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NATO Cyber Rapid Reaction teams are already equipped to conduct defensive cyber operations in support of member states if called upon. A mandate of cyber defence and security implies, however, that NATO also starts to engage in active military measures to deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive, or destroy an adversary’s offensive cyber capabilities. This requires the development of not only offensive cyber A2/AD capabilities by Allies, but also the restructuring of the NATO command structures, policies, processes (procurement, intelligence, operations, etc.) and engagements needed to integrate them by the Alliance. NATO coordination with both national and regional entities charged with cyber security aspects will, in particular, need to be enhanced. Many agreements already exist in the realm of defensive cyber at national and regional levels (as seen with the 2016 NATO-EU Technical Arrangement on Cyber Defence), but political consensus among Allies is missing on whether they should be expanded to incorporate the collective use of offensive cyber A2/AD capabilities.

Ion A. Iftimie 20, Eisenhower PhD Candidate Fellow, NATO Defense College, and Senior Advisor, European Union Research Center, George Washington University School of Business, “NATO’s needed offensive cyber capabilities”, NDC Policy Brief, No. 10, May 2020, http://www.ndc.nato.int/news/news.php?icode=1441

NATO Cyber Rapid Reaction teams are already equipped to conduct defensive cyber operations if called upon. A mandate of cyber defence and security implies, however, that NATO also starts to engage in active military measures to deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive, or destroy an adversary’s offensive cyber capabilities. This requires the development of not only offensive cyber A2/AD capabilities by Allies, but also the restructuring of the NATO command structures, policies, processes (procurement, intelligence, operations, etc.) and engagements needed to integrate them by the Alliance. NATO coordination will need to be enhanced. Many agreements already exist but political consensus among Allies is missing on whether they should be expanded to incorporate the collective use of offensive cyber A2/AD capabilities.

Limiting Article 5 in response to cyberattacks prevents NATO from successfully executing collective OCOs---

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

Speaking at the Cyber Defence Pledge Conference in London in May 2019, NATO Secretary General highlighted that for deterrence to have full effect against state and non-state adversaries, NATO and its member states must be ready to use the full range of capabilities at their disposal, to include national offensive cyber capabilities. Deterrence is the act of diminishing an adversary’s intent by highlighting the excessive costs for the said adversary if it proceeds with an undesired action. In NATO’s case, deterrence is achieved by highlighting to an adversary the excessive costs delivered through military means in the event of an attack against Allies. For deterrence to be successful, the adversary must believe that NATO is ready and willing to impose these excessive costs across all operational domains, to include the cyber domain. This may call for Allies to develop offensive cyber capabilities and integrate them with NATO operations in order to collectively impose a high enough cost to deter adversaries from aggressive behaviour. To avoid escalation to total war and cyber fratricide during the fog of war, Allies must also agree on a list of Flexible Deterrent Options meant to allow for a gradual increase of pressure in the cyber domain, and then hopefully limiting the scope and intensity of conflict in this domain. NATO Flexible Deterrent Options in the cyber domain could include (as presented in Figure 1):

Ion A. Iftimie 20, Eisenhower PhD Candidate Fellow, NATO Defense College, and Senior Advisor, European Union Research Center, George Washington University School of Business, “NATO’s needed offensive cyber capabilities”, NDC Policy Brief, No. 10, May 2020, http://www.ndc.nato.int/news/news.php?icode=1441

for deterrence to have full effect against state and non-state adversaries, NATO and its member states must be ready to use the full range of capabilities at their disposal, to include national offensive cyber capabilities In NATO’s case, deterrence is achieved by highlighting to an adversary the excessive costs delivered through military means in the event of an attack against Allies. For deterrence to be successful, the adversary must believe that NATO is ready and willing to impose these excessive costs across all operational domains, to include the cyber domain. This may call for Allies to develop offensive cyber capabilities and integrate them with NATO operations in order to collectively impose a high enough cost to deter adversaries from aggressive behaviour. To avoid escalation to total war and cyber fratricide during the fog of war, Allies must also agree on a list of Flexible Deterrent Options NATO Flexible Deterrent Options in the cyber domain could include

3) Signal of deterrence—access to a full range of capabilities across all operational domains is key

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

More than a week into war and Russia has yet to unleash a paralyzing, large-scale computer network attack on Ukraine. U.S. banks are bracing for retaliatory cyberstrikes that have yet to materialize. Even Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, continues to post videos.

Peter Ramjug 22, Journalist at Northeastern University, "Russia Hasn’t Launched a Massive Cyberattack on Ukraine Yet. Why Not?,” Northeastern University, 3/7/22, https://news.northeastern.edu/2022/03/07/ukraine-russia-cyberattack/

Russia has yet to unleash a paralyzing, large-scale computer network attack on Ukraine. U.S. banks are bracing for cyberstrikes that have yet to materialize

It's effectively deterring major cyberattacks now, but the plan derails it

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Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

For all their power and results, however, cyberspace operations are not silver bullets, and to be most effective, they require much planning and preparation. Cyber Command thus works closely with other combatant commands to integrate the planning of kinetic and nonkinetic effects. Cyber Command’s capabilities are meant to complement, not replace, other military capabilities, as well as the tools of diplomacy, sanctions, and law enforcement. And they are often used in cooperation with foreign military partners, who bring different skills and techniques to the table. The West’s united front against the Soviet Union kept the Cold War cold; likewise, today, the United States and its allies are building unity of purpose to promote respect for widely held international norms in cyberspace.

Paul M. Nakasone 20, Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, Director of the National Security Agency, and Chief of the Central Security Service, Michael Sulmeyer, Senior Adviser to the Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, 8/25/20, "How to Compete in Cyberspace: Cyber Command's New Approach", Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-08-25/cybersecurity

For all their power and results, however, cyberspace operations are not silver bullets, and to be most effective, they require much planning and preparation. Cyber Command works closely with other combatant commands to integrate the planning of kinetic and nonkinetic effects. Cyber Command’s capabilities are meant to complement, not replace, other military capabilities, as well as the tools of diplomacy, sanctions, and law enforcement. in cooperation with foreign military partners, who bring different skills and techniques to the table. The West’s united front against the Soviet Union kept the Cold War cold; likewise, today, the United States and its allies are building unity of purpose to promote respect for widely held international norms in cyberspace.

Collective action is key to OCO success

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

MR. CARLIN: And I don’t want to underestimate that it’s important to have a declaratory policy. But I would firmly agree with Jim. We had one. We declared it. We’ve declared it now multiple times in the context of specific actions, and then not acted. And that has a – the inverse effect of encouraging future action. So I think less time right now on figuring out the exact words of a go-forward declaratory policy, and more focus on putting points on the board and executing a response to the actions that have already taken place in violation of numerous statements from two administrations that really agreed on very little – very little else.

John Carlin 18, former assistant attorney general for the National Security Division at the Justice Department where he did lead the investigation on the Sony attack, currently chairs Morrison And Foerster’s global risk and crisis management team, interviewed by James A. Lewis, Director and Senior Fellow, Strategic Technologies Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 3/19/18, "Responding to Russia: Deterring Russian Cyber and Grey Zone Activities", CSIS, https://www.csis.org/analysis/responding-russia-deterring-russian-cyber-and-grey-zone-activities

a declaratory policy We had one. We declared it. We’ve declared it now multiple times in the context of specific actions, and then not acted that has the inverse effect of encouraging future action less time right now on figuring out the exact words of a go-forward declaratory policy, and more focus on putting points on the board and executing a response to the actions that have already taken place in violation of numerous statements from two administrations

OCOs are better than declaratory policies at incentivizing build-up of resiliency

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

This doctrine of persistent engagement reflects the fact that one-off cyber operations are unlikely to defeat adversaries. Instead, U.S. forces must compete with adversaries on a recurring basis, making it far more difficult for them to advance their goals over time. For example, publicly releasing adversary malware obtained during hunt forward missions to the cybersecurity community makes that malware less effective because defenses can be tuned to detect and defeat it. Additionally, cyber effects operations allow Cyber Command to disrupt and degrade the capabilities our adversaries use to conduct attacks.

Paul M. Nakasone 20, Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, Director of the National Security Agency, and Chief of the Central Security Service, Michael Sulmeyer, Senior Adviser to the Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, 8/25/20, "How to Compete in Cyberspace: Cyber Command's New Approach", Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-08-25/cybersecurity

persistent engagement reflects the fact that one-off cyber operations are unlikely to defeat adversaries. U.S. forces must compete with adversaries on a recurring basis, making it far more difficult for them to advance their goals over time. publicly releasing adversary malware obtained during hunt forward missions to the cybersecurity community makes that malware less effective because defenses can be tuned to detect and defeat it. cyber effects operations allow Cyber Command to disrupt and degrade the capabilities our adversaries use to conduct attacks.

The best defense is a good offense

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

MR. LEWIS: No, I think you need to split it into two parts. And so on the resilience side, I’m a little gloomier, in that I don’t – ten years is probably an optimistic estimate. So I do think – so I used to make fun of deterrence, and I still do at some levels, but I think you have to convince potential attackers – and we have four – that the risk of doing something to U.S. critical infrastructure is outweighed by the cost. And that’s part of what we’re talking about today, is how do we identify costs that could apply to people?

Jim Miller et al 18, president of Adaptive Strategies, member of the Defense Science Board at the Atlantic Council, previously co-chaired the Task Force of Cyber Deterrence, being interviewed by James A. Lewis, Director and Senior Fellow, Strategic Technologies Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 3/19/18, "Responding to Russia: Deterring Russian Cyber and Grey Zone Activities", CSIS, https://www.csis.org/analysis/responding-russia-deterring-russian-cyber-and-grey-zone-activities

on the resilience side ten years is probably an optimistic estimate deterrence have to convince potential attackers that the risk of doing something to U.S. critical infrastructure is outweighed by the cost

Resiliency takes too long

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

Adopting a policy of genuine transparency would have a much-needed stabilising effect by limiting the threat of inadvertent escalation or loss of escalation control. Such a policy should feature multilevel discussions, with varying levels of confidentiality, about strategic cyber capabilities and their command and control, alongside ongoing international discussions on norms of restraint.54 The obvious benefits of this approach explain why the United States’ closest allies and partners have almost unanimously advocated for it. Any covert cyber activities that impair these discussions, rather than advancing them, should remain just that – covert. Otherwise, mixing signals in the cyber domain is a recipe for serious adverse effects that threaten to undermine the security not just of the United States, but of all liberal democracies and of the internet itself.

Alexander Klimburg 20, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, 2/4/20, "Mixed Signals: A Flawed Approach to Cyber Deterrence", Survival, Global Politics and Strategy, Volume 62, Issue 1, https://www.hcss.nl/news/mixed-signals-flawed-approach-cyber-deterrence

Adopting a policy of genuine transparency would have a much-needed stabilising effect by limiting the threat of inadvertent escalation or loss of escalation control. Such a policy should feature multilevel discussions, about strategic cyber capabilities and their command and control, alongside ongoing international discussions on norms of restraint. The obvious benefits of this approach explain why the United States’ closest allies and partners have almost unanimously advocated for it. Any covert cyber activities that impair these discussions mixing signals in the cyber domain is a recipe for serious adverse effects that threaten to undermine the security not just of the United States, but of all liberal democracies and of the internet itself.

Causes mixed signals which escalate conflict

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

In a world of rapid socio-technical transformation and increasing fragmentation of political power and authority, cyber security has firmly established itself as one of the top national security issues of the 21st century. Managing cyber insecurities will most likely further increase in complexity and political significance in the next decade, co-produced by an acceleration of the ongoing socio-technical transformations, on the one hand, and the changing dynamics of the related political responses, on the other. The first part of the book recorded the ongoing geographic expansion of cyberspace into outer space, anticipated how emerging technologies will increase the interconnectedness of infrastructures and services, and projected how in a context of ever tighter coupled and integrated socio-technical systems cyber threat narratives will inevitably expand to more policy fields at both the national and international levels. The second part of the book discussed how in cyberspace state actors need to find the right balance between restraint and exploitation, why they need to uphold their efforts to control the risk of escalation, and why governments increasingly share responsibility with actors from economy and society.

Andreas Wenger & Myriam Dunn Cavelty 22, Wenger is professor of international and Swiss security policy at ETH Zurich and director of the Center for Security Studies (CSS), Switzerland; Cavelty is deputy head of research and teaching at the Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich, Switzerland, “Conclusion,” Cyber Security Politics, 1st ed., Routledge, 01/18/2022, pp. 239–266 DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.4324/9781003110224-18

In a world of rapid socio-technical transformation and increasing fragmentation of political power and authority, cyber security has firmly established itself as one of the top national security issues Managing cyber insecurities will likely further increase complexity and political significance in the next decade

High level cyber operations are empirically denied---ample past predictions have never come to pass

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

Similarly, the popular idea that opponents use cyber techniques to inflict cumulative economic harm is not supported by evidence. Economic warfare has always been part of conflict, but there are no examples of a country seeking to imperceptibly harm the economy of an opponent. The United States engaged in economic warfare during the Cold War, and still uses sanctions as a tool of foreign power, but few if any other nations do the same. The intent of cyber espionage is to gain market or technological advantage. Coercive actions against government agencies or companies are intended to intimidate. Terrorists do not seek to inflict economic damage. The difficulty of wreaking real harm on large, interconnected economies is usually ignored.

Dr. James Andrew Lewis 18, Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, January 2018, “Rethinking Cybersecurity: Strategy, Mass Effect, and States,” https://tinyurl.com/y27xcqbb, p. 7-11

the popular idea that opponents use cyber techniques to inflict cumulative economic harm is not supported by evidence. Economic warfare has always been part of conflict, but there are no examples of a country seeking to imperceptibly harm the economy of an opponent Terrorists do not seek to inflict economic damage The difficulty of wreaking real harm on large, interconnected economies is usually ignored

They have zero interest in producing widespread damage

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Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

Fighting in Ukraine continues but the much-anticipated Russian cyber blitzkrieg hasn’t occurred. Russian forces have failed to deploy devastating cyber attacks in the opening salvo, despite ample opportunity to cripple Ukrainian networks. Where is the dramatic, game-changing cyber war we were promised? Pundits are scrambling for explanations. Spoiler alert: Cyber isn’t a magic wand to wave and gain battlefield superiority. Cyber attacks are rarely decisive on their own, and they don’t exist in a vacuum. Strategic context is critical for unpacking the use of cyber operations, and Russia’s invasion strategy undeniably has shaped and restricted its menu of cyber options.

Jason Blessing 22, Ph.D., is a Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Research Fellow with the foreign and defense policy department at the American Enterprise Institute, “Where is Russia’s cyber blitzkrieg?,” The Hill, 3/9/22, https://thehill.com/opinion/cybersecurity/597272-where-is-russias-cyber-blitzkrieg/

Fighting in Ukraine continues but the much-anticipated Russian cyber blitzkrieg hasn’t occurred. Russian forces have failed to deploy devastating cyber attacks in the opening salvo, despite ample opportunity to cripple Ukrainian networks. Where is the dramatic, game-changing cyber war we were promised? Pundits are scrambling for explanations. Spoiler alert: Cyber isn’t a magic wand to wave and gain battlefield superiority. Cyber attacks are rarely decisive on their own, and they don’t exist in a vacuum. Strategic context is critical Russia’s invasion strategy undeniably restricted its menu of cyber options

They’re not using cyberattacks in Ukraine

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

The United States maintains a robust nuclear arsenal that consists of ground-based, air-launched and sea-launched weapons. Together, it's commonly called the "nuclear triad," and it remains the centerpiece of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The triad is fast approaching the end of its service life and must quickly be replaced before it's lost.

C. Todd Lopez 20, Reporter at DOD News, “U.S. Seeks to Maintain Credible Nuclear Deterrent”, DOD News, 3/3/2020, https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/2101067/us-seeks-to-maintain-credible-nuclear-deterrent/

The U S maintains a robust nuclear arsenal that consists of ground-based, air-launched and sea-launched weapons. Together, it's commonly called the "nuclear triad," and it remains the centerpiece of the U.S. nuclear deterrent

Alt causes---Klare says China, Iran, and North Korea will do it AND target the U.S., not NATO

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

If you based everything off what major news outlets are saying, you’d think our Critical National Infrastructure, particularly the energy sector, is riddled with weaknesses and ripe for a catastrophic cyber-attack. But the reality is, we haven’t experienced one yet (thankfully). Putting aside larger political reasons (fear of retaliation, widespread economic effects, etc.), is it possible that we haven’t seen one because these vulnerabilities have been overstated or the likelihood has been exaggerated? Below are some of my personal thoughts on the matter. Note: To be clear, I do not mean to imply we are “in the clear” and don’t need to worry about cybersecurity for the energy grid. On the contrary, continual efforts on best practices development, standards creation, regulation and vertical-specific technologies is of the utmost importance, especially as energy systems are brought online. I’m merely trying to see through the FUD and showcase the efforts that have helped keep the grid safe so far. Major Systems Have Been Offline and New Smart Systems Will Be Secured from the Start Grid providers are being hacked every day (303 incidents were reported to the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team [ICS-CERT] in 2015), but most of those hacks were unsuccessful due to major systems that could cause devastation being either off-line or accessible only by private networks (i.e. not run over the internet). Vulnerabilities to older systems are being addressed through retrofits, but again most of these systems are offline. The good news is the next generation of smart grid systems are being designed with security in mind from day one. One good example is the Open Field Message Bus (OpenFMB) framework that provides a specification for intelligent power systems field devices to leverage a nonproprietary and standards-based reference architecture, which consists of internet protocol (IP) networking and Internet of Things (IoT) messaging. OpenFMB is one of Smart Grid Interoperability Panel’s (SGIP) Energy IoT initiative projects, developed to accelerate IoT innovation within the energy industry. As seen in other industries such as automotive, manufacturing and smart cities, the value added services around energy grid IoT innovation are virtually limitless. However, just like other industries, security concerns are top of mind. That’s where the North American Energy Standards Board’s (NAESB) role really proves vital. OpenFMB has smartly teamed with NAESB to develop a complementary set of standards for utility providers to follow. Given NAESB’s track record of standards development and tight relationship with NERC and FERC, a set of standards to accompany OpenFMB’s specification is more likely to gather industry participation and accelerate adoption.

Lila Kee 16, General Manager for GlobalSign's North and South American Operations, “Why Haven't We Seen a Disastrous Electric Power Grid Attack Yet?”, https://www.globalsign.com/en/blog/large-scale-electric-power-grid-attack/

If you based everything off what major news outlets are saying you’d think our Critical National Infrastructure particularly the energy sector is riddled with weaknesses and ripe for a catastrophic cyber-attack the reality is we haven’t experienced one yet Putting aside larger political reasons fear of retaliation widespread economic effects is it possible that we haven’t seen one because these vulnerabilities have been overstated or the likelihood has been exaggerated? Below are some of my personal thoughts on the matter. Major Systems Have Been Offline and New Smart Systems Will Be Secured from the Start Grid providers are being hacked every day but most of those hacks were unsuccessful due to major systems being off-line or accessible only by private networks Vulnerabilities to older systems are being addressed through retrofits, but again most of these systems are offline. the next generation of smart grid systems are being designed with security in mind from day one.

All the important stuff is offline

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

Panelists in another recent panel discussion on the cyberthreat to the grid disagreed with the widespread catastrophic thinking about it. “A nationwide blackout from a cyberattack is implausible,” said Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security. While vulnerabilities exist, the utility industry has been working with local, state and federal government bodies for several years on prevention, detection, and recovery plans for a power grid cyberattack, Durkovich told listeners to the discussion on the topic hosted by The Energy Times. Utility companies deal with penetration attempts every day, said Gerry Cauley, CEO of the North American Electricity Reliability Corporation (NERC), an organization of U.S. electrical grid operators. NERC’s third grid attack simulation in November 2015 included participants from electric utilities; regional and federal law enforcement, first response and intelligence agencies; information sharing and analysis centers and other utilities; and supply chain stakeholder organizations. NERC is planning its fourth grid attack simulation for November 2017. In the event of an actual cyberattack on the grid, the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center in Arlington, VA would be the government’s control center. NERC has a representative at the center every day, according to a report by The Hill. In the event of a cyberattack that disabled large areas of the power grid, the person from NERC would be the liaison between the Department of Homeland Security and the electric industry. Working together will be key, according to Cauley. “This is not anyone’s problem to address or be prepared for, but it is a unity of effort across different agencies at the federal government as well as a state role in terms of a crisis to be able to make sure that the public is safe,” he said. Industry and government are focusing on real-time automated anomaly detection of cyber threats, according to Edna Conway, chief security officer of the global value chain for Cisco Systems, Inc. “We’re seeing some of that in the age of the Internet of Things and Big Data calculations that allow an operational-level view (in) real time and awareness to things that may not yet mean a security breach but are anomalous and need further investigation.”

Nancy Crotti 16, Writer and Editor at the Internet of Things Institute, “Could a Cyberattack Take Down the Power Grid”, http://www.ioti.com/security/could-cyberattack-take-down-power-grid

Panelists in a recent panel discussion on the cyberthreat to the grid disagreed with the widespread catastrophic thinking about it. A nationwide blackout from a cyberattack is implausible said Durkovich assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security While vulnerabilities exist the utility industry has been working with local, state and federal government bodies for several years on prevention detection, and recovery plans for a power grid cyberattack Utility companies deal with penetration attempts every day said Gerry Cauley CEO of the NERC an organization of U.S. electrical grid operators. NERC’s third grid attack simulation included participants from electric utilities law enforcement first response and intelligence agencies information sharing and analysis centers In the event of an actual cyberattack on the grid the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center would be the government’s control center NERC has a representative at the center every day it is a unity of effort across different agencies at the federal government as well as a state role in terms of a crisis to be able to make sure that the public is safe Industry and government are focusing on real-time automated anomaly detection of cyber threats We’re seeing some of that in the age of the Internet of Things and Big Data calculations that allow an operational-level view and awareness to things that are anomalous

Experts agree---the grid’s totally secure from cyber

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

We’ve all seen the news reports on power grid vulnerabilities and the possibility of an impending terror attack. Recently, Ted Koppel’s book, “Lights Out,” caused a wave of press around the issue. Similar spikes in press occurred in the year after the PG&E Metcalf substation sabotage and around the National Geographic special in October 2013, “American Blackout.” There are both good points and some amount of exaggeration in the reporting on grid vulnerabilities, so I’ll be debunking a couple of power grid security myths. The Associated Press credits anonymous top experts for revealing about a dozen times in the last decade, “…sophisticated foreign hackers have gained enough remote access to control the operations networks that keep the lights on…” Rather than anonymous “top experts” you can find the results of an authoritative investigation, with attribution, in the 2007 report, “Top 10 vulnerabilities of control systems and their associated mitigations,” from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Control Systems Security Working Group. Headlines about the cyberattack on the Ukraine power grid greeted us at the start of 2016. Ars Technica reported, “Highly destructive malware creates ‘destructive events’ at 3 Ukrainian substations.” Utilities Telecom Council Security offered a slightly different perspective in the Risk and Compliance Digest from January 6, 2016: “Some news media have speculated that the attacks were launched by or for Russia, in retaliation for Ukrainian activists’ attacks on the power supply to Crimea. That linkage will likely be impossible to prove or disprove. At present there is not enough evidence to positively conclude that this was a cyberattack or who is responsible. Regardless, the outage is fact. The discovered malware includes updated versions of known tools such as KillDisk, which is not in itself malware, and BlackEnergy. However there is no smoking gun – no piece of malicious code that definitively caused the outage. Researchers have yet to rule out the possibility of insider collaboration in the attack, possibly working in tandem with the malware.” Instead of panicking, let’s fact check some claims. Myth #1: Our power system is aging and outdated. The Associated Press warns that “Many of the substations and equipment that move power across the U.S. are decrepit and were never built with network security in mind…” It certainly is the case that many of the capital assets that comprise the United States grid infrastructure are used beyond their intended useful life of 25 years or longer. The initial operations certificates for nuclear power plants were 40 years. Of course they were never built with network security in mind because 40 years ago networks, if they existed at all, were local and limited (DECNet, Token Ring, etc.) For reference: The Hoover Dam was constructed in 1935. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) Unit 1 started operation in 1968. Cisco was founded in December of 1984. Despite their age, utilities every year spend billions of dollars maintaining and upgrading electric power infrastructure systems to maintain the level of reliability we’ve come to expect. For a closer look, watch this video of helicopter maintenance on an energized 765K Volt Line. Myth #2: We are unprepared if the grid goes down. Ted Koppel’s book primarily focuses on the potential consequences of an extended power outage, echoing the National Geographic special from 2 years earlier. Ted states that, “The Department of Homeland Security has no plans beyond those designed to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters.” And that “We are unprepared…” Both Ted Koppel and National Geographic start with the assumption that the grid has been disabled for months to establish the assumed starting conditions against which the story of preparedness for months of no power is told. The North American utility industry would disagree with the impression created by these writings that nothing has been done. They have spent billions implementing ever more stringent versions of NERC-CIP and other grid reliability measures. In addition to NERC-CIP, they have taken the following actions: Developed the NIST Interagency Report 7628, Guidelines for Smart Grid Cybersecurity Conducted GridEx, GridEx II, and GridEx III to exercise crisis response and recovery Complied with Presidential Order 13636 from February 2013 on Critical Infrastructure Security Applied recommendations from SuperStorm Sandy reports for grid resilience and response actions. Followed the Critical Infrastructure Security provisions in the 2016 budget bill just passed by the House. Is it enough? Can we relax? As the famous quote goes, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” and in this case, Eternal Vigilance is the price of security of our critical infrastructure. Despite what has been done to secure the grid, the industry remains too smug about the disconnected nature of many critical systems. In doing so, they overlook the fact that some of the most successful and devastating cyberattacks have been carried out against systems that were not connected to the internet, the most prominent example being Stuxnet and the damage to the Iranian centrifuge capability. Despite having rifle bullets shot into the high voltage transformers in the Metcalf substation, not a single PG&E customer lost power. That’s a result of protections and redundancy that are an integral part of the design of the grid. Experiences with wide area outages and cascade failures have led to constant improvements in control systems and design redundancy. Is it perfect? Certainly not. Can it be improved? Definitely. We continue to learn from each large outage or natural disaster. The analysis of the 2011 Southwest Blackout jointly issued by NERC & FERC is one example. Lessons learned from Superstorm Sandy are another. The Bottom Line While vulnerabilities in the grid remain, considerable investment, study, and effort are being expended to identify vulnerabilities and secure the grid from cyber and physical attacks. Events like Superstorm Sandy and the sabotage of the Metcalf substation have caused Federal, State, and Local governments and regulators to rethink critical power requirements and develop plans that are tested during crisis exercises.

Rick Geiger 16, Executive Director Utilities and Smart Grid at Cisco, “Power Grid Security: Separating Reality from Hype”, http://blogs.cisco.com/energy/power-grid-security-separating-reality-from-hype

We’ve all seen the news reports on power grid vulnerabilities and the possibility of an impending terror attack Instead of panicking, let’s fact check some claims. Myth #1: Our power system is aging and outdated. It certainly is the case that many of the capital assets that comprise the United States grid infrastructure are used beyond their intended useful life of 25 years or longer. The Hoover Dam was constructed in 1935. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station started operation in 1968. Despite their age, utilities every year spend billions of dollars maintaining and upgrading electric power infrastructure systems to maintain the level of reliability we’ve come to expect. Myth #2: We are unprepared if the grid goes down. Koppel’s book primarily focuses on the potential consequences of an extended power outage Ted states that, “The Department of Homeland Security has no plans beyond those designed to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters The North American utility industry would disagree with the impression created by these writings that nothing has been done They have spent billions implementing more stringent versions of NERC-CIP and other grid reliability measures they have taken the following actions: Developed the NIST Guidelines for Smart Grid Cybersecurity Conducted GridEx, GridEx II, and GridEx III to exercise crisis response and recovery Complied with Presidential Order 13636 from February 2013 on Critical Infrastructure Security Applied recommendations from SuperStorm Sandy reports for grid resilience and response actions. Followed the Critical Infrastructure Security provisions in the 2016 budget bill just passed by the House Despite having rifle bullets shot into the high voltage transformers in the Metcalf substation, not a single PG&E customer lost power. That’s a result of protections and redundancy that are an integral part of the design of the grid. Experiences with wide area outages and cascade failures have led to constant improvements in control systems and design redundancy We continue to learn from each large outage or natural disaster. The analysis of the 2011 Southwest Blackout jointly issued by NERC & FERC is one example. Lessons learned from Superstorm Sandy are another. While vulnerabilities in the grid remain, considerable investment study and effort are being expended to identify vulnerabilities and secure the grid from cyber and physical attacks. Events like Superstorm Sandy and the sabotage of the Metcalf substation caused Federal, State, and Local governments to rethink critical power requirements and develop plans that are tested during crisis exercises.

The grid’s fine---resiliency and redundancy check

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Northwestern (NHSI)

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2022

As with many things in Washington, a cottage industry of lobbyists, specialists, and ex-government officials has come together to attest to the danger of an EMP attack. Ballistic missile defense seems to be the panacea for this group's concern, though a generous dose of preemption and war on terror are often prescribed as well. Congress even created a special EMP commission in 2001 to study the issue and make recommendations to government and industry. It seems the only ones who take the time to talk about EMP publicly, however, are those who believe it to be the paramount threat facing America. According to their warnings over the last decade, our vulnerability worsens every day, and that vulnerability invites an attack.

Patrick Disney 11, Graduate Student Focusing on Iran and Nuclear Nonproliferation at Yale University, Former Assistant Policy Director for the National Iranian American Council, “The Campaign to Terrify You About EMP”, The Atlantic, 7/15/2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/the-campaign-to-terrify-you-about-emp/241971/

a cottage industry of lobbyists, specialists, and ex-government officials has come together to attest to the danger of an EMP attack Congress created a special EMP commission in 2001 to study the issue the only ones who believe it to be the paramount threat

Their evidence cites the EMP commission. They’re professional crackpots!

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That’s a good deal, but still. Show a crowd a pair of cooling towers, and at least some of them will see an atomic apocalypse featuring three-eyed fish, leafless forests, and hospital-gowned Soviet defectors with skin like glistening mayonnaise. Nuclear power may be clean, but people still question whether it is, or ever will be, safe enough.

Nick Stockton 16, Science Reporter for WIRED magazine, "Nuclear Power Is Too Safe to Save the World From Climate Change," WIRED, 4/3/2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/04/nuclear-power-safe-save-world-climate-change/

Show a crowd a pair of cooling towers, and at least some of them will see an atomic apocalypse featuring three-eyed fish

Blackouts don’t cause meltdowns and no extinction

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Northwestern (NHSI)

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2022

The nuclear crisis at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan has caused a nuclear frenzy where leaders around the world are questioning the safety of their plants. For instance, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for global nuclear review after visiting Japan, and U.S. senators demanded that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) repeat an expensive inspection of the country's nuclear power.

Tiffany Kaiser 11, writer for Daily Tech, citing Nuclear Regulatory Commission Report, 8/2/2011, DailyTech, "NRC: Far Fewer People Would Die in a U.S. Nuclear Meltdown Than Previously Thought," https://tinyurl.com/y4aujwkz

nuclear crisis at Fukushima caused a nuclear frenzy where leaders around the world are questioning the safety of their plants.

No meltdowns impact, and evacuation solves

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Nor do cyberattacks against Iran increase the risk of damaging cyberattacks against the United States. It is true that we are defenseless; efforts to make us safer are hamstrung by self-interest, ideology and the gridlock of American politics. But we are no more vulnerable today than we were the day before the news. If someone decides to attack us, they may cite Iran as precedent, but it will only be to justify a decision they had already made.

James Lewis 12, Director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Benefits Are Great, and the Risks Exist Anyway,” New York Times, 6/4/2012, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/06/04/do-cyberattacks-on-iran-make-us-vulnerable-12/benefits-are-great-and-the-risks-exist-anyway

Nor do cyberattacks against Iran increase the risk of damaging cyberattacks against the U S we are no more vulnerable today than we were the day before the news. If someone decides to attack us, they may cite Iran as precedent, but it will only be to justify a decision they had already made

U.S. restraint doesn’t cause global follow-on

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Realists in this regard are from Missouri, the “show me” state, and ask utopians to explain how, why, and when a powerful new cooperative international norm with corresponding international institutions will become a reality. Realists point to the unhappy history of the unmet claims and dashed hopes of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact (intended to prevent offensive war by global legal agreement), the League of Nations, and the United Nations. To be sure, the future does not have to be bound by the past, but before moving further toward nuclear disarmament, realists want to see some clear evidence of the emerging transformation of the global order—not just the claim that it can occur if all key leaders are so willing, faithful, and visionary and can “embrace a politics of impossibility.”12 As the old English proverb says, “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” But has not everything changed in the twenty-first century? Has not the end of the Cold War ushered in a new global commitment to cooperation, the rule of law globally, and benign conflict resolution? The unarguable answer is no. Russian military actions against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014 (the latter in direct violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed by Russia, Great Britain, and the United States) are sufficient empirical evidence to demonstrate that Thucydides’ stark description of reality is alive and well. China’s expansionist claims and military pressure against its neighbors in the East and South China Seas teach the same lesson. Why is this reality significant in the consideration of nuclear weapons? Because in the absence of reliably overturning the powerful norm of raison d’État and Thucydides’ explanation of international relations, states with the capability and felt need will continue to demand nuclear capabilities for their own protection and, in some cases, to provide cover for their expansionist plans. To wit, if Ukraine had retained nuclear weapons, would it now fear for its survival at the hands of Russian aggression? Former Ukrainian defense minister Valeriy Heletey and members of the Ukrainian parliament have made this point explicitly, lamenting Ukraine’s transfer of its nuclear forces to Russia in return for now-broken security promises of the Budapest Memorandum.13 This lesson cannot have been lost on other leaders considering the value of nuclear weapons. Nor is it a coincidence that US allies in Central Europe and Asia are becoming ever more explicit about their need for US nuclear assurances under the US extended nuclear deterrent (i.e., the nuclear umbrella). They see no new emerging, powerful global collective security regime or cooperative norms that will preserve their security; thus, they understandably seek the assurance of power, including nuclear power. The Polish Foreign Ministry observed in a recent press release that “the current situation reaffirms the importance of NATO’s nuclear deterrence policy.”14 This reality stands in stark contrast to utopian claims that powerful new global norms and international institutions will reorder the international system, overturn Thucydides, and allow individual states to dispense with nuclear weapons or the nuclear protection of a powerful ally. As the Socialist French president Francois Hollande has said, “The international context does not allow for any weakness. . . . The era of nuclear deterrence is therefore not over. . . . In a dangerous world—and it is dangerous—France does not want to let down its guard. . . . The possibility of future state conflicts concerning us directly or indirectly cannot be excluded.”15 There could be no clearer expression of Thucydides’ description of international relations and its contemporary implications for nuclear weapons. Opponents of the administration’s plan to modernize the US triad now double down on the utopian narrative by insisting that the United States instead lead the way in establishing the new global norm by showing that Washington no longer relies on nuclear weapons and does not seek new ones. Washington cannot expect others to forgo nuclear weapons if it retains them, they say, and thus it must lead in creation of the new norm against nuclear weapons by providing an example to the world. For instance, “by unilaterally reducing its arsenal to a total of 1,000 warheads, the United States would encourage Russia to similarly reduce its nuclear forces without waiting for arms control negotiations.”16 A good US example supposedly can help “induce parallel” behavior in others.17 If, however, the United States attributes continuing value to nuclear weapons by maintaining its arsenal, “other countries will be more inclined to seek” them.18 Nuclear realists respond, however, that the United States already has reduced its nuclear forces deeply over the last 25 years. America cut its tactical nuclear weapons from a few thousand in 1991 to a “few hundred” today.19 Moreover, US-deployed strategic nuclear weapons have been cut from an estimated 9,000 in 1992 to roughly 1,600 accountable warheads today, with still more reductions planned under the New START Treaty.20 The United States has even decided to be highly revealing of its nuclear capabilities to encourage others to do so, with no apparent effect on Russia, China, or North Korea.21 America has adhered fully to the reductions and restrictions of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—the “centerpiece of arms control”—but the Russians now are in open violation. As former undersec- retary of state Robert Joseph stated recently, decades of deep US reductions “appear to have had no moderating effect on Russian, Chinese or North Korean nuclear programs. Neither have U.S. reductions led to any effective strengthening of international nonproliferation efforts.”22 Utopians want the United States to lead the world toward nuclear disarmament by its good example, but no one is following. The basic reason, realists point out, is that foreign leaders make decisions about nuclear weaponry based largely on their countries’ strategic needs, raison d’État, not in deference to America’s penchant for nuclear disarmament or some sense of global fairness. A close review of India by S. Paul Kapur, for example, concluded that “Indian leaders do not seek to emulate US nuclear behavior; they formulate policy based primarily on their assessment of the security threats facing India.”23 The same self-interested calculation is true for other nuclear and aspiring nuclear states. Nations that are a security concern to the United States seek nuclear weapons to intimidate their neighbors (including US allies), to counter US conventional forces, and to gain a free hand to press their regional military ambitions. They see nuclear weapons as their trump cards and do not follow the US lead in nuclear disarmament. A bipartisan expert working group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded accordingly that “U.S. nuclear reductions have no impact on the calculus of Iran and North Korea.”24

Dr. Keith Payne 15, PhD, Professor and Head of the Graduate Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University, “US Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence”, Air & Space Power Journal, July-August 2015, https://www.airuniversity.af.mil/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Volume-29_Issue-4/V-Payne.pdf

Realists point to the unhappy history of the unmet claims and dashed hopes of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact the League of Nations and the United Nations realists want to see some clear evidence of the emerging transformation of the global order—not just the claim that it can occur if all key leaders are so willing, faithful, and visionary and can “embrace a politics of impossibility.” has not everything changed in the twenty-first century? Has not the end of the Cold War ushered in a new global commitment to cooperation the rule of law and benign conflict resolution? The unarguable answer is no. Russian military actions China’s expansionist claims This reality stands in stark contrast to utopian claims that powerful new global norms and international institutions will reorder the international system, overturn Thucydides, and allow individual states to dispense with nuclear weapons or the nuclear protection of a powerful Utopians want the United States to lead the world toward nuclear disarmament by its good example, but no one is following. The basic reason, realists point out, is that foreign leaders make decisions about nuclear weaponry based largely on their countries’ strategic needs not in deference to America’s penchant for nuclear disarmament or some sense of global fairness

Adversaries only care about balance of power

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Northwestern (NHSI)

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2022

The rhetorical spiral of mistrust in the Sino-American relationship threatens to undermine the mutual benefits of the information revolution. Fears about the [loss] paralysis of the United States’ digital infrastructure or the hemorrhage of its competitive advantage are exaggerated. Chinese cyber operators face underappreciated organizational challenges, including information overload and bureaucratic compartmentalization, which hinder the weaponization of cyberspace or absorption of stolen intellectual property. More important, both the United States and China have strong incentives to moderate the intensity of their cyber exploitation to preserve profitable interconnections and avoid costly punishment. The policy backlash against U.S. firms and liberal internet governance by China and others is ultimately more worrisome for U.S. competitiveness than espionage; ironically, it is also counterproductive for Chinese growth.

