the violence
and compromises of hegemony , moral and strategic, almost vanish.

Nostalgia for the liberal order also overlooks the reality that it was enforced through coercion . In the same era, a
defining episode in the postwar assertion of American hegemony was the Suez crisis of 1956. In that
hinge event of the Anglo-American relationship, the U.S. Sixth Fleet stalked and harassed British ships in the Mediterranean, fouling their radar and
sonar, menacing them with aircraft and lighting them up at night with searchlights.56 With the British pound and oil supplies under pressure, President
Dwight Eisenhower threatened Britain with the simple formula of “no ceasefire: no loans.” Patronage could be rapidly
withdrawn, regardless of recent history, blood ties, or shared visions of Western-enforced
order. The United States enforced its interpretation of that order by targeting its ally’s vitals.57

Between those two moments in time, the United States practiced geopolitics ruthlessly . It partly did so in the course of
its long security competition with the Soviet Union. Strikingly, the Cold War as it was actually conducted and lived — where two superpowers did not
allow rules, sovereignty, multilateralism, and institutions to constrain them when the stakes were high — does not occupy a prominent place in the
mytho-history.Hardly anywhere in nostalgic reminiscences do there appear the numerous coups
that were sponsored or supported by Washington. These interventions linked to the United States since 1945
may or may not have been defensible. They certainly violated one of the claimed core principles of “liberal,”

“rules-based” order, that of self-determination .

The United States not only overthrew governments (sometimes democratically elected ones) — or attempted to — in
Albania, Ghana, Guatemala, Greece, Cuba, Chile, Iran, El Salvador, Nicaragua, South Vietnam, Argentina, and Grenada. It also supported

violently illiberal forces , from Islamist mujahideen in Afghanistan-Pakistan and President Hosni Mubarak’s oppressive state in Egypt to
the Indonesian Suharto regime and its death squads. A mainstay of U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf is its

partnership with Saudi Arabia, an absolutist state that beheads apostates and survives by
making concessions to Wahhabi theocrats. It is currently waging a brutal campaign against
rebels in Yemen that, according to Amnesty International, includes attacks that are “indiscriminate, disproportionate or directed against
civilians and civilian objects, including funeral gatherings, schools, markets, residential areas and civilian boats.”58 NATO allies on the

European continent for decades included authoritarian Portugal and Greece . West Germany, the poster
child of the liberal order, did not have elections during its first four years, and its proud social democracy retained officials who had been security elites
in the Third Reich.59 Former Nazi mandarins stuffed the highest levels of government, including the Foreign Office and the Interior and Justice
Ministries. Several former Nazi generals would later become senior commanders in the Bundeswehr. And in the 1948 Italian elections, the CIA helped
ensure the electoral defeat of communists by funding anti-communist parties, forging documents to discredit the Communist Party, and warning
Italians that if they publicly supported the party they would be barred from entering the United States. For the sake of liberalism in
the long term, the United States exercised its privileges. If the deliberate subversion of a democratic election abroad
with “fake news,” bribes, and coercion represents the antithesis of liberal world order, as Trump’s critics now suggest, then Washington attacked that

order in the period of its creation. Coups, partisan electoral interventions, the cooptation of illiberal
actors, and the flouting of international law made American hegemony unexceptional.

In dismantling the power of old European colonial empires, the

United States erected a form of domination that had
an imperial quality of its own. Consider one of its more ambitious ventures in liberal ordering: the invasion and
remaking of Iraq . The occupiers of Iraq regarded themselves as liberators. After invasion, though, the United States also
projected power over Iraq’s interior governance in imperial fashion and with a liberal
program, with all the tensions this implies. Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer applied a
program of rapid liberalization not only through the well-known de-Ba’athification and disbanding of the Iraqi Army, but
through the order for “the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by
foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits … the opening of Iraq’s
banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and … the elimination of
nearly all trade barriers .”60 The United States continued to impose itself on Iraqi politics when
it wanted, demanding and receiving the resignation of elected prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in May 2007. Intended to implant market
democracy, these measures infringed the country’s sovereign democratic will. In other words, the liberators were freeing the Iraqis to conform with the
occupier’s preferences.

It remains hard to have an empire without imperialism. Yet many

visions of liberal order erase the historical process
of imperialism, decentering, as Jeanne Morefield argues, “ imperial violence while simultaneously positing
the necessity of imperial action .”61 If liberalism at a basic level is an enlightenment project
committed to liberty, equality, and limitations on state power, and if “world ordering”
requires imperialist power projection, it is hard to fuse them without friction . Some may
conclude from this historical record that, in the history of American hegemonic “world ordering,”
liberalism was missing in action. On each occasion, critics have accused the United States of betraying its own liberal traditions in
the pursuit of power. But it
is hard to believe that a republic whose leaders so often and so intensely
enunciate liberal principles is really driven by secret, amoral cynicism . A more troubling
possibility should be considered. Liberalism is a powerful engine of American statecraft, but
that statecraft often violates liberal principles. As a dogma of foreign policy, liberalism is
jealous, intolerant, and messianic . Applied unchecked, it leads to its own illiberal opposite .62 The
practitioners of rough geopolitics were not necessarily hypocrites. They often believed they were serving the ultimate cause of forging a liberal peace
In this way, a
under American oversight but that to do so they had to accommodate illiberal allies and pitilessly destroy liberalism’s enemies.

superpower attempting to create a liberal order permits itself to employ unsentimental

methods.

MARKED

Thus in February 2017, David Petraeus could recall sincerely that “to protect freedom here at home, we adopted a foreign policy that sought to protect
and, where possible, promote freedom abroad, along with human rights and rule of law,” invoking American values such as “political pluralism” and “a
free and open society.”63 Yet as commander in Iraq, Petraeus sought to reverse that country’s implosion and salvage victory by compromising these
standards. To that fight, he brought pragmatic, byzantine divide-and-exploit methods, paying for the defection of former Iraqi insurgents and working
with Shia paramilitary units not known for their commitment to the Hague conventions. As director of the CIA, Petraeus advocated and implemented a
campaign of “signature” drone strikes, whereby the assailant knowingly targets a group gathering — at a funeral for an al Qaeda member, for instance
— because of their suspicious behavior and association, rather than through verified identification of the presence of individual persons. Such strikes,
therefore, can also threaten noncombatants and the innocent.64 To bolster the struggling rebellion in Syria, Petraeus later in 2015 advocated luring
away and recruiting “opportunistic” members of the jihadist Jabhat al-Nusra, then formally affiliated with al Qaeda.65 This is not the place to arbitrate
the wisdom and legitimacy of such measures. Dealing with conflicts in such places is a choice of agonies, and no doubt Petraeus and his peers regard
themselves as guarding Americans while they sleep and trafficking with lesser evils to keep greater ones at bay. But note that a
senior
advocate of liberal order can also advocate measures that risk “crowd killing” and that involve
enlistment of members of jihadi terrorist organizations and collaboration with sectarian
governments. Champions of liberalism must somehow navigate their ideals through the
illiberal demands of warfare.
Nostalgists for the liberal order also betray a shallow conception of their central idea, liberalism. They conflate liberalism with other
desirable phenomena, like capitalism and democracy. They neglect the possibility of illiberal democracy, and illiberal capitalism.
Majority democratic rule does not equate with, or necessarily produce, a liberal protection of individual rights such as the
presumption of innocence or trial by jury, a liberal tolerance for opposition and dissent, or a constitutional order that separates
powers and constrains government through an independent judiciary or a free press. Capitalism can also be illiberal, as the Chinese
Communist Party demonstrates. One of America’s long-term allies, Singapore, evolved as a supervised market democracy that
curtailed the right to dissent. South Korea, an ally and protectorate within America’s Asian system, evolved first as a dictatorship
under authoritarian founding fathers who were also modernizers, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee. These authoritarians
nurtured the chaebol business groups, Hyundai, Daewoo, and Samsung. Free markets took root first as highly protected markets
under unfree political conditions. Such contradictions are absent from liberal-order panegyrics.

