The United States has a moral obligation to mitigate international conflicts

== Burden of proof == Pro defines an “international conflict” as “a conflict between two or more nations,” and Pro defines “obligation” as “something that you must do.” Therefore, the resolution requires Pro to defend that the United States must intervene in every conflict that occurs between two or more nations. If Con proves that the US should not intervene in every conflict between two or more nations, Con wins. == Con case == (1) Cost A. Nation building Whenever the US intervenes militarily, we always get stuck nation-building because of the Colin Powell Pottery Barn rule – “you break it, you buy it.” For example, after our “peace-keeping operation” in Kosovo, the US spent $80 billion nation-building there. [1] We never manage to get out of these operations scot-free because once we “win” and are left with a worn-torn country with no infrastructure, we are forced to build democratic institutions, roads, power plants, schools, courts, and a police force. The expensive part of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was not ousting the hostile regimes (i.e. the Taliban and Saddam Houssein); rather, the main cost came afterwards – from the nation-building. In Iraq, in particular, our intervention caused a violent civil war to spring up between the Sunni’s and Shi’ite’s. So there are always collateral consequences to intervening. B. Opportunity cost The United States has $17 trillion in debt and our unplanned military expenditures have greatly contributed to putting the United States on the path to bankruptcy. At the end of the day, the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost us $4 trillion. [2] Because of this, Andrew Bacevich says that the US can’t keep being the world’s peacekeeper and treating an act of war in any part of the world as tantamount to a direct attack on US soil. [3] According to Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment, since the Cold War ended, the US has had “an average of one significant new military action every sixteen months.” This cannot continue because it is not sustainable. Christopher Preble points out that we could build 171 schools for the price of one B-2 bomber and that every bomb dropped is a theft from those within the United States that hunger and are not fed. [5] It makes little sense to be paying billions of dollars to build schools in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq when we “can’t afford” to build more schools in the United States. (2) Interventions undermine our national security A. Limited resources The US military developed a test of our military capabilities called the two-MRC test, which stands for the ability to engage in two Major Regional Conflicts simultaneously. [6] While the US had such a capability during the height of World War II (when we fought Japan and Germany simultaneously), our military is too small today to meet the two-MRC test. [6] The result is that a conflict in one area eliminates our ability to engage in a conflict in another area. We saw this when the Iraq War started and diverted most of our resources away from Afghanistan, which led to our failure to sustain major victories there against the Taliban, resulting in a long drawn out war that lasted much longer than the one in Iraq. Therefore, if we intervene in a conflict between two other nations, we lose the ability to project power in other regions of the world and the ability to defend our own nation. There are some indications that China’s increased belligerence over the last decade is due, in part, to a loss of American power projection capabilities in the region because so many of our forces were tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan. Therefore, this turns my opponent’s national security argument against him in two ways: (1) when the US engages its military to stop an international conflict, it makes international conflicts *more likely* somewhere else in the globe because the US erodes its deterrent capabilities and its ability to project power, and (2) when the US intervenes, it makes the homeland more vulnerable because it overstretches our military capabilities and garrisons our troops far from where they would be needed in the case of an attack. As Professor Andrew Bacevich has explained, national security requires adopting “a strategy that accepts war as a last resort and not a policy option of first choice. [Because] the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have [demonstrated] the [finiteness] of military power, it would suit America’s interests to reorient its military towards homeland defense.” [7] B. Intervention breeds resentment The primary reason that Osama bin Laden issued his Declaration of Jihad Against Americans in 1996 was due to the American occupation of Kuwait after the US had defeat Saddam Hussein (the first time). [8] In general, when we have a large force presence, we are viewed as occupiers and eventually despised by the local population. Intervention really does show the dilemma that you either “die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.” In Afghanistan, we were initially welcomed as heroes and liberators, but when we failed to provide quick and tangible progress, we were soon treated as villains, particularly in rural southern Afghanistan where we focused very little “nation-building” initially (and which has an uncomfortable relationship with Karzai, who is seen as an American puppet dictator). Thus, interventions cause backlash against the US and stoke terrorist sentiment. (3) Regional actors should intervene instead As Professor Paul Collier explains, the cost to neighboring countries when their neighbors go to war can be catastrophic (for example because conflict always sparks a refugee crisis). [9] Collier explains that when there was a violent conflict in the DRC, “several of the neighbors got involved: indeed, three of them, Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola, sent their troops into the country. The neighborhood dimension of security could scarcely be more geographically illustrated.” [9] In fact, the African Union has formed its own peacekeeping forces to police regional conflicts locally, and they have been quite successful in the past. The US is not the only nation in the world that can do peacekeeping. == Rebuttal to my opponent’s previous round == R1) My opponent argues that Social Contract Theory obligates our government to engage in national defense Yes, national defense – not international defense. Professor John Mearsheimer writes in “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics” that the State has an obligation to protect its own citizens, not the citizens of other countries. He explains that the primary purpose of the nation-state is to secure the survival of its own citizens. My opponent fails to explain how a regional conflict between two African countries would put Americans at risk and why we would therefore be obligated to intervene in such a conflict. R2) My opponent provides three examples of supposedly good interventions in international conflicts. (A) WWI My opponent does not explain how our intervention this war upheld our national security. In addition, US intervention was rather limited, and our military forces were not critical to the outcome of this war. (B) WWII The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor precisely because we meddled in an international conflict and instituted an embargo against them due to their invasion of China. The Pearl Harbor attacks illustrate my point that intervening causing backlash against the United States. Many people would argue that WWII is the exception to non-intervention that proves the rule. Our key Allies were involved in that war, so it made sense to intervene. Rebuilding industrialized countries after the war was relatively easy. In contrast, interventions today are mostly going to be in impoverished developing countries. Nation-building in the UK and Germany is very different from nation-building in Somalia, Kosovo, and Iraq. (C) The First Gulf War Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institute has noted that the invasion of Iraq was what convinced the Iranian government that no country was safe from a US invasion and that it should seek a nuclear deterrent against the United States. Thus, the collateral fallout from the First Gulf War is a nuclear armed Iran. In addition, our own failures in the First Gulf War led to the second invasion of Iraq, which proves my point that military intervention is a never-ending process. We cannot afford the collateral spillover effects, the resentment, and the extreme costs that constant military intervention entails. Global Response Even if my opponent proved that these were three good examples of our intervention, it was our choice to intervene because these interventions supposedly served our self-interest: WWI and WWII because they involved important strategic allies and enemy countries that may have eventually posed a threat to the homeland and the Gulf War because Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait threatened to disrupt our supply of oil. These were strategic choices motivated by self-interest, not obligations motivated by some sense of moral high-handedness. A Con vote would preserve the ability to make strategic choices about when intervention is in our best interest, whereas a Pro vote obligates us to intervene in every instance. [1] http://www.wilsoncenter.org... [2] http://www.washingtonpost.com... [3] Mises Daily: Thursday, May 14, 2009 by David Gordon, Book review: End of American Exceptionalism. [4] Robert Kagan, 2008, The Return of History and The End of Dreams, page 50 [5] Christopher A Preble, 2009, The Power Problem, page 76 [6] http://www.heritage.org... [7] http://smallwarsjournal.com... [8] http://salempress.com... [9] Paul Collier, 2009, Wars, Guns, and Votes, page 222.