Jon R. Lindsay 15, Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, Assistant Research Scientist at the University of California, San Diego, “Exaggerating the Chinese Cyber Threat”, Belfer Center Policy Brief, May 2015, https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/linsday-china-cyber-pb-final.pdf [language modified]

Fears about the [loss] of the U S digital infrastructure are exaggerated. Chinese cyber operators face underappreciated organizational challenges, including information overload and bureaucratic compartmentalization, which hinder weaponization of cyberspace More important, both the U S and China have strong incentives to moderate the intensity of their cyber exploitation to preserve profitable interconnections and avoid costly punishment. The policy backlash is counterproductive for Chinese growth

No major China cyber threat

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Despite high levels of Chinese political harassment and espionage, there is little evidence of skill or subtlety in China’s military cyber operations. Although Chinese strategists describe cyberspace as a highly asymmetric and decisive domain of warfare, China’s military cyber capacity does not live up to its doctrinal aspirations. A disruptive attack on physical infrastructure requires careful testing, painstaking planning, and sophisticated intelligence. Even experienced U.S. cyber operators struggle with these challenges. By contrast, the Chinese military is rigidly hierarchical and has no wartime experience with complex information systems. Further, China’s pursuit of military “informatization” (i.e., emulation of the U.S. network-centric style of operations) increases its dependence on vulnerable networks and exposure to foreign cyberattack.

Jon R. Lindsay 15, Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, Assistant Research Scientist at the University of California, San Diego, “Exaggerating the Chinese Cyber Threat”, Belfer Center Policy Brief, May 2015, https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/linsday-china-cyber-pb-final.pdf

Despite high levels of espionage, there is little evidence of skill in China’s military cyber operations China’s military cyber capacity does not live up to its doctrinal aspirations. A disruptive attack on physical infrastructure requires careful testing, painstaking planning, and sophisticated intelligence. Even experienced U.S. cyber operators struggle with these challenges. By contrast, the Chinese military is rigidly hierarchical and has no wartime experience with complex information systems. Further, China’s pursuit of military “informatization” increases its dependence on vulnerable networks and exposure to foreign cyberattack

No major China cyber threat:

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Northwestern (NHSI)

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2022

Cybersecurity issues have increasingly been singled out as an irritant in the United States(US)-China bilateral relationship. US-China relations in cyberspace exemplify tensions in the broader bilateral relationship, canvassing military competition, trade barriers, intelligence activity, and pathways to long-term economic and political strength.[1] However, cybersecurity is still a nascent foreign policy issue. Much of the existing literature on cybersecurity in international relations addresses the issue through the lens of policy rather than theory. This paper is a contribution to bridging the gap between policy and theory. It examines the extent to which offensive realist theory helps us understand how the US and China are managing their relations on cybersecurity. I argue that the US is a hegemon in cyberspace, and China a revisionist power. Based on that assessment, I consider the likelihood of cyberwar, the issue of economic espionage, their respective approaches to Internet governance, and conclude that offensive realism provides a useful framework for considering security-related issues. However, it cannot explain the full range of bilateral cyber-related activity, including examples of cooperation and norm-building in cyberspace. I briefly touch on liberal theories’ ability to explain other elements of the relationship and conclude that given the breadth of cyber-related issues, an issue-specific or analytically eclectic approach may be the most fruitful. The framework for analysis: offensive neorealism Offensive realism refers to a sub-school of neorealist international relations theory, which developed from Kenneth Waltz’s work on structural realism.[2] The classical realism of thinkers like Hans Morgenthau had focused on human nature.[3] Waltz shifted realism’s focus to the international system, positing that the anarchic structure of the international system forces states to pursue power to ensure their survival. Power – measured by the relative distribution of economic and military capabilities across the system – is a state’s only guarantee of security. Subsequently, sub-schools of defensive and offensive realism have developed based on Waltz’s work.[4] This paper focuses on the applicability of John J. Mearsheimer’s offensive realism to US-China cybersecurity relations.[5] I have chosen offensive realism as the basis for my analysis because the relationship is popularly characterized as conflictual. Offensive neorealism posits that great powers seek to ensure their security by maximising their share of world power. Being the dominant power – a hegemon – is the best means to ensure survival. States therefore are “primed for offense”.[6] Mearsheimer makes five key assumptions about the international system, which together cause states to formulate aggressive policies.[7] These are: (1) anarchy is the ordering principle of the international system; (2) great powers possess some military capability; (3) states can never be certain about other states’ intentions; (4) survival is the primary goal of great powers; and (5) that great powers are rational actors.[8] I will treat these assumptions as given for the purposes of my analysis. Combined, these factors result in three patterns of behaviour: fear, self-help, and power maximisation.[9] Unable to trust other states, and aware that they operate in a self-help system, states view becoming the most powerful states in the system as the best way to ensure survival.[10] States look to maximise their power and alter the balance of power using a variety of tools – even if doing so makes other states suspicious or hostile.[11] Capability is what matters, given the intentions of other states are uncertain. States will lie, cheat and use force if it can help them gain an advantage.[12] All great powers will have revisionist tendencies until they achieve hegemony, resulting in constant security competition.[13] Finally, in Mearsheimer’s view, multipolar systems are more likely to result in conflict than bipolar systems, and multipolar systems with an emerging hegemon are the most dangerous (“unbalanced multipolarity”).[14] What is the current balance of power in cyberspace? In order to understand whether there is a security competition in cyberspace, it is necessary to assess the current balance of power. Because I am considering cybersecurity in isolation from the wider bilateral relationship this analysis necessarily will be artificial, focusing only on relative cyberpower (broadly defined). Mearsheimer defines a hegemon as a “state that is so powerful that it dominates all the other states in the system.”[15] A state that is substantially more powerful than other powers in the system is not a hegemon – a hegemon is the only great power.[16] Mearsheimer concludes that it is virtually impossible for a state to become a global power because of the difficulties in projecting power across the world’s oceans.[17] However, the US arguably has hegemonic power in cyberspace, where geographic boundaries do not affect power projection. The US, thanks to its role in the Internet’s creation and development, retains a huge amount of influence over its operations and governance. Ten of the Internet’s 13 root servers are on US soil, and China, like many other states, is still reliant on technology from American firms like Microsoft.[18] Secondly, the US is generally believed to have the most significant cyber offensive capabilities in the world. While cyber capability is shrouded in secret, the US is likely to have a good chance at dominating other great powers in cyberspace. The question is then whether there are any other great powers in cyberspace. China has arguably risen as a cyber power, though its (known) activities to date are computer-network exploitation for intelligence rather than attacks causing disruption.[19] China sees cyber power as a cost effective, long range way to counter a superior adversary in conflict.[20] China has also become increasingly influential in global policy debates on Internet governance issues, as will be discussed below. However, the US has considerably more experience in managing complex network operations and the Peoples’ Liberation Army faces sizeable challenges implementing cyber tactics.[21] Cyberspace also is not a simple bipolar world. Russia, for instance, is widely considered to be one of the most capable actors in cyberspace and is believed to have deployed offensive cyber capability in support of its wider objectives (most recently shutting down a power grid in the Ukraine). Cyber capabilities also are proliferating widely, in part because of low barriers to entry.[22] Cyberspace therefore can loosely be characterized as a multipolar system. In an unbalanced multipolar system, we should expect to see an ongoing security competition, based on calculations of relative state power. The US will seek to check China’s activity to maintain its hegemony. China, as an aspiring hegemon and revisionist power, will use force to alter the status quo if the benefits outweigh the costs.[23] The polarity of the system will make states fearful and security competition is likely to be particularly acute in the cyber context. The secrecy shrouding states’ cyber capabilities makes it difficult to measure relative capability, which will increase suspicion. A spiral of mistrust – should we expect the outbreak of cyberwar? Relations between the US and China indeed have been marked by fear and mistrust. Growing concerns about competitive advantage have exacerbated that mistrust, along with ongoing intelligence activities and political rhetoric. China is suspicious that the US is using its dominance in cyberspace to undermine other states, which suggests a sense of vulnerability, and US has a deep sense of unease about a rising China.[24] Offensive realism suggests that how much states fear each other determines the severity of their security competition as well as the likelihood that they will fight a war.[25] As signaled above, states cannot accurately assess their relative cyberpower because offensive cyber capabilities tend to be highly classified. Fear has therefore driven both states to invest in offensive and defensive capabilities.[26] There is also an incentive for both to misrepresent their strength, so the true balance of power is unclear.[27] This may lead to a misperception of dominance, particularly when the effectiveness of ‘cyberweapons’ is poorly understood.[28] However, a cyber conflict between the US and China is highly unlikely. Examples of attacks with destructive or physical consequences are still very rare (although the number may be increasing). Since the late 1980s, there have been 61 attacks conducted by states against during peacetime, and 24 during wartime.[29] Examples include Russian attacks on Georgia in 2008 and the infamous Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear infrastructure (usually attributed to the US and Israel).[30] No state has ever declared a ‘cyberwar’.[31] This is partly because to develop sophisticated attacks like Stuxnet is very difficult, requiring high levels of technical expertise.[32] Attribution is also notoriously difficult in cyberspace. It is extremely tough to trace attacks and states may also use proxy or non-state actors, further confusing the issue.[33] Until recently, the failure to develop an effective deterrence policy has been related to the difficulty in attributing cyberattacks. Nevertheless, the US has “reserve[d] the right to use all necessary means – diplomatic, informational, military, and economic – as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law” to respond to hostile acts in cyberspace.[34] China has not used ‘force’ against the US in cyberspace but it is clear that cyberattacks would feature in any broader military clash. Difficulties arise in considering what constitutes a proportionate response to low-level attacks like hacking or cybercrime. It is very unlikely that any incident of that nature could justify a traditional military response.[35] To date, countermeasures have fallen well below the use of military force. The US has instead relied on diplomatic and law enforcement tools: attribution, indictments, and the threat of sanctions.[36] Cyber-enabled espionage – a constant, low level conflict? Intense security competition between the US and China is much more evident when considering the issue of cyber-enabled espionage. As a trading state, China has benefited from Internet connectivity, but it is still a net importer of advanced technology.[37] To maintain high growth levels in an innovation-driven world, economic espionage is a useful shortcut, and economic power is fungible.[38] The US has consistently alleged that China is conducting economic espionage on a massive scale to support Chinese firms. Good evidence exists to support this allegation. For instance, one study found that “96 percent of recorded, state-affiliated attacks targeting businesses’ trade secrets and other intellectual property in 2012 could be traced by to Chinese hackers.”[39] While each loss might be small, the net effect has been described as “the most significant transfer of wealth in history.”[40] In response, China has consistently accused the US of hypocrisy, supported by evidence in the Snowden disclosures of the extent to which the US had penetrated a range of Chinese companies and networks.[41] Chinese officials point out that China is the largest victim of cyber attacks in the world, many emanating from the US.[42] In China’s view, the US has no “moral standing” to make accusations against China or define norms of appropriate behaviour online.[43] Despite this, the US has attempted to draw a distinction between espionage for national security purposes and economic espionage for the benefit of a states’ firms (such as China’s state-owned enterprises). While China has historically refused to acknowledge this distinction, US policy has been calibrated both to develop this norm and to raise the costs of Chinese activity. Until recently, actions in cyberspace had been largely penalty-free. Over the last two years, the US has executed the first steps in a new strategy to change the cost-benefit-risk calculus for its cyber adversaries.[44] In May 2014, the Department of Justice indicted of five members of the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) for hacking and commercial espionage against major US companies.[45] Following the high-profile hack of Sony pictures in December 2014, the US attributed the attack to North Korean actors – the first time that the US had publicly attributed an attack on a US company to a foreign government.[46] Then, in April 2015, President Obama signed an executive order allowing the US to impose severe financial restrictions on individuals or entities who engage in or benefit from cyber-enabled economic espionage.[47] In advance of President Xi Jinping’s first state visit to the US in 2015, there were serious indications that the Obama administration might impose sanctions against China in a second major volley on economic espionage.[48] Shortly before the visit, Obama described theft of intellectual property and trade secrets as an “act of aggression” and a “core national security threat”.[49] Despite previously refusing to accept the US distinction between ‘acceptable’ espionage for national security and ‘unacceptable’ economic espionage, President Xi reached a landmark agreement with President Obama in September 2015. The two leaders agreed that “neither country’s government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, with the intent of providing competitive advantages to companies or commercial sectors.”[50][51] The agreement was an unexpected reversal of the Chinese position. Offensive realism suggests that China may have signed the agreement for two reasons. Threatened with sanctions, China made a rational choice – the costs of cyber activity against the US were rising and it was in China’s interest to agree. More pessimistically, China may also have signed with no intention of adhering to the agreement. Offensive realism suggests that concerns about cheating will hinder cooperation, as states fear that the other side will cheat, putting them at a disadvantage. [52] Subsequent evidence suggests that China is not complying with the agreement. The Director of National Intelligence noted in February 2016 that “China continues to have success in cyber espionage against the U.S. government, our allies, and U.S. companies.”[53] Continuing Chinese activity suggests that the US has not succeeded in raising the real costs of economic espionage. The costs of an indictment and the threat of sanctions are slight in comparison to the benefits China is reaping from its economic espionage practices.[54] Cheating on a cyber agreement may also be simpler because deception is a core part of network intrusions.[55] As long as the benefits to China outweigh the risks, there is no reason to stop. For the US, it appears that more significant punishments may be too costly or escalatory to pursue.[56] Some of this reluctance likely derives from concerns about damaging relations with a state with a major economic market.[57]

Elizabeth Thomas 16, the Australian National University, 8-28-2016, "US-China Relations in Cyberspace: The Benefits and Limits of a Realist Analysis," E-International Relations, http://www.e-ir.info/2016/08/28/us-china-relations-in-cyberspace-the-benefits-and-limits-of-a-realist-analysis/

Cyber issues have been singled out as an irritant in the US)-China bilateral relationship US-China relations in cyberspace exemplify tensions in the broader relationship canvassing military competition, trade barriers, intelligence activity, and pathways to long-term economic and political strength However, cybersecurity is still a nascent foreign policy issue to understand whether there is a security competition in cyberspace, it is necessary to assess the current balance of power. Mearsheimer defines a hegemon as a “state that is so powerful that it dominates all the other states in the system.” the US has hegemonic power in cyberspace where geographic boundaries do not affect power projection The US, thanks to its role in the Internet’s creation and development, retains a huge amount of influence over its operations and governance Ten of the Internet’s 13 root servers are on US soil, and China, like many other states, is still reliant on technology from American firms While cyber capability is shrouded in secret, the US is likely to have good chance at dominating other great powers in cyberspace The question is whether there are any other great powers in cyberspace. China has arguably risen as a cyber power However, the US has considerably more experience in managing network operations and the Peoples’ Liberation Army faces sizeable challenges implementing cyber tactics Cyberspace also is not bipolar Russia is considered to be one of the most capable actors in cyberspace In an unbalanced multipolar system, we should expect to see an ongoing security competition The US will seek to check China’s activity China, as an aspiring hegemon and revisionist power, will use force to alter the status quo if the benefits outweigh the costs. Relations between the US and China indeed have been marked by fear and mistrust states cannot accurately assess their relative cyberpower because offensive cyber capabilities tend to be highly classified There is an incentive for both to misrepresent their strength, so the true balance of power is unclear However, a cyber conflict between the US and China is highly unlikely. Examples of attacks with destructive or physical consequences are still very rare No state has ever declared a ‘cyberwar’ partly because to develop sophisticated attacks like Stuxnet is very difficult Attribution is also notoriously difficult Until recently, the failure to develop an effective deterrence policy has been related to the difficulty in attributing cyberattacks. Nevertheless, the US has “reserve[d] the right to use all necessary means – diplomatic, informational, military, and economic – as appropriate and consistent with applicable international law” to respond to hostile acts in cyberspace.[ but it is clear that cyberattacks would feature in any broader military clash. Difficulties arise in considering what constitutes a proportionate response to low-level attacks like hacking or cybercrime It is very unlikely that any incident of that nature could justify a traditional military response To date, countermeasures have fallen well below the use of military force. The US has instead relied on diplomatic and law enforcement tools: attribution, indictments, and the threat of sanctions Despite previously refusing to accept the US distinction between ‘acceptable’ espionage and ‘unacceptable’ Xi reached a landmark agreement with Obama in 2015 The two leaders agreed that “neither will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property The agreement was an unexpected reversal of the Chinese position. China may also have signed with no intention of adhering Offensive realism suggests that cheating will hinder cooperation, as states fear that the other side will cheat, putting them at a disadvantage Subsequent evidence suggests that China is not complying with the agreement The Director of National Intelligence noted that “China continues to have success in cyber espionage against the U.S. government, our allies, and U.S. companies. Continuing Chinese activity suggests that the US has not succeeded in raising the real costs of economic espionage For the US, it appears that more significant punishments may be too costly or escalatory to pursue.

No US-China cyberwar and no escalation --- the US is too dominant. And, China will cheat.

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

Over the past three-plus months it has become increasingly clear that, despite the bombast that Pres. Donald Trump has hurled against the Islamic Republic of Iran (along with a full deck of extremely harmful sanctions and some cyber attacks), neither he nor his closest regional allies in the anti-Iran coalition have been willing to escalate to any military attack against Iran that could escalate to all-out war.

Helena Cobban 19, MA, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, 10-13-2019, "Mutual Deterrence: Good for the Middle East, Bad for the Nuclear Weapons Industry?", LobeLog, https://lobelog.com/mutual-deterrence-good-for-the-middle-east-bad-for-the-nuclear-weapons-industry/

despite the bombast that Trump has hurled against Iran neither he nor his closest regional allies in the anti-Iran coalition have been willing to escalate to any military attack against Iran that could escalate to all-out war

No Middle East war---deterrence.

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

There is no mechanism for expelling an errant NATO member. The alliance in the past turned a blind eye to military regimes in Greece and Turkey. But diplomats say pragmatic ways would be found to work around Ankara if it cannot be persuaded to mothball the Russian air defense system.

Paul Taylor 20, contributing editor at POLITICO, writes the “Europe At Large” column, senior fellow at the think-tank Friends of Europe, “How rogue can Turkey go?,” POLITICO, 1/1/20, https://www.politico.eu/article/turkey-rogue-state-recep-tayyip-erdogan/

There is no mechanism for expelling an errant NATO member. The alliance in the past turned a blind eye to military regimes in Greece and Turkey. But diplomats say pragmatic ways would be found to work around Ankara

Interdependence and fears of backlash check Turkey aggression

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria has been met with criticism amongst European leaders. Some of which have openly floated the idea that Erdogan could seek the support of NATO if the conflict widened. It which would make a large proportion of European states accessories of Erdogan’s move under NATO’s Article 5 – only in theory, however.

Thomas O. Falk 19, studied law in London before obtaining his M.A. in International Relations at the University of Birmingham, has been working as part of an international team that provides the European Commission and NATO with political news and developments, “Turkey and NATO's (Non) Conundrum of Article 5,” InsideOver, 10-20-2019, https://www.insideover.com/war/turkey-and-natos-non-conundrum-of-article-5.html

Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria has been met with criticism amongst European leaders. Some of which have openly floated the idea that Erdogan could seek the support of NATO if the conflict widened. It which would make a large proportion of European states accessories of Erdogan’s move under NATO’s Article 5 – only in theory

Especially if war was provoked by Turkey---allies would prevent Turkey from even invoking Article 5 by clarifying through backchannels that illegal aggression does not require military support

Aff - Cyber Article 5 - Northwestern 2022.html5

Northwestern (NHSI)

Affirmatives

2022

However, the satellite numbers are expected to multiply rapidly, and it was estimated there might be no less than 107,000 active satellites by 2029 (Samson 2020). Apart from functional systems, orbits are congested by a significant amount of space debris. As of January 2021, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network tracked over 28,000 objects in the orbits; nevertheless, it is estimated that there are already about 900,000 objects larger than 1 cm orbiting the Earth, from which only about 34,000 are larger than 10 cm (ESA 2021). The number of 10 cm is vital because, generally, satellites are protected against a collision with objects smaller than 0,1 cm and objects larger than 10 cm can be possibly avoided (EU Community Research and Development Information Service 2012).

Bohumil Doboš and Jakub Praˇz ́ak 21. Faculty of Social Studies, Institute of Political Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. “Master spoiler: a strategic value of Kessler Syndrome.” Taylor and Francis Online. Apr 27 2021. https://www-tandfonline-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/full/10.1080/14702436.2021.1997095

the satellite numbers are expected to multiply rapidly, and it was estimated there might be no less than 107,000 active satellites by 2029 Apart from functional systems, orbits are congested by a significant amount of space debris the U.S. Space Surveillance Network tracked over 28,000 objects in the orbits; nevertheless, it is estimated that there are already about 900,000 objects larger than 1 cm orbiting the Earth, from which only about 34,000 are larger than 10 cm

Probability of collision is cascading every second.

Aff - Cyber Space Assets Updates - Michigan 7 2022 FMPS.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

But most European governments conduct their national security policies at a much greater distance from their militaries, celebrating their concentration on “soft power” tools in lieu of force. Not only do they privilege those tools, they often consider their policies, and themselves, morally superior for the choice. One need only listen to EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker or read of the European Parliament passing legislation condemning U.S. intelligence agencies to share President Trump’s aggravation with Europe. We sentimentalize the Transatlantic connection at our peril.

Schake 17 [Kori, Distinguished Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Deputy Director-General of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Lecturer in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University, PhD in Government from the University of Maryland, “NATO Without America?”, The American Interest, 5/25/2017, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/05/25/nato-without-america/]

most European governments conduct their national security policies at a much greater distance from their militaries, celebrating their concentration on “soft power” tools in lieu of force. Not only do they privilege those tools, they often consider their policies, and themselves, morally superior for the choice

Aligning NATO policy to support EU multilateralism solves better.

Aff - Cyber Space Assets Updates - Michigan 7 2022 FMPS.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

The answer given by most European and American defense experts is that the European allies do need to do more. But most also agree that those efforts will be most effective if shaped by and built within the framework of the transatlantic alliance and its leading institution, NATO.

Stanley R. Sloan 17, Visiting Scholar in Political Science at Middlebury College and Author of Defense of the West: NATO, the European Union and the Transatlantic Bargain, “Washington Might Feel The Chill Of A More United European Defense”, War on the Rocks, 6/22/2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/06/washington-might-feel-the-chill-of-a-more-united-european-defense/

European allies do need to do more. But those efforts will be most effective if shaped by and built within the framework of the transatlantic alliance and its leading institution, NATO

Only building EU defense within NATO allows it to be financially feasible and synergistic with the U.S.

Aff - Cyber Space Assets Updates - Michigan 7 2022 FMPS.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

[Published: 12-04-18. “The Delusion of Strategic Autonomy.” CEPA. Accessible: https://www.cepa.org/the-delusion-of-strategic-autonomy] Some Europeans want to take the initiative, stitching up deals with China and other trading partners (Latin America, Japan) who feel bruised by the mercantilist “America First” approach. They would like to make the euro into a reserve currency, ending the European dependence on the dollar-based international financial infrastructure. Europe may be puny when it comes to hard security, they argue, but it wields clout elsewhere: just imagine if it combined its capabilities on aid, diplomacy, finance, trade, and soft-power strategically. Such an approach would be interesting; it would certainly give the U.S. administration cause to rethink its approach to Europe, though possibly not in the way that Europeans would like. For now and the foreseeable future, though, the question is purely theoretical. The practical trend is towards greater impotence, not autonomy. Brexit is a distraction. The Franco-German axis, on which many hopes rested only a year ago, has splintered. Second-tier countries such as Italy (run by eccentric populists) and Spain (with a weak minority government), Sweden (with no government at all) and Poland (self-marginalized) are in no position to take their share of the burden. At the level of European institutions, nothing will happen until the dust settles from the European Parliament elections, perhaps by the end of next year. The result is introversion and impotence: an open door for Russian influence, and, increasingly, Chinese. That is frustrating for everyone, not least the United States, which for years has been urging Europe to do more. But instead of serious contributions to global security, what Europe offers is empty talk of autonomy, exemplified by the notion of a “European Army”—a militarily nonsensical idea which threatens to weaken NATO at a time when the Alliance needs to do more, not less. Against this bleak background it is easy to despair. But it is worth remembering that the West survived the Cold War in worse shape than it is now. The USSR was a serious strategic adversary which controlled half of Europe and projected power all over the world. Russia is a nuisance not a threat. It succeeds mainly through bluff, not muscle. Transatlantic disunity is nothing new either. Europe shunned the U.S.-led cold war in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. France stormed out of NATO’s command structure in 1966 and did not return until 2009. Woolly, self-indulgent talk of “autonomy,” strategic or otherwise, counts for little when migration, climate change, humanitarian catastrophes, and technological change all remind Europeans insistently of the competitive, dangerous, and interconnected outside world. Like it or not, these threats necessitate cohesion, decisiveness—and a strong transatlantic Alliance.

Edward Lucas 18 --- Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

Some Europeans want to take the initiative Europe may be puny when it comes to hard security, they argue, but it wields clout elsewhere: just imagine if it combined its capabilities on aid, diplomacy, finance, trade, and soft-power strategically. For now and the foreseeable future, though, the question is purely theoretical The practical trend is towards greater impotence, not autonomy Brexit is a distraction The Franco-German axis, has splintered Second-tier countries such as Italy (run by eccentric populists) and Spain (with a weak minority government), Sweden (with no government at all) and Poland (self-marginalized) are in no position to take their share of the burden At the level of European institutions, nothing will happen until the dust settles from the European Parliament elections, perhaps by the end of next year. The result is introversion and impotence: an open door for Russian influence But instead of serious contributions to global security, what Europe offers is empty talk of autonomy, exemplified by the notion of a “European Army”—a militarily nonsensical idea which threatens to weaken NATO at a time when the Alliance needs to do more, not less Woolly, self-indulgent talk of “autonomy counts for little when migration, climate change, humanitarian catastrophes, and technological change all remind Europeans insistently of the competitive, dangerous d interconnected outside world these threats necessitate cohesion, decisiveness—and a strong transatlantic Alliance

Strategic autonomy? More like strategic incompetence.

Aff - Cyber Space Assets Updates - Michigan 7 2022 FMPS.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Synthetic biology uses engineering-based modeling and building techniques to modify existing organisms and microbes or to construct them from scratch. The rate of development and research related to synthetic biology for both industry and academia has increased over the past two decades (Ahteensuu 2017), with applications in medicine (new vaccines, delivery of therapeutics, and treatments), energy (biofuels), environmental remediation, food production, and general industry (detergents, adhesives, perfumes) (Evans and Selgelid 2015; Gronvall 2015).

Trump '21 – PhD, a research social scientist for the U.S.  Army Corps of Engineers, and served as a Strategic Planner and public health subject-matter expert for FEMA Region 1’s Data Analytics Task Force [Benjamin D, Marie-Valentie Florin, Edward Perkins, and Igor Linkov," Biosecurity for Synthetic Biology and Emerging Biotechnologies: Critical Challenges for Governance” in Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology, p. 1-2]

Synthetic biology uses engineering-based modeling and building techniques to modify existing organisms

Biotech is inevitable, we need to understand it to prevent bio-attacks.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Terror groups like al-Qaeda and ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) have expressed interested, and have even attempted, to use biological agents in terror plots (Biodefense, 2016). The technical and administrative knowledge of biology and chemistry can be acquired globally in medical schools, research programs, and laboratories, making it difficult to prevent potential practitioners of bioterrorism from acquiring the required scientific knowledge (Chiodo, 2015). While at one time the ability to mutate strands was restricted to advanced research laboratories, rudimentary high school laboratories now have the ability to develop deadly biological agents (Garrett, 2012). With relative easy, terror groups could engineer the flu virus, making it deadlier (Selk, 2017). By combining traits of multiple strains and maximizing the virus’ natural properties, it could become highly transmittable (Farmer, 2107). Genetically engineered viruses have the potential to kill more people than nuclear weapons, governments remain underprepared for that threat (Selk, 2017).

Pedersen ‘17—Pepperdine University [Christian, “Reflecting Back on the Ebola Outbreak and the Future of Bioterrorism,” Pepperdine Policy Review: Vol. 9, dml]

Terror groups like al-Qaeda and ISIL have expressed interested, and have even attempted, to use biological agents in terror plots The technical and administrative knowledge of biology and chemistry can be acquired globally in medical schools, research programs, and laboratories, making it difficult to prevent potential practitioners of bioterrorism from acquiring the required scientific knowledge While at one time the ability to mutate strands was restricted to advanced research laboratories, rudimentary high school laboratories now have the ability to develop deadly biological agents Genetically engineered viruses have the potential to kill more people than nuclear weapons

Bioterror causes extinction and is likely.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

The goal of a gene drive is to spread or suppress certain genes in a wild population of organisms. It works by exploiting a quirk of nature. In sexually reproducing species, most genes have a 50 percent chance of being passed from parent to child, as offspring receive half their genes from each parent. As a result, genetic mutations normally spread only if they make an organism more likely to survive or breed. But some genes have evolved mechanisms that give them better than 50 percent odds of being passed on. That allows changes in those genes to proliferate quickly even if they have no effect on evolutionary fitness. Scientists can exploit this tendency by using CRISPR to insert genetic material into the “selfish” part of an organism’s genome, ensuring that the new trait will be passed on to most offspring, eventually spreading through large populations.

Gutmann '18 -President of the University of Pennsylvania and Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Professor of Communication [Amy and Jonthan D Moreno, Apr 16, "Keep CRISPR Safe," https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-04-16/keep-crispr-safe]

The goal of a gene drive is to spread or suppress certain genes in a wild population of organisms genetic mutations normally spread only if they make an organism more likely to survive or breed. on. That allows changes in those genes to proliferate quickly even if they have no effect on evolutionary fitness. Scientists can exploit this tendency by using CRISPR ensuring that the new trait will be passed on to most offspring

Scenario 2 is biodiversity.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the two greatest existential threats to human civilization stem from climate change and nuclear weapons. Both pose clear and present dangers to the perpetuation of our species, and the increasingly dire climate situation and nuclear arsenal modernizations in the United States and Russia were the most significant reasons why the Bulletin decided to keep the Doomsday Clock set at three minutes before midnight earlier this year. But there is another existential threat that the Bulletin overlooked in its Doomsday Clock announcement: biodiversity loss. This phenomenon is often identified as one of the many consequences of climate change, and this is of course correct. But biodiversity loss is also a contributing factor behind climate change. For example, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere reduces the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by plants, a natural process that mitigates the effects of climate change. So the causal relation between climate change and biodiversity loss is bidirectional. Furthermore, there are myriad phenomena that are driving biodiversity loss in addition to climate change. Other causes include ecosystem fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, oxygen depletion caused by fertilizers running off into ponds and streams, overfishing, human overpopulation, and overconsumption. All of these phenomena have a direct impact on the health of the biosphere, and all would conceivably persist even if the problem of climate change were somehow immediately solved. Such considerations warrant decoupling biodiversity loss from climate change, because the former has been consistently subsumed by the latter as a mere effect. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions—such as restoring habitats, creating protected areas (“biodiversity parks”), and practicing sustainable agriculture. The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in danger of dying. Consistent with these data, the 2014 Living Planet Report shows that the global population of wild vertebrates dropped by 52 percent in only four decades—from 1970 to 2010. While biologists often avoid projecting historical trends into the future because of the complexity of ecological systems, it’s tempting to extrapolate this figure to, say, the year 2050, which is four decades from 2010. As it happens, a 2006 study published in Science does precisely this: It projects past trends of marine biodiversity loss into the 21st century, concluding that, unless significant changes are made to patterns of human activity, there will be virtually no more wild-caught seafood by 2048. Catastrophic consequences for civilization. The consequences of this rapid pruning of the evolutionary tree of life extend beyond the obvious. There could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. For example, prior research has shown that localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. According to a 2012 paper published in Nature, there are reasons for thinking that we may be approaching a tipping point of this sort in the global ecosystem, beyond which the consequences could be catastrophic for civilization. As the authors write, a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human life.” According to Missouri Botanical Garden ecologist Adam Smith, one of the paper’s co-authors, this could occur in a matter of decades—far more quickly than most of the expected consequences of climate change, yet equally destructive. Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Indeed, it could even fuel the rise of terrorism. (After all, climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria, and multiple high-ranking US officials, such as former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and CIA director John Brennan, have affirmed that climate change and terrorism are connected.) The reality is that we are entering the sixth mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, and the impact of this event could be felt by civilization “in as little as three human lifetimes,” as the aforementioned 2012 Nature paper notes. Furthermore, the widespread decline of biological populations could plausibly initiate a dramatic transformation of the global ecosystem on an even faster timescale: perhaps a single human lifetime. The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. As such, it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.