As it is recalled, the “liberal order” embodies the permanent commitment of the United States to alliances and institutions without coercion. A broader
historical perspective suggests, however, that Trump’s coercive treatment of allies is less of a break with the past than is often thought. In reality, the
United States has often coerced allies with threats of abandonment and punishment.66 In 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles threatened
Europe with an “agonizing reappraisal” of alliances. In 1973 and 1974, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger
suspended intelligence and nuclear cooperation with Britain to punish noncooperation over a U.S.-initiated declaration of principles and the privacy of
bilateral and UK-European Economic Community discussions. The United States has used the threat of abandonment to persuade allies and clients to
cancel their nuclear programs, including West Germany, Japan, and Taiwan, while threatening adversaries with sanctions or preventive war. The
demand that European allies shoulder more of the burden of military expenditure has been a staple of U.S. diplomacy, from President Eisenhower to
former secretary of defense Robert Gates. Despite Britain spending blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq to support the war on terror and
cement its standing in Washington, President Obama made a blunt threat that departing from the European Union would place the UK at the “back of
the queue” when seeking a bilateral free trade agreement. Assured
commitment to institutions and allies through
only positive solidarity is a false memory. This underlines the pattern whereby Washington
underwrites a liberal world order not by adhering to its principles but by stepping outside
them, practicing punishment, threats, and bribes that it would not accept if directed at itself.
In “liberal order” litanies, another persistent claim is that the order was “ rules-based.” It was
not. Rules exist, and flouting them can have costs. But at critical moments for strong states such as the permanent five
members of the UN Security Council, rules proved to be slippery ; they were invoked, stretched, arbitrarily
altered, or ignored, as interest permitted. The unreality of nostalgic legalism was illustrated in
the summer of 2016 by two adversaries who both at different times have appealed to “rules”
as the arbiter of international order. China defied the unanimous ruling of the Permanent
Court of Arbitration, which found against its territorial claims, and continued to expand into the South China
Sea and seize disputed waters, islands, and shoals. At the same time , the United States appealed to China to
respect the “legally binding” verdict yet had not even ratified the UN Convention on the Law of
the Sea that it urged China to observe. From ignoring the International Court of Justice over the mining of Nicaraguan harbors in 1986 to bombing
Serbia in 1999 without a UN mandate, the United States has infringed on the letter of international law when it has found that other interests or values
were compelling. It exercised a vigilante’s privilege. So too did other major powers. For
less powerful and emerging states, the
writ of liberal order was often remote, as they “routed around” rules to pursue their interests.
In this century, Africa, from the Great Lakes region to the Sudan, has seen millions butchered, displaced, and

unavenged . The era may have involved greater degrees of “rule following” than earlier eras.
But it was not “based” on the observation of rules, at least not for the major powers. To rebrand
this fraught history of power politics as an era of rule-bound civility is perverse. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in calling for the conservation, or

restoration, of an order on the basis that it represents something better. In this case, though, the nostalgia rests on delusion —
about what the world was and what it can be.
 2NC Turns Disease
Root cause, alt solves, aff doesn’t
Phillips 8/13/14 (Leigh, science writer and EU affairs journalist. His writing has appeared in
Nature, the Guardian, Scientific American, the EUobserver and the Daily Telegraph, “The
Political Economy of Ebola”, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/the-political-economy-of-
ebola/)

If, due to its profit-seeking imperative, the pharmaceutical industry is structurally incapable of
producing those products that are required by society, and the public sector (in this case in the
guise of the military) consistently has to fill in the gaps left by this market failure, then this
sector should be nationalized, permitting the revenues from profitable treatments to
subsidize the research, development, and production of unprofitable treatments.

In such a situation, we would no longer have to even argue whether the prevention of malaria,
measles, or polio deserves greater priority; we could target both the big name and neglected
diseases at the same time. There is no guarantee that turning on the tap of public funding will
immediately produce a successful result, but at the moment, private pharmaceutical companies
aren’t even trying.

This is precisely what is meant when socialists talk of capitalism being a fetter on the further
development of the forces of production. Our concern here is not merely that the refusal of Big
Pharma to engage in neglected tropical disease, vaccine, and antibiotic R&D is grotesquely
immoral or unjust, but that the production of a potential cornucopia of new goods and services
that could otherwise benefit our species and expand the realm of human freedom are
blocked due to the free market’s lethargy and paucity of ambition.

Focusing on a vaccine or drugs is critical. But doing so without also paying attention to the
deterioration of public health and general infrastructure across West Africa, and the wider
economic conditions that contribute to the likelihood of outbreaks of zoonotic diseases like
Ebola, is at best using a bucket to empty the water out of a leaky and sinking boat.

Phylogeographer and ecologist Rob Wallace has described well how neoliberal fallout has
established the ideal conditions for the epidemic. Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are some of
the poorest countries on the planet, ranking 178th, 174th, and 177th out of 187 countries in the
UN’s Human Development Index.

Were such an outbreak to occur in northern European countries, for example, nations with
some of the best health infrastructure in the world, the situation would more likely have been
contained.

It is not merely the dearth of field hospitals, lack of appropriate hygiene practices in existing
hospitals, absence of standard isolation units, and limited cadre of highly trained health
professionals that are able to track down every person that may have been exposed and isolate
them. Or that better supportive care is a crucial condition of better outcomes, whatever the
treatment available. The spread of the disease has also been exacerbated by a withering away
of basic governmental structures that would otherwise be able to more broadly restrict
movement, to manage logistical difficulties, and to coordinate with other governments.

Epidemiologist and infectious diseases specialist Daniel Bausch, who worked on research
assignments near the epicenter of the current outbreak, describes in a paper published in July in
the Public Library of Science journal Neglected Tropical Diseases how he “witnessed this ‘de-
development’ firsthand; on every trip back to Guinea, on every long drive from Conakry to the
forest region, the infrastructure seemed to be further deteriorated — the once-paved road was
worse, the public services less, the prices higher, the forest thinner.”

Wallace notes that here, as in many countries, a series of structural adjustment programs have
been encouraged and enforced by Western governments and international financial
institutions that require privatization and contraction of government services, removal of
tariffs while Northern agribusiness remains subsidized, and an orientation toward crops for
export at the expense of food self-sufficiency. All of this drives poverty and hunger, and, in
turn, competition between food and export crops for capital, land, and agricultural inputs
leads to an ever greater consolidation of land ownership, in particular by foreign companies,
that limits access of small farmers to land.

Ebola is a zoonotic disease, meaning a disease spread from animals to humans (or vice versa).
Some 61 percent of human infections throughout history have been zoonotic, from influenza to
cholera to HIV.

The single biggest factor driving growth in new zoonotic pathogens is increased contact
between humans and wildlife, often by the expansion of human activity into wilderness. As
neoliberal structural adjustment forces people off the land but without accompanying urban
employment opportunities, Wallace points out, they plunge “deeper into the forest to expand
the geographic as well as species range of hunted game and to find wood to make charcoal
and deeper into mines to extract minerals, enhancing their risk of exposure to Ebola virus and
other zoonotic pathogens in these remote corners.”

As Bausch puts it: “Biological and ecological factors may drive emergence of the virus from the
forest, but clearly the sociopolitical landscape dictates where it goes from there — an isolated
case or two or a large and sustained outbreak.”

These outcomes are the predictable result of unplanned, haphazard development in areas
known to be the origin of zoonotic spillover, and without the sort of infrastructural support and
egalitarian ethos that permitted, for example, the elimination of malaria from the American
South after World War II by the CDC in one of its earliest missions.

Over these past few months, the worst Ebola outbreak in history has exposed the moral
bankruptcy of our pharmaceutical development model. The fight for public health care in the
United States and the allied fight against healthcare privatization elsewhere in the West has
only ever been half the battle. The goal of such campaigns can only truly be met when a new
campaign is mounted: to rebuild the international pharmaceutical industry as a public sector
service as well as address wider neoliberal policies that indirectly undermine public health.

We could take inspiration from HIV/AIDS activist groups from the late 1980s–early 1990s like
ACT UP and the Treatment Action Group, and, in the 2000s, South Africa’s Treatment Action
Campaign, which combined direct action and civil disobedience against both companies and
politicians with a scientifically rigorous understanding of their condition.

