Resolved: North Korea poses a more serious threat to US national security than Iran

As I am not familiar with the rules of policy, I can't say whether the rules are similar. This debate is structured to be two speeches, each followed by a crossfire (where we ask each other questions to try to prove each other wrong). -------------------------------------------------------------------- My first speech begins here. Two nations, one in East Asia and one in West Asia, are allegedly developing nuclear weapons. The US government is panicking. The purpose of this debate is to decide which country's nuclear program is more cause for panic. I negate the resolution on the grounds that neither is a threat to US national security, and that even if they were a threat, that Iran would be a greater threat than North Korea. I define national security as the condition of the nation in terms of threats (especially from outside), as defined by historycentral. com. Contention 1: Neither Iran nor North Korea is a threat to the US itself. They are a threat to certain US allies. My first point is that neither Iran nor North Korea will attack the United States, or support people that will attack the United States. Iran does train terrorist groups, but according to CSIS, Iran trains terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Two dangerous terrorist groups. .. for Israel. Iran poses no threat to the US because it makes one important exclusion from its training camps: al Qaeda. Iran is Shiite, while al Qaeda is Sunni. These two branches of Islam have a history of killing each other, which means they will never work together against the US. North Korea has ballistic missiles and bio weapons, but they are also not a threat to the US. Why? Remember when Teddy Roosevelt imperialized Latin America to keep the European powers out (source is American Pageant)? The same concept can be applied to this situation. In the Age of Imperialism, the last thing the US wanted was to have an aggressive world power like Germany in Latin America. Today, the last thing China wants is to have an aggressive superpower like the US fighting a war on its doorstep, which would happen if North Korea attacked the United States. Thus China would do everything in its power to keep North Korea from engaging in fights, and with a combination of peer pressure and a "big stick" (quoted from TR), they should be quite effective at it. Contention 2: Iran's intentions are more dangerous than North Korea's According to the Jerusalem Post, Iran plans to attack oil fields in other Arab nations, in effect working to control the oil market. This is bad for the United States since Iran already hates us and the rest of the West for our sanctions and support for Israel. Iran will probably raise prices high enough to hurt the US economy as part of their vengeance. North Korea, on the other hand, doesn't have control of the oil market or vengeance against the US in mind. All they care about is reuniting Korea under Communism (which doesn't threaten US national security). We can all agree that people who have non-threatening intentions are less threatening than people with threatening intentions, all other things being equal.