Torres 2016 -the founder of the X-Risks Institute, an affiliate scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies [Phil, "Biodiversity loss: An existential risk comparable to climate change," Apr 11, thebulletin.org/biodiversity-loss-existential-risk-comparable-climate-change9329]

there is another existential threat : biodiversity loss. biodiversity loss is also a contributing factor behind climate change. , deforestation reduces the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere . So the causal relation between climate change and biodiversity loss is bidirectional. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, is already under way.” The consequences of this rapid pruning could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. , a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. it could even fuel the rise of terrorism The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.

Biodiversity loss is a threat multiplier, it outweighs and triggers their impacts

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

China’s hunger for data extends to some of the most personal information imaginable: our own DNA. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, BGI—a Chinese genome-sequencing company that began as a government-funded research group—has broken ground on some 50 new laboratories abroad designed to help governments test for the virus. China has legitimate reasons to build these labs, but it also has an ugly record of forcibly collecting DNA data from Tibetans and Uighurs as part of its efforts to monitor these minorities. Given that BGI runs China’s national library of genomics data, it is conceivable that through BGI testing, foreigners’ biological data might end up in that repository.

Darby '21 - is CEO of IQT, a not-for-profit investment firm working on behalf of the U.S. national security community [Christopher and Sarah Sewall, "The Innovation Wars America’s Eroding Technological Advantage," https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-02-10/technology-innovation-wars]

China’s hunger for data extends to some of the most personal information imaginable it also has an ugly record of forcibly collecting DNA data from Tibetans and Uighurs as part of its efforts to monitor these minorities.

China is a posed to take the lead on biotech – risking planetary survival.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Today, biomedical science sits on the cusp of another revolution: the use of human and microbial cells as therapeutic entities (1). In principle, cells have therapeutic capabilities that are distinct from those of small molecules and biologics and that extend beyond the regenerative-medicine arena. Part drug and part device, cells can sense diverse signals, move to specific sites in the body, integrate inputs to make decisions, and execute complex response behaviors—all in the context of a specific tissue environment. These attributes could potentially be harnessed to treat infections, autoimmunity, cancers, metabolic diseases, and tissue degeneration as well as realizing tissue repair and regeneration. Indeed, pioneering clinical trials have highlighted the benefits of using cells as therapeutic agents (2–7). However, the complexity of cells and the challenge of controlling their actions in a therapeutic setting provide daunting scientific, regulatory, economic, and cultural obstacles to the establishment of cells as a widespread and viable pharmaceutical platform.

Fischbach 2013 - UCSF Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, University of California, San Francisco Michael A, Jeffrey A Bluestone, and Wendell A Lim, "Cell-Based Therapeutics: The Next Pillar of Medicine," Science Translational Medicine 03 Apr 2013: Vol. 5, Issue 179, pp. 179ps7

biomedical science sits on the cusp of another revolution: the use of human and microbial cells as therapeutic entities cells have therapeutic capabilities that are distinct from those of small molecules and biologics and that extend beyond the regenerative-medicine arena Part drug and part device cells can sense diverse signals, move to specific sites in the body, integrate inputs to make decisions, and execute complex response behaviors all in the context of a specific tissue environment These attributes could be harnessed to treat infections, autoimmunity, cancers, metabolic diseases, and tissue degeneration realizing tissue repair and regeneration

Solves disease and drug resistance

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Bioweapons were the second most frequently mentioned threat, appearing in 28% of the articles analyzed. Franconi et al. (2018) define bioweapons as “deadly pathogens – bacteria or viruses – or toxins that can be deliberately released in order to cause harm to people or animals and plants.” Generally, when a bioweapon is used by a state sponsored entity it is considered an act of biowarfare, while the use of a bioweapon by a non-state sponsored entity or individual is considered an act of bioterrorism (Jamil 2015), the latter of which was mentioned in 17% of articles. Unaltered organisms can and have been used as bioweapons in the past, such as in the 2001 anthrax attacks. Biotechnology opens the door to creating enhanced or novel pathogens and new avenues for toxin production. Cross (2018) identifies three ways in which biotechnology can be used to create bioweapons: (1) “recreating pathogenic viruses such as Ebola, SARS, or smallpox,” (2) “engineering bacteria to make them more dangerous, which could be easily accomplished by inserting genes to confer antibiotic resistance,” and (3) “engineering microbes to produce and release toxic biochemicals.” Researchers have already demonstrated capabilities in all three of these avenues. Horsepox, a close relative of smallpox, has been synthesized from mail-ordered DNA (Noyce et al. 2018), avian influenza has been engineered to allow for airborne transmission between mammals (Linster et al. 2014), and botulinum toxin has been produced using yeast cells (Fonfria et al. 2018). These three cases are also prime examples of dual use research, as they were carried out for beneficial purposes (vaccine development, study of transmission, and enhanced therapeutics, respectively) but also provide a clear avenue towards weaponization.

Cummings '21 [Christopher L., Kaitlin M. Volk, Anna A. Ulanova, Do Thuy Uyen Ha Lam & Pei Rou Ng, “Emerging Biosecurity Threats and Responses: A Review of Published and Gray Literature” in Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology, pp 13–36]

Bioweapons were the second most frequently mentioned threat, appearing in 28% of the articles analyzed. when a bioweapon is used by a state sponsored entity it is considered an act of biowarfare, while the use of a bioweapon by a non-state sponsored entity or individual is considered an act of bioterrorism Biotechnology opens the door to creating enhanced or novel pathogens and new avenues for toxin production

Scientific consensus proves bioweapons are a threat.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Because emerging biotechnologies are dual-use, governance must weigh the risk of misuse with the potential for beneficial use in innovation and development. Unfortunately, biosecurity attempts are mired in uncertainty around both the actual capabilities of synthetic biology, as well as the motivations of actors given the increasing number of contexts in which synthetic biology is used. Modern governments are still relying on old rules to regulate a new technology, clearly an insufficient strategy for ensuring security in the coming decades.

Trump '21 – PhD, a research social scientist for the U.S.  Army Corps of Engineers, and served as a Strategic Planner and public health subject-matter expert for FEMA Region 1’s Data Analytics Task Force [Benjamin D, Marie-Valentie Florin, Edward Perkins, and Igor Linkov," Biosecurity for Synthetic Biology and Emerging Biotechnologies: Critical Challenges for Governance” in Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology]

, biosecurity attempts are mired in uncertainty around both the actual capabilities of synthetic biology, as well as the motivations of actors given the increasing number of contexts in which synthetic biology is used Modern governments are still relying on old rules to regulate a new technology, clearly an insufficient strategy for ensuring security in the coming decades

Elementary school students could build a bioweapon.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Dozens of violent episodes across the world were reported during the food price hikes of 2007 and 2008.55 And others have since followed. Casualties associated with such episodes—popularly known as “food riots” (yet somewhat arbitrarily defined, box 1)—in Argentina, Cameroon, Haiti and India, to cite a few, made world headlines. There have been violent episodes also associated with low prices, such as those involving coffee producers in Vietnam (or cotton producers in Burkina Faso).56 These episodes remind us about the close relationship between food insecurity and conflict. Furthermore, the world has grown accustomed to seeing a different angle of the food-conflict nexus: foodrelated humanitarian disaster and famines were—and continue to be—associated with civil conflict and interstate wars, for example, the recent Somalia famine. But the other link, the food-to-conflict connection is hardly news, and, as the father of the Green Revolution and Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug eloquently put it: “we cannot build world peace on empty stomachs and human misery.” The interrelated and bidirectional connection between food and war has also been emphasized in the works of Amartya Sen, Jean Drèze, and anthropologist Ellen Messner, who coined the term “food wars.”57 Food price shocks can be responsible for the origination and continuation of conflict and, more generally, political instability. Increasing empirical evidence shows that international food prices and the domestic pass through to local markets of these international prices has a significant role in all types of conflict, from interstate wars to civil wars, regime breakdowns, and communal violence.58 Food price shocks may cause spontaneous and largely urban sociopolitical instability, with urban food consumers as the primary protesters.59 In these cases, price shocks can trigger sociopolitical unrest, fueling preexisting grievances—including poverty and other disparities—and highlighting the lack of adequate social safety nets and other compensating policies.60 This is the case, for example, with protests in Guinea and Mauritania in 2007 and Haiti in 2008.61 Yet, some argue that poverty is not a precondition for such protests, and, in fact, some of these protests did not necessarily always engage the poorest or hungriest individuals nor countries (for example, protests organized by consumers’ associations in Senegal and trade unions in Burkina Faso in 2008).62 Either way, those shocks reduce a country’s capability of producing, purchasing, and providing access to food, thus increasing the risk of food insecurity and, consequently, the likelihood of protests and escalated conflict.63 But food prices are not the only cause or contributor to violent protests associated with food.64 More structural pressures, such as competition— intra or interstate—over natural resources such as land, water, fisheries, labor, or capital may well cause political instability and unrest. Farmers and farm workers become, in such cases, the main agitators, more likely developing into social movements than riots from price shocks in urban settings.65 This is the case, for example, in land grabs in Madagascar that in 2009 were reported to contribute to a coup that ousted then President Ravalomanana, or the violent protests concerning genetically modified food in the Philippines in 2013.66 Consequently, the attention given to conflict jeopardizing food security (by reducing agricultural production and forcing displacement of people) during the last decades needs to be expanded. A more encompassing view should also incorporate the fact that food insecurity in general, and food price shocks in particular, also contribute to instability and conflict. Monitoring food prices (table 3 and figure 2) responds not only to food security and welfare interests, but also to serious political instability and conflict motivations. As a result, a proper monitoring constitutes a first step in addressing the interactions between food insecurity and conflict.

Cuesta 2014 - Senior Economist at the World Bank [Jose, "Food Price Watch," May, www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/Poverty%20documents/FPW_May%202014_final.pdf]

Dozens of violent episodes across the world were reported during the food price hikes of 2007 and 2008 These episodes remind us about the close relationship between food insecurity and conflict we cannot build world peace on empty stomachs and human misery.” The interrelated and bidirectional connection between food and war has also been emphasized in the works of Amartya Sen, Jean Drèze, and anthropologist Ellen Messner, who coined the term “food wars Food price shocks can be responsible for the origination and continuation of conflict and, , political instability. Increasing empirical evidence shows that international food prices and the domestic pass through to local markets of these international prices has a significant role in all types of conflict regime breakdowns, and communal violence. Food price shocks may cause spontaneous and largely urban sociopolitical instability price shocks can trigger sociopolitical unrest, fueling preexisting grievances and highlighting the lack of adequate social safety nets and other compensating policies hocks reduce a country’s capability of producing, purchasing, and providing access to food increasing the risk of food insecurity and, escalated conflict. . Monitoring food prices ) responds not only to food security and welfare interests, but also to serious political instability and conflict motivations.

A litany of empirical studies prove food security are the largest determinant of conflict

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

The increasingly globalized, distributed, and dispersed nature of synthetic biology products and research worsens challenges arising from differing practices of biosecurity governance globally. Advanced biological research is no longer overwhelmingly dominated by Europe and the US, and this may introduce different approaches to, or priorities for, biosecurity. Russia’s Federal Research Programme for Genetic Technologies Development for 2019–2027, for instance, intends to “implement a comprehensive solution to the task of the accelerated development of genetic technologies, including genetic editing; to establish scientific and technological groundwork for medicine, agriculture and industry; to improve the system of preventing biological emergencies and monitoring in this area” (Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation 2019). Similarly, Saudi Arabia is funding research related to the development of microbial cell factories to produce fuels and chemicals, while the Singaporean government is investing considerable resources into the funding of life and environmental sciences researchat Nanyang Technological University, the National University of Singapore, and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). The Chinese Academy of Sciences is establishing an Institute of Synthetic Biology, which is tasked with the dual responsibilities of fostering roadmaps for the future development of Chinese synthetic biology while also establishing safety and security norms for researchers at Chinese institutions. There are no top-down efforts beyond existing mechanisms like the BWC or the CWC (The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction) that standardize global governance and usage of synthetic biology, and bottom-up efforts are not coordinated in their reach or messaging.

Trump '21 – PhD, a research social scientist for the U.S.  Army Corps of Engineers, and served as a Strategic Planner and public health subject-matter expert for FEMA Region 1’s Data Analytics Task Force [Benjamin D, Marie-Valentie Florin, Edward Perkins, and Igor Linkov," Biosecurity for Synthetic Biology and Emerging Biotechnologies: Critical Challenges for Governance” in Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology]

globally. Advanced biological research is no longer overwhelmingly dominated by Europe and the US, and this may introduce different approaches to, , biosecurity Russia’s Programme intends to “implement a comprehensive solution to the task of the accelerated development of genetic technologies Saudi Arabia is funding research related to the development of microbial cell factories The Chinese Academy of Sciences is establishing an Institute of Synthetic Biology,

The biotech race is afoot.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Since the withdrawal, there has been a lot of talk of the US’s lost credibility. But what credibility did it have to lose? Credibility is not about saying you are committed. It is not even about sending troops. It is about your antagonist believing that your public pronouncements are aligned with your interests, so that you will stick with them even when the going gets rough. The problem for the US in Afghanistan was that its reluctance to stay for the truly long haul was obvious.

Tooze ’21 - Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University [Adam; Sep 8; “The new age of American power;” https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2021/09/new-age-american-power]

Since withdrawal, there has been of talk of the US’s lost credibility But what credibility did it have to lose? Credibility is not about saying you are committed . It is about your antagonist believing that your public pronouncements are aligned with your interests The problem for the US in Afghanistan was that its reluctance to stay for the truly long haul was obvious

Afghanistan withdrawal boosts cred

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Claims about synthetic biology’s potential, like other emerging technologies, nonetheless tend to overstate its ‘enabling’ capacity. Likewise, the ease of producing biological weapons tends to be overstated. As a number of commentators note, biology is not yet easy to engineer (Jefferson et al. 2014) and, for the foreseeable future, the skills necessary to produce biological weapons are likely to remain only within the grasp of states (Piers Millet in Regalado 2016). However, the field’s emphasis on eliminating technical barriers and reducing the importance of tacit knowledge (Oye 2012) represents a powerful source of expectation for advocates and critics alike. For advocates, it represents the possible realization of modern biology’s full potential, one that could yield revolutionary advances in health, medicine, and industry in the twenty-first century. For critics, it represents a seemingly open-ended risk that requires exceptional precaution. For national governments, and international conventions responsible for establishing global biosecurity norms and obligations that are operationalized at the national level through legislation and other regulatory tools (McLeish and Nightingale 2007), a central question is how (if at all) does top-down biosecurity governance need to change in response to synthetic biology?

Hamilton '21 [R. Alexander Hamilton, Ruth Mampuys, S. E. Galaitsi, Aengus Collins, Ivan Istomin, Marko Ahteensuu & Lela Bakanidze, "Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Considerations for Top-Down Governance for Biosecurity and Synthetic Biology," in Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology, pp 37–58]

Likewise, the ease of producing biological weapons tends to be overstated. biology is not yet easy to engineer and, for the foreseeable future, the skills necessary to produce biological weapons are likely to remain only within the grasp of states the field’s emphasis on eliminating technical barriers and reducing the importance of tacit knowledge represents a powerful source of expectation for advocates and critics alike. For national governments, and international conventions responsible for establishing global biosecurity norms and obligations that are operationalized at the national level through legislation and other regulatory tools a central question is how does top-down biosecurity governance need to change in response to synthetic biology?

Top-down bans fail – instead we need adaptive policies like the aff.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Synthetic biology is a transformative technology with the possibility to change the world to the same extent as – if not more than – the digital revolution. As is the case with previous scientific breakthroughs, the potential for its dual-use and misuse represents a global problem, and necessitates that the highest levels of policy makers pay it close attention. Although targeted countermeasures can go some way toward providing protection, preventative actions are likely to be more effective given the heightened uncertainty of the field’s future (Trump et al. 2020a). It is necessary that biosecurity policies and practices be updated to take into account both the unprecedented challenges associated with synthetic biology and the globalized, diffuse, and varied nature of its threat space.

Trump '21 – PhD, a research social scientist for the U.S.  Army Corps of Engineers, and served as a Strategic Planner and public health subject-matter expert for FEMA Region 1’s Data Analytics Task Force [Benjamin D, Marie-Valentie Florin, Edward Perkins, and Igor Linkov," Biosecurity for Synthetic Biology and Emerging Biotechnologies: Critical Challenges for Governance” in Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology]

Synthetic biology is a transformative technology with the possibility to change the world to the same extent as the digital revolution the potential for its dual-use and misuse represents a global problem, and necessitates that the highest levels of policy makers pay it close attention It is necessary that biosecurity policies and practices be updated to take into account both the unprecedented challenges associated with synthetic biology and the globalized nature of its threat space.

Bans solve neither advantage and drive the tech underground.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

A laissez-faire governance approach cedes much of the regulatory power to existing or emerging bottom-up initiatives, placing trust in the capacity of technology producers, industry and users to play an active role in their own regulation. Under this approach, such non-governmental actors are encouraged to determine (at least in part) how safety and security practices are structured, implemented and enforced, while centralized government plays a role in setting minimum standards and intervening in the event of regulatory failures. This approach is generally intended to promote innovation and flexibility, as well as rapid adaption and response to emerging threats (Linkov et al. 2018a, b).

Hamilton '21 [R. Alexander Hamilton, Ruth Mampuys, S. E. Galaitsi, Aengus Collins, Ivan Istomin, Marko Ahteensuu & Lela Bakanidze, "Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Considerations for Top-Down Governance for Biosecurity and Synthetic Biology," in Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology, pp 37–58]

A laissez-faire governance approach cedes much of the regulatory power to existing or emerging bottom-up initiatives, placing trust in the capacity of technology producers This approach is generally intended to promote innovation and flexibility

The CP disregards bioethics.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Still, the problem of how to incentivize private actors to invest in biosecurity remains. The answer will require the participation not only of bench scientists, but also of various overseers, gatekeepers, and watchdog groups involved in biotechnology research and development (for instance, the World Organisation for Animal Health’s Guideline for Responsible Conduct in Veterinary Research). One example of a potential approach is to train journal editors to recognize potential information hazards within article submissions. Additionally, funders responsible for reviewing grants could require that applicants include a review of potential information and security hazards which might occur over the course of the proposed work. In these and other examples, a fusion of top-down and bottom-up approaches is necessary in order to identify security threats and to raise awareness of biosecurity issues; meanwhile, bottom-up organizations can develop on-the-ground passive surveillance programs to monitor potential dual-use security threats.

Trump '21 – PhD, a research social scientist for the U.S.  Army Corps of Engineers, and served as a Strategic Planner and public health subject-matter expert for FEMA Region 1’s Data Analytics Task Force [Benjamin D, Marie-Valentie Florin, Edward Perkins, and Igor Linkov," Biosecurity for Synthetic Biology and Emerging Biotechnologies: Critical Challenges for Governance” in Emerging Threats of Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology]

problem of how to incentivize private actors to invest in biosecurity remains The answer will require the participation bench scientists overseers, gatekeepers, and watchdog groups involved in biotechnology research and development funders responsible for reviewing grants could require that applicants include a review of potential information and security hazards which might occur over the course of the proposed work , a fusion of top-down and bottom-up approaches is necessary in order to identify security threats and to raise awareness of biosecurity issues;

The perm solves best.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Terror groups like al-Qaeda and ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) have expressed interested, and have even attempted, to use biological agents in terror plots (Biodefense, 2016). The technical and administrative knowledge of biology and chemistry can be acquired globally in medical schools, research programs, and laboratories, making it difficult to prevent potential practitioners of bioterrorism from acquiring the required scientific knowledge (Chiodo, 2015). While at one time the ability to mutate strands was restricted to advanced research laboratories, rudimentary high school laboratories now have the ability to develop deadly biological agents (Garrett, 2012). With relative easy, terror groups could engineer the flu virus, making it deadlier (Selk, 2017). By combining traits of multiple strains and maximizing the virus’ natural properties, it could become highly transmittable (Farmer, 2107). Genetically engineered viruses have the potential to kill more people than nuclear weapons, governments remain underprepared for that threat (Selk, 2017). Terrorists could be drawn to the use of biological agents because of the difficulty of detection and the ease at which some biological agents can naturally spread through a population (Bioterrorism, 2006). There are essentially three ways which agents could be acquired by terrorist: they could be stolen, created in laboratory environments, or collected naturally. A gloomy reality is that as the advancement of new technologies reduce the costs of genetic sequencing, it will become easier and less expensive to create novel organisms (Garrett, 2012). Bioterrorist attacks can be planned to induce maximum damage and panic with a minimum risk of early detection. Potential agents of attack are categorized by risk (rated as an, A, B, or a C) depending on the agent’s availability, ease of dissemination and transmission, and potential impact (Bioterrorism, 2006). Category A agents are considered the most dangerous and threatening to National Security. Ebola is categorized as a Category A bioagent because of its ability to cause mass panic and disruption and the special public health actions required for treating those infected. Through the EVD, “mother nature has created the perfect bioweapon” (Thiessen, 2014). Following the Paris terrorist attacks, the French have warned that terrorist organizations may attempt to steal biological agents (Talent & Graham, 2016). The British Ministry of Defense feared terrorists would try to acquire EVD and released a report outlining three separate scenarios in which terror groups could successfully weaponize the virus. (Quinn, 2015) These could be stolen from research facilities, laboratories, or government stockpiles. While the more exotic and devastating agents (such as small pox) must be cultivated in laboratory environments and are therefore more difficult to obtain, many biological agents are naturally occurring (Gottron, 2002). Examples of these naturally occurring, and easier to obtain agents include: human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the hepatitis strands, yellow fever, and the Ebola virus (Gottron, 2002). Moreover, the Ebola virus is native to a continent where terrorist organizations like Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State are active (Thiessen, 2014). The 21-day incubation period allows potential jihadists more than enough time to infect themselves, then travel to infected population centers, developing the means of mass distribution (Thiessen, 2014). In June 2001 – months prior to the September 11th attack in New York – Dark Winter, a senior level wargame, was run in conjunction with security think tanks and government agencies to simulate government responses to acts of bioterrorism (Dark Winter). The simulation demonstrated how a biological terror attack could result in mass civilian casualties, civil disorder, institutional breakdown and lack of faith in government – compromising national security (Dark Winter). Major challenges for policymakers included the many “fault lines” which existed between governmental agencies, the levels of government, private healthcare systems, and the public (Dark Winter). Breakdowns in centralized leadership and communication could threaten containment and control. It was revealed that the healthcare system in the United States had no surge abilities to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed or to meet the heightened demand for vaccinations (Dark Winter). Finally, targeted communications and information management was recognized as a challenge, both in working with the media and in disseminating important information (Dark Winter). It became very clear after the exercise that the United States was unprepared for an act of bioterrorism. In 2010, nearly ten years after the Dark Winter exercise, a commission created to evaluate the national emergency response capabilities gave the nation a failing grade on its ability to respond to a bioterrorist threat (O’Grady, 2015).

Pedersen, 17—Pepperdine University (Christian, “Reflecting Back on the Ebola Outbreak and the Future of Bioterrorism,” Pepperdine Policy Review: Vol. 9, dml)

Winter run in conjunction with security think tanks and government agencies to simulate government responses to acts of bioterrorism The simulation demonstrated how a biological terror attack could result in mass civilian casualties, civil disorder, institutional breakdown and lack of faith in government – compromising national security Major challenges for policymakers included the many “fault lines” which existed between governmental agencies, the levels of government, private healthcare systems, and the public Breakdowns in centralized leadership and communication could threaten containment and control Finally, targeted communications and information management was recognized as a challenge, both in working with the media and in disseminating important information

States can’t solve bioterror.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

The other worry is Mr Macron’s: that NATO will provoke Russia. From the start of this war, when he spoke of “consequences…such as you have never seen in your entire history”, Mr Putin has hinted that Western involvement could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. Wisely, the West has therefore been clear that NATO will not fight against Russian forces—because, if they did, the war could spin out of control, with catastrophic results.

Economist '4/2 ["Why Ukraine Must Win," economist.com/leaders/2022/04/02/why-ukraine-must-win]

West has therefore been clear that NATO will not fight against Russian forces—

Retreat now is a victory for Putin, he’ll escalate in the future.

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

First, NATO’s formidable conventional and nuclear forces are the most effective way to protect North America and Europe — the heart of the democratic world — from attack. Threats to our collective security have not vanished in the 21st century. Mr. Putin remains a determined adversary preying on Eastern Europe and American elections. NATO is a force multiplier: The United States has allies who will stand by us, while Russia has none.

Burns 2018 - former under secretary of state and ambassador to NATO, teaches diplomacy and international relations at Harvard Nicholas, "What America Gets out of NATO," Jul 11, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/opinion/what-america-gets-out-of-nato.html

NATO’s formidable conventional and nuclear forces are the most effective way to protect North America and Europe from attack. Putin remains a determined adversary preying on Eastern Europe and American elections. NATO is a force multiplier: The United States has allies who will stand by us, while Russia has none

NATO is the only tool to deter Putin

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Adding a further degree of uncertainty to the story, neither the Israeli or Russian governments have acknowledged the report yet. This is not surprising, for a direct Russia-Hezbollah relationship could lead to any number of dangerous scenarios that might spiral out of control. For example, what happens if Israel strikes Russian arms shipments to Hezbollah and Russian troops are killed in the process? Alternatively, what if Russia defends an arms transfer to Hezbollah by shooting down an Israeli jet with one of its S-400 missiles recently deployed to Syria? Either one of these scenarios could lead to a rapid escalation that would draw the United States — still Israel’s closest ally despite the longstanding tensions between Netanyahu and Obama — into the fray. However, even if one of these worst case scenarios does not come to pass, at a minimum, Israel’s freedom for maneuver in Syria is diminished by the Russian presence. Whereas previously Israel owned the skies over Syria, the Israeli air force must now coordinate its activities with the Russians to avoid accidental clashes. Moreover, according to a report co-authored by Israeli Brig. Gen. Muni Katz and Nadav Pollak for the Washington Institute, simply working alongside the Russians will significantly upgrade Hezbollah’s military capabilities. “Hezbollah will be exposed to Russian military thought, which entails sophisticated operational concepts and advanced military planning skills,” the report notes, including “how to organize an effective command-and-control structure, how to choose different weapons for different scenarios, how to create additional targets after entering a battlefield, and how to maintain logistical routes.” The authors argue this will enhance Hezbollah’s offensive warfare and urban capabilities, which better positions the group to make good on Nasrallah’s pledge to launch strikes into northern Israel’s Galilee region in the next war. Hezbollah can also watch the weapons systems the Russians use, and according to the report, “can learn how to use its existing weapons more effectively, and examine systems it might want to procure in the future.”

Cohen 2016 - Former U.S. State Department project officer involved in managing economic reform projects Josh, "Is Russia supporting Hezbollah," Feb 8, intersectionproject.eu/article/russia-world/russia-supporting-hezbollah

direct Russia-Hezbollah relationship could lead to any number of dangerous scenarios that might spiral out of control. if Israel strikes Russian arms shipments to Hezbollah and Russian troops are killed in the process? what if Russia defends an arms transfer to Hezbollah by shooting down an Israeli jet with one of its S-400 missiles Either one of these scenarios could lead to a rapid escalation that would draw the United States into the fray. Israel’s freedom for maneuver in Syria is diminished by the Russian presence. Israeli air force must now coordinate its activities with the Russians to avoid accidental clashes. “Hezbollah will be exposed to Russian military thought, which entails sophisticated operational concepts and advanced military planning skills,” including “how to organize an effective command-and-control structure, how to choose different weapons for different scenarios, how to create additional targets after entering a battlefield, and how to maintain logistical routes.” Hezbollah can also watch the weapons systems the Russians use, and can learn how to use its existing weapons more effectively, and examine systems it might want to procure in the future.”

Shapiro proves that Russia will partner with Iran and terror groups like Hezbollah if the US left NATO, that spirals into a global war

Aff - Biotech - Packet - Michigan 7 2022.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Affirmatives

2022

Since the formation of NATO in 1949 the defense of Europe and the free world has depended on the absolute certainty that whatever president is occupying the White House, the United States will come to the aid of a NATO member if attacked. Any doubt about the American commitment, and the credibility of NATO's doctrine of collective defense, is holed below the waterline. At a time when the West faces a greater threat from a resurgent Russia since the most dangerous crises of the Cold War, NATO, more than ever, needs to stand strong, united and credible. Russia's invasion of Crimea and Ukraine in 2014 may have already lit the fuse that could lead to the unthinkable: nuclear war with Russia in Europe. Consider the words and actions of President Vladimir Putin, who has described the breakup of the Soviet Union as the "greatest geo-strategic tragedy of the 20th century." In his speech on March 18, 2014, the day Crimea was admitted into the Russian Federation, Putin majored on the threat the West posed to Russia by its continued encirclement and warned about the possibility of pushback: "If you compress the spring to its limit, it will snap back hard: something you should remember," while claiming the right to protect the interests of Russian speakers everywhere, "even if it will worsen our relations with some states." Overnight, Putin became NATO's strategic adversary, starting a dynamic that could lead to a clash with NATO over the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (which have significant Russian-speaking minorities). Two years on and the threat is even greater. Indeed, the ratchet of tension clicks tighter on an almost weekly basis: Even this week we wake up to news of Russia sailing warships near the British coast in "a show of force and a show of capabilities," according to Peter Felstead, editor of Jane's Defence Weekly. Unprecedented levels of military activity on the borders and in the airspace of the Baltic states, Finland and Sweden have been matched by the rapid buildup of military forces in Russia's Western Military District on the borders of NATO. For example, in January, Russia announced the formation and deployment of three motor rifle divisions, about 60,000 troops, along the Russian frontier with the Baltic states. And the Russians have kept themselves busy with regular so-called snap exercises to test the readiness of their military, at least one of which was based on a scenario of invasion and occupation of the Baltic states. Putin's strategic aim is clear: to re-establish Russia's status as one of the world's great powers and to dominate the former republics of the Soviet Union -- imperialist intentions that might have been acceptable to great powers in the 19th century but which are an affront in 2016. If the opportunity presents itself, he may well activate long-held plans to march into the Baltic states. To paraphrase British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's 1938 comment on Czechoslovakia, why are events in these faraway countries of which we may know little important to Americans? First, because if Russia puts one soldier across the borders of the Baltic states it means war with NATO. Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have been members of NATO since 2004 and are therefore protected under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, the founding document of NATO, which states that an attack on one is an attack on all. A Russian attack on the Baltic states puts America at war with Russia -- meaning nuclear war, because Russia integrates nuclear weapons into every aspect of its military doctrine. And don't think Russia would limit itself to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Any form of nuclear release by the Russians would almost certainly precipitate nuclear retaliation by the United States, and the dreadful reality of mutually assured destruction and the end of life as we know it would follow. Indeed, Russia is at war with America already. Russian hacking of Democratic Party email servers and, if confirmed, WikiLeaks publicizing of Clinton campaign emails to discredit the Democrats and propel Donald Trump -- arguably what Putin would classify as a "useful idiot" into the White House -- is classic maskirovka -- deception, aimed at undermining the intelligence and integrity of the enemy in a way that remains below the threshold of conventional warfare. In the words of Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, and a man with close connections to the Putin regime, the Kremlin has been at war since 2014. But although the clock may be ticking close to midnight, it is not too late. Maintenance of the peace we have enjoyed in Western Europe for nearly 70 years depends on effective deterrence. The bar of risk must be raised too high for Russia to consider any opportunistic move into the Baltic states. This requires forward basing of a credible military capability in the Baltic states and eastern Poland (rather than the token presence agreed at the NATO Warsaw Summit in July). NATO reserves able to move quickly and effectively to bolster defenses in the Baltics will send a powerful message. It also requires Canada and European members of NATO to recognize that military capabilities lost from cumulative disarmament over the past two decades must be regenerated. This means increasing defense spending, almost certainly above the 2% of gross domestic product agreed -- but often not acted upon -- by NATO members (less the United States, UK, Estonia and Greece). 2017 is 100th anniversary of the first occasion the United States intervened in one of Europe's wars. The region's security is a matter of American security, and it means continued and close engagement in Europe and a continuation of the strong leadership that America has given NATO from the start.

Shirreff 2016 - senior British army officer and former deputy supreme allied commander Europe Richard, "Putin's aggression in Europe should worry the US," Oct 21, www.cnn.com/2016/10/21/opinions/russia-aggression-nato-shirreff-opinion/

At a time when the West faces a greater threat from a resurgent Russia NATO, needs to stand strong, united and credible. Russia's invasion of Crimea may have already lit the fuse that could lead to the unthinkable: nuclear war with Russia in Europe if Russia puts one soldier across the borders of the Baltic states it means war with NATO A Russian attack on the Baltic states puts America at war with Russia -- meaning nuclear war, because Russia integrates nuclear weapons into every aspect of its military doctrine Any form of nuclear release by the Russians would almost certainly precipitate nuclear retaliation by the U S and the dreadful reality of mutually assured destruction and the end of life as we know it would follow , Russia is at war with America already. Russian hacking of Democratic Party email servers and WikiLeaks publicizing of Clinton campaign emails to discredit the Democrats and propel Trump is classic maskirovka although the clock may be ticking close to midnight, it is not too late.

Russian aggression causes extinction

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How the United States chooses to manage the Russia challenge will shape the geopolitical land- scape for decades to come. U.S. allies, partners, and adversaries in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere will be watching to see how the United States responds to the evolving challenges posed by Russia and will calibrate their behavior accordingly. In the rush to make deals with Russia to se- cure lesser objectives, the United States may well find itself sacri- ficing a more fundamental goal: advancing a global order that benefits our people, our econo- my, and our constitutional values. Standing resolutely by our allies and our treaty commitments is central to upholding that order. We must meet Russia's efforts to challenge it with the steel of our determination rather than mush that cedes our hard-won gains.

Samp 17 – senior fellow @ CSIS, MA in International Affairs @ GW (Lisa, with Kathleen Hicks et al, “Recalibrating US Strategy Towards Russia,” Kindle Edition)

How the United States chooses to manage the Russia challenge will shape the geopolitical land- scape for decades to come. U.S. allies, partners, and adversaries in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere will be watching to see how the United States responds to the challenges posed by Russia and will calibrate their behavior accordingly Standing resolutely by our allies and our treaty commitments is central to upholding that order. We must meet Russia's efforts to challenge it with the steel of our determination rather than mush that cedes our hard-won gains

Remaining steadfast to treaty commitments against Russia is perceived by allies and enemies globally

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WASHINGTON - After two years under rhetorical assault from U.S. President Donald Trump, America’s alliances have somehow held up. This year, however, the constraints on Trump’s anti-alliance instincts are falling away, and a mix of internal and external pressures are endangering several key alliances at once.