But this time, we need a larger, more comprehensive campaign covering not just one disease,
but the panoply of market failures with respect to vaccine development, the antibiotic
discovery void, neglected tropical diseases, and all neglected diseases of poverty. We need a
science-based treatment activism that has the long-term, ambitious but achievable aim of the
pharmaceutical industry’s democratic conquest.
 2NC AT Green Growth
No green growth—cap causes environmental destruction—dematerialization
wrong.
Næss 16 (Petter, Prof of Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning @ Norwegian U of Life
Sciences, “The Illusion of Green Capitalism,” in Crisis System: A Critical Realist and
Environmental Critique of Economics and the Economy, ed. Petter Næss and Leigh Price, p. 173-
91)

Despite the fact that decoupling has been on the sustainability agenda for nearly thirty years, the attempts to compensate,
through increased eco-efficiency and sub- stitution, for the increased pressure against the environment resulting
from eco- nomic growth have only been able to slow down the environmental degradation. Within most
sectors, and for most impact categories, the annual environmental load is higher today than
thirty years ago, both in total and when measured per capita. The accumulated environmental degradation and
resource depletion, for example in terms of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, extinction of
species, loss of farmland, and exhaustion of finite energy sources and minerals, are far more
exten- sive today than in 1987 when the Brundtland Commission published its sustain- ability report. Admittedly,
rising GDP levels accompanied by reduced emissions have been found for certain pollutants at
a local scale. However, for a number of other types of environmental impacts there is far less
evidence of such decoupling. Minimizing the consequences on one impact category may also
sometimes result in increased environmental load on another impact category. According to
Spangenberg (2001), no indication of an environmental Kuznets curve can be found when using

measures accounting for the total use of energy, materials, and land. During the period 1974–
2013, global CO2 emissions increased steadily along with economic growth, while there was
non-growth or reduction in the emissions in three periods of economic downturn (in the early
1980s, 1992, and 2009). For the first time during the whole forty-year period in which the International Energy Agency has been
collecting data on carbon dioxide emission, 2014 showed no increase in CO2 emissions despite economic growth (IEA. 2015). It
remains to be seen whether the 2014 result, which IEA attributes to greater generation of electricity from renewable sources in
China, and increased energy efficiency and more renewable energy in OECD countries, will continue. Anyway, zero-growth in
CO2 emissions is far from sufficient in a situation where a reduction of 90 percent or more
within the next fifty years is called for in order to avoid "dangerous climate change.” Moreover, without the 3
percent global growth in 2014, the emissions would probably have decreased instead of remaining constant, as they did in 2009
when the global economy also had a downturn due to the financial crisis. In a somewhat older study, Azomahou and Van Phu (2001)
investigated economic
growth and CO2 emissions in one hundred countries during the period
1960-1996. Using non-parametric regressions, they found a correlation between economic
growth and increased CO2 emissions among poor countries, middle-income countries, and
wealthy countries. Within all three groups of countries, the CO2 emissions tend to increase
with higher gross domestic products. To the extent that correlations between affluence levels and
emissions of some pollutants (notably NO2, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide) consistent
with the EKC hypothesis have been found, this may in part be due to the limitation of many such
studies to a confined geographical scale (e.g. cities). According to Stem (2004), the total pollution
emissions tend to rise with increasing income rather than follow an inverted U-shaped Curve.
Pollution concentrations may still follow the tune predicted by the EKC hypothesis due to urban and industrial
decentralization, taller smoke stacks, and so forth. Moreover, reduced emission levels in
wealthy countries may be a result of outsourcing polluting industries to third world countries ,
Another case in point is the fact that the emission reductions obtained for impact categories where some
evidence for the EKC hypothesis can be found are invariantly resulting from strong governmental
regulations. While the EKC hypothesis is often used in the environmental debate to create an
image of a “self-regulatory” market economy, the empirical examples referred to in
supporting this hypothesis were dependent on precisely the type of regulations that are usually
fiercely opposed by its proponents. The fact that dematerialization to a degree sufficient to counterweight the impacts
of economic growth has not taken place until now does not in itself rule out the possibility of a stronger and more successful
dematerialization in the future. The prospects for this still do not seem very promising in the light of the nearly forty-five years that
have passed since the publication of the Limits to Growth report, and the nearly thirty years since the publication of the Brundtland
report. Decoupling growth from environmental degradation has been on the agenda during the very same period when only partial
or local evidence of the EKC hypothesis has been found. Moreover, many of the lowest-hanging fruits have
probably been picked in this period. Improving eco-efficiency further will often require
technologically more challenging and socially more controversial measures. This may be the reason
why some more recent studies indicate that in the longer term, the Environmental Kuznets
Curve tends to be N-shaped instead of following the originally hypothesized inverted U
shape. This suggests that pollution increases as a poor country becomes industrialized, decreases
once a threshold affluence level is reached, and then begins increasing again as national
income continues to increase. In much of the debate about economic growth and decoupling, there has been a
tendency to focus solely on emissions of various pollutants (and in recent years a rather one-sided
concentration on CO2 emissions only), whereas negative environmental impacts resulting from land take

and land fragmentation have tended to be overlooked. The prospects for decoupling growth
from the latter kinds of impacts may be even less bright. This is particularly the case for the direct
impacts on biodiversity, natural areas, food-production, soil, and landscape qualities from converting
undeveloped land into building sites or technical infra- structure such as roads and power plants. The few studies carried out on
loss of biodiversity suggest that further economic growth in an already wealthy country or region is
accompanied by higher biodiversity losses (Mills and Waite, 2009-; Tevie et al., 2011). Theoretically, it is possible to
imagine a “Factor 4" or “Factor 10" reduction of the land use per produced unit by building more densely and higher, as well as
placing most of the buildings in areas that are already technically affected, such as traffic areas and derelict industrial
estates/brownfields. However, unless the new buildings or infrastructure replace existing, less environmentally favorable parts of
the built environment, construction of new, eco-efficient buildings or infrastructure will at best be ecologically friendly in a relative
sense, i.e. compared with environmentally more straining solutions (Xue, 2014; see also Chapter 8). In the USA, farmland is
reduced ten times faster than the influx of new cultivated land, and in China the reduction of
farmland is 30-40 times faster than the supply of new soil for food production (Steigan, 201 1).
Phosphorus is another natural resource of key importance to food production. According to Cordell
et al. (2009), the peak of phosphorus production may be reached already within 30-40 years, and
the known sources of phosphorus may be exhausted within 50-100 years. Some of the raw
materials used in renewable energy production, such as lithium, are also becoming
increasingly scarce (Defra and BIS, 2012). Along with a number of other so-called rare minerals
(including beryllium, cobalt, and tantalum) used in computers, mobile phones, aircrafts, communication
satellites, and rechargeable batteries, lithium is on the “critical list" identified by a panel of sixty-nine
executives of key global companies in seven different industries (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2011). Limits to
decoupling What would be required to obtain a decoupling between economic growth and negative environmental impacts strong
enough to avoid continual environmental degradation? First, the decoupling would need to be absolute, not
only relative (i.e. compared with current practice). The correlation between economic growth and
environmental impacts would have to be zero or negative — it would not be sufficient that
the correlation remained positive but weaker than before. Second, the absolute decoupling would
need to apply to all types of environmental impacts , not only a few selected ones. Decoupling thus
would have to encompass not only greenhouse gases and pollutants such as sulfur dioxide,
nitrogen oxides, and soot, but also impacts such as loss of species, encroachments on
ecosystems, deforestation, loss of soil for food production, and shrinking drinking water
resources. Third, and importantly, for several categories of impacts, non-growth of impacts would not
be sufficient. This applies, among others, to greenhouse gas emissions, where present annual
emissions are way above what would be an environmentally sustainable level. Fourth,
institutional frameworks and mechanisms would have to be in place to secure that technical
possibilities for decoupling were actually implemented — not only in isolated pilot projects or
by particularly motivated actors, but everywhere . Different categories of environmental impacts may be of
different importance for human life and health. Some environmental qualities (such as water) are crucial, whereas others may be
important to people’s quality of life but not imperative for human survival. Some economists have differentiated between “critical
natural capital" and “substitutable natural capital,” where the latter category refers to amenities that may be important to many
people’s quality of life but still not necessities for survival, and hence negotiable against “human-made capital.” According to this
view, loss of a forest for outdoor recreation could be outweighed by economic gains enabling nearby residents to purchase, for
example, new and more advanced smartphones and iPads. Whether or not such a forest should actually be protected would then be
a question of willingness-to-pay. All of nature’s diversity and richness is thus considered reducible to one category, namely money.
However, apart from the severe validity problems of willingness-to-pay investigations (see Chapter
4), the differentiation between “critical” and “substitutable" nature capital is based on at entirely anthropocentric view according to
which nature has no value beyond what is useful, enjoyable, or interesting for humans. If we consider (as I do) that nature has value
apart from this, and that we have moral responsibilities for other parts of nature than just our own species (Vetlesen, 2011), the
idea that ecosystems, bio- diversity, and species are substitutable with an increased supply of
commodities and services becomes highly problematic. Limits to eco-efficiency increase As mentioned above,
technical possibilities for more eco-efficient production and consumption would not be
sufficient - institutional frameworks securing their implementation would also need to exist.
However, such institutional frameworks (for example, legislation, regulations, taxation, and subsidies) for changing the qual- ity of
growth are largely absent today. In addition, private enterprises, as well as many politicians, have been strong opponents of the
introduction of such institu- tional arrangements. More fundamentally, even if institutional frameworks
were eventually established, serious doubt may be raised against the possibility of making
continuing economic growth environmentally sustainable. In its physical dimension, the
economy is an open subsystem of the earth system, which is finite, non-growing, and
materially closed (with the exception of the influx of solar energy and occasional solid parti- cles, such as meteorites). As
the economic subsystem grows, it incorporates an ever greater proportion of the total
ecosystem into itself and must reach a limit toward 100 percent, if not before (Daly, 1993).
Institutional arrangements that may change the quality of growth are thus only able to
postpone the encounter of ecological limits to economic growth; they cannot enable
humanity to trespass such limits . The so-called cradle-to-cradle strategy has received considerable attention dur- ing
recent years as a technological pathway to allow environmentally benign eco- nomic growth (McDonough and Braungart, 2002).
Based on a consistent recycling of waste and large-scale transition toward renewable energy
supply, a future society is envisaged where the same resources are used again and again, the energy is supplied from
environmentally friendly and renewable sources, and the buildings, instead of being dependent on energy supply from elsewhere,
are producing their own renew- able energy, and are even able to export a surplus of energy via “smart grid” electri- city networks.
Some even envisage roads where solar cells produce energy not only for maintenance but also for the propulsion of the vehicles
driving on the roads. rendering traffic growth unproblematic from a climate perspective (FEHRL, 2015). However, even if it
were possible to meet the energy demand in buildings and for transportation without negative impacts (which would probably
not be the case since, for example, the production of photovoltaic cells and cables depends on scarce minerals, and entails
considerable pollution during the production process), the increasing consumption of materials associated
with continual growth would hardly be environmentally neutral . With steadily rising numbers of products,
buildings, and infrastructure, the Circulation rate must also increase continually to secure sufficient
input of recycled resources for the growing economy. In practice, this implies that the products,
buildings, and infrastructures tying up resources must be taken out of use with a shorter interval each