Brands 1/30 - Henry Kissinger distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies [Hal, 2019, Bloomberg, Can U.S. alliances withstand Trump's venom?, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/01/30/commentary/world-commentary/can-u-s-alliances-withstand-trumps-venom/#.XFIBZ1xKg_g]

After two years under rhetorical assault from Trump, America’s alliances have somehow held up. This year the constraints on Trump’s anti-alliance instincts are falling away a mix of internal and external pressures are endangering several key alliances

Now matters---internal restraints on the executive have completely eroded and undermines crisis response

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Trump’s comments are worse than just undermining NATO: By refusing to commit to the Baltics categorically, he encourages Russia to test American resolve in dangerous ways. According to some Russia experts, Vladimir Putin’s ultimate wish in Europe is to break NATO. The way to do that, according to these scholars, is to expose the Article 5 guarantee as hollow: to show that when push comes to shove, the United States or other large NATO powers wouldn’t actually defend the weaker states. The Baltic states would be the most likely scenario for this to happen. They are very small, they’re right on Russia’s borders, and they aren't really all that important to Western countries' own security. By threatening these states, Russia would force a question: Are the United States, Britain, and France really willing to sacrifice their own soldiers in defense of a tiny state? In 2014, the Danish intelligence agency — note that Denmark is a NATO ally — publicly warned that this was a serious possibility: Russia may attempt to test NATO’s cohesion by engaging in military intimidation of the Baltic countries, for instance with a threatening military build-up close to the borders of these countries and simultaneous attempts of political pressure, destabilization and possibly infiltration. Russia could launch such an intimidation campaign in connection with a serious crisis in the post-Soviet space or another international crisis in which Russia confronts the United States and NATO. The critical issue in preventing this scenario, again, is the perception of NATO commitment. So long as Putin believes that the US and other major powers are firmly committed to the defense of their treaty allies, he’s unlikely to risk starting a war that he would almost certainly lose. This is why Trump’s comments are so damaging: They send a direct signal to the Kremlin that a Trump-led America will be less than serious about the defense of NATO allies. This suggests that a ploy to break NATO might have a bigger risk of succeeding than previously thought. But note that Trump also refused to say unequivocally that he wouldn’t abide by the NATO treaty. “I don’t want to tell you what I’d do because I don’t want Putin to know what I’d do,” he said. But the entire point of NATO is that Putin needs to know what America will do. If he knows the US will defend the Baltics, then he will likely back off. If he knows the US won’t defend the Baltics, then we could have the breakup of NATO — which would be quite bad but wouldn’t immediately risk World War III. The nightmare scenario, though, is that Putin’s confidence in NATO is undermined even though the United States under Trump remains committed to defending its treaty allies. That’s the scenario under which misperceptions potentially escalate into an actual war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. Max Fisher wrote an extended piece on how this uncertainty could plausibly escalate to war for Vox last year; I encourage you to read it. But the point, according the experts Fisher spoke to, is that a firm understanding that the US will defend its NATO allies is crucial. "That kind of misperception situation is definitely possible, and that’s how wars start," Steve Saideman, a professor who studies NATO at Carleton University, told Fisher. He then scarily compared modern Europe with pre–World War I Europe: "The thing that makes war most thinkable is when other people don’t think it’s thinkable."

Beauchamp 16 – senior reporter at Vox, where he covers global politics and ideology (Zach, “Donald Trump needs to clarify his position on NATO before something scary happens,” Vox, https://www.vox.com/2016/7/21/12247074/donald-trump-nato-war)

Trump’s comments are undermining NATO: By refusing to commit to the Baltics categorically he encourages Russia to test American resolve in dangerous ways According to Russia experts Putin’s ultimate wish in Europe is to break NATO. The way to do that, according to these scholars, is to expose the Article 5 guarantee as hollow: to show that when push comes to shove, the United States wouldn’t actually defend the weaker states The Baltic states would be the most likely scenario for this to happen Russia may attempt to test NATO’s cohesion with a threatening military build-up close to the borders of these countries and simultaneous attempts of political pressure, destabilization and possibly infiltration Russia could launch such an intimidation campaign The critical issue in preventing this scenario, again, is the perception of NATO commitment So long as Putin believes that the US and other major powers are firmly committed to the defense of their treaty allies, he’s unlikely to risk starting a war that he would almost certainly lose This is why Trump’s comments are so damaging: They send a direct signal to the Kremlin that a Trump-led America will be less than serious about the defense of NATO allies. This suggests that a ploy to break NATO might have a bigger risk Trump refused to say unequivocally that he wouldn’t abide by the NATO treaty But the entire point of NATO is that Putin needs to know what America will do If he knows the US will defend the Baltics, then he will likely back off. If he knows the US won’t defend the Baltics, then we could have the breakup of NATO The nightmare scenario is that Putin’s confidence in NATO is undermined even though the United States under Trump remains committed to defending its treaty allies That’s the scenario under which misperceptions escalate into an actual war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers a firm understanding that the US will defend its NATO allies is crucial misperception is how wars start The thing that makes war most thinkable is when other people don’t think it’s thinkable

Ambiguous US commitments to NATO cause Russia to test resolve in Europe---it causes a deterrence perception crisis

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This crisis began long before Crimea. Indeed, Russia's annexation of Crimea was the natural outcome of a clear, consistent policy dating back years. I detail this record in my full testimony. Second, Putin will not stop until he encounters serious pushback. Third, only the United States can galvanize Europe and the international community around an effective strategy to deter Putin for the long term. Fourth, any strategy should urgently and decisively back Ukraine, as well as other vulnerable states with significant economic and military assistance in the short term, while keeping the door open to the European Union or NATO. And fifth, we should neither abandon the Russian people nor the vision that a democratic Russia one day can find its peaceful place within a Europe whole and free. Putin's strategy has been to use this crisis to consolidate his own hold at home through greater oppression of civil society and independent media even as he fuels nationalist fervor. He has created an environment of fear and intimidation fostering the circumstances that led to the assassination of Boris Nemtsov. Putin, of course, is also seeking to dominate his neighbors, to drain them of resources to fuel his kleptocracy, and to restore a sense of Russia's greatness in the only way a bully knows. He aims to prevent his neighbors from joining either NATO or the EU, achieving this through coercion when possible and by dismemberment and occupation when necessary. Ultimately Putin knows that the best check on his power is a united transatlantic community, and he has sought to divide Europe, undermining the resolve for sustained sanctions. But the most tempting objective for Putin is to call into question the credibility of NATO's Article 5 mutual defense commitment as doing so would effectively end NATO. A Russian move against an ally, such as a Baltic State, cannot be ruled out. Putin has demonstrated time and again that if he senses an opportunity to act he will, convinced that the West lacks the will or the ability to take decisive action. That is why today's situation is dangerous. We have seen repeatedly that Putin's objectives expand with success and contract with failure. This means that the best determinant of his action is Western action. There is a tendency, however, to argue that the Europeans should take the lead on Ukraine. After all, we have our hands full with ISIS and other global responsibilities. But the Ukraine crisis is a Russia crisis, and Russia is too big, too strong, and too scary for Europe to resolve this without us. Without U.S. leadership, Europe may feel forced to accommodate a revanchist Russia, and we have seen throughout history this is a dangerous formula. The United States has the ability to rally its allies and international partners around a comprehensive strategy that not only deters Putin's aggression, but avoids an unstable gray zone in Europe East. To do so, we should begin by articulating what we want to achieve. We should more decisively increase the cost to Russia, including by enacting sectorial sanctions and targeting Gazprom and Putin directly.

Wilson 15 – MPA @ Princeton, American foreign policy advisor and the current executive vice president at the Atlantic Council of the United States, Deputy Director of the Private Office of the NATO Secretary General, decorated by the Presidents of Estonia, Hungary, Latvia and Poland for his efforts to advance transatlantic relations (Damon, “A Transatlantic Strategy to Deter Putin’s Aggression,” US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation, Lexis)

Russia's annexation of Crimea was the natural outcome of a clear, consistent policy dating back years Putin will not stop until he encounters serious pushback only the United States can galvanize Europe and the international community around an effective strategy to deter Putin for the long term Putin's strategy has been to use this crisis to consolidate his own hold He aims to prevent his neighbors from joining NATO achieving this through coercion when possible and by dismemberment and occupation when necessary Putin knows that the best check on his power is a united transatlantic community But the most tempting objective for Putin is to call into question the credibility of NATO's Article 5 mutual defense commitment as doing so would effectively end NATO A Russian move against an ally a Baltic State, cannot be ruled out. Putin has demonstrated time and again that if he senses an opportunity to act he will convinced that the West lacks the will or the ability to take decisive action the best determinant of his action is Western action Without U.S. leadership, Europe may feel forced to accommodate a revanchist Russia, and we have seen throughout history this is a dangerous formula The United States has the ability to rally its allies and international partners around a comprehensive strategy that not only deters Putin's aggression, but avoids an unstable gray zone in Europe East

Specifically, Putin moves on the Baltics

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However, the possibility of nuclear war between America and Russia not only still exists, but is probably growing. And the place where it is most likely to begin is in a future military confrontation over three small Baltic states -- Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Since those nations and several other Eastern European states joined NATO in 2004, the United States has been committed to defending their freedom and territorial integrity under Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty.

Loren B. Thompson, 7-20-2016 - Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates, taught at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.; “Why The Baltic States Are Where Nuclear War Is Most Likely To Begin," National Interest, http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/why-the-baltic-states-are-where-nuclear-war-most-likely-17044?page=2

possibility of nuclear war between America and Russia is growing the place it is most likely to begin is military confrontation over Baltic states Estonia Latvia and Lithuania Since those nations joined NATO the U S committed to defending their freedom

Baltics invasion goes nuclear.

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Trump’s diatribes are not the only cause of the unease. A broadening chorus of realist strategists claims that the United States is overdue for a major strategic retrenchment and that it is past time for Europe to tend its own garden. Even staunch defenders of NATO express doubts about its future. Some worry that the growing U.S. preoccupation with East Asia will lure the United States away from its Atlantic calling and generate transatlantic tensions over how to deal with the rise of China. Others fear that democratic backsliding among members is compromising the alliance’s values-based solidarity. Close NATO watchers are concerned that EU efforts to more deeply integrate European foreign and defense policy could ultimately weaken the Atlantic link. And debate rages on both sides of the Atlantic as to whether NATO enlargement has enhanced or eroded European stability and whether to continue expansion despite the costs to the West’s relationship with Russia.

Kupochan 2019 - Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Charles, "NATO Is Thriving in Spite of Trump," Mar 20, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-03-20/nato-thriving-spite-trump

. A broadening chorus of realist strategists claims that the United States is overdue for retrenchment and that it is past time for Europe to tend its own garden

Their burden sharing arguments are wrong – all countries benefit from NATO stability

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Support on the other side of the Atlantic is similarly strong. Around two-thirds of Europeans approve of the alliance. Most European democracies not yet members of NATO are clamoring to get in.Confidence in U.S. leadership may have plummeted, but Europeans still want their security guarantor to stay put. Furthermore, European member states are finally taking steps to increase defense spending. Twenty-four of NATO’s 29 members increased their defense budgets in 2018, and nine NATO members will this year reach the NATO benchmark of spending two percent of GDP on defense—compared with just four members in 2014. A majority of members are on track to meet this benchmark by the target date of 2024 set at the 2014 summit.

Kupochan 2019 - Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Charles, "NATO Is Thriving in Spite of Trump," Mar 20, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-03-20/nato-thriving-spite-trump

European member states are finally taking steps to increase defense spending Twenty-four of NATO’s 29 members increased their defense budgets in 2018, and nine NATO members will this year reach the NATO benchmark

Europe is increasing funding – prefer evidence from this week

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The evolution of Putin’s historical revisionism can be seen throughout his public statements over the years. In 2005, he famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Two years later, Putin bemoaned the aftermath of the Soviet era and the pernicious, unipolar world—one led not by Moscow, but by Washington—that it had created. Last year, in perhaps the clearest articulation of his worldview, Putin said that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people—a single whole.” On Monday, he took that sentiment even further, declaring Ukraine to be “an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space” whose independence was a product not of self-determination (Ukrainians resoundingly voted in favor of independence from the Soviet Union in a 1991 referendum), but rather “a mistake.”Unlike his 2014 address announcing Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, which was largely framed as a moment of celebration, this was an angry speech—one ostensibly designed to make Russia’s people angry too, and to justify what was to come. “In territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile ‘anti-Russia’ is taking shape,” Putin said in another address ahead of the invasion. “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.” It’s hard to know what Putin means by historical future (which is, on its face, an oxymoron), though we can take an educated guess. When Putin speaks of Russia today, he speaks of a country whose greatness is defined by its past—namely, its imperial history and its victory during World War II—which he believes must guide its present. “Putin weaponized history by giving it a function,” Orysia Lutsevych, the head of the Ukraine Forum at the London-based Chatham House think tank, told me. As far as the Russian president is concerned, “history is the fortune teller of the future.”

Serhan 22 [Yasmeen Serhan; Staff writer at the Atlantic; Who is Vladimir Putin’s Revisionist History For?; Atlantic; https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/02/putin-russia-ukraine-revisionist-history/622936/; Accessed 7-11-2022; DQ]

of Putin’s historical revisionism can be seen throughout his public statements over the years. , he famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century , Putin bemoaned the aftermath of the Soviet era and the pernicious, unipolar world—one led not by Moscow, but by Washington—that it had create , Putin said that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people—a single whole.” he took that sentiment even further, declaring Ukraine to be “an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space” whose independence was a product not of self-determination , this was an angry speech—one ostensibly designed to make Russia’s people angry too, and to justify what was to come. When Putin speaks of Russia today, he speaks of a country whose greatness is defined by its past—namely, its imperial history and its victory during World War II—which he believes must guide its present . As far as the Russian president is concerned, “history is the fortune teller of the future.”

Classic MMP cut these cards as a part of a research drill in one afternoon. Good work MMP!

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There is still the possibility of a diplomatic settlement that would bring an early end to this dreadful war and Russian military withdrawal while safeguarding the vital interests of Ukraine. Indeed, if the Russians are ever to withdraw, a diplomatic agreement on the terms of withdrawal will be necessary. The first round of Ukrainian-Russian talks has now taken place in Belarus, and a member of the Ukrainian delegation has stated that “The parties identified a number of priority topics in which certain solutions were outlined”. The West should back a peace agreement and Russian withdrawal by offering Russia the lifting of all new sanctions imposed on it. The offer to Ukraine should be a massive reconstruction package that will also help Ukraine to move towards the West economically and politically rather than militarily – just as Finland and Austria were able to do during the Cold War despite their neutral status. The demands by the Russian side are that Ukraine should sign a treaty of neutrality; engage in “demilitarisation” and “denazification”; and recognise Russian sovereignty over Crimea, which was seized back by Russia after the Ukrainian Revolution. These demands are a mixed bag of the acceptable, the unacceptable, and the undefined. The option of neutrality for Ukraine has often been called “Finlandisation”, and perhaps the determined and unified Ukrainian response to Russian aggression over the past week has given a new meaning to that term in the case of Ukraine. For like the Finns in the “winter war” of 1939-40, the Ukrainians have also been abandoned militarily by the West, which has declared publicly and repeatedly that it has no intention of fighting to defend them. On the other hand, it seems that the extraordinary courage and resolution with which the Finns fought convinced Stalin that to rule Finland would be too much of a challenge. Finland became the only part of the former Russian Empire not to be incorporated in the USSR, and during the cold war, though neutral by treaty, was able to develop as a successful social market democracy. Similarly, we must hope that the courage and determination of the Ukrainians has convinced Putin that it will be impossible to run Ukraine as a Russian client state, and neutrality is the best deal he is going to get. President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly hinted that a treaty of neutrality may be on offer; and he is right to do so. For two things have been made absolutely clear by this war: that Russia will fight to prevent Ukraine becoming a military ally of the West, and the West will not fight to defend to defend Ukraine. In view of this, to keep open the possibility of an offer of Nato membership that Nato has no intention of ever honouring, and asking Ukrainians to die for this fiction, is worse than hypocritical. As to “demilitarisation” and “denazification”, the meaning and terms of these will have to be negotiated. Demilitarisation is obviously unacceptable if it means that Ukraine must unilaterally dissolve its armed forces; but the latest statement by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has suggested that Russia would accept a ban on missiles based in Ukraine. This could be modelled on a similar guarantee to the US that ended the Cuba Missile Crisis. As for “Denazification”, this presumably means that Ukraine should ban extreme right wing nationalist parties and militias at Russia’s behest. This is a completely unacceptable interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs; but perhaps Ukraine could make a counter-offer that would meet Moscow’s concerns about the rights and future of the Russian minority in Ukraine by guaranteeing these under the Ukrainian constitution – which, by the way, is something that the West should support anyway, in accordance with its own principles. There remains the demand for recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea. Here, respect for international law (slightly ambiguous in the case of Crimea, which was only transferred from Russia to Ukraine by Soviet decree in 1954) must be tempered by considerations of reality, the prevention of future conflict, and the interests of ordinary people in the region – which is essentially what we have been asking Russia to do in the case of Kosovo. Ukraine has already lost Crimea, and cannot recover it, as Serbia cannot recover Kosovo, without a bloody and unending war that in this case Ukraine would almost certainly lose. Our principle in all such disputes must be that the fate of the territories concerned must be decided by local democratic referenda under international supervision. This should also apply to the Donbas separatist republics. These proposals will be denounced as “rewarding Russian aggression”; but if Putin’s original aim really was to subjugate the whole of Ukraine, then by such an agreement Moscow would fall far short of its maximal goals. Moreover, such an agreement would give Russia nothing that it had not in practice already achieved before launching the invasion. The West is morally right to oppose the monstrous and illegal Russian war and to have imposed exceptionally severe sanctions on Russia in response, but would be morally wrong to oppose a reasonable agreement to end the invasion and spare the people of Ukraine terrible suffering. America’s own record over the past generation gives no basis for such self-righteous hyper-legalism.

Lieven 22 (Anatol Lieven; Anatol Lieven is a British author, journalist, and policy analyst best known for his expertise on the Taliban of Afghanistan. He is currently a visiting professor at King's College London and senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; 3-4-22; “It’s time to ask: what would a Ukraine-Russia peace deal look like?”; Guardian News and Media Limited; https://proxy.lib.umich.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/blogs-podcasts-websites/s-time-ask-what-would-ukraine-russia-peace-deal/docview/2635741560/se-2?accountid=14667)//SD

There is still the possibility of a diplomatic settlement that would bring an early end to this dreadful war and Russian military withdrawal while safeguarding the vital interests of Ukraine. Indeed, if the Russians are ever to withdraw, a diplomatic agreement on the terms of withdrawal will be necessary. The demands by the Russian side are that Ukraine should sign a treaty of neutrality; engage in “demilitarisation” and “denazification”; and recognise Russian sovereignty over Crimea, which was seized back by Russia after the Ukrainian Revolution. neutrality is the best deal he is going to get. but the latest statement by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has suggested that Russia would accept a ban on missiles based in Ukraine. but if Putin’s original aim really was to subjugate the whole of Ukraine, then by such an agreement Moscow would fall far short of its maximal goals. Moreover, such an agreement would give Russia nothing that it had not in practice already achieved before launching the invasion.

Russia’s not revisionist –

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No, none of us know what’s going to happen. You don’t think he has designs on Kyiv? No, I don’t think he has designs on Kyiv. I think he’s interested in taking at least the Donbass, and maybe some more territory and eastern Ukraine, and, number two, he wants to install in Kyiv a pro-Russian government, a government that is attuned to Moscow’s interests. I thought you said that he was not interested in taking Kyiv. No, he’s interested in taking Kyiv for the purpose of regime change. O.K.? As opposed to what? As opposed to permanently conquering Kyiv. It would be a Russian-friendly government that he would presumably have some say over, right? Yes, exactly. But it’s important to understand that it is fundamentally different from conquering and holding onto Kyiv. Do you understand what I’m saying? We could all think of imperial possessions whereby a sort of figurehead was put on the throne, even if the homeland was actually controlling what was going on there, right? We’d still say that those places had been conquered, right? I have problems with your use of the word “imperial.” I don’t know anybody who talks about this whole problem in terms of imperialism. This is great-power politics, and what the Russians want is a regime in Kyiv that is attuned to Russian interests. It may be ultimately that the Russians would be willing to live with a neutral Ukraine, and that it won’t be necessary for Moscow to have any meaningful control over the government in Kyiv. It may be that they just want a regime that is neutral and not pro-American. When you said that no one’s talking about this as imperialism, in Putin’s speeches he specifically refers to the “territory of the former Russian Empire,” which he laments losing. So it seems like he’s talking about it. I think that’s wrong, because I think you’re quoting the first half of the sentence, as most people in the West do. He said, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart.” And then he said, “Whoever wants it back has no brain.” He’s also saying that Ukraine is essentially a made-up nation, while he seems to be invading it, no? O.K., but put those two things together and tell me what that means. I’m just not too sure. He does believe it’s a made-up nation. I would note to him, all nations are made up. Any student of nationalism can tell you that. We invent these concepts of national identity. They’re filled with all sorts of myths. So he’s correct about Ukraine, just like he’s correct about the United States or Germany. The much more important point is: he understands that he cannot conquer Ukraine and integrate it into a greater Russia or into a reincarnation of the former Soviet Union. He can’t do that. What he’s doing in Ukraine is fundamentally different. He is obviously lopping off some territory. He’s going to take some territory away from Ukraine, in addition to what happened with Crimea, in 2014. Furthermore, he is definitely interested in regime change. Beyond that, it’s hard to say exactly what this will all lead to, except for the fact that he is not going to conquer all of Ukraine. It would be a blunder of colossal proportions to try to do that. I assume that you think if he were to try to do that, that would change your analysis of what we’ve witnessed. Absolutely. My argument is that he’s not going to re-create the Soviet Union or try to build a greater Russia, that he’s not interested in conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia. It’s very important to understand that we invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine. The argument that the foreign-policy establishment in the United States, and in the West more generally, has invented revolves around the claim that he is interested in creating a greater Russia or a reincarnation of the former Soviet Union. There are people who believe that when he is finished conquering Ukraine, he will turn to the Baltic states. He’s not going to turn to the Baltic states. First of all, the Baltic states are members of nato and— Is that a good thing? No. You’re saying that he’s not going to invade them in part because they’re part of nato, but they shouldn’t be part of nato. Yes, but those are two very different issues. I’m not sure why you’re connecting them. Whether I think they should be part of nato is independent of whether they are part of nato. They are part of nato. They have an Article 5 guarantee—that’s all that matters. Furthermore, he’s never shown any evidence that he’s interested in conquering the Baltic states. Indeed, he’s never shown any evidence that he’s interested in conquering Ukraine. It seems to me that if he wants to bring back anything, it’s the Russian Empire that predates the Soviet Union. He seems very critical of the Soviet Union, correct? Well, I don’t know if he’s critical. He said it in his big essay that he wrote last year, and he said in a recent speech that he essentially blames Soviet policies for allowing a degree of autonomy for Soviet Republics, such as Ukraine. But he also said, as I read to you before, “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart.” That’s somewhat at odds with what you just said. I mean, he’s in effect saying that he misses the Soviet Union, right? That’s what he’s saying. What we’re talking about here is his foreign policy. The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you think that this is a country that has the capability to do that. You realize that this is a country that has a G.N.P. that’s smaller than Texas. Countries try to do things that they don’t have the capabilities for all the time. You could have said to me, “Who thinks that America could get the Iraqi power system working quickly? We have all these problems in America.” And you would’ve been correct. But we still thought we could do it, and we still tried to do it, and we failed, right? America couldn’t do what it wanted during Vietnam, which I’m sure you would say is a reason not to fight these various wars—and I would agree—but that doesn’t mean that we were correct or rational about our capabilities. I’m talking about the raw-power potential of Russia—the amount of economic might it has. Military might is built on economic might. You need an economic foundation to build a really powerful military. To go out and conquer countries like Ukraine and the Baltic states and to re-create the former Soviet Union or re-create the former Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe would require a massive army, and that would require an economic foundation that contemporary Russia does not come close to having. There is no reason to fear that Russia is going to be a regional hegemony in Europe. Russia is not a serious threat to the United States.

Chotiner 22 [Isaac Chotiner ;Staff Writer at NYT ; 3-1-2022; Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine; New Yorker; https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine; Accessed 7-23-2022; DQ]

No, none of us know what’s going to happen. You don’t think he has designs on Kyiv? No, I don’t think he has designs on Kyiv it is fundamentally different from conquering and holding onto Kyiv. he understands that he cannot conquer Ukraine and integrate it into a greater Russia or into a reincarnation of the former Soviet Union. He can’t do that. What he’s doing in Ukraine is fundamentally different. He is obviously lopping off he is not going to conquer all of Ukraine he’s not interested in conquering and integrating Ukraine into Russia He’s not going to turn to the Baltic states. They are part of nato. They have an Article 5 guarantee—that’s all that matters. Furthermore, he’s never shown any evidence that he’s interested in conquering the Baltic states To go out and conquer countries like Ukraine and the Baltic states and to re-create the former Soviet Union or re-create the former Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe would require a massive army, and that would require an economic foundation that contemporary Russia does not come close to having Russia is not a serious threat to the United States.

no means nor will

Impacts - Impact Updates - Michigan Classic 2022 MMP.html5

Michigan (Classic)

Impact Files

2022

I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the nato Summit in Bucharest, where afterward nato issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of nato. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just nato expansion. nato expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat. You said that it’s about “turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” I don’t put much trust or much faith in America “turning” places into liberal democracies. What if Ukraine, the people of Ukraine, want to live in a pro-American liberal democracy? If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of nato, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no nato expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, nato expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy. You keep saying “turning Ukraine into a liberal democracy,” and it seems like that’s an issue for the Ukrainians to decide. nato can decide whom it admits, but we saw in 2014 that it appeared as if many Ukrainians wanted to be considered part of Europe. It would seem like almost some sort of imperialism to tell them that they can’t be a liberal democracy. It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States. The Monroe Doctrine, essentially. Of course. There’s no country in the Western hemisphere that we will allow to invite a distant, great power to bring military forces into that country. Right, but saying that America will not allow countries in the Western hemisphere, most of them democracies, to decide what kind of foreign policy they have—you can say that’s good or bad, but that is imperialism, right? We’re essentially saying that we have some sort of say over how democratic countries run their business. We do have that say, and, in fact, we overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave. Of course we did, but I’m wondering if we should be behaving that way. When we’re thinking about foreign policies, should we be thinking about trying to create a world where neither the U.S. nor Russia is behaving that way? That’s not the way the world works. When you try to create a world that looks like that, you end up with the disastrous policies that the United States pursued during the unipolar moment. We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well. I think it would be difficult to say that America’s policy in the Middle East in the past seventy-five years since the end of the Second World War, or in the past thirty years since the end of the Cold War, has been to create liberal democracies in the Middle East. I think that’s what the Bush Doctrine was about during the unipolar moment. In Iraq. But not in the Palestinian territories, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or anywhere else, right? No—well, not in Saudi Arabia and not in Egypt. To start with, the Bush Doctrine basically said that if we could create a liberal democracy in Iraq, it would have a domino effect, and countries such as Syria, Iran, and eventually Saudi Arabia and Egypt would turn into democracies. That was the basic philosophy behind the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine was not just designed to turn Iraq into a democracy. We had a much grander scheme in mind. We can debate how much the people who were in charge in the Bush Administration really wanted to turn the Middle East into a bunch of democracies, and really thought that was going to happen. My sense was that there was not a lot of actual enthusiasm about turning Saudi Arabia into a democracy. Well, I think focussing on Saudi Arabia is taking the easy case from your perspective. That was the most difficult case from America’s perspective, because Saudi Arabia has so much leverage over us because of oil, and it’s certainly not a democracy. But the Bush Doctrine, if you go look at what we said at the time, was predicated on the belief that we could democratize the greater Middle East. It might not happen overnight, but it would eventually happen. I guess my point would be actions speak louder than words, and, whatever Bush’s flowery speeches said, I don’t feel like the policy of the United States at any point in its recent history has been to try and insure liberal democracies around the world. There’s a big difference between how the United States behaved during the unipolar moment and how it’s behaved in the course of its history. I agree with you when you talk about American foreign policy in the course of its broader history, but the unipolar moment was a very special time. I believe that during the unipolar moment, we were deeply committed to spreading democracy. With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision nato expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014. nato expansion, E.U. expansion, and turning Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia. What happened is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union. Let’s turn to that time and the annexation of Crimea. I was reading an old article where you wrote, “According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine Crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian president Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a longstanding desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe.” And then you say, “But this account is wrong.” Does anything that’s happened in the last couple weeks make you think that account was closer to the truth than you might have thought? Oh, I think I was right. I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument, and they will say that the Russians are responsible.

Chotiner 22 (Isaac Chotiner; He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principle contributor to Q.&A, a series of interviews and became a senior editor after graduating from the University of California, Davis; 3-1-22; “Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine”; “The New Yorker”; https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine)//SD

trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the nato Summit in Bucharest, nato issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of nato. from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat. don’t put much trust or much faith in America “turning” places into liberal democracies. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, nato expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy. You keep saying “turning Ukraine into a liberal democracy,” and it seems like that’s an issue for the Ukrainians to decide. nato can decide whom it admits, but we saw in 2014 that it appeared as if many Ukrainians wanted to be considered part of Europe. It would seem like almost some sort of imperialism to tell them that they can’t be a liberal democracy. It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. if you take a stick and poke them , they’re going to retaliate you end up with the disastrous policies that the United States pursued during the unipolar moment. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well. this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union. Let’s turn to that time and the annexation of Crimea. I was reading an old article where you wrote, “According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine Crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian president Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a longstanding desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe.” Does anything that’s happened in the last couple weeks make you think that account was closer to the truth than you might have thought? Oh, I think I was right. I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster

Only reacting to Western expansion

Impacts - Impact Updates - Michigan Classic 2022 MMP.html5

Michigan (Classic)

Impact Files

2022

Societal legends are born out of challenging times. The Great Recession bore out not only the difficulties of American capitalism, but provided a myth among millennials of living through uniquely bad times. The current crop of young adults has known the comfort and ease their parents’ work afforded them. A serious recession is something for which most in that age cohort have done little planning. The unsustainability of work-from-home, low-output and overpaid jobs, massive student loan debts accumulated for prestige, and the effects of the pandemic will come to bear soon. For many young people who have known nothing but relative ease, the coming years will be a harsh reality check.

Tate 6/30, Kristin Tate is a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Voice and a libertarian writer, “Young Americans are in for a rude awakening with the coming recession,” 6/30/2022, https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3540529-young-americans-are-in-for-a-rude-awakening-with-the-coming-recession/, AJS

The unsustainability of work-from-home, low-output and overpaid jobs, massive student loan debts accumulated for prestige, and the effects of the pandemic will come to bear soon. the coming years will be a harsh reality check

Recession now---inflation, debt, and unsustainable work-at-home practices prove.

Impacts - Impact Updates - Michigan Classic 2022 MMP.html5

Michigan (Classic)

Impact Files

2022

Another month, another round of flash purchasing managers’ indexes (PMIs) giving an early read into major economies’ business activity. Though they mostly ticked down in June, prompting more recessionary chatter, their levels still indicate overall expansion. It may not be gangbusters, but stocks don’t need perfection to mount a recovery from this year’s downturn—just for reality to beat dreary expectations. PMIs are surveys that aim to measure growth’s breadth. Readings above 50 indicate the majority of surveyed firms reported expanding business activity, with growth (and contraction) theoretically accelerating the further readings drift from that marker. PMIs don’t say anything about how much their businesses grew (or shrank), only that they did, so they are a timely but loose estimate of economic activity at best. Among the various readings, the composite PMI combines services and manufacturing, but it is a narrower measure of their “output” that focuses only on production. The services and manufacturing PMIs are broader, including new orders, backlogs, suppliers’ delivery times and employment. That is why, for example, the composites for June’s US, UK and eurozone PMIs can be below each of their services and manufacturing PMIs. Exhibit 1 shows major economies’ PMIs remain above 50—though they are down from the spring, implying deceleration (Japan excepted). The US and eurozone’s June flash composites, released with only 85% – 90% of responses in, fell to the low 50s, continuing a generally slower trend. This includes both services, which comprise the bulk of developed market economies, and manufacturing. But while low-50s PMIs aren’t historically robust, they generally coincide with pedestrian growth. Exhibit 1: Major Economy PMIs ***image omitted*** Source: FactSet and S&P Global, as of 6/23/2022. Flash PMIs are preliminary estimates based on 85% – 90% of responses. Also note, the downward trend isn’t global—Japan’s composite PMI rose and the UK’s was flat. Japan’s lift was services-based as COVID restrictions eased there. Reopening-related boosts helped buoy UK services, too, as more workers returned to the office and patronized surrounding businesses. However, Japanese and UK manufacturing weakened alongside the rest of the developed world as Chinese lockdowns hit global supply chains. As a whole, the picture here appears mixed. Business activity growth is less broad-based. But through mid-June at least, the pockets of strength seemingly outnumbered the pockets of weakness. Whether that translates to actual economic growth, we will see when output data roll in. For many, this isn’t exactly consoling. As we wrote in early June for the eurozone, there are some discrepancies between “soft” survey data and “hard” sales and volume data, with some signs of contraction in the latter. In the US and UK, May retail sales fell -0.3% m/m (nominal) and -0.5% (real), respectively.[i] But we don’t think this is conclusive, as it may reflect a continuing shift back to services spending from goods—a return to normal, not necessarily weakness. Hard services data tend to lag, which is why timelier PMIs are helpful and looking at both provides a fuller picture, if only in broad brushstrokes. Based on our read of all the data so far, it is premature to declare a recession is underway. Some quantitative efforts to derive GDP from monthly indicators—like the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow—might seem to disagree, but these models aren’t air-tight. GDPNow currently predicts 0.3% annualized Q2 growth given available data.[ii] But the most telling component, personal consumption expenditures—71% of GDP—won’t be released until month end, and that is just May’s number.[iii] More broadly, these nowcast models are young, with a spotty record of accuracy. The New York Fed’s proved so inaccurate that they have temporarily ceased publication, pending methodological improvements. The St. Louis Fed’s attempt currently estimates 3.9% annualized growth in Q2, but neither it nor the Atlanta Fed’s model predicted Q1’s inventory-fueled GDP contraction.[iv] Absent a foolproof tool, investors must survey the entire landscape and make their best judgments. For now, we are inclined to interpret PMIs as more evidence economies aren’t uniformly weak despite well-documented struggles. Notably, though, even survey data have some weak points worth monitoring. Deteriorating new orders may suggest demand is faltering—but it is too early to tell. Relative services strength may be fading, but whether that is normalization following the initial reopening boom or something worse—e.g., cost of living pressures taking a more lasting toll—remains to be seen. Meanwhile, manufacturing’s downtrend, beset by component shortages, could reverse as supply chains recover. Some businesses, particularly in the consumer world, apparently overstocked trying to compensate amid surging goods demand. They may just have inventory overhangs they need to work through—a more temporary hiccup than needing to get lean to correct prior excess. We also see some other encouraging nuggets. The PMI surveys indicate falling backorders, which could be signaling easing supply chain and price pressures. This may be occurring as headwinds from China’s choppy reopening fade. One hint: The New York Fed’s Global Supply Chain Pressure Index, which aggregates transportation costs, input-output prices and other measures—like PMIs’ delivery times, backlogs and inventories—to gauge the overall intensity of bottlenecks’ disruption on world trade. (Exhibit 2) While still at lofty levels, it has started subsiding and may be past its peak. Exhibit 2: Global Supply Chain Pressures Elevated, but Easing ***image omitted*** Source: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as of 5/18/2022. Global Supply Chain Pressure Index, January 1998 – May 2022. For investors, the most salient aspect of the latest PMI releases may be their accompanying bearish sentiment. Given the market environment, it isn’t surprising. But we still think it is notable that PMI coverage widely extrapolates imminent recession—which the data don’t confirm, at least yet. The evidence, as we have explored, is more mixed. While recession is possible, we think the global economy’s resilience is just as remarkable given the challenges it has faced year to date. This is an underappreciated positive to us. Recession uncertainty has undoubtedly weighed on markets lately. But by the same token, it lowers the expectations bar reality needs to clear to surprise stocks positively. In our view, increasing economic clarity in the second half—even if it just muddles through—will likely provide relief.