time . In a recycling-based growth economy, innovation will therefore have to address the question of how the life- time of
recycling is not environmentally neutral;
products and built environments can be reduced (Hoyer, 1997). However,
it ties up and consumes energy and mater- ial resources, and even more so if the circulation
rate is increased. Moreover, many materials begin to fail after a couple of recycling cycles and
have to be put to dif- ferent, less quality-demanding use, or become waste. In a growth-
oriented economy, the lower flows of energy and other resources made possible by higher
efficiency tend to be rebound because of the quest of the economy for higher flows. Such
rebound effects also include increased environmen tal loads from other activities made
possible as a result of reducing an environment tally harmful activity (Norgaard, 2008). As long as
purchasing power remains the same or increases, resource efficiency improvement resulting in money saving is like squeezing the
balloon. Avoiding such effects seem impossible unless the purchas ing power decreases . Needless to
say, this poses a huge challenge to the dematerialization strategy: unless you manage to

dematerialize all products, services, and activities of society simultaneously, reduced

consumption within one field is likely to be compensated by increased consumption in
another field. In a situation with economic growth, the metaphoric balloon is on top of that, pumped up with more and more
gas.
 2NC AT Environment Resilient
Biome-level decline makes the planet uninhabitable – functional and
phylogenetic diversity is the foundation of all planetary biogeochemical
processes
AT Kareiva – misses the point; it’s not about individual species extinctions but about a biome’s
ability to maintain the breadth of phylogenetic diversity for other ecological processes – like
P/N cycling, clean water cycling, integrity of atmospheric composition, and sustenance of fish
and higher trophic levels

Mace et al 14 – Georgina M. Mace, Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems at University

College London, PhD on the evolutionary ecology of small mammals in 1979 from the University
of Sussex, Belinda Reyers, Rob Alkemade, Reinette Biggs, F. Stuart Chapin III, Sarah E. Cornell,
Sandra Díaz, Simon Jennings, Paul Leadley, Peter J. Mumby, Andy Purvis, Robert J. Scholes,
Alistair W.R. Seddon, Martin Solan, Will Steffen, Guy Woodward (“Approaches to defining a
planetary boundary for biodiversity,” Global Environmental Change, September 2014, pp. 289-
297, Available to Subscribing Institutions through ScienceDirect)

Instead of asking about the consequences of progressive biodiversity loss, we now consider the
large-scale biodiversity-mediated responses in Earth systems that affect the planet's
suitability for complex human societies. For example, the biosphere drives global
biogeochemistry, which in turn governs atmospheric composition, soil fertility and ocean
productivity. The loss or degradation of entire biomes (e.g., coral reefs), or of the biodiversity
components associated with large-scale ecological processes (e.g. predation, nutrient cycling)
would have substantial impacts on regional and distant social and ecological systems
(Barnosky et al., 2012 and Leadley et al., 2010). Changes in these biospheric processes could be
large enough to compromise the Earth's ability to sustain human societies as we know them,
and offer a potentially simpler route to developing a boundary. For example, Running (2012)
proposes the use of NPP for a global boundary, which would reflect changes to the fundamental
biosphere processes of production and nutrient cycling. Here we develop a similar logic for
subsets of the biosphere.

Biomes are global-scale systems, such as tundra, coral reefs or tropical grasslands and
savannas, distinguished from one another by the collections of ecosystems and species
assemblages found there. There are several classifications, but one widely used scheme
recognises 14 terrestrial, seven freshwater and five marine biomes (Olson and Dinerstein, 2002).
A biome-based approach to planetary boundaries rests on the notion that biomes embed
functional diversity and some aspects of phylogenetic diversity and are therefore, at least to a
degree, biophysically coherent sub-units of the whole Earth. They could connect meaningfully
to other planetary boundaries. Changes in the condition and spatial extent of biomes may be
appropriate for a planetary boundary because the consequences of biome-level changes on
ecosystem processes, services, and human well-being are relatively well understood (Heyder
et al., 2011), as are impacts on species and ecological communities within them (Alkemade et
al., 2009 and Kennedy et al., 2013). For example, shifts of tropical forest to savanna or pastures,
if they occur at sufficiently large scales, can affect regional rainfall patterns and global-scale
carbon storage (Davidson et al., 2012) and radically alter the diversity of particular functional
groups and species (Gibson et al., 2011).

A general indicator of biome-level change could be identified by defining a control variable that
determines the integrity and functioning of specific biomes at broad scales. For example, the
marine carbonate budget controls the persistence of coral reefs, precipitation levels determine
the existence of dryland–rainforest systems, nitrogen deposition controls the existence of some
forests, and carbon dioxide concentrations can control the existence of grasslands with a C4
photosynthetic pathway.

Using this approach would require biophysical control variables to be identified for each biome
and then for them all to be aggregated to the global-level. Box 1 describes the general approach
and presents a worked example for coral reef integrity. Multiple control variables need to be
identified; ideally one per biome. Given the striking differences among biomes, such as arctic
tundra and coral reefs, a single control variable would not apply meaningfully to all, but one
control variable could assess the security of biome function on a per-biome basis. Sub-global
patterns within a biome, such as those due to biogeographical differences, could be accounted
for by scaling the control variable to levels expected for each province. In certain cases, control
and response variables could also be identified in long-term (i.e. palaeoecological,
palaeolimnological) datasets to provide insights into a biome's functioning over the Holocene.
Biome security could then be aggregated to a global-scale to encompass the functioning of all
major biomes (Fig. 2). More sophisticated means of scaling up might first disaggregate scores
within each biome into categories of degradation (highly degraded, partly degraded, etc.).
Global aggregation might then include the distribution of the Earth's surface that falls within a
particular category overall (e.g., percentage of Earth biomes categorised as highly degraded).

Box 1.

Biome integrity as a boundary

One approach is to set biodiversity boundaries that maintain the functioning of the Earth's
major biomes (rainforest, savannah, coral reefs, etc.; see main text). Biomes provide a wealth
of regulating ecosystem services that maintain Earth system processes, including the cycling
of fresh water and carbon. We suggest that secure functioning of biomes would support Earth
system function

MARKED

in a Holocene-like state, largely by maintaining the structure and functional diversity of

ecosystems.