Fisher Investments Editorial Staff 22 (Fisher Investments Editorial Staff, Fisher Investments is a fee-only investment adviser serving institutional and private clients globally, published 6/27/22, accessed 7/23/22, “June’s Global Flash PMIs Still Look Ok”, https://www.fisherinvestments.com/en-us/marketminder/junes-global-flash-pmis-still-look-ok) KCabrera

economies’ mostly ticked down in June, prompting more recessionary chatter, their levels still indicate overall expansion. . Readings above 50 indicate the majority of surveyed firms reported expanding business activity, with growth (and contraction) theoretically accelerating the further readings drift from that marker The US and eurozone’s June flash composites, released with only 85% – 90% of responses in, fell to the low 50s, continuing a generally slower trend. This includes both services, which comprise the bulk of developed market economies, and manufacturing However, Japanese and UK manufacturing weakened alongside the rest of the developed world as Chinese lockdowns hit global supply chains. this isn’t exactly consoling. may reflect a continuing shift back to services spending from goods—a return to normal, not necessarily weakness Some quantitative efforts might seem to disagree, but these models aren’t air-tight Notably, though, even survey data have some weak points worth monitoring. Deteriorating new orders may suggest demand is faltering—but it is too early to tell manufacturing’s downtrend, beset by component shortages, could reverse as supply chains recover. Some businesses, particularly in the consumer world, apparently overstocked trying to compensate amid surging goods demand. While still at lofty levels, it has started subsiding and may be past its peak. While recession is possible, we think the global economy’s resilience is just as remarkable given the challenges it has faced year to date. . Recession uncertainty has undoubtedly weighed on markets

No recession---survey data recovery now

Impacts - Impact Updates - Michigan Classic 2022 MMP.html5

Michigan (Classic)

Impact Files

2022

Recessions are economic contractions following a period of economic expansion. They are part of the business cycle, and do not feature a regular periodicity. Market adjustments and policy measures are capable to revitalize the economy and turn around the trend of economic decline. In the modern economic history of the U.S., policy makers have tried time and time again to address unemployment and declining incomes with recovery measures in the New Deal, the employment act, new institutional frameworks, the Bretton Woods agreement, etc. [1, 2]. In addition to reforms and new regulations, different instruments of fiscal control can be activated, such as adjustments in taxation, public expenditure and debt management to foster economic growth [3]. The efficiency of all these policies can be measured with so-called fiscal multipliers, which behave differently during expansions and recessions [4, 5]. However, these multipliers do not allow us to estimate the time and probability of the next recession. The lifetime of a system is defined as the time that a system can carry out its function before going into a failure state [6, 7]. In this work, the failure state corresponds with a recession event, and the age of the system is the time that the system has already worked properly, i.e., the time that the economy is in expansion. There are multiple approaches to predict business cycle turning points, such as econometric techniques [8], the spread between short-term and long-term interest rates captured in the yield function [9], or stochastic simulation [10, 11]. Typically, the probability of a recession is determined based on the several indicator variables, such as stock prices, credit market activity, or employment and interest rate [11]. These techniques are valuable, but they do not capture explicitly the effect of system age, system aging, or the effects of policy and market interventions on the state of the economy. There is in fact evidence that the termination probability of recessions is dependent on its duration [12, 13]. This dependence can be captured by different types of survival models, such as the proportional hazard model [14] and the accelerated failure time model [15], which include the effect of covariates in the hazard function. Aforementioned models are however not able to include the effect of interventions following an event on system age. Business cycle durations have typically been modeled using Markov switching processes [16, 17]. Here, we use an alternative approach based on Generalized Renewal Processes (GRP) to model the inter-arrival times of recessions. This method allows us to integrate explicitly the effect of policy interventions and to determine if aging is a real process happening in economic systems. GRPs integrate simultaneously two sources of stochastic variability in system performance: deterioration through aging and restoration by means of policy interventions. System deterioration can occur through different types of aging processes. No aging indicates that the age of the system has no effect on the residual lifetime. The no-aging property implies a system with no memory, a constant failure rate, and lifetimes distributed according to the exponential distribution. In reliability analysis, positive aging is much more common and means that the expected residual lifetime decreases with age. System restoration deals with repair actions that improve the system after failure. The literature often distinguishes between perfect repair and minimal repair [18]. Perfect repair is applicable, for instance, to engineering systems that consist of a single component that can be replaced, resulting in a system as good as new. Minimal repair requires the replacement of only these components that failed; minimal repair is a reasonable assumption for systems consisting of multiple components all of which have their own failure properties, leaving the system in a state as bad as before the failure. Minimal repair and perfect repair are however specific cases and in realistic settings the degree of restoration can be better described by general repair and the corresponding stochastic process, the GRP. The effectiveness of interventions in general repair can take arbitrary values, and general renewal theory extends the classical renewal theory by including the notion of rejuvenation, indicating the performance of the system after interventions. This idea was firstly presented in [19] and requires to introduce the concept of virtual age, a function that reflects how interventions affect the real age of the system. In the literature, a Weibull-GRP (WGRP) model is usually fitted to observed data in order to infer lifetime probabilities [20–23]. The restoration process is commonly captured by a rejuvenation parameter [22, 24, 25], whereas the deterioration of the system is reflected by the shape and scale parameters of the Weibull distribution regardless of the restoration process [20–22]. The GRP can also be used in an optimization context, where policies are searched for that minimize intervention costs while maintaining certain levels of system performance [24, 26–28]. In reliability analysis and engineering, the Weibull distribution has typically been used to describe the functioning of a serial system that operates well as long as all components operate correctly [29]. In this work, we propose to model the arrival time of recessions by means of a GRP based on the Gumbel distribution. The Gumbel distribution is able to describe a parallel system that stops operating once all components fail, and we use the abstraction of a parallel system as a stylized representation of the economy. The duration of an expansion period is affected by market adjustments taking place during the preceding recession as well as by the policies and reforms introduced to mitigate the causes of this recession. We therefore argue that the periods between consecutive recessions do not constitute a stationary process. We deduce the distribution of the GRP based on the Gumbel distribution, and show how the parameters of the statistical model can be estimated. Importantly, we propose a novel goodness of fit test to demonstrate that the observed recessions of the American and European markets can be represented by the Gumbel-based GRP. We show that the GRP outperforms several stationary distributions, and in addition to the recession incidence rate over time, we also estimate the expected time of the next recession.

Cristino et al 20 (Cláudio Tadeu Cristino, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Visualization, Writing – review & editing, Piotr Żebrowski, Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – review & editing, Matthias Wildemeersch, Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, published 5/7/20, accessed 7/23/22, “Assessing the time intervals between economic recessions”, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0232615) KCabrera

Recessions are part of the business cycle, and do not feature a regular periodicity. adjustments policy measures are capable to revitalize the economy turn around the trend of economic decline .S., policy makers have tried time and time again to address unemployme declining incomes with recovery measures in the New Deal, the employment act, new institutional frameworks, the Bretton Woods agreement, etc different instruments of fiscal control can be activated management to foster economic growth multipliers do not allow us to estimate the time and probability of the next recession. Typically, the probability of a recession is determined based on the several indicator variables, such as stock prices, credit market activity, or employment and interest rate techniques are valuable, but they do not capture explicitly the effect of system age the effects of policy and market interventions on the state of the economy models are however not able to include the effect of interventions following an event on system age System deterioration can occur through different types of aging processes positive aging is much more common and means that the expected residual lifetime decreases with age Minimal repair and perfect repair are however specific cases and in realistic settings the degree of restoration can be better described by general repair and the corresponding stochastic process, the GRP in addition to the recession incidence rate over time, we also estimate the expected time of the next recession.

No recession---impossible to coordinate the next one and responses solve

Impacts - Impact Updates - Michigan Classic 2022 MMP.html5

Michigan (Classic)

Impact Files

2022

But war could still be much less likely. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Barry Posen has already considered the likely impact of the current pandemic on the probability of war, and he believes COVID-19 is more likely to promote peace instead. He argues that the current pandemic is affecting all the major powers adversely, which means it isn’t creating tempting windows of opportunity for unaffected states while leaving others weaker and therefore vulnerable. Instead, it is making all governments more pessimistic about their short- to medium-term prospects. Because states often go to war out of sense of overconfidence (however misplaced it sometimes turns out to be), pandemic-induced pessimism should be conducive to peace.

Walt 20, Stephen Walt is the Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, “Will a Global Depression Trigger Another World War?,” 5/13/2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/13/coronavirus-pandemic-depression-economy-world-war/, AJS

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Barry Posen believes COVID-19 is more likely to promote peace instead. the current pandemic is affecting all the major powers adversely, which means it isn’t creating tempting windows of opportunity for unaffected states while leaving others weaker and therefore vulnerable. Because states often go to war out of sense of overconfidence pandemic-induced pessimism should be conducive to peace.

Economic decline doesn’t cause war---Covid has weakened countries.

Impacts - Impact Updates - Michigan Classic 2022 MMP.html5

Michigan (Classic)

Impact Files

2022

The Own Goal Recession: May 1937–June 1938 Duration: 13 months GDP decline: 10% 5 Peak unemployment rate: 20% 5 Reasons and causes: Expansionary monetary and fiscal policies had secured a recovery from the Great Depression after 1933, albeit an uneven and incomplete one. In 1936-1937 policymakers changed course, more preoccupied with cutting budget deficits and heading off inflation than with the dangers of a depressive relapse. 5 Following a tax increase in 1935 and Social Security payroll deductions starting in 1937, the budget deficit shrank from 5.4% of GDP in 1936 to 0.1% of GDP by 1938. 6 7 Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve in 1936 doubled the reserve requirement ratios for banks, thus curbing lending with the stated aim of preventing "an injurious credit expansion." 5 Perhaps most damagingly of all, the U.S. Treasury began the same year to sterilize gold inflows, ending brisk money supply growth that had supported the expansion. 8 Industrial production began falling in September; it would decline 32% in the course of the recession. The stock market crashed in October. The recession ended after policymakers rolled back the increase in reserve requirements and gold sterilization as well as fiscal austerity. 5 The V-Day Recession: February 1945–October 1945 Duration: Eight months GDP decline: 10.9% 9 Peak unemployment rate: 3.8% 10 Reasons and causes: The 1945 recession reflected massive cuts in U.S. government spending and employment toward the end and immediately after World War II. Federal spending fell 40% in 1946 and 38% in 1947 while the private sector's output grew rapidly. 11 The severity of the downturn remains open to question because much of the eliminated spending represented wartime production that did not serve to increase living standards. 12 The elimination of price controls in 1946 artificially depressed output as adjusted for inflation, while the unemployment rate remained low in part because women left the workforce in large numbers (and often unwillingly). 13 14 15 The Post-War Brakes Tap Recession: November 1948–October 1949 Duration: 11 months GDP decline: 1.7% 16 Peak unemployment rate: 7.9% 17 Reasons and Causes: The first phase of the post-war boom was in some ways comparable to the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid a backlog of consumer demand suppressed during the war and a shortage of production capacity, the collapse of wartime price controls fueled an abrupt surge of inflation by mid-1946. 18 The annualized inflation rate rose from 3.3% in June 1946 to 11.6% two months later and 19% at its peak in April 1947. 19 Policymakers only responded in the second half of 1947, and when they did their efforts to tighten credit ultimately led to a relatively mild recession as consumers and producers retrenched. 20 The M*A*S*H* Recession: July 1953–May 1954 Duration: 10 months GDP decline: 2.7% 16 Peak unemployment rate: 5.9% 17 Reasons and causes: The wind-down of the Korean War caused government spending to decline dramatically, lowering the federal budget deficit from 1.7% of GDP in fiscal 1953 to 0.3% a year later. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy in 1953. 21 The Investment Bust Recession: August 1957–April 1958 Duration: Eight months GDP decline: 3.7% 16 Peak unemployment rate: 7.4% 17 Reasons and causes: The end of the Korean War unleashed a global investment boom marked by a surge in exports of U.S. capital goods. 22 The Fed responded by tightening monetary policy as the inflation rate rose from 0.4% in March 1956 to 3.7% a year later. 21 19 Fiscal policy focused on limiting budget deficits produced a surplus of 0.7% of GDP in 1957. 21 The 1957 Asian Flu pandemic killed 70,000 to 100,000 Americans in 1957, and industrial production slumped late that year and early in 1958. 23 The dramatic drop in domestic demand and evolving consumer expectations led to the failure of the Ford Edsel, the beginning of the end for Detroit's auto industry dominance. 24 The sharp worldwide recession contributed to a foreign trade deficit. The recession ended after policymakers eased fiscal and monetary constraints on growth. 21 The 'Rolling Adjustment' Recession: April 1960–February 1961 Duration: 10 months GDP decline: 1.6% 16 Peak unemployment rate: 6.9% 17 Reasons and causes: This relatively mild recession was named for the so-called "rolling adjustment" in U.S. industrial sectors tied to consumers' diminished demand for domestic autos amid growing competition from inexpensive imports. Like most other recessions, it was preceded by higher interest rates, with the Fed increasing the federal funds rate from 1.75% in mid-1958 to 4% by the end of 1959. 25 Fiscal policy also tightened at the end of President Dwight Eisenhower's second term, from a deficit of 2.6% of GDP in 1959 to a surplus of 0.1% a year later. 26 The Guns and Butter Recession: December 1969–November 1970 Duration: 11 months GDP decline: 0.6% 16 Peak unemployment rate: 5.9% 17 Reasons and causes: Military spending increased in the late 1960s amid growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and alongside high expenditures on domestic policy initiatives. 27 As a result, the federal budget deficit rose from 1.1% of GDP in 1967 to 2.9% in 1968, while inflation increased from 3.1% in 1967 to 4.3% a year later and 5.3% by 1970. The Federal Reserve increased the federal funds rate from 5% in March 1968 to more than 9% by August 1969. By early 1971, the Fed had lowered the federal funds rate back below 4%, aiding the recovery. 26 The Oil Embargo Recession: November 1973–March 1975 Duration: 16 months GDP decline: 3% 28 Peak unemployment rate: 8.6% 17 Reasons and causes: This long, deep recession began following the start of the Arab Oil Embargo, which would quadruple crude prices. That tipped the balance for an economy struggling with the devaluation of the dollar amid high U.S. trade and budget deficits and slipping domestic crude output. 29 The collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement fixing currency exchange rates contributed to a rise in U.S. inflation from 2.4% in August 1972 to 7.4% a year later, causing the Fed to double the federal funds rate to 10% between late 1972 and mid-1973. 19 30 After increasing the federal funds rate to 13% in the first half of 1974, the Fed cut it to 5.25% in under a year. 28 Inflation and unemployment remained elevated after the recession ended, ushering in stagflation. Unemployment reached 9% in May of 1975, after the declared end of the recession. 17 The Iran and Volcker Recession, Part 1: January 1980–July 1980 Duration: Six months GDP decline: 2.2% 31 Peak unemployment rate: 7.8% 17 Reasons and causes: Accommodative monetary policy aimed at alleviating rising unemployment pushed U.S. inflation to 7% by early 1979, just before the Iranian Revolution caused oil prices to double. 32 The Federal Reserve was already raising rates when Paul Volcker was named Fed chair in August 1979, and the rate went from 10.5% at the time of his appointment to 17.5% by April 1980. 33 This short recession formally ended as the Fed dropped the fed funds rate back down to 9.5% by August of 1980, but inflation stayed high and the Volcker Fed wasn't done. Part 2 of Double-Dip Recession: July 1981–November 1982 Duration: 16 months GDP decline: 2.9% 31 Peak unemployment rate: 10.8% 17 Reasons and causes: By the fourth quarter of 1980 inflation was up to 11.1%, prompting the Federal Reserve to raise the fed funds rate to 19% by July 1981. 33 As the downturn worsened and joblessness climbed, Volcker resisted repeated demands in Congress to change course. 34 By October 1982 inflation had declined to 5%, while unemployment would remain above 10% until mid-1983. 35 17 Most economists today accept Volcker's arguments at the time that failure to control inflation and restore the Fed's credibility would have led to continued economic underperformance. 36 The Gulf War Recession: July 1990–March 1991 Duration: Eight months GDP decline: 1.5% 37 Peak unemployment rate: 6.8% 17 Reasons and causes: This relatively mild recession began a month before Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the resulting oil price shock may have contributed to a frustratingly lackluster recovery. The Fed had raised the federal funds rate from 6.5% in February 1988 to 9.75% in May 1989 in an effort to contain inflation, which rose from 2.2% in 1986 to 3.9% for 1990. 38 The Dot-Bomb Recession: March 2001–November 2001 Duration: Eight months GDP decline: 0.3% Peak unemployment rate: 5.5% 17 Reasons and causes: The collapse of the dotcom bubble contributed to one of the mildest recessions on record following what was then the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. 39 The Fed raised the fed funds rate from 4.75% in early 1999 to 6.5% by July 2000. The Sept. 11 attacks and the associated economic disruptions may have hastened the recession's end by encouraging the Fed to keep cutting the fed funds rate. The benchmark rate reached a low of 1% by mid-2003. 40 The Great Recession: December 2007–June 2009 Duration: Eighteen months GDP decline: 4.3% 41 Peak unemployment rate: 9.5% 41 Reasons and causes: The nationwide downturn in U.S. housing prices triggered a global financial crisis, a bear market in stocks that had the S&P 500 down 57% at the lows, and the worst economic downturn since the recession of 1937-38. 41 Global investment flows into the U.S. had kept market rates low, likely encouraging unscrupulous mortgage underwriting and mortgage-backed securities marketing practices. 42 Oil prices spiked to record highs by mid-2008 and then crashed, depressing the U.S. oil industry. The COVID-19 Recession: February 2020–April 2020 Duration: Two months Reasons and causes: The COVID-19 pandemic spread to the U.S. in March 2020, and the resulting travel and work restrictions caused employment to plummet, triggering an unusually short but sharp recession. 43 The unemployment rate climbed from 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.7% in April 2020 but was back below 4% by the end of 2021, capped by $5 trillion in pandemic relief spending. 17 44 In addition, quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from $4.1 trillion in February 2020 to nearly $9 trillion by the end of 2021, complementing a federal funds rate that remained near zero until March 2022. 45 What Is the Average Length of a Recession? The U.S. has experienced 34 recessions since 1857 according to the NBER, varying in length from two months (February to April 2020) to more than five years (October 1873 to March 1879). The average recession has lasted 17 months, while the six recessions since 1980 have lasted less than 10 months on average. 1 Which Stocks Tend Fare Better During a Recession? Companies in the consumer staples, health care, and utilities sectors, which see relatively small fluctuations in demand for economic reasons, tend to fare best during recessions, and their stocks have outperformed during past downturns as a result. 46 47 Do Recessions Always Coincide With Bear Markets? A bear market is commonly defined as a sustained drop of 20% or more from a market peak. Of the 25 bear markets since 1928, 14 have overlapped with recessions. 48 ***image omitted*** The Bottom Line As the history of recessions over the past century suggests, they're almost always preceded by monetary policy tightening in the form of rising interest rates. Fiscal contractions, whether they involve lower government spending, higher taxes, or both, have also played a role. This is not to automatically deprecate such policies when they lead to a recession. In some cases, as during the 1970s, the long-run alternative to immediate economic pain may be even less palatable. In others, as with the end of World War II and the Korean War, there may be no easy way or no will to find immediate alternatives to high military spending. That doesn't change the fact that most modern recessions have occurred in response to some combination of rising interest rates, lower budget deficits, and higher energy prices.

The Investopedia team 22 (Investopedia contributors come from a range of backgrounds, and over 20+ years there have been thousands of expert writers and editors who have contributed, last updated (no publish date) 6/16/22, accessed 7/23/22, “A Review of Past Recessions”, investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/past-recessions.asp) KCabrera

The Own Goal Recession: May 1937–June 1938 Expansionary monetary and fiscal policies had secured a recovery from the Great Depression after 1933 policymakers changed course , more preoccupied with cutting budget deficits and heading off inflation than with the dangers of a depressive relapse most damagingly of all, the U.S. Treasury began the same year to sterilize gold inflows, ending brisk money supply growth that had supported the expansion . The stock market crashed in October. The V-Day Recession recession reflected massive cuts in U.S. government spending and employment toward the end after World War II. severity of the downturn remains open to question because much of the eliminated spending represented wartime production The Post-War Brakes Tap Recession some ways comparable to the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. The M*A*S*H* Recession government spending to decline dramatically The Investment Bust Recession The sharp worldwide recession contributed to a foreign trade deficit The U.S. has experienced 34 recessions since 1857 ? Companies in the consumer staples, health care, and utilities sectors, which see relatively small fluctuations in demand for economic reasons fare best during recessions stocks have outperformed during past downturns as a result Fiscal contractions, whether they involve lower government spending, higher taxes, or both, have also played a role most modern recessions have occurred in response to some combination of rising interest rates, lower budget deficits, and higher energy prices.

No impact to recession---COVID proves

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2022

Another familiar folk theory is “military Keynesianism.” War generates a lot of economic demand, and it can sometimes lift depressed economies out of the doldrums and back toward prosperity and full employment. The obvious case in point here is World War II, which did help the U.S economy finally escape the quicksand of the Great Depression. Those who are convinced that great powers go to war primarily to keep Big Business (or the arms industry) happy are naturally drawn to this sort of argument, and they might worry that governments looking at bleak economic forecasts will try to restart their economies through some sort of military adventure.

Walt 20, Stephen Walt is the Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, “Will a Global Depression Trigger Another World War?,” 5/13/2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/13/coronavirus-pandemic-depression-economy-world-war/, AJS

War generates a lot of economic demand it can sometimes lift depressed economies

Military Keynesianism is wrong---war fails to generate enough growth and other methods solve.

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2022

Starting tomorrow, on Halloween, government leaders from around the world will meet in Glasgow, Scotland, for the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference, which this year will feature some of its scariest stories yet. The only problem is that when you take the mask off the harrowing claims that climate change poses an imminent existential threat to humanity, they don’t hold up. The most dire climate-change predictions, which fuel the apocalyptic discourse that surrounds the issue, stem from a climate model known as RCP 8.5. According to RCP 8.5, by the year 2100, the Earth will warm 4.3 degrees Celsius, causing sea levels to surge and making many countries too hot to inhabit. But models are only as solid as the assumptions on which they rest, and RCP 8.5’s assumptions are wild, to put it mildly. The model assumes that, despite coal’s declining market position and usage, and despite projections that it will continue to decline, worldwide per capita coal use will rise three- to six-fold over the next 50 years, coming to once again power our economies and heat our homes. It assumes that liquefied coal will even fuel our cars. It assumes that the rebirth of the coal industry will power so much growth that, by 2100, the poorest country on Earth today will have a higher GDP than today’s wealthiest countries currently do (while paradoxically also being too hot to inhabit). And it assumes that economic growth will be much less energy-efficient than it is today, which would represent the reversal of a decades-long trend. It should go without saying that none of these are even remotely safe assumptions. Similarly, many dire predictions about climate change’s effects on weather patterns are overwrought. It is true that the latest report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that fire weather, heavy precipitation, ecological and agricultural droughts, and heat waves are increasing in frequency. But it is also true that while heat waves have become more frequent since 1960, the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the peak period of extreme heat in the U.S. Similarly, while weather conducive to wildfires has become more frequent, the global land area burned by wildfires has steadily decreased since the early 1900s, and much of the recent damage has been due to poor forest-management practices. What’s more, there’s plenty of good news that can’t be fit into a spooky climate-change story. The IPCC’s most recent report notes no discernible long-term increase in flooding, hydrological and meteorological droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms, extreme winds, thunderstorms, lightning, or hail. And humanity is better protected than it once was from those natural disasters that do happen: A recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change found that economic losses caused by climate-related disasters dropped 80 percent from 1980 to 2016. If you can ignore the overblown rhetoric, there are fundamental truths to be reckoned with: Climate change is real, and human activity does indeed contribute to it. But irresponsible fearmongering only makes the problem harder to address. According to the best evidence, the world is on track to hit emissions and warming levels that, as of a couple of years ago, would have been considered a success. For instance, according to leading industry publications, energy-related-emissions projections are in line with the (much cooler) climate model RCP 4.5, which the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment heralded as a low-emissions policy-success scenario. It’s likely that global “peak per capita CO2 emissions” were reached several years ago. Major independent energy-research organizations such as the International Energy Agency predict that annual per capita CO2 emissions will decline in the decades to come, and it’s likely that global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are on the brink of a long plateau. The best computer models predict that by 2100, the Earth will be 2.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 1850. That will certainly cause environmental changes, but it doesn’t constitute an existential threat. Nor are we humans without tools to ameliorate the problem. Adaptive engineering, carbon–offset and water markets, and the continued growth of more environmentally conscious ways of producing the goods and services needed for modern life can all lessen climate change and its effects. So, as Halloween arrives amid the U.N. Climate Change Conference this year, leaders should ditch the Grim Reaper costumes and don more reasonable attire. With level heads and the right policies, they can both protect the environment and provide a better life for billions around the globe.

Puckett 21, (Jakob, An energy-policy analyst and a Young Voices associate contributor. “Don’t Buy the U.N. Climate Change Conference’s Scary Stories”, National Review, 10-30-2021, https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/dont-buy-the-un-climate-change-conferences-scary-stories/ 7-23-2022)///LD

The most dire climate-change predictions, which fuel the apocalyptic discourse that surrounds the issue, stem from a climate model known as RCP 8.5. models are only as solid as the assumptions on which they rest, and RCP 8.5’s assumptions are wild, to put it mildly. The model assumes that, despite coal’s declining market position and usage, and despite projections that it will continue to decline, worldwide per capita coal use will rise three- to six-fold over the next 50 years, coming to once again power our economies and heat our homes. It assumes that liquefied coal will even fuel our cars. that the rebirth of the coal industry will power so much growth that, by 2100, the poorest country on Earth today will have a higher GDP than today’s wealthiest countries currently do And it assumes that economic growth will be much less energy-efficient than it is today, which would represent the reversal of a decades-long trend. none of these are even remotely safe assumptions. dire predictions about climate change are overwrought. the latest report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that fire weather, heavy precipitation, ecological and agricultural droughts, and heat waves are increasing in frequency. But it is also true that while heat waves have become more frequent since 1960, the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the peak period of extreme heat in the U.S. Similarly, while weather conducive to wildfires has become more frequent, the global land area burned by wildfires has steadily decreased since the early 1900s, and much of the recent damage has been due to poor forest-management practices The IPCC’s most recent report notes no discernible long-term increase in flooding, hydrological and meteorological droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms, extreme winds, thunderstorms, lightning, or hail. humanity is better protected than it once was A recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change found that economic losses caused by climate-related disasters dropped 80 percent from 1980 to 2016. there are fundamental truths to be reckoned with: Climate change is real, and human activity does indeed contribute to it. But irresponsible fearmongering only makes the problem harder to address. the world is on track to hit emissions and warming levels that, as of a couple of years ago, would have been considered a success. Nor are we humans without tools to ameliorate the problem. leaders With level heads and the right policies, they can both protect the environment and provide a better life for billions around the globe.

Climate change won’t cause extinction---Recent decrease in natural disasters proves.

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2022

Humans are changing the climate too rapidly for nature to keep up, according to a new United Nations (UN) report released on Monday. Unless greenhouse gas emissions are quickly slashed, both humans and wildlife will no longer adapt to the dangers of a warming planet. The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is based on years of research from hundreds of scientists and follows previous landmark assessments on the global threat of climate change. The new 3,675-page report authored by 270 researchers from nearly 70 nations, concluded that human-caused climate change is happening faster and causing more damage than researchers previously expected, according to Sara Kiley Watson for Popular Science. The report is the second of three reviews from the IPCC. “With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are getting clobbered by climate change,” says UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement. “Nearly half of humanity is living in the danger zone—now. Many ecosystems are at the point of no return—now. Unchecked carbon pollution is forcing the world’s most vulnerable on a frog march to destruction—now.” Climate change is not a future abstract threat, per the new report, and is already harming communities and ecosystems around the world. In 2019, extreme weather like storms and floods displaced more than 13 million people across Asia and Africa, according to Brad Plumer and Raymond Zhong for the New York Times. Heat and drought are threatening the food and water supply for millions of people, and rising sea levels are encroaching on coastal communities. In recent years, more individuals have been forced to deal with extreme weather events linked to climate change, like the deadly heatwave that hit the western United States last summer. Anthropogenic warming increased the likelihood of floods that swept through parts of Europe last year by up to nine times and made Australia's devastating fire seasons 30 percent more likely.

Wetzel 22, (Corryn Wetzel is a freelance science journalist based in Brooklyn. Her work has also appeared in Audubon magazine, National Geographic and others.“We Are Changing Climate Faster Than We Can Adapt, New IPCC Report Warns”, 3-2-2022, Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/we-are-changing-climate-faster-than-we-can-adapt-new-ipcc-report-warns-180979655/ 7-23-2022)///LD

Humans are changing the climate rapidly , according to a new United Nations (UN) report The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is based on years of research from hundreds of scientists and follows previous landmark assessments on the global threat of climate change. concluded that human-caused climate change is happening faster and causing more damage than researchers previously expected The report is the second of three reviews from the IPCC. “Nearly half of humanity is living in the danger zone—now. Unchecked carbon pollution is forcing the world’s most vulnerable on a frog march to destruction—now.” Climate change is not a future abstract threat, and is already harming communities and ecosystems around the world. In 2019, extreme weather like storms and floods displaced more than 13 million people across Asia and Africa, according New York Times. Heat and drought are threatening the food and water supply for millions of people, and rising sea levels are encroaching on coastal communities. extreme weather events link to climate change, like the deadly heatwave that hit the western United States last summer. Anthropogenic warming increase

Adaptation solves the impacts of climate change---Executive action solves

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Michigan (Classic)

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2022

THE TRIFECTA of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and civil unrest not seen since the 1960s are inspiring predictions of the diminution of American power and an accelerated fin de siècle breakdown of the post-Cold War order. This predicament has given rise to a panoply of essays and reports, a series of them in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs alone, debating “The World After the Pandemic,” with variations on how the United States must, phoenix-like, shape a new order. One recent example that is emblematic of the Washington foreign policy mainstream emanates from the Council on Foreign Relations. It is entitled The End of World Order and American Foreign Policy, by Robert Blackwill and Thomas Wright.

Mathew Burrows and Robert Manning 20, Burrows is a former worker at the CIA and the State Department and the director of the Strategic Foresight Initiative, Manning is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and formerly served as a senior advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Asia, “What Happens When America Is No Longer the Undisputed Super Power?”, 8/17/2020 https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-happens-when-america-no-longer-undisputed-super-power-166828 , accessed 7-23-22, Wpeng

THE TRIFECTA of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and civil unrest not seen since the 1960s predictions of the diminution of American power and an accelerated breakdown of the post-Cold War order predicament has given rise to a panoply of essays and reports The World After the Pandemic,” with variations on how the United States must, phoenix-like, shape a new order.

US hegemony’s unsustainable --- shifts in power means no country is willing to follow the US.

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Michigan (Classic)

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2022

The conspicuous absence of American leadership during the pandemic has emboldened the narratives about the United States’ decline and the weakening of the international order. The result has been a proliferation of commentary on the reconfiguration of global power, and America’s diminished position.

Roman Darius 20, Writer for The Strategist, “Don’t Panic: America Will Still Dominate the World After Coronavirus”, 6/19/2020, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/dont-panic-america-will-still-dominate-world-after-coronavirus-163154 , accessed 7-23-22, Wpeng

absence of American leadership during the pandemic has emboldened the narratives about the United States’ decline and the weakening of the international order

US heg is sustainable – multiple reasons:

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The third is Taiwan’s determination to defend itself. Taiwan at this stage is focusing its efforts on self-reliance without provoking China. The current Tsi Ing-wen government does not chant slogans about independence to ease concerns on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. On the other hand, the Taiwanese government is keen to acquire weapon systems that are essential for defense. Taiwan has continued to increase its defense spending in recent years, especially for defensive systems. The United States is also actively supporting Taiwan in this respect. Thanks to the current military build-up, Taiwan could survive a sudden Chinese attack which makes Beijing hesitant to launch a preemptive but costly military action.

Park 22 (Joshua Namtae Park, Joshua NamTae Park is senior researcher at ISA(Institute for Asian Strategy, Seoul), ROK navy captain, retired, Ph.D. from U.S. Texas A&M University. He had various experiences at sea duties, worked for ROK MND and recently KIDA (Korea Institute for Defense Analyses). Currently, he is staying in Taipei, Taiwan as a visiting scholar. His primary research interests are Chinese security and military issues. 7-9-2022,"Why China Can't Afford to Attack Taiwan," National Interest. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-china-cant-afford-attack-taiwan-203504 - 7/23/22 JY)

Taiwan’s determination to defend itself. Taiwan at this stage is focusing its efforts on self-reliance without provoking China Taiwanese government is keen to acquire weapon systems that are essential for defense. Taiwan has continued to increase its defense spending in recent years, especially for defensive systems. The United States is also actively supporting Taiwan in this respect. Thanks to the current military build-up, Taiwan could survive a sudden Chinese attack which makes Beijing hesitant to launch a preemptive but costly military action.

No China-Taiwan war –

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Michigan (Classic)

Impact Files

2022

The Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) was substantially predicated on preventing two faits accomplis: a Russian invasion of the Baltics and a Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan. To what degree these scenarios will survive the Biden administration’s soon-to- be-released strategic review remains to be seen. The most likely outcome is that “integrated deterrence,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s term—for now more a slogan than a strategic concept that attempts a more “wholistic” all-of-government effort—will become prominent, as will a greater focus on the “deter” element rather than on “defeat” as was the last NDS. Defining what defeat means and how it would be achieved remains elusive. Some observers believe that how the United States handles the Ukraine crisis will be closely watched by China. That is true. But, as this paper argues, the Ukraine crisis will not influence Chinese decisions on whether or not to launch a full-scale amphibious invasion because, given the force demands, China simply lacks the capacity to do so for the foreseeable future. The current and former heads of Indo-Pacific Command have warned about China’s building the necessary forces to invade and conquer Taiwan, possibly by decade’s end. Given China’s long-standing determination to make Taiwan part of the mainland and achieve “one China,” a military takeover of Taiwan sounds plausible. However, this notion is based on a fundamental misperception regarding China’s capability to launch a major amphibious assault. If China were to launch such a military attack on Taiwan, what would that take in terms of forces and force levels? Does China possess the requisite numbers and capabilities? If not, when, if at all, might it build those forces that, if history counts, would number in the hundreds of thousands of troops and thousands of ships and maritime assault vehicles? Current and past studies do not successfully or specifically address these questions. These studies focus on the how, but not on the specific manpower requirements of what would be required to carry out an invasion. The definitive document on what size force would be required to seize Taiwan in a full-out landing was drafted by the US military in the late stages of World War II in the Pacific. In 1944, Operation Causeway was the US plan for retaking Formosa, as it was then called, from 30,000 starving Japanese soldiers. The planned invasion force was double the size of Operation Overlord, the Normandy landing: 400,000 soldiers and marines deployed on 4,000 ships. With a potential defending force of 450,000 Taiwanese today, using the traditional three-to-one ratio of attackers to defenders taught at war colleges, China would need to deploy over 1.2 million soldiers (out of a total active force of over 2 million). Many thousands of ships would be required to land all those forces, and doing so would take weeks. How many occupation forces would be required to pacify the Taiwanese? Surely the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq are not lost on the PLA leadership. China possesses a small fraction of the necessary ships to execute a landing of that size and lacks the capacity to do so for the foreseeable future. Nor are there any current plans suggesting China is intent on procuring such a force, though that could change.