A biome is considered functionally secure if it can maintain its key structures and functions in
the long term (e.g. to at least 2100, but given the Holocene focus of the boundaries concept,
potentially for millennia). Clearly, an important consideration is the selection of appropriate
response and control variables for each biome. The control variable (or set of variables) pertains
to the functioning of the system. It should be measurable, ideally have a biotic basis and fulfil
the rationale, ‘if control variable X exceeds (or is below) threshold A, then the biome is intact
and functioning’. The threshold might be based on levels observed in relatively pristine
environments, or might be defined with respect to some key attribute (e.g. permafrost in the
tundra, or stability in coral reefs). The response variable represents the security of functioning
with respect to changes in the control variable. In some cases this might be the long-term
probability of staying within the critical threshold of the control variable given the present value
of a control variable.

An example based on coral reefs

This approach is particularly relevant for biomes that experience significant long-term impacts
from slow drivers such as subsidence or climate change. Carbonate budgets in coral reefs are an
example of a biome-level control variable with thresholds which, if crossed, result in the loss
of that biome (Kennedy et al., 2013). The carbonate budget reflects whether the processes that
construct a reef habitat, such as the calcification of living corals, outweigh those that erode the
habitat, such as the boring action of sponges. If a reef's carbonate budget remains negative then
the reef eventually erodes away causing a direct loss of calcifying taxa, an indirect loss of
biodiversity associated with reef habitat, and a decline in ecosystem functions, such as fisheries
productivity. Thus, a single metric, the carbonate budget (kg CaCO3 m−2 y−1) serves as a proxy
for the maintenance of biodiversity and much of the function of an entire ecosystem. Carbonate
budgets are measurable in the field (Perry et al., 2013) and can be linked to both climate change
and local management measures (Kennedy et al., 2013). Thus for coral reefs, the balance
between growth and dissolution of the calcium carbonate skeletons of the reef-building
organisms is an example of a biome-level control variable with thresholds that, if persistently
crossed, result in the degradation and eventual loss of that biome. In this example, the
threshold level of control variable might be, say, a carbonate budget of 1 kg m−2 y−1. However,
with rising sea temperature and increased ocean acidification, a reef attaining this threshold
today might fail to maintain that threshold in the long term. In this case, a higher threshold
might be needed today in order to sustain ecosystem function in to the next century (e.g., 3 kg
m−2 y−1). The response variable might therefore be calculated as the probability of achieving a
carbonate budget of ≥1 kg m−2 y−1 in the year 2100.

While data currently do not exist to populate this boundary across biomes, a simulation of
future carbonate budgets of Caribbean reefs under various scenarios of local management
action, major changes in biodiversity (recovery of keystone species), and greenhouse gas
emissions (Kennedy et al., 2013) shows that recovery of key species (from region-wide
epizootics) while important, had to be complemented by low emissions scenarios (RCP2.6 from
IPCC AR5) and local management of pollution and fishing. This example highlights the potential
implementation of such a biome boundary, as well as the importance of boundary interactions
in determining a safe operating space.
The advantage of this approach is that it is a system-based approach, fully consistent with the
planetary boundaries concept, with clear relevance for environmental stability in terms of
maintaining a safe operating space of the Earth system. It provides a sub-global scale that is
meaningful in terms of human pressures, biophysical responses and the consequences for
people, and would appropriately include loss of species richness or extinction rates as a
response variable, rather than as a driver as currently formulated. This deals with one potential
disadvantage to this approach (that it might miss the variability component of biodiversity at
species and organism levels). However the link to management interventions and decision-
support at the local scale, could be relatively weak.

While genetic and functional diversity metrics and their thresholds appear not to function or
scale up as global biodiversity boundaries, the possibility of a biosphere integrity boundary at
biome scales appears a promising avenue for determining human wellbeing at global and sub-
global scales. Furthermore there is plenty of evidence that the state of the biosphere is critical
for the safe operating space conceptualised by Rockstrom et al. (2009b) through mechanistic
interactions with the other eight planetary boundaries.

4. The biodiversity boundary and other planetary boundaries

The biodiversity boundary interacts with all other boundaries and could be framed explicitly as a
response variable to changes in other boundaries (e.g. ocean acidification), or as a control
variable for others (e.g. climate change). Fig. 3 presents a schematic of the magnitude of the
effect of a given change in biodiversity state from its current position, on the position of the
other planetary boundaries in relation to the state of their indicator variables. A positive
feedback exists with most interactions between boundary types. As biodiversity loss moves
closer to its own boundary it reduces the condition of others, moving them closer to their
own boundaries with feedbacks onto biodiversity (see Fig. 3 for details). This self-amplifying
perturbation will push the coupled system at an accelerating rate into a new state (thus
constituting a potential tipping point) if the feedback is both positive and strong.

Fig. 3 shows that the net effects from all the interactions involving biodiversity are weakly
positive. Biodiversity has no known threshold close to its current state, but does have a positive
feedback on itself due to the interdependencies between species. For instance, a trophic
cascade may cause loss of species at one trophic level (or functional group) to result in a
further loss at other trophic levels (or functional groups). The effects of biodiversity loss have a
weakly aggravating effect on the proximity of all other boundaries to their thresholds (mostly
because the loss of biodiversity-based adaptive capacity brings those boundaries closer).
Conversely, the effects of exceeding the ocean acidification, land use, climate change,
nutrients and water boundaries have large impacts on biodiversity since they are primary
drivers of biodiversity change. However, to the best of our knowledge, exceeding any of these
boundaries does not trigger a biodiversity feedback strong enough to precipitate a threshold
crossing, or an accelerating cascade in biodiversity loss, although such scenarios can be
envisaged (Barnosky et al., 2012).
On the other hand, biome-level biodiversity changes can have major feedbacks to climate
change, water cycles and nutrient cycles. For example, ongoing regime shifts in Arctic tundra
biomes will likely result in biodiversity-mediated feedbacks to the climate system through
massive releases of greenhouse gases and changes in albedo (Leadley et al., 2010 and Myers-
Smith et al., 2011); degradation of tropical forest biomes can alter precipitation patterns and
river flow at sub-global scales (Davidson et al., 2012); and biome degradation often alters the
capacity of ecosystems to retain N and P (Clow et al., 2011). While some of these biome-level
biodiversity changes are driven by and therefore confounded with land use conversion to
croplands (land use boundary), they are also being driven by other anthropogenic impacts on
biomes, including climate change, use of fire, and logging, that are not included in the land use
boundary (Anderegg et al., 2013, Davidson et al., 2012 and Leadley et al., 2010).

The biodiversity boundary may be most significant through its interactions with other
planetary boundaries when viewed at the biome level. There are perhaps additional significant
connections between biodiversity change at biome levels and other planetary boundaries, and
we recommend developing this understanding further as these interactions may suggest more
urgent and important boundaries and may prove more useful for policy interventions than
biodiversity alone.
Circumvention
 1NR Sanctions Shift
Trump is using tariffs instead of sanctions—the plan causes a shift to financial
warfare
Wadhams 18 (Nick, 8/13/18, foreign policy export and reporter " Trump Wields a Tariffs-and-
Sanctions Hammer in Risky Strategy" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-
13/trump-wields-a-tariffs-and-sanctions-hammer-in-risky-strategy)

Donald Trump isn’t the first American president to rely on economic sanctions and tariffs to
exert U.S. power, but he’s taking that approach to new heights against allies and adversaries
from Turkey to North Korea.

With an unexpected tweet on Friday morning, Trump

announced that he was employing tariffs -- normally
used to address trade disputes -- to pressure Turkey over its continued detention of an American pastor held
since 2016. Turkish markets, already in a tailspin over President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s economic policies, tumbled further with
Trump’s decision to double steel and aluminum tariffs.

The move against Turkey follows Trump’s “ maximum pressure” campaign on North Korea, fresh
penalties against Russia and his plan to reimpose a raft of sanctions against Iran and anyone who does business with it -- including
U.S. allies in Europe.

The result is an administration wielding a tariffs-and-sanctions hammer more liberally and

with less regard for the consequences than its predecessors. Analysts say the White House strategy reflects a
fundamental belief in using American economic might to force others to change their behavior, an approach that will test past
findings that sanctions often fail absent broad global support.

"They are explicitly using tariffs as a sanction ,” said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at the Center on
Global Energy Policy and the author of a new book on sanctions. “All these years, we separated the two. Tariffs
were for unfair trading practices, and sanctions were for foreign policy problems. The
president via tweet said, to heck with it, we’re going to use tariffs for foreign policy
problems.”

U.S. administrations have increasingly relied on sanctions since the 1990s to prod countries over
everything from human rights violations to sponsoring terrorism, and their use swelled under President Barack Obama. But
Trump increasingly relies on them in almost every foreign policy challenge he faces , and some
analysts say he isn’t backing up the penalties with a deft diplomatic approach.

“This administration has continued to be strong and nuanced in its application of sanctions,” said David Mortlock, a former director
of international economic affairs on Obama’s National Security Council. “What’s different is the use of sanctions as the only tool
without a broad diplomatic push.”

Yet the administration -- particularly Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner -- have credited their “maximum pressure” campaign
aimed at North Korea’s economy for bringing Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table and believe that in a case such as Iran the same
can be done to compel its rivals to make a deal.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, rejected that view in a tweet on Aug. 11, saying “The
US has to
rehabilitate its addiction to sanctions & bullying or entire world will unite—beyond verbal
condemnations—to force it to.” Referring to Trump’s “shameful” new tariffs on Turkey, Zarif said, “We’ve stood with
neighbors before, and will again now.”
Trump uses sanctions and tariffs interchangeably, he'll just sanction countries if
he can't levy tarrifs
Wadhams 18 (Nick, 8/13/18, foreign policy export and reporter " Trump Wields a Tariffs-and-
Sanctions Hammer in Risky Strategy" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-
13/trump-wields-a-tariffs-and-sanctions-hammer-in-risky-strategy)

Donald Trump isn’t the first American president to rely on economic sanctions and tariffs to
exert U.S. power, but he’s taking that approach to new heights against allies and adversaries
from Turkey to North Korea.

With an unexpected tweet on Friday morning, Trump announced that he was employing tariffs
-- normally used to address trade disputes -- to pressure Turkey over its continued detention of
an American pastor held since 2016. Turkish markets, already in a tailspin over President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan’s economic policies, tumbled further with Trump’s decision to double steel and
aluminum tariffs.

The move against Turkey follows Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign on North Korea,
fresh penalties against Russia and his plan to reimpose a raft of sanctions against Iran and
anyone who does business with it -- including U.S. allies in Europe.

The result is an administration wielding a tariffs-and-sanctions hammer more liberally and

with less regard for the consequences than its predecessors. Analysts say the White House
strategy reflects a fundamental belief in using American economic might to force others to
change their behavior, an approach that will test past findings that sanctions often fail absent
broad global support.

"They are explicitly using tariffs as a sanction,” said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar
at the Center on Global Energy Policy and the author of a new book on sanctions. “All these
years, we separated the two. Tariffs were for unfair trading practices, and sanctions were for
foreign policy problems. The president via tweet said, to heck with it, we’re going to use
tariffs for foreign policy problems.”
U.S. administrations have increasingly relied on sanctions since the 1990s to prod countries
over everything from human rights violations to sponsoring terrorism, and their use swelled
under President Barack Obama. But Trump increasingly relies on them in almost every foreign
policy challenge he faces, and some analysts say he isn’t backing up the penalties with a deft
diplomatic approach.

“This administration has continued to be strong and nuanced in its application of sanctions,”
said David Mortlock, a former director of international economic affairs on Obama’s National
Security Council. “What’s different is the use of sanctions as the only tool without a broad
diplomatic push.”

Yet the administration -- particularly Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner -- have credited
their “maximum pressure” campaign aimed at North Korea’s economy for bringing Kim Jong Un
to the negotiating table and believe that in a case such as Iran the same can be done to compel
its rivals to make a deal.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, rejected that view in a tweet on Aug. 11, saying
“The US has to rehabilitate its addiction to sanctions & bullying or entire world will unite—
beyond verbal condemnations—to force it to.” Referring to Trump’s “shameful” new tariffs on
Turkey, Zarif said, “We’ve stood with neighbors before, and will again now.”
 Plan Vagueness Link
Plan vagueness renders it unenforceable and easy to circumvent
Posner and Vermeule 10—Eric A. Posner, author Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law,
University of Chicago Law School, Chicago, IL Adrian Vermeule, author John H. Watson, Jr.
Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, The Executive Unbound: After the
Madisonian Republic

the aura of independence fades quickly when one considers the board’s powers and
However this may be,
the actual conduct of its members. The board is authorized to “review[] the exercise of [the secretary’s powers],” to ensure
that the secretary is carrying out the purposes and policies of the statute, to recommend action to the secretary, and to send reports
to appropriate congressional committees. 76 These provisions are another exercise in “studied ambiguity .” 77
Their scope and force is vague , the crux of the ambiguity being whether the board has power to actually countermand
the secretary’s purchasing decisions and other orders, or whether its power to “review” simply amounts to a power to find out what
the secretary is up to and transmit information to Congress. The high-minded interpretation is that Congress
declined to give the board clearly controlling authority because of lurking constitutional questions
about whether the powers of a “core” executive agency like the Treasury could be subjected to independent control, even under the
Court’s latitudinarian precedents. The low-minded interpretation is that legislators benefited politically by creating
an oversight mechanism whose atmospherics suggest independent supervision of the secretary’s
massive new powers, but whose operational reality is far less impressive . “‘[The board is] sort of a joke in terms
of oversight,’ a congressional aide said.” 78
 AT Fiat Solves circumvention
That best for research—aff should write clear, specific policy not susceptible to
loopholes.
Most real world—presidents have violated explicit laws at key moments in
American history
Posner and Vermeule 10 Eric A. Posner, author Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law,
University of Chicago Law School, Chicago, IL Adrian Vermeule, author John H. Watson, Jr.
Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, The Executive Unbound: After the
Madisonian Republic

A corollary is that the executive’s power can sometimes be exercised in defiance or violation of
statutes, even where they arguably or indeed clearly prohibit what the executive has done, so
long as the executive can block retaliation by other branches after the fact. When President
Clinton violated the War Powers Resolution in Kosovo, the military action created new facts in
the world to which Congress and other actors had to adjust, regardless of the legal niceties.
This is an old theme in American politics—when Lincoln exceeded his legal powers at the
beginning of the Civil War, (p.12) Congress had little choice but to ratify the fait accompli—but
in the administrative state, the president’s power to affect the world in this way, whatever the
law books might say, has grown enormously.
KORUS
 Disease
Natural pandemics don’t cause extinction
Sandberg 6/11/14 (Anders, James Martin Research Fellow at University of Oxford, “The five
biggest threats to human existence”,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/06/11/the-five-biggest-threats-to-
human-existence/)

Natural pandemics have killed more people than wars. However, natural pandemics are
unlikely to be existential threats: There are usually people resistant to the pathogen, and the
offspring of survivors would be more resistant. Evolution also does not favor parasites that
wipe out their hosts, which is why syphilis went from a virulent killer to a chronic disease as it
spread in Europe.
 A/C

Pharma won’t invest in solving their impacts

Sample 1/23/13 (Ian, Guardian Science Correspondent, Sally Davies is Britain's most senior
medical adviser, “Antibiotic-resistant diseases pose 'apocalyptic' threat, top expert says”,
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jan/23/antibiotic-resistant-diseases-apocalyptic-
threat)

"In the past, most people haven't worried because we've always had new antibiotics to turn to,"
said Alan Johnson, consultant clinical scientist at the Health Protection Agency. "What has
changed is that the development pipeline is running dry. We don't have new antibiotics that
we can rely on in the immediate future or in the longer term."

Changes in modern medicine have exacerbated the problem by making patients more
susceptible to infections. For example, cancer treatments weaken the immune system, and
the use of catheters increases the chances of bugs entering the bloodstream.

"We are becoming increasingly reliant on antibiotics in a whole range of areas of medicine. If we
don't have new antibiotics to deal with the problems of resistance we see, we are going to be in
serious trouble," Johnson added.

The supply of new antibiotics has dried up for several reasons, but a major one is that drugs
companies see greater profits in medicines that treat chronic conditions, such as heart
disease, which patients must take for years or even decades. "There is a broken market model
for making new antibiotics," Davies told the MPs.