Harlan Ullman 22, Senior Advisor of the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he served in combat in assignments in Vietnam. He holds an MA, MALD, and PhD from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, 2/18,2022, “Reality Check #10: China will not invade Taiwan,” https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/reality-check/reality-check-10-china-will-not-invade-taiwan/, Accessed 7/23/2022, CC

Ukraine crisis will not influence Chinese decisions on whether or not to launch a full-scale amphibious invasion because, given the force demands, China simply lacks the capacity to do so for the foreseeable future. one China,” a military takeover of Taiwan sounds plausible. a fundamental misperception regarding China’s capability to launch a major amphibious assault. , using the traditional three-to-one ratio of attackers to defenders taught at war colleges, China would need to deploy over 1.2 million soldiers Many thousands of ships would be required to land all those forces, and doing so would take weeks. China possesses a small fraction of the necessary ships to execute a landing of that size and lacks the capacity to do so for the foreseeable future

China lacks force capability

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Just kidding, that’s not what happened at all. In fact, as the world has become more capitalist and more globalized, the quality of life for the average person, and especially for the average poor person, has increased substantially. In 1990, 37% of the global population lived on less than $1.90 per day. By 2012, that number had been reduced to 12.8%, and in 2015 it was under 10%. The source of this progress isn’t a massive wealth redistribution program; it’s massive wealth creation — that is, economic growth. Economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay found that, in a global sample of over 100 countries, changes in the income growth of the bottom 40% of the world’s income earners are highly correlated with economic growth rates. On the other hand, changes in inequality contributed relatively little to changes in social welfare of the poor over the last few decades. There is good reason to believe that the expansion of free trade, facilitated by international organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), have had a considerable impact in accelerating the economic development of developing countries. In the 1990s GATT facilitated reforms which moved 125 countries towards freer trade by reducing the burden of government imposed trade barriers like tariffs. This was the first serious attempt at trade reform for most developing countries at the time, and arguably presents a unique natural experiment on the economic effects of trade reform. In fact, a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), specifically examined how trade reforms facilitated by GATT affected the economic development of the reforming countries. In the paper, the authors compared the trends in economic growth before and after trade reform in the reforming countries. Then they compared those results to trends in economic growth of a control group of countries which didn’t undergo trade reform. What they found was very encouraging for proponents of free trade. Prior to reform, the economic development of reformers and non-reformers was practically identical, but after reform, the economic development of reforming countries accelerated while non-reforming countries saw their economies stagnate and decline. The results suggest that the reforms towards freer trade lead to an increase in income per capita of around 20% in the long-run, an effect so large that it almost certainly had a positive and non-trivial impact on poverty reduction. Similarly, other research has shown that more free market trade policies result in lower rates of extreme poverty and child mortality in developing countries. There are other benefits as well. One study on trade reform in Indonesia found that reductions of import tariffs led to an increase in disposable income among poor households, which allowed them to pull their children out of the labor force, leading to “a strong decline” in the incidence of child labor. Unfortunately, many activists have reflexively taken up the cause of opposing the expansion of global capitalism, for a number of reasons. Western anti-sweatshop activists, for example, will often argue in favor of government imposed barriers to trade with poor countries because their working conditions are terrible in comparison to those in developed Western nations. In their view, western consumers should not be promoting a cycle of capitalist exploitation by buying products made in Vietnamese sweat-shops. But satisfactory working conditions aren’t the natural state of mankind; they are a consequence of decades of economic development. Erecting barriers to trade with poor countries is surely a large impediment to their development, in fact, research suggests that existing developed world tariffs depress economic growth rates in the developing world by 0.6 to 1.6 percent per person, a considerably large effect. Moreover, the sweat-shops which produce clothing for Westerners are often much better than alternative forms of domestic employment. In poor countries like Bangladesh, China, and Vietnam, the apparel industry consistently pays more than most other domestic industries. According to research by economist Ben Powell, in poor countries “most sweatshop jobs provide an above average standard of living for their workers.” Notably, a paper published in the Journal of Development Economics found that the expansion of the garments industry in Bangladesh lead to an increase in employment and income among young women, giving them the means to finance their own education. Remarkably the authors found that, “the demand for education generated through manufacturing growth appears to have a much larger effect on female educational attainment compared to a large-scale government conditional cash transfer program to encourage female schooling.” Foreign investment is also more desirable than opponents of capitalism and globalization give it credit for. The conventional wisdom among activists in wealthy countries is that multinational corporations exploit poor workers in third world countries for cheap labor, profiting off people working in sweatshop conditions. It should come as a surprise to the individuals who hold this view to learn that 85% of people in developing countries believe that foreign companies building factories in their countries is a good thing, according to Pew Research. In fact, for all the talk of exploitative multinational corporations, research shows that, in general, these corporations provide higher wages and better working conditions than domestic employers in developing countries. Additionally, when multinational corporations build factories in poor countries, it raises the demand for low-skilled workers, resulting in higher wages for local workers. Consistent with this fact, recent empirical evidence demonstrates that investment by foreign companies in developing countries reduces both poverty and income inequality by raising the incomes of low-skilled workers. Foreign investment can also make people in relatively low-income countries better off by providing better or more inexpensive products. A recent analysis published by the NBER found that foreign retailers like Wal-Mart greatly reduce the cost of living for both the rich and poor in Mexico, making everyone along the income distribution better off. Global capitalism is by no means a perfect phenomenon. Many businesses do have questionable labor practices that are worthy of contempt. And free market policies may in many instances lead to socially undesirable outcomes, sometimes on a large scale. However, the one-dimensional, automatic denunciation of capitalism and the accompanying refusal to give it any credit for its successes — as social media activists have done — reflects an uncompromising, and quite frankly ignorant worldview. It is one in which capitalism is always bad, no matter what the evidence tells us.

Iacono ‘16, Corey Iacono is a student at the University of Rhode Island studying Pharmaceutical Science and Economics, “How Capitalism and Globalization Have Made the World a Better Place,” Quillette, January 16, 2016, http://quillette.com/2016/01/16/how-capitalism-and-globalization-have-made-the-world-a-better-place, msm

as the world has become more capitalist and globalized quality of life especially for the average poor person has increased substantially In 1990, 37% of the global population lived on less than $1.90 per day By 2012, that number had been reduced to 12.8%, and in 2015 it was under 10%. The source of this progress is economic growth Economists found in a global sample of over 100 countries changes in the income growth of the bottom 40% of the world’s income earners are highly correlated with economic growth rates There is good reason to believe the expansion of free trade facilitated by international organizations have had a considerable impact in accelerating the economic development of developing countries a paper specifically examined how trade reforms affected the economic development of the reforming countries the authors compared the trends in economic growth before and after trade reform in the reforming countries Then they compared those results to trends in economic growth of a control group of countries which didn’t undergo trade reform. What they found was very encouraging for proponents of free trade Prior to reform, the economic development of reformers and non-reformers was practically identical but after reform the economic development of reforming countries accelerated while non-reforming countries saw their economies stagnate and decline reforms towards freer trade lead to an increase in income per capita an effect so large that it almost certainly had a positive and non-trivial impact on poverty reduction research has shown more free market trade policies result in lower rates of extreme poverty and child mortality in developing countries reductions of import tariffs led to an increase in disposable income among poor households leading to “a strong decline” in the incidence of child labor. activists have reflexively taken up the cause of opposing the expansion of global capitalism But satisfactory working conditions aren’t the natural state they are a consequence of decades of economic development the sweat-shops which produce clothing for Westerners are often much better than alternative forms of domestic employment in poor countries “most sweatshop jobs provide an above average standard of living for their workers.” paper published in the Journal of Development Economics found the expansion of the garments industry in Bangladesh lead to an increase in employment and income among young women giving them the means to finance their own education the demand for education generated through manufacturing growth appears to have a much larger effect on female educational attainment compared to a large-scale government conditional cash transfer program to encourage female schooling for all the talk of exploitative multinational corporations research shows these corporations provide higher wages and better working conditions than domestic employers in developing countries when multinational corporations build factories in poor countries, it raises the demand for low-skilled workers, resulting in higher wages for local workers recent empirical evidence demonstrates that investment by foreign companies in developing countries reduces both poverty and income inequality by raising the incomes of low-skilled workers NBER found that foreign retailers like Wal-Mart greatly reduce the cost of living for both the rich and poor in Mexico making everyone along the income distribution better off the one-dimensional, automatic denunciation of capitalism and the accompanying refusal to give it any credit for its successes reflects an uncompromising, and ignorant worldview It is one in which capitalism is always bad, no matter what the evidence tells us.

Productivity is good for global quality of life and reducing structural violence—they’re reductionist.

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

Heidegger (1962) and Feenberg, in his critical theory (2003), suggest that a synthesis between these opposing polarities of rules versus interpretation is possible. Both argue that, in association with the instrumental role a technology may have, we must also give consideration to the essence of the technology in terms of its social and cultural implications. Out of this emerges a synthesis that leads to an anamorphosis in technology education. In other words, the technologies that we simply accept as presented are often distortions of the truth, much as the lettering used in road markings appears to be elongated and distorted from the point of view of a pedestrian. However, the same markings when viewed from a driver’s point of view, seen head on and from a different perspective, appear, as a result of foreshortening, to be perfectly in proportion. This is deliberate on the part of the designers, but significantly, very few of us, drivers or pedestrians, are actually aware of this. It is only by repositioning ourselves that we may begin to see a different perspective, and this may, in turn, serve to transform our previously distorted values by illuminating and clarifying the controlling logic of the technologically mediated world we inhabit (Dakers, 2005a). A technological literacy in which the dialectics of “calculation versus meditation, objectification versus art, ‘world’ versus ‘earth’, identity versus difference” (Kroker, 2004: 38) are explored is therefore a crucial part of a learner’s technological development.

Dakers 6 (John R. Dakers – Professor of the Philosophy of Technology at the Technology University of Delft, “Towards a Philosophy for Technology Education”, Springer Link, 2006, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781403983053_11, MG)

opposing polarities of rules versus interpretation is possible. Both argue that, in association with the instrumental role a technology may have, we must also give consideration to the essence of the technology in terms of its social and cultural implications It is only by repositioning ourselves that we may begin to see a different perspective, and this may, in turn, serve to transform our previously distorted values by illuminating and clarifying the controlling logic of the technologically mediated world we inhabit (Dakers, 2005a).

Having debates over technology better prepares us to deal with it through technological literacy

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

However, we need to consider the expectations as well. The positive side focuses on the so-called friendly AI, meaning AI which will benefit and not harm humans, thanks to its advanced intelligence.23

Tzimas 21 (Themistoklis Tzimas PhD - post- doc researcher in international law at the University of Macedonia and assistant professor at the Law School of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, “Legal and Ethical Challenges of Artificial Intelligence from an International Law Perspective”, Law Governance and Technology Series Volume 46, 30 July 2021, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-78585-7_7#DOI, MG)

The positive side focuses on the so-called friendly AI, meaning AI which will benefit and not harm humans, thanks to its advanced intelligence.23

AI solves every existential threat and inevitable death – leads to immortality

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

Making cybernetics real, however, required more than just a name. It required conversations, champions, and framing questions in such a way as to reveal the edges of the cybernetics potential. From 1946 to 1953 a series of conferences took place to try to do just that. Created and curated by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, in collaboration with Wiener, these conferences, later known as the Macy cybernetics conferences, took place in New York. And the participants were strikingly diverse — there were mathematicians and philosophers, physicists and psychologists, anthropologists and historians, hailing from North America including Mexico, Europe and Asia. They were at different points in their careers and they had different lived experiences. What Mead, Bateson and Wiener knew was that building something new like this was not a task for one scientific discipline. It could, in fact, only be built in the intersections between fields and existing ideas.

Bell 20 (Genevieve Bell – Distinguished Professor and Violet McKenzie Chair at the Australian National University, “Why we need a cybernetic future”, Australian National University, 14 November 2020, https://cybernetics.anu.edu.au/2020/11/14/why-we-need-cybernetic-future/, MG)

Making cybernetics real, however, required more than just a name. It required conversations and framing questions in such a way as to reveal the edges of the cybernetics potential

Conversations are uniquely key towards making the AI cybernetic world possible

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

While there are still some on the earth who claim climate change is a farce, the majority of us believe we need to throw everything possible into slowing down or solving the problem. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are two tools in our climate-change-halting toolbox. The more we utilize AI and machine learning technology to help us understand our current reality, predict future weather events and create new products and services to minimize our human impact our chances of improving and saving lives, creating a healthier world and making businesses more efficient, the better chance we have to stall or even reverse the climate change trajectory we’re on. Here are just a few of the ways AI and machine learning are helping us tackle climate change. Machines can analyze the flood of data that is generated every day from sensors, gauges and monitors to spot patterns quickly and automatically. By looking at data about the changing conditions of the world’s land surfaces that is gathered by NASA and aggregated at Landsat, it provides a very accurate picture of how the world is changing. The more accurate we’re able to be at the current status of our climate, the better our climate models will be. This information can be used to identify our biggest vulnerabilities and risk zones. This knowledge from climate scientists can be shared with decision-makers so they know how to respond to the impact of climate change—severe weather such as hurricanes, rising sea levels and higher temperatures. Artificial intelligence and deep learning can help climate researchers and innovators test out their theories and solutions about how to reduce air pollution and other climate-friendly innovations. One example of this is the Green Horizon Project from IBM that analyzes environmental data and predicts pollution as well as tests “what-if” scenarios that involve pollution-reducing tactics. By using the information provided by machine learning algorithms, Google was able to cut the amount of energy it used at its data centers by 15%. Similar insights can help other companies reduce their carbon footprint. While businesses and manufacturing might contribute significantly to greenhouse gas levels, it’s still imperative that each citizen commits to reducing their impact as well. The easier we make green initiatives for each person, the higher the adoption rate and the more progress we make to save the environment. Artificial intelligence and machine learning innovations can help create products and services that make it easier to take care of our planet. There are several consumer-facing AI devices such as smart thermostats (which could save up to 15% on cooling annually for each household) and irrigation systems (which could save up to 8,800 gallons of water per home per year) that help conserve resources. Everyone doing their part over time will add up. The damage to human lives and property can be reduced if there are earlier warning signs of a catastrophic weather event. There has been significant progress in using machine-learning algorithms that were trained on data from other extreme weather events to identify tropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers. The earlier warning that governments and citizens can get about severe weather, the better they are able to respond and protect themselves. Machines are also being deployed to assess the strengths of models that are used to investigate climate change by reviewing the dozens of them that are in use and extracting intelligence from them. They also help predict how long a storm will last and its severity. Since machines can’t tell you “how” it arrived at its prediction or decisions, most climate professionals don’t feel comfortable relying on only what the machines suggest will happen, but use machine insight along with their own professional analysis to complement one another. Climate change is a gargantuan problem and its complexity is exacerbated by the many people and players involved from divergent worldwide government entities to profit-driven corporations and individuals who aren’t always open to change. Therefore, the faster and smarter we can become through the use of AI and machine learning the higher our probability of success to at least slow down the damage caused by climate change.

Bernard Marr 18, 2-21-2018, Bernard Marr is a best-selling author & keynote speaker on business, technology and big data. His new book is Data Strategy.,"The Amazing Ways We Can Use AI To Tackle Climate Change," Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/02/21/the-amazing-ways-we-can-use-ai-to-tackle-climate-change/#7c27122f4a35

. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are two tools in our climate-change-halting toolbox. The more we utilize AI and machine learning technology to help us understand our current reality, predict future weather events and create new products and services to minimize our human impact our chances of improving and saving lives, creating a healthier world and making businesses more efficient, the better chance we have to stall or even reverse the climate change trajectory we’re on. By looking at data about the changing conditions of the world’s land surfaces it provides a very accurate picture of how the world is changing. This information can be used to identify our biggest vulnerabilities and risk zones. This knowledge from climate scientists can be shared with decision-makers so they know how to respond to the impact of climate change—severe weather such as hurricanes, rising sea levels and higher temperatures. Artificial intelligence and deep learning can help climate researchers and innovators test out their theories and solutions about how to reduce air pollution and other climate-friendly innovations. Artificial intelligence and machine learning innovations can help create products and services that make it easier to take care of our planet AI help conserve resources. The earlier warning that governments and citizens can get about severe weather, the better they are able to respond and protect themselves. the faster and smarter we can become through the use of AI and machine learning the higher our probability of success to at least slow down the damage caused by climate change.

A.I. Critical to mitigating the impact of Climate Change--- Leads to new technology and predicts harmful weather to mitigate escalation.

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

Taking a cue from Simpson and Tuck and Yang, I turn to Tuck’s 2010 critique of Deleuze’s notion of “desire” as an example of the theoretical practice of refusal, which Simpson wonders about and which Tuck and Yang elaborated on in 2014. Eve Tuck’s 2010 article “Breaking Up with Deleuze” refuses Deleuze’s understanding and imposition of his definition of desire for Native studies and Native resurgence in particular. Tuck refuses the Deleuzoguattarian nomadic due to its totalizing moves and specifically its evasion and refusal of Native and alternative notions of refusal that emerge from Native struggles for survival.24 For Tuck, paying attention to “the continuity of ancestors,” or genealogies, in Native and in all modes of knowledge production is imperative. For Indigenous and Native studies, it reverses the erasure enacted by continental European and settler- colonial theory, which uses a tradition of ongoing genocide to annihilate Native thinkers and subsequently their epistemologies and theories. Prior to Byrd’s indictment of Deleuzoguattarian laudatory accounts of America’s terrain of “Indians without Ancestry,” Tuck reroutes us back to ancestral and genealogical thinking as a way of asserting Indigenous presence and its epistemological systems and traditions, devoid of Cartesian boundary- making impulses and desires. Tuck’s work also prepares us in 2010 for the critique that Byrd levies in 2011, which exposes the traditions, roots, and genealogies of Western poststructuralist theory. Such theory created the conditions of possibility and emergence for Deleuzoguattarian genocidal forms of rhizomatic and nonrepresentational thought. Black Caribbean feminist Michelle V. Rowley argues we need to especially attend to a theory’s “politics and conditions of emergence.”25 In other words, we need to consider on whose backs or through whose blood a theory developed and then circulated while hiding its own violence. Jodi Byrd in particular attends to the colonialist, genocidal, and therefore humanist impulses of the rhizome in her book Transit of Empire.26 What is particularly instructive is the way that Byrd operationalizes her critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s first chapter, “Rhizome,” in their tome A Thousand Plateaus.27 Byrd’s deconstruction, or picking apart, of the poststructuralist and nonsubject- and nonobject- related Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatics are a masterful (and frankly thuggish and rude) demonstration of refusing to adapt or “repair” colonial epistemologies and geographies. Byrd’s refusal is a moment that further helps one distinguish between the works of postcolonial and decolonial studies. Byrd performs an outright refusal that short circuits the colonial and postcolonial comportments of politesse, which allow genocidal Western thought to continue uninterrupted. Byrd’s interrogation of the “colonial nostalgia” latent in poststructural and nonrepresentational forms of thought like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is an explicit example of how the violence of white nonrepresentational theory creates an immediate space of impasse for Indigenous, decolonial, Black, and abolitionist intellectual traditions. As Byrd argues, the Deleuzian and Guattarian rhizome assumes its errant, untraceable, and de/reterritorializing path through Native genocide. The rhizome obtains its metaphorical and theoretical elasticity from the discursive genocide of Indigenous peoples. The territory of maneuver or ground that the rhizome gains its bearing on is unwittingly or perhaps indifferently anchored in the disavowal of the Indigenous ancestral claims, history, presence, and ongoing relationship with the land in North America. Deleuze and Guattari covet the free- range and bloody movements in the West, described as a land of “Indians without Ancestry” primarily because they do not have to contend with the presence of Indigenous peoples and their prior relationships (ancestors) to the land and space through which they move and clear as nomads. There are no existing people to which Deleuze and Guattari have to be accountable. Therefore, their own and others’ self- actualizing, free- form whiteness can proceed unimpeded. The rhizomatic West— terra nullius— is without a people, history, or a cosmology to navigate. Byrd’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s reproduction or transit of the “Indian” in their book A Thousand Plateaus limns some of the methods in which colonialism and modes of conquest are enacted on behalf of the self-actualization of white subjects who produce nonrepresentational theory. In fact, Byrd argues that the “Indian is the ontological prior through which poststructuralism functions.”28 Byrd traces the appearance or deployment of the Indian as a simulation or “present absent” in Jacques Derrida’s and then Deleuze and Guattari’s work, which creates space for the white subject and the unending frontier. Byrd also argues that nonrepresentational theory heralded as a liberatory path beyond the subject is colonialist. Byrd indicts Deleuze and Guattari’s use of Leslie Fiedler’s work in order to invoke the American West and the Indian as exceptional cases that inspire rhizomatic movement through the notion of an ever- receding frontier.29 It is colonialist on (at least) two accounts: in its need to render the Indian already and inevitably (ontologically) dead as “it” has no ancestors or living community to whom one needs to be accountable; and in its invocation of the vanishing “Indian,” which opens up the possibility of an “ever- receding frontier” and inspiration for the metaphor of the rhizome. This logic and mode of conquistador thought undergirds the Deleuzian and Guattarian ethos of experimental and rhizomatic lines of flight. Their nonrepresentational theory of lines of flight are only possible as a form of white self-actualizing posthumanism due to the death of Indigenous peoples and their excision from the Earth/land. White posthumanism and its flows and lines of flight are made possible through Native death.

King 17 [Tiffany Lethabo King is assistant professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight”; Critical Ethnic Studies; Spring 2017, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162?casa_token=Ayg-S-eXLu4AAAAA%3AaGlHrzMA9tWXklUEbQHL0P7GcNfaYbAs9EQAog6pgi3kUWD0hjWhL3xATIEZ963qYqlLTAlQTz2zxgcJIMo5i1APwp3OEbbEwfkmhNFDocRcFeKS&seq=1]//eleanor

Tuck refuses Deleuze’s understanding and imposition of his definition of desire for Native studies and Native resurgence in particular Tuck refuses the Deleuzoguattarian nomadic due to its totalizing moves and specifically its evasion and refusal of Native and alternative notions of refusal that emerge from Native struggles for survival paying attention to “the continuity of ancestors,” or genealogies, in Native and in all modes of knowledge production is imperative. it reverses the erasure enacted by continental European and settler- colonial theory, which uses a tradition of ongoing genocide to annihilate Native thinkers and subsequently their epistemologies and theories. Western poststructuralist theory created the conditions of possibility and emergence for Deleuzoguattarian genocidal forms of rhizomatic and nonrepresentational thought. Byrd’s deconstruction, or picking apart, of the poststructuralist and nonsubject- and nonobject- related Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatics are a masterfu demonstration of refusing to adapt or “repair” colonial epistemologies and geographies Byrd’s refusal is a moment that further helps one distinguish between the works of postcolonial and decolonial studies Byrd performs an outright refusal that short circuits the colonial and postcolonial comportments of politesse, which allow genocidal Western thought to continue uninterrupted interrogation of the “colonial nostalgia” latent in poststructural and nonrepresentational forms of thought like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is an explicit example of how the violence of white nonrepresentational theory creates an immediate space of impasse for Indigenous, decolonial, Black, and abolitionist intellectual traditions , the Deleuzian and Guattarian rhizome assumes its errant, untraceable, and de/reterritorializing path through Native genocide The rhizome obtains its metaphorical and theoretical elasticity from the discursive genocide of Indigenous peoples. The territory of maneuver or ground that the rhizome gains its bearing on is unwittingly or perhaps indifferently anchored in the disavowal of the Indigenous ancestral claims, history, presence, and ongoing relationship with the land in North America. Deleuze and Guattari covet the free- range and bloody movements in the West, described as a land of “Indians without Ancestry” primarily because they do not have to contend with the presence of Indigenous peoples and their prior relationships (ancestors) to the land and space through which they move and clear as nomads Deleuze and Guattari self- actualizing, free- form whiteness can proceed unimpeded The rhizomatic West terra nullius is without a people, history, or a cosmology to navigate. colonialism and modes of conquest are enacted on behalf of the self-actualization of white subjects who produce nonrepresentational theory. the “Indian is the ontological prior through which poststructuralism functions.” the appearance or deployment of the Indian as a simulation or “present absent” in Jacques Derrida’s and then Deleuze and Guattari’s work, creates space for the white subject and the unending frontier. nonrepresentational theory heralded as a liberatory path beyond the subject is colonialist d indicts Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the American West and the Indian as exceptional cases that inspire rhizomatic movement through the notion of an ever- receding frontier It is colonialist : in its need to render the Indian already and inevitably (ontologically) dead as “it” has no ancestors or living community to whom one needs to be accountable; and in its invocation of the vanishing “Indian,” which opens up the possibility of an “ever- receding frontier” and inspiration for the metaphor of the rhizome This logic and mode of conquistador thought undergirds the Deleuzian and Guattarian ethos of experimental and rhizomatic lines of flight. Their nonrepresentational theory of lines of flight are only possible as a form of white self-actualizing posthumanism due to the death of Indigenous peoples and their excision from the Earth/land White posthumanism and its flows and lines of flight are made possible through Native death.

Deleuze’s lines of flight run through the graveyard of the native – rhizomatic movement disavows indigenous claims to the land and history.

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

If Byrd’s refusal is a first- order engagement and argument, then Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s interrogation of the spatial vocabularies of the human and colonialism is a second- order analysis and practice of refusal, one that reroutes us and makes us ask new questions. As Smith has argued in her classic work Decolonizing Methodologies, “there is a very specific spatial vocabulary of colonialism which can be assembled around three concepts: (1) the line, (2) the centre, and (3) the outside.”33 The Deleuzian and Guattarian line of flight then also emerges from the colonial spatial imaginings of the colonizer. Within Western ideas and philosophical conceptions of temporality and spatiality, like Deleuze and Guattari’s line, time and space have been categorized and imagined as entities that can be measured. In Smith’s account, “Space came to be seen as consisting of lines which were either parallel or elliptical.”34 Rather than escaping the reterritorializing capture of colonial and state power, Deleuzian and Guattarian “lines of flight” coalesce with the line’s emergence as a way to map “territory, to survey land, to establish boundaries, and mark the limits of colonial power.”35 While not intended to mark boundaries or colonize Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the line of flight, rhizomatic and violent movements to produce a land of Indigenous peoples without ancestors continues rather than ruptures colonial violence.36 As Deleuze and Guattari attempt to move away from an “I” or “a subject,” through the use of nonrepresentational and nomadic “lines of flight,” they successfully resurrect the human through the geo- epistemology of the “line.” Within humanist cognitive frames, lines emerge in response to chaos. The line, which seeks to separate “order” from “chaos,” falls into formation with what Sylvia Wynter identifies as “the structural oppositions” that order humanist thought.37 Even the “line of flight” establishes a linear/nonlinear structural opposition that demarcates the “order” of the invisible white “self ” in opposition to the “chaotic” realm of the dead Indigenous and Black “nonbeing.” The line in all of its Deleuzian and Guattarian “molar, molecular, and nomadic” iterations is a humanist geospatial and epistemic configuration. The molar lines that make smooth space do so through the clearing of Indigenous peoples (clear to smooth) in order to produce a colonial grid of order. Deleuze and Guattari even fret over the potential susceptibility of the molecular (a more supple and ambiguous line not so prone to segmentation and rigidity) and the liberatory line of flight to become susceptible to the pull of the state. In A Thousand Plateaus, one can sense the anxiety they have about the molecular and nomadic line of flight. There is one last problem, the most anguishing one, concerning the dangers specific to each line. There is not much to say about the danger confronting the first [molar line], for the chances are slim that its rigidification will fail. There is not much to say about the ambiguity of the second [molecular line]. But why is the line of flight, even aside from the danger it runs of reverting to one of the other two lines, imbued with such singular despair in spite of its message of joy, as if at the very moment things are coming to a resolution its undertaking were threatened by something reaching down to its core, by a death, a demolition?38 The “something” that is reaching down and can be found in its core are the very traces of the human. Humanist secular thought that emerged from the fifteenth- century conquest and enslavement of Native and Black peoples produced the geometry of the line. The line is a way or an episteme used by the human to distinguish self from the other and produce the very structural oppositions that Sylvia Wynter names as essential to the human and its various genres. Smith’s deconstruction of the geo- epistemologies of “the center, the line,” and the “outside” poses questions and prods Western critical theory in ways that Western theory has yet to do itself, particularly about its subjectless and more specifically nonrepresentational moves. In addition to Wynter’s structural oppositions, it is also productive to think about how Wynter’s “beyond” has us contend with the underlying epistemes that make the human possible. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s engagement with Wynter’s “beyond” also interrogates the call to transcend the human. In a recent GLQ roundtable discussion titled “Queer Inhumanisms,” Jackson asks what it means when Black life is asked to make this transcendent move.39 Finally, I more carefully consider the work of Amber Jamilla Musser, who makes room for Deleuze and Guattari’s influence while being skeptical of and drawing attention to the specific ways that affect, sensation, and other nonrepresentational theories end up hailing and producing subjects even as they try and avoid systems of representation. GETTING ON AND BEYOND Throughout Sylvia Wynter’s body of work, particularly the portion that Greg Thomas calls the “beyond” work,40 Wynter attends to the epistemic, aesthetic, performative, and moral technologies such as structural oppositions, which are needed in order to write the human as an exclusive mode of being. Sylvia Wynter is concerned with getting rid of the epistemic systems and orders of knowledge (e.g., biological determinism, economic rationalization, performances, and epistemes) that make the very emergence of exclusionary categories like the human possible. Without getting rid of these systems or artifacts, even if the category of the human is eliminated from language, it will be replaced with something else as long as biological determinism, economic rationalization, oppositions, and lines continue to order and govern thought. The problem with the human is its scaffolding, not the category itself. The emergence of the human and specifically the overrepresentation of the human as man depends on the continual reproduction of and sometimes destruction of oppositional frames— in order to replace a structural oppositional with another. Wynter contends that “all founding oppositions . . . express the fact that humans as organized orders not only struggle against the opposing “chaos,” but have need of it as well, not only destroying but also continually creating it.”41 Over the course of Wynter’s work, there is a protracted discussion about the usefulness of the opposition “order/chaos” as a primary ordering force, which has persisted throughout time yet makes adjustments to what it posits as abject difference or the chaotic outside of man at any given moment. Within the secular human’s mode of man, the ordered self, culture, or “we” needs the chaotic, not- us, or them in the Negro and the Indian in order to know itself as culture— Logos, Reason— and therefore as human. The human as man, in its ordered, rational, gendered, sexed, European, bourgeois form, needs chaos in order to secure a self, even as what is human changes. While the human as man may become elastic and more diverse (as proletariat and woman), it still requires an outside. It still requires chaos, even if those who were previously a part of the realm of chaos enter into the zone of order. It is within this lineated orbit of chaos and order that even nonrepresentational poststructuralist theories retain the trace of the human as a narrow ordering line of the self (even in subjectless guise). The line is but one geo- epistemology of white posthumanist thought. The Deleuzoguattarian “lines of flight,” even as a nomadic line though supposedly not attached to a self or a subject, carry the specter and trace of the human in the ordering and disciplining colonial lines of flight of conquest. As Wynter argues, there are often reversals of the order and hierarchies of structural oppositions; the reversals fail to actually overcome and annihilate the need and desire for structural opposition as an actual order of knowledge.42 While “natural man” may prevail over ecclesiastical, clergical, or theological man, natural or rational man still needs to create himself as the center or norm in relation to those who lack rationality and reason (the Black and Native). Similarly, poststructuralist theory may prevail over structuralist narratives that center the self or the “I”; however, the impulse to kill and create the Indian without ancestors alongside crafting a new self- annihilating posthumanist subject is still part of the order of knowledge of structural opposition. The selfless, subjectless, posthuman still persists as the realm of life because of the annihilation of Indigenous and Black life. Within critical theories, Black and Native people are rendered structuralist (or modernist and dead) as white self- actualizing subjects disguise themselves as rhizomatic movements that transcend representation and the human. Epistemes such as the line segregate the chaotic realm of death (Black and Native) from the poststructuralist realm of life (white transcendence) through structural opposition marked with blood. The line is a humanist geo- form and geo- episteme, which makes the kinds of segmentation that structural oppositions are based on possible.43 Humans must perceive and come to some social or human agreement that lines even exist in the social (cultural) and natural world. Even in Deleuze and Guattari’s ideal scenario in which lines are drawn and (re)drawn again outside the state’s mandates, someone (as a subject) must still render them as an outside to something.

King 17 [Tiffany Lethabo King is assistant professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight”; Critical Ethnic Studies; Spring 2017, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162?casa_token=Ayg-S-eXLu4AAAAA%3AaGlHrzMA9tWXklUEbQHL0P7GcNfaYbAs9EQAog6pgi3kUWD0hjWhL3xATIEZ963qYqlLTAlQTz2zxgcJIMo5i1APwp3OEbbEwfkmhNFDocRcFeKS&seq=1]//eleanor

interrogation of the spatial vocabularies of the human and colonialism is a practice of refusal there is a very specific spatial vocabulary of colonialism which can be assembled around three concepts: (1) the line, (2) the centre, and (3) the outside. The Deleuzian and Guattarian line of flight then also emerges from the colonial spatial imaginings of the colonizer. Within Western ideas and philosophical conceptions of temporality and spatiality, like Deleuze and Guattari’s line, time and space have been categorized and imagined as entities that can be measured Rather than escaping the reterritorializing capture of colonial and state power, Deleuzian and Guattarian “lines of flight” coalesce with the line’s emergence as a way to map “territory, to survey land, to establish boundaries, and mark the limits of colonial power Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the line of flight, rhizomatic and violent movements to produce a land of Indigenous peoples without ancestors continues rather than ruptures colonial violence As Deleuze and Guattari attempt to move away from an “I” or “a subject,” through the use of nonrepresentational and nomadic “lines of flight,” they successfully resurrect the human through the geo- epistemology of the “line.” the “line of flight” establishes a linear/nonlinear structural opposition that demarcates the “order” of the invisible white “self ” in opposition to the “chaotic” realm of the dead Indigenous and Black “nonbeing.” The line in all of its Deleuzian and Guattarian “molar, molecular, and nomadic” iterations is a humanist geospatial and epistemic configuration. The molar lines that make smooth space do so through the clearing of Indigenous peoples (clear to smooth) in order to produce a colonial grid of order Humanist secular thought that emerged from the fifteenth- century conquest and enslavement of Native and Black peoples produced the geometry of the line. The line is a way or an episteme used by the human to distinguish self from the other and produce the very structural oppositions essential to the human and its various genres. deconstruction of the geo- epistemologies of “the center, the line,” and the “outside” poses questions and prods Western critical theory in ways that Western theory has yet to do itself, particularly about its subjectless and more specifically nonrepresentational moves. affect, sensation, and other nonrepresentational theories end up hailing and producing subjects even as they try and avoid systems of representation. The problem with the human is its scaffolding, not the category itself. The emergence of the human and specifically the overrepresentation of the human as man depends on the continual reproduction of and sometimes destruction of oppositional frames— in order to replace a structural oppositional with another Within the secular human’s mode of man, the ordered self, culture, or “we” needs the chaotic, not- us, or them in order to know itself as culture— Logos, Reason— and therefore as human The human as man, in its ordered, rational, gendered, sexed, European, bourgeois form, needs chaos in order to secure a self, even as what is human changes. While the human as man may become elastic and more diverse it still requires an outside It still requires chaos, even if those who were previously a part of the realm of chaos enter into the zone of order. It is within this lineated orbit of chaos and order that even nonrepresentational poststructuralist theories retain the trace of the human as a narrow ordering line of the self The line is but one geo- epistemology of white posthumanist thought. The Deleuzoguattarian “lines of flight,” even as a nomadic line though supposedly not attached to a self or a subject, carry the specter and trace of the human in the ordering and disciplining colonial lines of flight of conquest there are often reversals of the order and hierarchies of structural oppositions; the reversals fail to actually overcome and annihilate the need and desire for structural opposition as an actual order of knowledge natural or rational man still needs to create himself as the center or norm in relation to those who lack rationality and reason (the Black and Native). the impulse to kill and create the Indian without ancestors alongside crafting a new self- annihilating posthumanist subject is still part of the order of knowledge of structural opposition The selfless, subjectless, posthuman still persists as the realm of life because of the annihilation of Indigenous and Black life. Black and Native people are rendered structuralist (or modernist and dead) as white self- actualizing subjects disguise themselves as rhizomatic movements that transcend representation and the human. Epistemes such as the line segregate the chaotic realm of death (Black and Native) from the poststructuralist realm of life (white transcendence) through structural opposition marked with blood. The line is a humanist geo- form and geo- episteme, which makes the kinds of segmentation that structural oppositions are based on possible Even in Deleuze and Guattari’s ideal scenario in which lines are drawn and (re)drawn again outside the state’s mandates, someone (as a subject) must still render them as an outside to something.