Global inequality blocks drug access

Reich March 2000 (Michael, Harvard School of Public Health, “The Global Drug Gap”)
The 20th century created a multinational pharmaceutical industry with an extraordinary
research and development (R&D) capacity to produce new drugs for many health conditions.
But this R&D system remains focused primarily on the health issues of the world’s affluent
countries. The system depends on, for its financing, deriving large profits from the most
successful products, which leads to high prices for these products and global inequities in
access and health status. Recently, there has been increasing mobilization around the idea of
a right to essential and new drugs and growing resistance to the notion that intellectual
property rights should trump other policy considerations.

The global drug gap between rich and poor countries arises from multiple market and
government failures as well as from huge income differences. Consequently, multiple policies
are required to address this inequity. These efforts need to combine “push” approaches of
financial subsidies to support targeted drug development, “pull” approaches of financial
incentives such as market guarantees, and “process” approaches aimed at improved
institutional capacity. Distinct policy mechanisms must address three categories: essential drugs,
new drugs, and yet to-be-developed drugs.

The concept of essential drugs, as unanimously endorsed by the World Health Assembly (1, 2),
consists of “those that satisfy the health care needs of the majority of the population and should
therefore be available at all times in adequate amounts and in appropriate dosage forms” (1).
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one-third of the world’s population does
not have access to essential drugs (this estimate has remained unchanged since the mid-1980s)
 Food – Don’t Solve
Climate change and food for fuel are giant alt causes—they provide a
protein source but can’t correct structural shortages
FAO 2008 (Food and Agriculture Organization, yes, that one, “How to Feed the World in
2050”,
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/expert_paper/How_to_Feed_the_Worl
d_in_2050.pdf)

Climate change and increased biofuel production represent major risks for long-
term food security. Although countries in the Southern hemisphere are not the main
originators of climate change, they may suffer the greatest share of damage in the form
of declining yields and greater frequency of extreme weather events. Studies estimate
that the aggregate negative impact of climate change on African agricultural output up to
2080-2100 could be between 15 and 30 percent. Agriculture will have to adapt to climate
change, but it can also help mitigate the effects of climate change, and useful synergies exist
between adaptation and mitigation. Biofuel production based on agricultural
commodities increased more than threefold from 2000 to 2008,. In 2007-08 total
usage of coarse grains for the production of ethanol reached 110 million tonnes, about 10
percent of global production. Increased use of food crops for biofuel production could have
serious implications for food security. A recent study estimates that continued rapid
expansion of biofuel production up to 2050 would lead to the number of
undernourished pre-school children in Africa and South Asia being 3 and 1.7 million
higher than would have been otherwise the case. Therefore, policies promoting the
use of food- based biofuels need to be reconsidered with the aim of reducing the
competition between food and fuel for scarce resources.

Double bind – either no food scarcity, or there are tons of alt causes
Adeline 13 – food preservation specialist (02/17, “Food Storage: The Solution to Food
Shortage,” http://beforeitsnews.com/survival/2013/02/food-storage-the-solution-to-food-
shortage-2462712.html)

We humans need food for proper nutrition. In times of crisis, access to a stable food supply
is the key to continued survival. In the presence of natural disasters, human conflicts,
climate change, and overpopulation, the threat of food shortages and total famine is
not as far-fetched as it seems. Preparing long-term food supplies can buffer the effects of
these potential catastrophes. The Anatomy of a Catastrophe Many people think that food
shortages may be a thing of the past. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology and
scientific farming methods, we have a constant and abundant supply of food. It is
difficult to imagine how a food shortage can happen – but it is still a possibility. During
ancient times, humans hunted and gathered for food. Then a revolution occurred and
changed the course of history: we learned how to cultivate the soil, plant crops, and
domesticate animals for a stable source of food. Eventually, modern technology has
improved farming and fishing techniques, that food production has now become large-
scale. People now depend on hard-working farmers and fishermen for their everyday
supply of food. But what happens when the harvests are poor? The farmer will keep his
produce to feed his own family first – other people are left without food. Such scenario is
still possible today because there are man-made disasters and natural calamities that
threaten the world’s food supply. For example, a hurricane rages across the country and
floods several states. Our access to food is restricted because travel is nearly impossible. To
add to that, business establishments like groceries and supermarkets are probably closed
down due to the flood as well as a power outage. Some might argue that this is not a real
food shortage scenario because the problem is merely logistics: there is food; it is just that
we have no access to it. It is true that natural calamities and wars cause a food shortage only
temporarily. However, recent studies show that at present, we consume more than we
produce. The UN warns that grain reserves are progressively getting lower because of
droughts and crop failures in major food producing countries. The famine in Africa may
possibly be felt in other parts of the world. This is an emergency situation that requires
us to prepare beforehand. We must have a supply of food and water for us to survive.
North Korea
 1NR AT Miscalc
War with North Korea is exceptionally unlikely, but a permanent crisis
without escalation is likely inevitable.
Tonnesson 17—Stein Tonnesson, research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo
(“Why a war with North Korea is unlikely,” Al Jazeera, August 12th,
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/08/war-north-korea-
170811130544750.html)

The recent flurry of threats between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump has caused much
consternation. Threats can indeed be dangerous but only when they are followed up by hostile action.
The latest important developments in this crisis have been North Korea's July 4 and July 28 tests of long-range missiles that may be
able to reach the American continent, and the UN Security Council's unanimous decision on August 5 to impose new harsh sanctions
on North Korea. These sanctions may cause much hardship for the North Korean population, and if China and Russia implement
them loyally, they may also harm the ruling class in Pyongyang.

I see three scenarios for how the Korean crisis can develop in the next year: War, permanent crisis
or a negotiated deal. The first is least likely, the second very likely, and the third more likely
than war.

Why is war unlikely?

No one wants war . It would spell the end of the Kim dynasty (Kim Il-sung 1912–94; Kim Jong-il 1941–2011;
Kim Jong-un 1984- ), and could cause a tremendous disaster in South Korea, maybe also in Japan - if
North Korea were able and willing to launch a nuclear attack on its former colonial master.

the US would also be harmed in this scenario. If it decides to launch a military

Although not directly,
attack against North Korea, then this could cause an uproar in South Korea, causing the US to
lose its Korean ally.

Moreover, the White House and the Pentagon are no doubt aware that the
North Korean regime is not a ripe fruit
ready to fall, as it relies on a disciplined army and population. The power of the Kim dynasty is
based on fear, faith and pride. People live in constant fear of the government. Yet many combine their fear with faith in
the "great leader". North Koreans are immensely proud of their nation and its history. Together these three factors provide for a
high level of discipline. Although North Korea's main weapons and command centres might be quickly destroyed through US
precision-bombing, North
Korea's command structure would most likely function in the opening
phase of a war, thus allowing Kim to launch massive artillery and missile attacks against the South
Korean capital Seoul, with its more than ten million inhabitants.

Why is war still possible? The risk of war increases if Kim decides to launch new missile or nuclear tests and Trump then decides to
send aircraft carriers, submarines and troops to the Korean peninsula in an attempt to force Kim to the negotiating table. Either side
might then convince itself that the other is about to attack, and conclude that a pre-emptive strike is necessary. Both sides know
how advantageous it will be to strike first.

Will the crisis just continue?

A permanent crisis is likely , since the US and North Korean objectives are incompatible. Kim
doggedly pursues his aim to have the same capacity as Russia and China to strike the American
continent. This would deter US attacks against his country. A succession of US presidents have seen this as totally
unacceptable. Trump has said "it will not happen". The US has made it a precondition for negotiating with North Korea that it totally
give up its nuclear weapons. This makes it all but impossible to reach a negotiated deal between the two sides.
The North Korean nuclear crisis has already lasted for a long time . Trump is trying to overcome George W
Bush and Barack Obama's "strategic patience" by forcing North Korea with Chinese help to give up its nuclear weapons. Kim,
however, defies Chinese advice and Beijing does not want to provoke a total crisis with the country it
helped to save in the Korean War.

The most likely scenario is therefore permanent crisis . The current situation is particularly
difficult for Kim Jong-un, since Russia and China have decided to join the US in applying sanctions.
Their reasons, however, have much to do with a need to avoid too much US hostility against themselves. If the relationship between
the US and Russia/China worsens, if the US becomes preoccupied with a crisis somewhere else, or if the internal political crisis in
Washington prevents Trump from pursuing US foreign policy goals, then the pressure on North Korea will lessen.

Historical record proves – there will be no escalation to nuclear war.