Lines of flight are colonial imaginings that require a structural opposition to indigeneity, giving geospatial birth to the ‘line’ itself

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2022

Poststructuralist traditions that attempt to transcend identity actually function as a ruse of subjectlessness. In fact, queer subjectlessness and nonrepresentational rhizomes are an expression of a posthumanism that resuscitates normative subjects through the death of Black and Indigenous peoples. Continental theory has not typically had the stomach for sustaining an investigation of the kind of unspeakable violence that enabled the Marxist worker, queer, and affective subjectless discourses (one can only strive for subjectlessness if you possess it) to exist. The erasure of the (white) body-as- subject- as- ontology has been more effective in covering the bloody trail of white/human- self- actualization than it has been at successfully offering a way around and beyond the entrapments of liberal humanism. According to Amber Jamilla Musser, even in its postidentitarian and subjectless modes, continental theories’ transgressive moves (affective, sensational, masochistic) tend to reinstantiate the white male (sometimes queer) subject that it hopes to overcome.44 While not throwing away affect theory in Sensational Flesh, Musser scrutinizes white queer theory’s moves toward subjectless, futurelessnes, and masochism as gestures that actually recover and reify a subject (often white male gay) as they seek to annihilate the subject. Because of this, Musser refuses to read sensations like masochism in an exceptional vein. She explains, “I seek to reinvigorate these other ways of reading masochism, particularly because reading it as exceptional reifies norms of whiteness and masculinity and suppresses other modes of reading power, agency, and experience.”45 As Musser suspects, those who claim a radical subjectless must do so through the abjection of others. Men who claim masochism must become like (or reify) the position of the feminine-as- debased other without a self in order to then occupy this position of subjectlessness. A fixing of an abject position through the (female, Black, Indigenous) body of the other must occur; then, an evacuation of the other’s body must take place in order for the embalming of or supplanting of the body with the white normative male figure. While Musser does not entirely refuse Deleuze and Guattari’s nonrepresentational gesture, she does practice a kind of detached and suspicious read of the forms of violence that can be enacted in white moves beyond the human. Musser treats queer theories’ evangelists of loss and futurelessness, Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, as nonexceptional and even potentially dangerous to subjects who inhabit the abject spaces that white bourgeois men try to occupy. In the 2015 GLQ roundtable discussion titled “Queer Inhumanisms,” Zakiyyah Iman Jackson reiterated the suspicion that posthumanism is a ruse for white human ascendency. Similar to Musser, Jackson knows that there is often a subject lurking within the bowels or lines of nonrepresentational discourse. Jackson indicts posthumanist calls to move to the “beyond” for reproducing a false and dishonest European transcendentalism. Thus a call for movement in the direction of the “beyond,” issued in a manner that suggests that this call is without location, and therefore with the appearance of incognizance regarding its situated claims and internal limits, returns us to a Eurocentric transcendentalism long challenged.46 Jackson argues that a call for movement beyond always happens from a very specific place. The posthumanist’s horn often blows from a place situated securely within the folds of humanity. This is a very different place than the space of nonbeing from which Black and Indigenous peoples moan, sing, or speak. Native feminist refusal and Black feminist abolitionist skepticism function as intervening comportments, dispositions, and modes of critique that expose the violent and unself- conscious ways that Western theory attempts to move beyond the human through the annihilation of the Other. Because the crafting of the human is a process of relations, specifically the relations of negation, then moving beyond the violence of the human is also a relational process. Transcendence is a relational process of accountability. White subjects cannot transcend identity (e.g., whiteness, queerness), the subject (self- writing and autonomy), or the human (self- actualization) without ending Native genocide and anti- Black racism. Identities, subjects, and the human as they are currently configured come into formation through processes of negation. If there is no plan to enable Black and Indigenous life, then there is no transcending the violence of the human. The scholarship of Native/Indigenous and Black feminists force continental theory to come outside itself and gaze on the way even the various attempts of nonrepresentational theory to annihilate the self actually end up reinventing the subject and the human through new forms of violent invention. This article argues that both refusal and skepticism can work in tandem and interrupt the performance of white innocence through less- than- effective attempts to evade representation that jettison the garb of the human without abolishing the need for Black and Indigenous death.47

King 17 [Tiffany Lethabo King is assistant professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight”; Critical Ethnic Studies; Spring 2017, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162?casa_token=Ayg-S-eXLu4AAAAA%3AaGlHrzMA9tWXklUEbQHL0P7GcNfaYbAs9EQAog6pgi3kUWD0hjWhL3xATIEZ963qYqlLTAlQTz2zxgcJIMo5i1APwp3OEbbEwfkmhNFDocRcFeKS&seq=1]//eleanor

Poststructuralist traditions that attempt to transcend identity actually function as a ruse of subjectlessness subjectlessness and nonrepresentational rhizomes are an expression of a posthumanism that resuscitates normative subjects through the death of Black and Indigenous peoples. The erasure of the (white) body-as- subject- as- ontology has been more effective in covering the bloody trail of white/human- self- actualization than it has been at successfully offering a way around and beyond the entrapments of liberal humanism even in its postidentitarian and subjectless modes, continental theories’ transgressive moves (affective, sensational, masochistic) tend to reinstantiate the white male subject those who claim a radical subjectless must do so through the abjection of others A fixing of an abject position through the (female, Black, Indigenous) body of the other must occur an evacuation of the other’s body must take place in order for the embalming of or supplanting of the body with the white normative male figure posthumanism is a ruse for white human ascendency. there is often a subject lurking within the bowels or lines of nonrepresentational discourse posthumanist calls to move to the “beyond” reproduc false and dishonest European transcendentalism. a call for movement in the direction of the “beyond,” issued in a manner that suggests that this call is without location, and therefore with the appearance of incognizance regarding its situated claims and internal limits, returns us to a Eurocentric transcendentalism call for movement beyond always happens from a very specific place. The posthumanist’s horn often blows from a place situated securely within the folds of humanity This is a very different place than the space of nonbeing from which Black and Indigenous peoples moan, sing, or speak. Native feminist refusal and Black feminist abolitionist skepticism function as intervening comportments, dispositions, and modes of critique that expose the violent and unself- conscious ways that Western theory attempts to move beyond the human through the annihilation of the Other Because the crafting of the human is a process of relations, specifically the relations of negation, then moving beyond the violence of the human is also a relational process Transcendence is a relational process of accountability White subjects cannot transcend identity the subject ), or the human without ending Native genocide and anti- Black racism Identities, subjects, and the human as they are currently configured come into formation through processes of negation. If there is no plan to enable Black and Indigenous life, then there is no transcending the violence of the human The scholarship of Native/Indigenous and Black feminists force continental theory to come outside itself and gaze on the way even the various attempts of nonrepresentational theory to annihilate the self actually end up reinventing the subject and the human through new forms of violent invention both refusal and skepticism can work in tandem and interrupt the performance of white innocence through less- than- effective attempts to evade representation that jettison the garb of the human without abolishing the need for Black and Indigenous death

The 1AC is a performance of white fluidity – their forwarding of “becoming” is a ruse of subjectlessness that allows Settler’s to rescue settler futurity at the expense of genocide.

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

The Indian—as a threshold of past and future, regimes of signs, alea, becoming, and death—combats mechanisms of interpretation through an asignifying disruption that stops, alters, and redirects flow. This stopping of the world of signification is the same as Derrida’s “tattooed savage” at the beginning of deconstruction. The Indian sign is the field through which poststructuralism makes its intervention, and as a result, this paradigmatic and pathological Indianness cannot be circumvented as a colonialist trace. In fact, this colonialist trace is exactly why “the Indian” is so disruptive to flow and to experimentation. Every time flow or a line of flight approaches, touches, or encounters Indianness, it also confronts the colonialist project that has made that flow possible. The choice is to either confront that colonialism or to deflect it. And not being prepared to disrupt the logics of settler colonialism necessary for the terra nullius through which to wander, the entire system either freezes or reboots. It seems slightly ironic, then, that many who pick up Deleuze and Guattari’s work use language similar to “Experiment, don’t signify and interpret!” to describe the possibilities of reframing the world through affect and affective relationships that move toward the states of enchantment, ecstasy, and the everyday. Brian Massumi’s cultivation of deviation and contagion to foster radicalism at the crossroads between science, humanities, and cultural studies contains similar Castanedian staccato imperatives: “Let it. Then reconnect it to other concepts, drawn from other systems, until a whole new system of connection starts to form. Then, take another example. See what happens. Follow the new growth. You end up with many buds. Incipient systems.”⁶⁶ In a gesture towards “a thousand tiny races” in which he provides an alternative future for race to that of Paul Gilroy’s After Race, Arun Saldanha writes, “Race should not be eliminated, but proliferated, its many energies directed at multiplying racial differences so as to render them joyfully cacophonic.”⁶⁷ Jasbir Puar’s delineation of the biopolitics of the now in Terrorist Assemblages depends on A cacophony of informational flows, energetic intensities, bodies, and practices that undermine coherent identity and even queer anti-identity narratives . . . assemblages allow for complicities of privilege and the production of new normativities even as they cannot anticipate spaces and moments of resistance, resistance that is not primarily characterized by oppositional stances, but includes frictional forces, discomfiting encounters, and spurts of unsynchronized delinquency.⁶⁸ Each of these cultural studies moments flow from the phrase “Experiment, don’t signify and interpret!” that functions as a call for transformational new worlds of relation and relationship that move us toward a joyously cacophonic multiplicity and away from the lived colonial conditions of indigeneity within the postcolonizing settler society.⁶⁹ This Deleuzian and Guattarian motif, even if it acknowledges all the divergent discourses that come into race, gender, sexual, and class assemblages, smoothes once again into uncultivated wilderness that allows any trajectory or cultivation to enter it, but not arise from it. By extension, and even if one cannot access how these evocations of “the Indian” function within the plateaus opened by Deleuze and Guattari, “the Indian” serves as an errant return of the repressed that spreads along its own line of infection once the theory is taken up.⁷⁰ For example, Jasbir Puar, by restricting her analysis to the biopolitics of the post-9/11 coming out of U.S. empire as “an event in the Deleuzian sense, privileging lines of flight, an assemblage of spatial and temporal intensities, coming together, dispersing, reconverg- ing,” can discuss as sui generis the monster-terrorist-fag that emerges in the twenty-first century as a new phenomenon, despite the Wanted posters in New York the week after 9/11 that compared Osama bin Laden to Geronimo.⁷¹ Additionally, Puar discusses Jessica Lynch as a “heroic girlnext-door” in conversation with a “depraved, cigarette-toting, dark-haired, pregnant and unmarried, racialized” Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib. Puar does not even acknowledge Hopi Lori Piestewa, reportedly the first American Indian woman to die in combat while fighting for the United States. Piestewa died in the same attack in which Jessica Lynch was captured, and her absence is a telling amnesia within Puar’s discussion of how “nostalgically mourning the loss of the liberal feminist subject” converges “white liberal feminists and white gay men” and “unwittingly reorganizes the Abu Ghraib tragedy around their desires” through the now racialized body of the no longer white Lynndie England.⁷² Piestewa’s absence is yet another deferral that vanishes the violences done to indigenous women, and those same indigenous soldiers’ cathexis of U.S. nationalism and imperialism that signals an indigenationalism compatriot to the homonationalism that Puar defines as “the arrangements of U.S. sexual exceptionalisms [marked] explicitly in relation to the nation” that demobilize queer identities by normativizing certain bodies but not others within the enfranchisements of the state.⁷³ To phrase this slightly differently, the Indian is simultaneously, multiply, a colonial, imperial referent that continues to produce knowledge about the indigenous as “primitive” and “savage” otherness within poststructuralist and postcolonial theory and philosophy. As a philosophical sign, the Indian is the transit, the field through which presignifying polyvocality is re/introduced into the signifying regime, and signs begin to proliferate through a series of becomings—becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-Indian, becoming-multiplicity—that serves all regimes of signs. And the Indian is a ghost in the system, an errant or virus that disrupts the virtual flows by stopping them, redirecting them, or revealing them to be what they are and will have been all along: colonialist. The Indian, then, is a Deleuzian event within poststructuralism: “To the extent that events are actualized in us,” Deleuze writes, “they wait for us and invite us in.”⁷⁴ For Derrida, as he grieved and mourned the loss of his friend and colleague, and saw in that loss the passing of a generation of thought, the event in Deleuze’s work becomes the Event, death, the paradox of humorous conformity of a leaping in place, an apotheosis of will. “‘It is in this sense that Amor fati is one with the struggle of free men,’” Derrida quotes from Deleuze.⁷⁵ Nietzsche’s love of fate, the invitation inherent in the will of the event opposes the ressentiment of resignation to become the point “at which war is waged against war, the wound would be the living trace of all wounds, and death turned on itself would be willed against all death.”⁷⁶ On the threshold, then, of “the necessity with the aleatory, chaos and the untimely” that is both the work of Derrida’s mourning of Deleuze and the haksuba of Southeastern cosmologies that Choctaw scholar LeAnne Howe defines in her work as headache, chaos, the collision of Upper and Lower Worlds initiated by colonialism, the Indian wills against the signifying system.⁷⁷ That the Indian represents the violent slamming of worlds in what might otherwise be fluidity and flow helps us frame the problem within a U.S. empire, with ties to Enlightenment liberalism, that continues to transit itself globally along lines put to flight by “the Indian without ancestry” that makes everyone its progeny. It is untimely as a site of the death of signification. That haksuba can additionally mean “to be stunned with noise, confused, deafened” signals the degree to which cacophony, whether joyous or colonialist, hinges upon the disruptions caused when “the Indian” collides with the racial, gendered, classed, and sexed normativities of an imperialism that has arisen out of an ongoing settler colonialism.⁷⁸ The Southeastern cosmologies of the Chickasaw and Choctaw imagine worlds with relational spirals and a center that does not so much hold as stretches, links, and ties everything within to worlds that look in all directions. It is an ontology that privileges balance, but understands that we are constant movement and exist simultaneously among Upper and Lower Worlds, this world and the next. In her poem “The Place the Musician Became a Bear,” Mvskoke poet and musician Joy Harjo sings about how Southeastern Indians have always known “where to go to become ourselves again in the human comedy. / It’s the how that baffles, the saxophone can complicate things.”⁷⁹ Harjo reminds us that there is always a prior “becoming-human” within Southeastern worlds that links us to the complications and improvisations of stars, spirals, and jazz. Much of the scholarship on U.S. imperialism and its possible postcoloniality sees it as enough to challenge the wilderness as anything but vacant; to list the annihilation of indigenous nations, cultures, and languages in a chain of –isms; and then still to relegate American Indians to the site of the already-doneness that begins to linger as unwelcome guest to the future. This last is particularly relevant to understanding how the United States propagates itself as empire transhemispherically and transoceanically, not just through whiteness, but through the continued settling and colonizing of indigenous peoples’ lands, histories, identities, and very lives that implicate all arrivants and settlers regardless of their own experiences of race, class, gender, colonial, and imperial oppressions. My point in tracing the Deleuzian wilderness and the Indian deferred is to detail the ways in which “the Indian” is put to flight within Western philosophical traditions in order to understand how the United States transits itself globally as an imperial project. As Derrida and Deleuze are evoked within affect theories, the “Indian” and “tattooed savages” remain as traces. Any assemblage that arises from such horizons becomes a colonialist one, and it is the work of indigenous critical theory both to rearticulate indigenous phenomenologies and to provide (alter)native interpretative strategies through which to apprehend the colonialist nostalgias that continue to shape affective liberal democracy’s investment in state sovereignty as a source of violence, remedy, memory, and grievability.

Byrd 11 [Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw) is assistant professor of American Indian studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.; “The Transit of Empire”; pp. 17-21; 2011; https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-transit-of-empire#:~:text=Jodi%20Byrd's%20book%20The%20Transit,the%20larger%20project%20of%20decolonization.]//eleanor

The Indian combats mechanisms of interpretation through an asignifying disruption that stops, alters, and redirects flow The Indian sign is the field through which poststructuralism makes its intervention colonialist trace is exactly why “the Indian” is so disruptive to flow and to experimentation Every time flow or a line of flight approaches, touches, or encounters Indianness, it also confronts the colonialist project that has made that flow possible. not being prepared to disrupt the logics of settler colonialism necessary for the terra nullius through which to wander, the entire system either freezes or reboots many who pick up Deleuze and Guattari’s work use language similar to “Experiment, don’t signify and interpret!” to describe the possibilities of reframing the world through affect and affective relationships that move toward the states of enchantment, ecstasy, and the everyday. cultural studies moments flow from the phrase “Experiment, don’t signify and interpret!” that functions as a call for transformational new worlds of relation and relationship that move us toward a joyously cacophonic multiplicity and away from the lived colonial conditions of indigeneity within the postcolonizing settler society This Deleuzian and Guattarian motif smoothes once again into uncultivated wilderness that allows any trajectory or cultivation to enter it, but not arise from it. “the Indian” serves as an errant return of the repressed that spreads along its own line of infection once the theory is taken up the Indian is a colonial, imperial referent that continues to produce knowledge about the indigenous as “primitive” and “savage” otherness within poststructuralist and postcolonial theory and philosophy. As a philosophical sign, the Indian is the transit, the field through which presignifying polyvocality is re/introduced into the signifying regime, and signs begin to proliferate through a series of becomings—becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-Indian, becoming-multiplicity—that serves all regimes of signs. And the Indian is a ghost in the system, an errant or virus that disrupts the virtual flows by stopping them, redirecting them, or revealing them to be what they are and will have been all along: colonialist. The Indian, then, is a Deleuzian event within poststructuralism: That the Indian represents the violent slamming of worlds in what might otherwise be fluidity and flow helps us frame the problem within a U.S. empire, with ties to Enlightenment liberalism, that continues to transit itself globally along lines put to flight by “the Indian without ancestry” that makes everyone its progeny. It is untimely as a site of the death of signification. the Indian” collides with the racial, gendered, classed, and sexed normativities of an imperialism that has arisen out of an ongoing settler colonialism there is always a prior “becoming-human Much of the scholarship on U.S. imperialism and its possible postcoloniality sees it as enough to challenge the wilderness as anything but vacant; to list the annihilation of indigenous nations, cultures, and languages in a chain of –isms; and then still to relegate American Indians to the site of the already-doneness that begins to linger as unwelcome guest to the future. the United States propagates itself as empire transhemispherically and transoceanically, not just through whiteness, but through the continued settling and colonizing of indigenous peoples’ lands, histories, identities, and very lives that implicate all arrivants and settlers regardless of their own experiences of race, class, gender, colonial, and imperial oppressions. My point in tracing the Deleuzian wilderness and the Indian deferred is to detail the ways in which “the Indian” is put to flight within Western philosophical traditions in order to understand how the United States transits itself globally as an imperial project. As Derrida and Deleuze are evoked within affect theories, the “Indian” remain as traces Any assemblage that arises from such horizons becomes a colonialist one, colonialist nostalgias continue to shape affective liberal democracy’s investment in state sovereignty as a source of violence, remedy, memory, and grievability

The affirmative’s free flowingness and multiplicity places indigeneity as a transient quality – “becoming” reduces the native to a colonial reverent, but never as a milieu from which becoming emerges.

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

The forces of identity appropriation, cultural encroachment, and corporate commodification pressure American Indian communities to employ essen- tialist tactics and construct relatively fixed notions of identity, and to render the concepts of fluidity and transgression highly problematic. It is evident from the examples above that the notion of fluid boundaries has never worked to the advantage of Indigenous peoples: federal agencies have in- voked the language offluid or unstable identities as the rationale for disman- tling the structures of tribal life and creating greater dependency on the U.S. government; Whitestream America has seized its message to declare open season on Indians, thereby appropriating Native lands, culture, spiritual practices, history, and literature; and Whitestream academics have now em- ployed the language of postmodern fluidity to unwittingly transmute centu- ries of war between Indigenous peoples and their respective nation-states into a "genetic and cultural dialogue" (Valle & Torres, 1995, p. 141). Thus, in spite of its aspirations to social justice, the notion of a new cultural democ- racy based on the ideal of mestizaje represents a rather ominous threat to American Indian communities. In addition, the undercurrent of fluidity and sense of displacedness that permeates, if not defines, mestizaje runs contrary to American Indian sensi- bilities of connection to place, land, and the Earth itself. Consider, for exam- ple, the following statement on the nature of critical subjectivity by Peter Mc- Laren: The struggle for critical subjectivity is the struggle to occupy a space of hope — a liminal space, an intimation of the anti-structure, Of What lives in the in-between zone of undecided-ability — in which one can work toward a praxis of redemp- tion.... A sense of atopy has always bccn with me, a resplendent placelessness, a feeling ofliving in germinal formlessness.... I cannot find words to express what this border identity means to me. All I have are what Gcorgres Bastille (1988) calls mots glissants (slippery words). (1997, pp. 13—14) McLaren speaks passionately and directly about the crisis of modern society and the need for a "praxis of redemption." As he perceives it, the very possi- bility of redemption is situated in our willingness not only to accept but to flourish in the "liminal" spaces, border identities, and postcolonial hybrid- ities that are inherent in postmodern life and subjectivity. In fact, McLaren perceives the fostering of a "resplendent placelessness" itself as the gateway to a more just, democratic society. While American Indian intellectuals also seek to embrace the notion of transcendent subjectivities, they seek a notion of transcendence that remains rooted in historical place and the sacred connection to land. Consider, for example, the following commentary by Deloria (1992) on the centrality of place and land in the construction of American Indian subjectivity: Recognizing the sacredness of lands on which previous generations have lived and died is the foundation of all other sentiment. Instead of denying this di- mension of our emotional lives, we should be setting aside additional places that have transcendent meaning. Sacred sites that higher spiritual powers have chosen for manifestation enable us to focus our concerns on the specific form Of our lives.... Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and prac- tices because they represent the presence of the sacred in Our lives. They prop- crly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibili- ties to the rest of the natural world that transcend our own personal desires and wishes. This lesson must be learned by each generation. (pp. 278, 281) Gross misunderstanding of this connection between American Indian sub- jectivity and land, and, more importantly, between sovereignty and land has been the source of numerous injustices in Indian country. For instance, I be- lieve there was little understanding on the part of government officials that passage of the Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978) would open a Pandora's box of discord over land, setting up an intractable conflict between property rights and religious freedom. American Indians, on the other hand, viewed the act as a invitation to return to their sacred sites, several of which were on government lands and were being damaged by commercial use. As a result, a flurry of lawsuits alleging mismanagement and destruction of sacred sites was filed by numerous tribes. Similarly, corporations, tourists, and even rock climbers filed suits accusing land managers of unlawfully restricting access to public places by implementing policies that violate the constitutional separa- tion between church and state. All of this is to point out that the critical pro- ject of mestizaje continues to operate on the same assumption made by the U. S. government in this instance, that in a democratic society, human subjec- riviry — and liberation for that matter — is conceived of as inherently rights- based as opposed to land-based. To be fair, I believe that both American Indian intellectuals and critical theorists share a similar vision — a time, place, and space free of the compul- sions Of Whitestream, global capitalism and the racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia it engenders. But where critical scholars ground their vision in Western conceptions of democracy and justice that presume a *liberated" self, American Indian intellectuals ground their vision in conceptions of sov- ereignty that presume a sacred connection to place and land. Thus, to a large degree, the seemingly liberatory constructs of fluidity, mobility, and trans- gression are perceived not only as the language of critical subjectivity, but also as part of the fundamental lexicon Of Western imperialism. Deloria (1999) writes: Although the loss of land must be seen as a political and economic disaster of the first magnitude, the real exile of the tribes occurred With the destruction Of ceremonial life (associated with the loss of land) and the failure or inability of white society to offer a sensible and cohesive alternative to the traditions which Indians remembered. People became disoriented with respect to the world in which they lived. They could not practice their old ways, and the new ways which they were expected to learn were in a constant State Of change because they were not a cohesive view of the world but simply adjustments which whites were making to the technology they had invented. (p. 247). In summary, insofar as American Indian identities continue to be defined and shaped in interdependence with place, the transgressive mestizaje func- tions as a potentially homogenizing force that presumes the continued exile of tribal peoples and their enduring absorption into the American "demo- cratic" Whitestream. The notion of mestizaje as absorption is particularly problematic for the Indigenous peoples of Central and South America, where the myth of the mestizaje (belief that the continent's original cultures and inhabitants no longer exist) has been used for centuries to force the in- tegration of Indigenous communities into the national mestizo model (Van Cott, 1994). According to Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1992) , the myth of mestiza- je has provided the ideological pretext for numerous South American gov- ernmental laws and policies expressly designed to strengthen the nation- state through incorporation of all "non-national" (read "Indigenous") ele- ments into the mainstream. Thus, What Valle and Torres (1995) previously describe as "the continent's unfinished business of cultural hybridization" (p. 141), Indigenous peoples view as the continents' long and bloody battle to absorb their existence into the master narrative of the mestizo. While critical scholars do construct a very different kind of democratic solidarity that disrupts the sociopolitical and economic hegemony of the dominant culture around a transformed notion of mestizaje (one committed to the destabilization of the isolationist narratives of nationalism and cul- tural chauvinism), I argue that any liberatory project that does not begin with a clear understanding of the difference of American Indianness will, in the end, work to undermine tribal life. Moreover, there is a potential danger that the ostensibly "new" cultural democracy based upon the radical mes- tizaje will continue to mute tribal differences and erase distinctive Indian identities. Therefore, as the physical and metaphysical borders of the post- modern world become increasingly fluid, the desire of American Indian communities to protect geographic borders and employ "essentialist" tactics also increases. Though such tactics may be viewed by critical scholars as highly problematic, they are viewed by American Indian intellectuals as a last line of defense against the steady erosion of tribal culture, political sover- eignty, Native resources, and Native lands. The tensions described above indicate the dire need for an Indigenous, revolutionary theory that maintains the distinctiveness of American Indians as tribal peoples of sovereign nations (border patrolling) and also encour- ages the building of coalitions and political solidarity (border crossing). In contrast to critical scholars McLaren and Kris Gutierrez (1997) , who admon- ish educators to develop a concept of and difference as political mobili- zation rather than cultural authenticity, I urge American Indian intellectuals to develop a language that operates at the crossroads of unity and difference and defines this space in terms of political mobilization and cultural authen- ticity, thus expressing both the interdependence and distinctiveness of tribal peoples.

Grande 2K [Sandy Grande is associate professor and Chair of the Education Department at Connecticut College.; “American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power: At the Crossroads of Indígena and Mestizaje”; Harvard Educational Review; https://meridian.allenpress.com/her/article-abstract/70/4/467/31773/American-Indian-Geographies-of-Identity-and-Power?redirectedFrom=fulltext]//eleanor

The forces of identity appropriation, cultural encroachment, and corporate commodification pressure American Indian communities to employ essen- tialist tactics and construct relatively fixed notions of identity, and to render the concepts of fluidity and transgression highly problematic the notion of fluid boundaries has never worked to the advantage of Indigenous peoples: federal agencies have in- voked the language offluid or unstable identities as the rationale for disman- tling the structures of tribal life and creating greater dependency on the U.S. government; Whitestream America has seized its message to declare open season on Indians, thereby appropriating Native lands, culture, spiritual practices, history, and literature; and Whitestream academics have now em- ployed the language of postmodern fluidity to transmute centu- ries of war between Indigenous peoples and their respective nation-states into a "genetic and cultural dialogue the undercurrent of fluidity and sense of displacedness runs contrary to American Indian sensi- bilities of connection to place, land, and the Earth itself. While American Indian intellectuals also seek to embrace the notion of transcendent subjectivities, they seek a notion of transcendence that remains rooted in historical place and the sacred connection to land Recognizing the sacredness of lands on which previous generations have lived and died is the foundation of all other sentiment Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and prac- tices because they represent the presence of the sacred in Our lives. They prop- crly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibili- ties to the rest of the natural world that transcend our own personal desires and wishes. Gross misunderstanding of this connection between American Indian sub- jectivity and land, and, more importantly, between sovereignty and land has been the source of numerous injustices in Indian country critical scholars ground their vision in Western conceptions of democracy and justice that presume a *liberated" self American Indian intellectuals ground their vision in conceptions of sov- ereignty that presume a sacred connection to place and land. the seemingly liberatory constructs of fluidity, mobility, and trans- gression are perceived not only as the language of critical subjectivity, but also as part of the fundamental lexicon Of Western imperialism insofar as American Indian identities continue to be defined and shaped in interdependence with place, the transgressive func- tions as a potentially homogenizing force that presumes the continued exile of tribal peoples and their enduring absorption into the American "demo- cratic" Whitestream. any liberatory project that does not begin with a clear understanding of the difference of American Indianness will, in the end, work to undermine tribal life. as the physical and metaphysical borders of the post- modern world become increasingly fluid, the desire of American Indian communities to protect geographic borders and employ "essentialist" tactics also increases. The tensions described above indicate the dire need for an Indigenous, revolutionary theory that maintains the distinctiveness of American Indians as tribal peoples of sovereign nations and also encour- ages the building of coalitions and political solidarity

Embracing “fluidity” and “flux” pathologizes tribal notions of fixed relationships to land and place.

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward overthrowing colonial regimes. Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land. We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism. So, we respectfully disagree with George Clinton and Funkadelic (1970) and En Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you “free your mind, the rest (your ass) will follow.”

Tuck and Yang 12 [Eve Tuck is an award-winning Unangax̂ scholar in the field of Indigenous studies and educational research. Tuck is the associate professor of critical race and indigenous studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto; K. Wayne Yang is Professor in the Ethnic Studies department at University of California San Diego; “Decolonization is not a metaphor”; Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, No.1; 2012; https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf]//eleanor

another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land. the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism

The affirmative is a settler move to innocence par excellence – pedagogical projects of critical enlightenment through research and knowledge production do not translate into action but rather serve as a diversion that attempt to displace settler culpability without giving up land or power.

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An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework.

Tuck and Yang 12 [Eve Tuck, Unangax, State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego; “Decolonization is not a metaphor”; Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society; 2012; https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf]//eleanor

An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework.

Vote negative for an ethic of incommensurability.