Jackson and Suh ’15 [Van Jackson is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for a New American
Security, a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, and Hannah Suh is Program
Coordinator for the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security,
The National Interest, The Biggest Myth about North Korea, July 9, 2015,
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-biggest-myth-about-north-korea-13290]
A million lives and a trillion dollars. Experts in the 1990s predicted that the costs of war with North Korea would reach at least this magnitude. While
this is probably true of a worst-case scenario, and estimates would doubtless be even higher today, pundits and officials alike have allowed it to cloud
A strawman argument has taken hold that any actions against North
reasoned judgment about North Korea.

Korea will lead to cataclysmic death and destruction.

This is wrong. Alliance military actions against North Korea will not automatically trigger a
nuclear holocaust or the annihilation of Seoul. Fear, risk aversion and a misunderstanding of North Korea have allowed the
most dangerous scenario to be conflated with the most likely one. Rather than being paralyzed by the fact that anything is possible, alliance policy and
military planning needs to recognize a simple reality: no matter what North Korea threatens, it will assiduously seek to avoid war-triggering actions.

North Korea’s own historical behavior and its widely presumed goal of regime survival
confirms as much.

It isn’t hard to find pundits who would have us believe North Korea is prepared to immolate
the Korean Peninsula in a blaze of glory at the first hint of conflict. One argument goes that offensive military
action “likely would trigger a war which would devastate South Korea.” Another offers that even an “extremely limited” preemptive strike “…risks
sparking a major military conflict…that might have devastating consequences for the [United States], Korea, and beyond...” Still others argue that
there’s nothing the United States or South Korea can do because North Korean artillery aimed at Seoul prevents even minor military actions, implying
that any attacks on North Korea will trigger the worst scenario imaginable. One analyst even pointedly remarks that using force against North Korea
would be worse than allowing its nuclear program to expand.

Nor is this illogic limited to pundits; successive U.S. administrations have fallen prey to the same fear-based, rather than logic-based, thinking. During
the George W. Bush administration, the prevailing view “…was that if any kind of military strike starts against North Korea, the North Koreans would
invade…and they will cause enormous destruction of Seoul.” And former secretary of defense Robert Gates wrote in his memoir of the Obama
administration’s hyperventilating pleas with the highest levels of the South Korean government not to retaliate against North Korea for its November
2010 artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island.

Widespread fear of a North Korean total war is a pathology based on an imaginary North
Korea. No matter one’s political leanings, right and left alike agree that North Korea’s primary goal is regime survival,
meaning that North Korea will not only take actions to safeguard its regime, but also avoid
taking actions that put its survival at risk.

This bears out in sixty years of observing North Korean behavior—even during the so-called
“second Korean war” of the late 1960s, North Korea never escalated beyond isolated military
attacks. Today, North Korea threatens South Korean NGOs that send propaganda balloons into its territory, yet fires at the balloons and not
the people launching them. In repeated naval clashes with South Korea in the Yellow Sea, North Korea strikes
some blows and suffers others, but it never escalates beyond the local clash. North Korea has
had countless opportunities to escalate or broaden conflicts in a crisis, yet has consistently
chosen restraint. Whatever North Korea’s rhetoric and motivations for violence, its track
record shows a preference for not taking actions that would jeopardize the regime, and the
North Korean escalation that everyone fears would do precisely that.

Even if North Korea responded with violence when attacked or retaliated against, there is a massive
difference between responding with limited or tit-for-tat violence (its historical modus
operandi) and responding with the most devastatingly lethal response it can come up with, like a nuclear first-strike or
artillery barrages against Seoul. The latter are regime-ending actions, while the former may
demonstrate resolve against the alliance and allow both sides a chance to sue for peace.
To be clear, we’re not saying conflict with North Korea is impossible. On the contrary, North Korean military adventurism may become more likely as it
feels its expanding nuclear and missile capability affords it greater protections from retaliation. But such conflicts won’t escalate to an all-out war, even
if the alliance responds to North Korean violence with a limited counteroffensive. We are also not calling for preventive strikes on North Korean nuclear
facilities at this time. A disarming first-strike against North Korea requires answering many questions. How confident are we of destroying 100 percent
of the targets? How far would a first-strike set back North Korea’s nuclear capabilities? How can we disabuse North Korea of the perception that the
alliance is pursuing regime change (the one scenario that would trigger devastating North Korean retaliation)?

But we are arguing that it’s a mistake for alliance policy and military plans to be made on the assumption that any preventive or retaliatory strike
inevitably escalates to total war and regime change. Not only is that contrary to North Korea’s own primary goal, it’s the kind of thing that paralyzes the
alliance when faced with North Korean aggression.

Just because something is possible, doesn’t make it probable. As a matter of historical

observation—not rational assumption—North Korea’s primary goal is regime survival, and its foreign
policy is bounded by a logic of consequences. If we accept those two propositions, then we must plan and formulate policy
not on the assumption that North Korea will escalate in response to any offensive or counteroffensive alliance action, but rather with the expectation
that North Korea will seek to keep any military friction limited for the sake of regime survival.
Middle Power
 1NR AT DPT
Democratic peace theory is fundamentally flawed + Imposition is newer, veiled
imperialism.
Rosato 3 (Sebastian, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame,
12-29-2003, "The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory," American Political Science Review,
Cambridge Core)//mbawmb

FLAWS IN THE NORMATIVE LOGIC

The causal mechanisms that comprise the normative logic do not appear to operate as
stipulated. The available evidence suggests that, contrary to the claims of democratic peace theorists,
democracies do not reliably externalize their domestic norms of conflict resolution, nor do
they generally treat each other with trust and respect when their interests clash. Moreover, existing
attempts to repair the logic are unconvincing. Norm Externalization The historical record indicates that democracies have
often failed to adopt their internal norms of conflict resolution in an international context. This
claim rests, first, on determining what democratic norms say about the international use of force and, second, on establishing
whether democracies have generally adhered to these prescriptions. Liberal democratic norms narrowly circumscribe the range of
situations in which democracies can justify the use of force. As Doyle (1997, 25) notes, “Liberal wars
are only fought for
popular, liberal purposes.”This does not mean that they will go to war less often than other
kinds of states; it only means that there are fewer reasons available to them for waging war. Democracies are certainly
justified in fighting wars of self-defense. Locke ([1690] 1988), for example, argues that states, like men in the state of nature, have a
right to destroy those who violate their rights to life, liberty, and property (269–72). There is considerable disagreement among
liberal theorists regarding precisely what kinds of action constitute self-defense, but repulsing an invasion, preempting an impending
military attack, and fighting in the face of unreasonable demands all plausibly fall under this heading. Waging war when the other
party has not engaged in threatening behavior does not. In short, democracies should only go to war when “their safety and security
are seriously endangered by the expansionist policies of outlaw states” (Rawls 1999, 90–91). Another justification
for the
use of force is intervention in the affairs of other states or peoples, either to prevent blatant
human rights violations or to bring about conditions in which liberal values can take root. For Rawls
(1999, 81), as for many liberals, human rights violators are “to be condemned and in grave cases may be subjected to forceful
sanctions and even to intervention” (see also Doyle 1997, 31–32, and Owen 1997, 34–35). Mill ([1859] (1984)) extendsthe
scope of intervention, arguing that “barbarous” nations can be conquered to civilize them for
their own benefit (see also Mehta 1990). However, if external rule does not ensure freedom and equality, it will be as illiberal
as the system it seeks to replace. Consequently, intervention can only be justified if it is likely to “promote the development of
conditions in which appropriate principles of justice can be satisfied” (Beitz 1979, 90). The
imperialism of Europe’s great
powers between 1815 and 1975 provides good evidence that liberal democracies have often
waged war for reasons other than self-defense and the inculcation of liberal values. Although there
were only a handful of liberal democracies in the international system during this period, they were involved in 66 of the 108 wars
listed in the Correlates of War (COW) dataset of extrasystemic wars (Singer and Small 1994). Of these 66 wars, 33
were
“imperial,” fought against previously independent peoples, and 33 were “colonial,” waged
against existing colonies. It is hard to justify the “imperial” wars in terms of self-defense. Several
cases are clear-cut: The democracy faced no immediate threat and conquered simply for profit or to
expand its sphere of influence. A second set of cases includes wars waged as a result of imperial competition: Liberal
democracies conquered non-European peoples in order to create buffer states against other
empires or to establish control over them before another imperial power could move in.