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

This article tracks how traditions of “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” that emerge from Native/Indigenous and Black studies expose the limits and violence of contemporary nonidentitarian and nonrepresentational impulses within white “critical” theory. Further, this article asks whether Western forms of nonrepresentational (subjectless and nonidentitarian) theory can truly transcend the human through self- critique, selfabnegation, and masochism alone. External pressure, specifically the kind of pressure that “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” as forms of resistance that enact outright rejection of or view “posthumanist” attempts with a “hermeneutics of suspicion,”7 is needed in order to truly address the recurrent problem of the violence of the human in continental theory. While this article does not directly stake a claim in embracing or rejecting identity per se, it does take up the category of the human. Because the category of the human is modified by identity in ways that position certain people (white, male, able- bodied) within greater or lesser proximity to humanness, identity is already taken up in this discussion. Conversations about the human are very much tethered to conversations about identity. In the final section, the article will explore how Black and Native/Indigenous absorption into the category of the human would disfigure the category of the human beyond recognition. Engaging how forms of Native decolonization and Black abolition scrutinize the violently exclusive means in which the human has been written and conceived is generative because it sets some workable terms of engagement for interrogating Western and mainstream claims to and disavowals of identity. Rather than answer how Native decolonization and Black abolition construe the human or identity, the article examines how Native and Black feminists use refusal and misandry to question the very systems, institutions, and order of knowledge that secure humanity as an exclusive experience and bound identity in violent ways. I consider the practices and postures of refusal assumed by Native/Indigenous scholars such as Audra Simpson, Eve Tuck, Jodi Byrd, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith to be particularly instructive for exposing the violence of ostensibly nonrepresentational Deleuzoguattarian rhizomes and lines of flight. While reparative readings and “working with what is productive” about Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work is certainly a part of the Native feminist scholarly tradition, this article focuses on the underexamined ways that Native feminists refuse to entertain certain logics and foundations that actually structure Deleuzoguattarian thought.8 Further, I discuss “decolonial refusal” in relation to how Black scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Amber Jamilla Musser work within a Black feminist tradition animated by a kind of skepticism or suspicion capable of ferreting out the trace of the white liberal human within (self- )professed subjectless, futureless, and nonrepresentational white theoretical traditions. In other words, in the work of Sylvia Wynter, one senses a general suspicion and deep distrust of the ability of Western theory— specifically its attempt at self- critique and self- correction in the name of justice for humanity— to revise its cognitive orders to work itself out of its current “closed system,” which reproduces exclusion and structural oppositions based on the negation of the other.9 Wynter’s study of decolonial theory and its elaboration of autopoiesis informs her understanding of how the human and its overrepresentation as man emerges. Recognizing that humans (of various genres) write themselves through a “self- perpetuating and self- referencing closed belief system” that often prevents them from seeing or noticing “the process of recursion,” Wynter works to expose these blind spots.10 Wynter understands that one of the limitations of Western liberal thought is that it cannot see itself in the process of writing itself. I observe a similar kind of cynicism about the way the academic left invokes “post humanism” in the work of Jackson and Musser. Musser in particular questions the capacity of queer theories to turn to sensations like masochism within the field of affect studies to overcome the subject. Further, Jackson’s and Musser’s work is skeptical that white transcendence can happen on its own terms or rely solely on its own processes of self- critique and self- correction. I read Jackson’s and Musser’s work as distrustful of the ability for “posthumanism” to be accountable to Black and Indigenous peoples or for affect theory on its own to not replicate and reinforce the subjugation of the other as it moves toward self- annihilation. Both the human and the post human are causes for suspicion within Black studies. Like Wynter, the field of Black studies has consistently made the liberal human an object of study and scrutiny, particularly the nefarious manner in which it violently produces Black existence as other than and at times nonhuman. Wynter’s empirical method of tracking the internal epistemic crises and revolutions of Europe from the outside has functioned as a model for one way that Black studies can unfurl a critique of the human as well as Western modes of thought. I use the terms “misanthropy” and “misandry” in this article to evoke how Black studies has remained attentive to, wary about, and deeply distrustful of the human condition, humankind, and the humanas- man/men in the case of Black “feminists.” Both Black studies’ distrust of the “human” and Black feminism’s distrust of humanism in its version as man/men (which at times seeks to incorporate Black men) relentlessly scrutinize how the category of the human and in this case the “posthuman” reproduce Black death. I link misandry (skepticism of humankind- as- man) to the kind of skepticism and “hermeneutics of suspicion” that Black feminist scholars like Wynter, Jackson, and Musser at times apply to their reading and engagement with revisions to or expansions of the category of the human, posthuman discourses, and nonrepresentational theory. In this article, I connect discursive performance of skepticism to embodied and affective responses I have witnessed in the academy that challenge the sanctioned modes of protocol, politesse, and decorum in the university. For example, Wynter assumes a critically disinterested posture as she gazes empirically on and examines intra- European epistemic shifts over time. Paget Henry has described Wynter as an anthropologist of the Occident, as Europe becomes an object of study rather than the center of thought and humanity.11 Throughout the body of Wynter’s work, she seems to be more interested in drawing our attention to the capacity of European orders of knowledge to shift over time— or their fragility— than in celebrating the progress that European systems of knowledge have claimed to make. Wynter’s tracking is just a tracking and not a celebration of the progress narrative that Western civilization tells about itself and its capacity to define, refine, and recognize new kinds of humanity over time. This comportment of critical disinterest is often read as an affront to the codes and customs of scholarly discourse and dialogue in the academic community, particularly when it is in response to the white thinkers of the Western cannon. Decolonial refusal and abolitionist skepticism respond to how perverse and reprehensible it is to ask Indigenous and Black people who cannot seem to escape death to move beyond the human or the desire to be human. In fact, Black and Indigenous people have never been fully folded into the category of the human. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has argued, It has largely gone unnoticed by posthumanists that their queries into ontology often find their homologous (even anticipatory) appearance in decolonial philosophies that confront slavery and colonialism’s inextricability from the Enlightenment humanism they are trying to displace. Perhaps this foresight on the part of decolonial theory is rather unsurprising considering that exigencies of race have crucially anticipated and shaped discourses governing the non- human (animal, technology, object, and plant).12 A crucial point that Jackson emphasizes is that Black and Indigenous studies, particularly decolonial studies, has already grappled with and anticipated the late twentieth- century impulses inspired by Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman to annihilate the self and jettison the future. Indigenous and Black “sex” (as activity, reproduction, pleasure, world- building, and not- human sexuality) are already subsumed by death. For some reason, white critical theory cannot seem to fathom that self- annihilation is something white people need to figure out by themselves. In other words, “they can have that.”13

King 17 [Tiffany Lethabo King is assistant professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight”; Critical Ethnic Studies; Spring 2017, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162?casa_token=Ayg-S-eXLu4AAAAA%3AaGlHrzMA9tWXklUEbQHL0P7GcNfaYbAs9EQAog6pgi3kUWD0hjWhL3xATIEZ963qYqlLTAlQTz2zxgcJIMo5i1APwp3OEbbEwfkmhNFDocRcFeKS&seq=1]//eleanor

traditions of “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” that emerge from Native/Indigenous and Black studies expose the limits and violence of contemporary nonidentitarian and nonrepresentational impulses within white “critical” theory. the kind of pressure that “decolonial refusal” and “abolitionist skepticism” as forms of resistance that enact outright rejection of or view “posthumanist” attempts with a “hermeneutics of suspicion is needed in order to truly address the recurrent problem of the violence of the human in continental theory. the category of the human is modified by identity in ways that position certain people (white, male, able- bodied) within greater or lesser proximity to humanness, identity is already taken up in this discussion the practices and postures of refusal assumed by Native/Indigenous scholars such as Audra Simpson, Eve Tuck, Jodi Byrd, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith to be instructive for exposing the violence of ostensibly nonrepresentational Deleuzoguattarian rhizomes and lines of flight Native feminists refuse to entertain certain logics and foundations that actually structure Deleuzoguattarian thought Black scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Amber Jamilla Musser work within a Black feminist tradition animated by a kind of skepticism or suspicion capable of ferreting out the trace of the white liberal human within (self- )professed subjectless, futureless, and nonrepresentational white theoretical traditions one senses a general suspicion and deep distrust of the ability of Western theory — to revise its cognitive orders to work itself out of its current “closed system,” which reproduces exclusion and structural oppositions based on the negation of the other. one of the limitations of Western liberal thought is that it cannot see itself in the process of writing itself. discursive performance of skepticism and affective responses challenge the sanctioned modes of protocol, politesse, and decorum in the university Decolonial refusal and abolitionist skepticism respond to how perverse and reprehensible it is to ask Indigenous and Black people who cannot seem to escape death to move beyond the human or the desire to be human. Black and Indigenous people have never been fully folded into the category of the human It has largely gone unnoticed by posthumanists that their queries into ontology often find their homologous (even anticipatory) appearance in decolonial philosophies that confront slavery and colonialism’s inextricability from the Enlightenment humanism they are trying to displace exigencies of race have crucially anticipated and shaped discourses governing the non- human (animal, technology, object, and plant white critical theory cannot seem to fathom that self- annihilation is something white people need to figure out by themse

White postmodernism resuscitates liberal humanism.

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Because of this, Byrd haltingly stops the reader’s momentum as she critiques Deleuzoguattarian and poststructuralist tendencies that often emerge in postcolonial work. Rather than allow the preemptive rejoinder that white and some postcolonial scholars use, such as “I know that theorist X did not consider race or was racist, but he enables us to do XYZ with his work,”30 Byrd instead cuts off Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics at the path. As Byrd anticipates that following Deleuze and Guattari will end in genocide, she allows the reader the time and space to let this reality sink in and consider a different route than the normative impulse and course of action that is to repair Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Byrd’s work slows us down and brings us to a point of impasse and a resting place where one can slow down, stop, and make a choice to stay put or move forward with the dismissive, whimsical, white conceit that tolerates Native death. Byrd’s refusal allows the reader to feel the violent puncture of the nonrepresentational gash that it tries to disavow. Byrd gives her reader the space and time to say, “Yes, I understand your attempt to evade signification and thus representation but it is not compelling enough for me to overlook the reality that it requires Native genocide.” The way that Byrd’s and others’ decolonial work brings these kinds of tensions and violence to a head enables us to make other kinds of analytic and conceptual choices. The reader is allowed to think and then say, “If this line of thought requires Indigenous death, why even venture down it? What could one possibly repair or salvage of it?” PARSING OUT THE “POST” FROM THE “DE” OF COLONIALIT Y Byrd’s work, which is often postcolonial and has cited Jasbir Puar’s appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari as an example, seeks out opportunities to repair and reclaim Western modes of critique such as feminism, queer, and nonrepresentational theories. Postcolonial work (as well as white settlercolonial studies) often goes along with the linearity and temporality of white equivocations that attempt to excuse how the feminist, the queer (nonsubject), and Deleuzoguattarian lines of connectivity function as parasitic forms of situated knowledge and epistemes. This kind of acquiescence makes the epistemic revolutions internal to white European humanity possible and seem natural as they dehumanize and kill Indigenous and Black people.31 Byrd’s indictment of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics refuses and cuts off the colonial and postcolonial equivocations, sanitization of affects, and speed and pace of the rhizomatic and nomadic line. As an example of how the protocols, codes of conduct, and politesse of postcolonial “business as usual” unfold in the university, I reflect on my encounters as a student and now professor in the graduate classroom, reading scholarly texts, listening, and taking part in scholarly critique and the collegial repartee that occurs at academic conferences. Within these scenarios, I have observed the decorum of supposedly “engaged and rigorous” critique proceed in the following ways. Often postcolonial interventions into colonial or critical theory travel through phases, stages of progression, and levels of engagement with continental philosophy. First, in order to demonstrate your scholarly due diligence, capacity for rigor, and abstraction, you must learn and rehearse the origins of and become fluent in the language, idioms, and grammar of Deleuze and Guattari or whichever white scholar is in fashion. Second, you must figuratively inhabit and empathize with the white scholar’s very personal and particular existential and ethical questions (even if you cannot relate to her particular kind of situatedness or experience). It is often in graduate seminars where you have been asked— and we have been trained as faculty— to have you think about what it must have been like to be Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the moment in which they lived. Imagine the trials and tribulations of being a European bourgeois male maverick in the academy and civil society. In other words, you must internalize and perform this worldview as if it applies to you. After you internalize and perform, the third thing that you are allowed but by no means required to do is list the problems with this theory or worldview. Once you have identified the problems, even irreconcilable ones, you are encouraged to make an intervention or slight adjustment to the discourse or theory by asserting that you will now put Indigenous or Black life at the center of this body of thought. The challenge or intervention usually reads as “what if we put Native or Black studies at the center of Deleuzoguattarian thought?” Although we may become disillusioned with and challenge a metanarrative, we are rarely encouraged to do what Eve Tuck does when she “Break[s] Up with Deleuze.” We are often prevented from getting to this stage of exasperation or justified disgust because we are not allowed to stop, look at, and more importantly feel the violence of Western turns in critical theory. Because of academic respectability politics that impose a kind of bourgeois politesse on all “communicative acts,” be they in person or in writing, it is impolite and more importantly irrational to be rendered devastated, enraged, mute, or immobile by the violent terms on which continental theory proceeds. One must tolerate that Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatic movements require Indigenous genocide. In fact, it is a necessary evil in order for the West to model the kind of unfettered nomadic movement that Deleuze and Guattari privilege. The neoliberal temporality of productivity also requires that scholars keep moving unaffected in the midst of the violence. In fact, one is required to work through and repair or do damage control for Deleuze and Guattari. This is what a “good scholar” does: puts Black or Native studies at the center of rhizomes rather than contesting the very terms in which lines of flight become epistemic entities. But how do we perform or act otherwise in the face of this kind of violence?

King 17 [Tiffany Lethabo King is assistant professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight”; Critical Ethnic Studies; Spring 2017, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/jcritethnstud.3.1.0162?casa_token=Ayg-S-eXLu4AAAAA%3AaGlHrzMA9tWXklUEbQHL0P7GcNfaYbAs9EQAog6pgi3kUWD0hjWhL3xATIEZ963qYqlLTAlQTz2zxgcJIMo5i1APwp3OEbbEwfkmhNFDocRcFeKS&seq=1]//eleanor

Byrd haltingly stops the reader’s momentum as she critiques Deleuzoguattarian and poststructuralist tendencies that often emerge in postcolonial work. Rather than allow the preemptive rejoinder that white and some postcolonial scholars use, such as “I know that theorist X did not consider race or was racist, but he enables us to do XYZ with his work Byrd instead cuts off Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics at the path following Deleuze and Guattari will end in genocide, she allows the reader the time and space to let this reality sink in and consider a different route than the normative impulse and course of action that is to repair Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Byrd’s work slows us down and brings us to a point of impasse and a resting place where one can slow down, stop, and make a choice to stay put or move forward with the dismissive, whimsical, white conceit that tolerates Native death refusal allows the reader to feel the violent puncture of the nonrepresentational gash that it tries to disavow Yes, I understand your attempt to evade signification and thus representation but it is not compelling enough for me to overlook the reality that it requires Native genocide If this line of thought requires Indigenous death, why even venture down it? What could one possibly repair or salvage of it?” Postcolonial work often goes along with the linearity and temporality of white equivocations that attempt to excuse how the feminist, the queer (nonsubject), and Deleuzoguattarian lines of connectivity function as parasitic forms of situated knowledge and epistemes. This kind of acquiescence makes the epistemic revolutions internal to white European humanity possible and seem natural as they dehumanize and kill Indigenous and Black people Byrd’s indictment of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics refuses and cuts off the colonial and postcolonial equivocations, sanitization of affects, and speed and pace of the rhizomatic and nomadic line. you are allowed but by no means required to list the problems with this theory or worldview. Once you have identified the problems, even irreconcilable ones, you are encouraged to make an intervention or slight adjustment to the discourse or theory by asserting that you will now put Indigenous or Black life at the center of this body of thought. The challenge or intervention usually reads as “what if we put Native or Black studies at the center of Deleuzoguattarian thought?” Although we may become disillusioned with and challenge a metanarrative, we are rarely encouraged to Break Up with Deleuze.” We are often prevented from getting to this stage of exasperation or justified disgust because we are not allowed to stop, look at, and more importantly feel the violence of Western turns in critical theory academic respectability politics impose a kind of bourgeois politesse on all “communicative acts,” be they in person or in writing, it is impolite and more importantly irrational to be rendered devastated, by the violent terms on which continental theory proceeds One must tolerate that Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatic movements require Indigenous genocide it is a necessary evil in order for the West to model the kind of unfettered nomadic movement that Deleuze and Guattari privilege. The neoliberal temporality of productivity also requires that scholars keep moving unaffected in the midst of the violence. one is required to work through and repair or do damage control for Deleuze and Guattari This is what a “good scholar” does: puts Black or Native studies at the center of rhizomes rather than contesting the very terms in which lines of flight become epistemic entities

Erasure DA – the perm tries to make a slight adjustment and put natives at the center of Deleuzian thought – this sanitizes genocide and demands outright refusal.

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

We observe that another component of a desire to play Indian is a settler desire to be made innocent, to find some mercy or relief in face of the relentlessness of settler guilt and haunting (see Tuck and Ree, forthcoming, on mercy and haunting). Directly and indirectly benefitting from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples is a difficult reality for settlers to accept. The weight of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any reprieve. In her 1998 Master’s thesis, Janet Mawhinney analyzed the ways in which white people maintained and (re)produced white privilege in self-defined anti-racist settings and organizations.8 She examined the role of storytelling and self-confession - which serves to equate stories of personal exclusion with stories of structural racism and exclusion - and what she terms ‘moves to innocence,’ or “strategies to remove involvement in and culpability for systems of domination” (p. 17). Mawhinney builds upon Mary Louise Fellows and Sherene Razack’s (1998) conceptualization of, ‘the race to innocence’, “the process through which a woman comes to believe her own claim of subordination is the most urgent, and that she is unimplicated in the subordination of other women” (p. 335). Mawhinney’s thesis theorizes the self-positioning of white people as simultaneously the oppressed and never an oppressor, and as having an absence of experience of oppressive power relations (p. 100). This simultaneous self-positioning afforded white people in various purportedly anti-racist settings to say to people of color, “I don’t experience the problems you do, so I don’t think about it,” and “tell me what to do, you’re the experts here” (p. 103). “The commonsense appeal of such statements,” Malwhinney observes, enables white speakers to “utter them sanguine in [their] appearance of equanimity, is rooted in the normalization of a liberal analysis of power relations” (ibid.). In the discussion that follows, we will do some work to identify and argue against a series of what we call ‘settler moves to innocence’. Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler. This discussion will likely cause discomfort in our settler readers, may embarrass you/us or make us/you feel implicated. Because of the racialized flights and flows of settler colonial empire described above, settlers are diverse - there are white settlers and brown settlers, and peoples in both groups make moves to innocence that attempt to deny and deflect their own complicity in settler colonialism. When it makes sense to do so, we attend to moves to innocence enacted differently by white people and by brown and Black people. In describing settler moves to innocence, our goal is to provide a framework of excuses, distractions, and diversions from decolonization. We discuss some of the moves to innocence at greater length than others, mostly because some require less explanation and because others are more central to our initial argument for the demetaphorization of decolonization. We provide this framework so that we can be more impatient with each other, less likely to accept gestures and half-steps, and more willing to press for acts which unsettle innocence, which we discuss in the final section of this article.

Tuck and Yang 12 [Eve Tuck, Unangax, State University of New York at New Paltz K. Wayne Yang University of California, San Diego; “Decolonization is not a metaphor”; Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society; 2012; https://clas.osu.edu/sites/clas.osu.edu/files/Tuck%20and%20Yang%202012%20Decolonization%20is%20not%20a%20metaphor.pdf]//eleanor

a settler desire to be made innocent, to find some mercy or relief in face of the relentlessness of settler guilt and haunting benefitting from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples is a difficult reality for settlers to accept this reality is uncomfortable white people maintained and (re)produced white privilege in self-defined anti-racist settings and organizations which serves to equate stories of personal exclusion with stories of structural racism and exclusion what she terms ‘moves to innocence,’ or “strategies to remove involvement in and culpability for systems of domination the self-positioning as the oppressed and never an oppressor, Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler We provide this framework so that we can be less likely to accept gestures and half-steps, and more willing to press for acts which unsettle innocence

Settler move to innocence DA – voting neg is necessary to produce settler discomfort – anything less allows for settler recuperation.

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A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Haraway 85 (Donna Haraway - American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Australian Feminism Studies, Pages 1-4, 1985, MG)

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

The more robotic we become the better – only as we reincarnate as the cyborg can feminism be uplifted

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So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artifacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture. From One-Dimensional Man to The Death of Nature,6 the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically-mediated societies.

Haraway 85 (Donna Haraway - American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Australian Feminism Studies, Pages 7-9, 1985, MG)

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artifacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically-mediated societies.

Refusing to succumb to a cyborg world is complicit in the masculine orgy of war – they had their chance to unify and they didn’t, attempting to have them unify now fractures us all

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One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries — and not on the integrity of natural objects. 'Integrity' or 'sincerity' of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analyzed so well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress — communications breakdown.16 The cyborg is not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.

Haraway 85 (Donna Haraway - American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Australian Feminism Studies, Pages 17-19, 1985, MG)

One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries — and not on the integrity of natural objects control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language The cyborg is not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.

Thus, you should vote negative to become the Cyborg – control isn’t cybernetic, it’s aesthetic and oriented against women

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation. Every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; i.e., war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics — rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginary. It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a 'Western' commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by 'Western' technology, by writing.33 These real-life cyborgs, e.g., the Southeast Asian village women workers in Japanese and U.S. electronics firms described by Aiwa Ong, are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies. Survival is the stakes in this play of readings. *

Haraway 85 (Donna Haraway - American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Australian Feminism Studies, Pages 32-34, 1985, MG)

This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation. Every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; i.e., war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics — rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral less at stake in masculine autonomy illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a 'Western' commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by 'Western' technology Survival is the stakes

Drawing dualisms between the “natural” and the “robotic”, the “flawed” vs the “perfect”, and the “self” vs the “controlled” solely work to reproduce women under masculine autonomy and enable domination of the Other

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable. Since much of this picture interweaves with the social relations of science and technology, the urgency of a socialist-feminist politics addressed to science and technology is plain. There is much now being done, and the grounds for political work are rich. For example, the efforts to develop forms of collective struggle for women in paid work, like SEIU's District 925, should be a high priority for all of us. These efforts are profoundly tied to technical restructuring of labor processes and reformations of working classes. These efforts also are providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labor organization, involving community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in the largely white male industrial unions.

Haraway 85 (Donna Haraway - American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”, Australian Feminism Studies, Pages 26-28, 1985, MG)

The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable. , the urgency of a socialist-feminist politics addressed to science and technology is plain

The perm fails – it’s imperialist and totalizes feminist analysis – inclusion of the affirmative saves oppression, while the alt intentionally loses out on it

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022

Silent protests, such as the two refugees’ protest in Finland, can be described as expressions of a certain kind of political ‘spirit’. This spirit can be defined in many ways. It can be named, for example, the spirit of autonomy, the spirit of freedom or the spirit of equality. In On Revolution (1963), Hannah Arendt discusses the idea of the revolutionary spirit, which is the spirit of actualising something new politically. In Arendtian theory, this spirit appears as the urge and courage for miraculous political action that initiates something new in the world (Arendt, 1958, 1963).

Kaura-aho 21 (Katariina Kaura-aho - doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Helsinki, “The aesthetics of political resistance: On silent politics”, Thesis Eleven 65, 2021, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/07255136211035154, MG)

Silent protests, such as the two refugees’ protest in Finland, can be described as expressions of a certain kind of political ‘spirit’. This spirit can be defined in many ways. It can be named, for example, the spirit of autonomy, the spirit of freedom or the spirit of equality.

We endorse subversive silence as a counter-act to their loud politics – that’s the only way to create a true aesthetic revolution

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Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

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The refugees’ protest evokes many pressing political questions calling for theoretical analysis. One key question the protest evokes is to what extent the human right to sexuality is in practice recognised as a ground for asylum and protected in contemporary political contexts (see, for example, Spijkerboer, 2013).2 In this article, however, I will not focus on the question of the right to sexuality as such, but specifically on the mode of the political action through which the refugees resisted their denial of this right. In the article, I focus especially on the silent character of the refugees’ protest.

Kaura-aho 21 (Katariina Kaura-aho - doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Helsinki, “The aesthetics of political resistance: On silent politics”, Thesis Eleven 65, 2021, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/07255136211035154, MG)

The refugees’ protest evokes many pressing political questions calling for theoretical analysis. One key question the protest evokes is to what extent the human right to sexuality is in practice recognised as a ground for asylum and protected in contemporary political

It’s aesthetic and they exclude refugees from their method otherwise

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Case Negatives

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First, Schnurer offers what appears to me to be a major contradiction. He savages the game concept. He then introduces us to the game of “Potlatch,” and sings its praises as a way to tear down consumerist society and as a model for inspiring exchange of ideas. He finishes with an exhortation to “find games that fulfill our revolutionary potential, take whatever moments we can for ourselves to try and push for as much change as we possibly can.” How “Potlatch” avoids his earlier criticisms or how his search for “game to fulfill our revolutionary potential” can avoid them is not explained. He simply cannot have it both ways absent a substantial explanation of how this contradiction is bridged.

Snider, 3—former director of debate at the University of Vermont (Alfred, “Paris Nocturne,” CAD 24 (2003): 16-101)

Schnurer offers a major contradiction. He savages the game concept. He then introduces us to the game of “Potlatch,” and sings its praises as a way to tear down consumerist society and as a model for inspiring exchange of ideas How “Potlatch” avoids his earlier criticisms or how his search for “game to fulfill our revolutionary potential” can avoid them is not explained. He simply cannot have it both ways absent a substantial explanation of how this contradiction is bridged

“Debate-as-potlatch” is meaningless and devolves into a forensic reenactment of bygone revolutions that takes flaunting the rules as an endpoint and becomes complacent in the same sterilizing practices they criticize. Our framework doesn’t mold debaters in any particular way—it breeds the skills to make trained and tested actions through a ritualized policy debate-game that looks a lot like a potlatch!

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Michigan (7-week)

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2022

If it is indeed true that debate inevitably produces other-oriented deliberative discourse at the expense of students' confidence in their first-order convictions, this would indeed be a trade-off worth criticizing. In all fairness, Hicks and Greene do not overclaim their critique, and they take care to acknowledge the important ethical and cognitive virtues of deliberative debating. When represented as anything other than a political-ethical concern, however, Hicks and Greene's critique has several problems: First, as my colleague J.P. Lacy recently pointed out, it seems a tremendous causal (or even rhetorical) stretch to go from "debating both sides of an issue creates civic responsibility essential to liberal democracy" to "this civic responsibility upholds the worst forms of American exceptionalism." Second, Hicks and Greene do not make any comparison of the potentially bad power of debate to any alternative. Their implied alternative, however, is a form of forensic speech that privileges personal conviction. The idea that students should be able to preserve their personal convictions at all costs seems far more immediately tyrannical, far more immediately damaging to either liberal or participatory democracy, than the ritualized requirements that students occasionally take the opposite side of what they believe. Third, as I have suggested and will continue to suggest, while a debate project requiring participants to understand and often "speak for" opposing points of view may carry a great deal of liberal baggage, it is at its core a project more ethically deliberative than institutionally liberal. Where Hicks and Greene see debate producing "the liberal citizen-subject," I see debate at least having the potential to produce "the deliberative human being." The fact that some academic debaters are recruited by the CSIS and the CIA does not undermine this thesis. Absent healthy debate programs, these think-tanks and government agencies would still recruit what they saw as the best and brightest students. And absent a debate community that rewards anti-institutional political rhetoric as much as liberal rhetoric, those students would have little-to-no chance of being exposed to truly oppositional ideas. Moreover, if we allow ourselves to believe that it is "culturally imperialist" to help other peoples build institutions of debate and deliberation, we not only ignore living political struggles that occur in every culture, but we fall victim to a dangerous ethnocentrism in holding that "they do not value deliberation like we do." If the argument is that our participation in fostering debate communities abroad greases the wheels of globalization, the correct response, in debate terminology, is that such globalization is non-unique, inevitable, and there is only a risk that collaborating across cultures in public debate and deliberation will foster resistance to domination—just as debate accomplishes wherever it goes. Indeed, Andy Wallace, in a recent article, suggests that Islamic fundamentalism is a byproduct of the colonization of the lifeworld of the Middle East; if this is true, then one solution would be to foster cross-cultural deliberation among people on both sides of the cultural divide willing to question their own preconceptions of the social good. Hicks and Greene might be correct insofar as elites in various cultures can either forbid or reappropriate deliberation, but for those outside of that institutional power, democratic discussion would have a positively subversive effect.

Stannard 2006 – Director of Forensics and Associate Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Wyoming (4/18, Matt, The Underview, Spring 2006 Faculty Senate Speaker Series Speech, “Deliberation, Debate, and Democracy in the Academy and Beyond”, http://theunderview.blogspot.com/2006/04/deliberation-democracy-and-debate.html, 3NR)

I see debate at least having the potential to produce "the deliberative human being." The fact that some academic debaters are recruited by the CSIS and the CIA does not undermine this thesis. Absent healthy debate programs, these think-tanks and government agencies would still recruit what they saw as the best and brightest students. And absent a debate community that rewards anti-institutional political rhetoric as much as liberal rhetoric, those students would have little-to-no chance of being exposed to truly oppositional ideas. Moreover, if we allow ourselves to believe that it is "culturally imperialist" to help other peoples build institutions of debate and deliberation, we not only ignore living political struggles that occur in every culture, but we fall victim to a dangerous ethnocentrism in holding that "they do not value deliberation like we do." If the argument is that our participation in fostering debate communities abroad greases the wheels of globalization, the correct response, in debate terminology, is that such globalization is non-unique, inevitable, and there is only a risk that collaborating across cultures in public debate and deliberation will foster resistance to domination—just as debate accomplishes wherever it goes Hicks and Greene might be correct insofar as elites in various cultures can either forbid or reappropriate deliberation, but for those outside of that institutional power, democratic discussion would have a positively subversive effect

switch-side debate is good and any alternative links worse to their criticism of debate

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Snider argued several years ago that a suitable paradigm should address “something we can ACTUALLY DO” as opposed to something we can MAKE BELIEVE ABOUT” (“Fantasy as Reality” 14). A utopian literature metaphor is beneficial precisely because it is within the power of debaters to perform the desired action suggested by the metaphor, if not always to demonstrate that the desired action is politically feasible.

McGee and Romanelli, 97—Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at Texas Tech AND Director of Debate at Loyola University of Chicago (Brian and David, “Policy Debate as Fiction: In Defense of Utopian Fiat,” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate 18 (1997) 23-35, dml) [ableist language modifications denoted by brackets]

a suitable paradigm should address “something we can ACTUALLY DO” as opposed to something we can MAKE BELIEVE ABOUT” A utopian metaphor is beneficial precisely because it is within the power of debaters to perform the desired action suggested if not always to demonstrate that the desired action is politically feasible.

Debate is a game played by students who want to win. Debating about utopian imaginaries of plans enacted by the USFG effectively positions debaters and judges as budding social critics—without positioning debate as anything more than a game.

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One of the most pernicious myths about creativity, one that seriously inhibits creative thinking and innovation, is the belief that one needs to “think outside the box.” As someone who has worked for decades as a professional creative, nothing could be further from the truth. This a is view shared by the vast majority of creatives, expressed famously by the modernist designer Charles Eames when he wrote, “Design depends largely upon constraints.” The myth of thinking outside the box stems from a fundamental misconception of what creativity is, and what it’s not. In the popular imagination, creativity is something weird and wacky. The creative process is magical, or divinely inspired. But, in fact, creativity is not about divine inspiration or magic. It’s about problem-solving, and by definition a problem is a constraint, a limit, a box. One of the best illustrations of this is the work of photographers. They create by excluding the great mass what’s before them, choosing a small frame in which to work. Within that tiny frame, literally a box, they uncover relationships and establish priorities. What makes creative problem-solving uniquely challenging is that you, as the creator, are the one defining the problem. You’re the one choosing the frame. And you alone determine what’s an effective solution. This can be quite demanding, both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectually, you are required to establish limits, set priorities, and cull patterns and relationships from a great deal of material, much of it fragmentary. More often than not, this is the material you generated during brainstorming sessions. At the end of these sessions, you’re usually left with a big mess of ideas, half-ideas, vague notions, and the like. Now, chances are you’ve had a great time making your mess. You might have gone off-site, enjoyed a “brainstorming camp,” played a number of warm-up games. You feel artistic and empowered. But to be truly creative, you have to clean up your mess, organizing those fragments into something real, something useful, something that actually works. That’s the hard part. It takes a lot of energy, time, and willpower to make sense of the mess you’ve just generated. It also can be emotionally difficult. You’ll need to throw out many ideas you originally thought were great, ideas you’ve become attached to, because they simply don’t fit into the rules you’re creating as you build your box.

David Intrator, President of The Creative Organization, October 21, 2010, “Thinking Inside the Box,” http://www.trainingmag.com/article/thinking-inside-box

most pernicious myths about creativity, that seriously inhibits creative thinking is the belief that one needs to “think outside the box nothing could be further from the truth This a is view shared by the vast majority of creative Design depends largely upon constraints.” thinking outside the box stems from a fundamental misconception of what creativity is In the popular imagination, creativity is something weird and wacky. creativity is about problem-solving, and by definition a problem is a constraint, a limit photographers create by excluding the great mass what’s before them choosing a small frame in which to work Intellectually, you are required to establish limits from a great deal of material to be truly creative, you have to clean up your mess, organizing those fragments into something useful You’ll need to throw out many ideas you originally thought were great because they simply don’t fit into the rules you’re creating as you build your box

Constraints actually fuel innovation and creativity

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Case Negatives

2022

Additionally, there are social benefits to the practice of requiring students to debate both sides of controversial issues. Dating back to the Greek rhetorical tradition, great value has been placed on the benefit of testing each argument relative to all others in the marketplace of ideas. Like those who argue on behalf of the efficiency-maximizing benefits of free market competition, it is believed that arguments are most rigorously tested (and conceivably refined and improved) when compared to all available alternatives. Even for beliefs that have seemingly been ingrained in consensus opinion or in cases where the public at-large is unlikely to accept a particular position, it has been argued that they should remain open for public discussion and deliberation (Mill, 1975). Along these lines, the greatest benefit of switching sides, which goes to the heart of contemporary debate, is its inducement of critical thinking. Defined as "reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do" (Ennis, 1987, p.10), critical thinking learned through debate teaches students not just how advocate and argue, but how to decide as well. Each and every student, whether in debate or (more likely) at some later point in life, will be placed in the position of the decision-maker. Faced with competing options whose costs and benefits are initially unclear, critical thinking is necessary to assess all the possible outcomes of each choice, compare their relative merits, and arrive at some final decision about which is preferable. In some instances, such as choosing whether to eat Chinese or Indian food for dinner, the importance of making the correct decision is minor. For many other decisions, however, the implications of choosing an imprudent course of action are potentially grave. As Robert Crawford notes, there are "issues of unsurpassed important in the daily lives of millions upon millions of people...being decided to a considerable extent by the power of public speaking" (2003). Although the days of the Cold War are over, and the risk that "The next Pearl Harbor could be 'compounded by hydrogen" (Ehninger and Brockriede, 1978, p.3) is greatly reduced, the manipulation of public support before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 points to the continuing necessity of training a well-informed and critically-aware public (Zarefsky, 2007). In the absence of debate-trained critical thinking, ignorant but ambitious politicians and persuasive but nefarious leaders would be much more likely to draw the country, and possibly the world, into conflicts with incalculable losses in terms of human well-being. Given the myriad threats of global proportions that will require incisive solutions, including global warming, the spread of pandemic diseases, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cultivating a robust and effective society of critical decision-makers is essential. As Louis Rene Beres writes, "with such learning, we Americans could prepare...not as immobilized objects of false contentment, but as authentic citizens of an endangered planet" (2003). Thus, it is not surprising that critical thinking has been called "the highest educational goal of the activity" (Parcher, 1998). While arguing from conviction can foster limited critical thinking skills, the element of switching sides is necessary to sharpen debate's critical edge and ensure that decisions are made in a reasoned manner instead of being driven by ideology. Debaters trained in SSD are more likely to evaluate both sides of an argument before arriving at a conclusion and are less likely to dismiss potential arguments based on his or her prior beliefs (Muir 1993). In addition, debating both sides teaches "conceptual flexibility," where decision-makers are more likely to reflect upon the beliefs that are held before coming to a final opinion (Muir, 1993, p,290). Exposed to many arguments on each side of an issue, debaters learn that public policy is characterized by extraordinary complexity that requires careful consideration before action. Finally, these arguments are confirmed by preponderance of empirical research demonstrating a link between competitive SSD and critical thinking (Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt and Louden, 1999; Colbert, 2002, p.82).

Harrigan 8 (Casey, Associate Director of Debate at UGA, Master’s in Communications – Wake Forest U., “A Defense of Switch Side Debate”, Master’s thesis at Wake Forest, Department of Communication, May, pp. 6-9)

arguments are most rigorously tested (and conceivably refined and improved) when compared to all available alternatives. Even for beliefs that have seemingly been ingrained in consensus opinion they should remain open for public discussion and deliberation the greatest benefit of switching sides, which goes to the heart of contemporary debate, is its inducement of critical thinking. Defined as "reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do critical thinking learned through debate teaches students not just how advocate and argue, but how to decide as well. Each student will be placed in the position of the decision-maker critical thinking is necessary to assess all possible outcomes and arrive at some final decision about which is preferable. the manipulation of public support before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 points to the continuing necessity of training a well-informed and critically-aware public In the absence of debate-trained critical thinking, ignorant but ambitious politicians and persuasive but nefarious leaders would be much more likely to draw the world, into conflicts with incalculable losses in terms of human well-being. Given the myriad threats that will require incisive solutions, including global warming, the spread of pandemic diseases, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cultivating a robust and effective society of critical decision-makers is essential with learning, we could prepare as authentic citizens of an endangered planet the element of switching sides is necessary to sharpen debate's critical edge and ensure that decisions are made in a reasoned manner instead of being driven by ideology. Debaters trained in SSD are more likely to evaluate both sides of an argument before arriving at a conclusion and are less likely to dismiss potential arguments based on his or her prior beliefs debating both sides teaches "conceptual flexibility," where decision-makers are more likely to reflect upon the beliefs that are held before coming to a final opinion debaters learn that public policy is characterized by extraordinary complexity these arguments are confirmed by preponderance of empirical research demonstrating a link between competitive SSD and critical thinking

Our framework preserves switch side debate, which is key to critical thinking

Neg - Digital Cyclops - Michigan 7 2022 BFHR.html5

Michigan (7-week)

Case Negatives

2022