Nate+and+Natalie

natalieknez@gmail.com -- aff sawyer.nathaniel@gmail.com -- neg = 1ac – inherency =
 * Contention one is inherency**

The White House on Thursday put Port Miami’s long-awaited dredging project on a list of fast-tracked, nationally significant seaport improvement projects, guaranteeing it an expedited permitting process. Practically speaking, the designation means little, since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had already pushed the plan forward after it cleared all regulatory hurdles and survived a legal challenge from environmentalists. The Army Corps is already expected to put the $180 million project up for bid in August. Still, in a joint statement, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and Port Miami Director Bill Johnson lauded the federal recognition, with Johnson saying “over the past several years the deep dredge has been a number one priority for Port Miami.” Thursday’s announcement by the White House does not mean money is likely to flow from the federal government any time soon. In March, pushing the much-needed dredging project along, Gov. Rick Scott visited the port and announced the state would advance the county more than $90 million. Scott’s hope was that the state would be reimbursed. Miami-Dade will cover the remainder of the $180 million cost to deepen the port from 42 to 50 feet, a move the county is undertaking to accommodate the mega-ships that will glide through the newer, deeper Panama Canal. Because Congress has ordered the Army Corps not to begin any new projects indefinitely, Johnson said, the White House would need to propose funding for Miami-Dade, which then would send the money back to the state. Asked Johnson: “I’ve got a big question mark: Where are the dollars? Is the president putting dollars for Port Miami into his budget next year?” That wasn’t clear Thursday, with one senior administration official saying only, “Today’s announcements focus just on expediting all remaining federal reviews.”
 * Obama has expedited approval for dredging projects, but not allocated funds – increase action is necessary but there’s no link uniqueness for disads**
 * Morgan and Rabin 7/19** – Miami Herald reporter, environment reporter (Curtis and Charles, “White House Speeds Up Permits, Offers No New Cash For PortMiami Dredge Project”, The Miami Herald, July 21 2012, [])//CB

We were already expecting the final approval this fall of the dredging of the Savannah Harbor to 47 feet. So it is unclear at this point what practical effect the President’s executive order has. It certainly indicates a fresh seriousness from Washington, but the action does not seem to **guarantee federal funding or a faster approval process** than had been previously promised. = 1ac – plan text =
 * The executive order came with no guarantees**
 * Dawers 7/19** – JULY 19, 2012 1:44 AM by [|BILL DAWERS]-Savannah Morning News ([]) MK

= = = 1ac – sealift adv. =
 * The United States federal government should substantially increase its expedited investment in port deepening projects in the United States.**
 * Contention**


 * The plan is critical to sealift capabilities – two internal links**

(1973), Burroughs: professor, Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (1975) (Lawrence Juda and Richard Burroughs, “Dredging Navigational Channels in a Changing Scientific and Regulatory Environment” 34 Journal of Maritime Law & Commerce 174-179) //CB// // But port facilities and maritime transportation are also important from another perspective, that of national security. They enable the supply of U nited S tates military forces deployed abroad. For example,DOT points out that ninety per cent of all supplies used in Operation Desert Storm were shipped from U.S. ports. 6 According to DOT, water transportation is environmentally sound, since ships and barges, when compared to other means of transportation, have the smallest number of accidental spills or collisions. 7 Further, water transportation is more fuel efficient per ton of cargo moved than other modes of transportation. 8 But these assessments focus only on the actual operation of transportation systems and do not consider, for example, potential environmental problems associated with dredging, an activity essential for contemporary maritime transportation While the movement of goods in trade is shaped fundamentally by factors of supply and demand, it is also affected by the ability to transport goods from where they are found or manufactured to where they are desired, as well as the ability to do so in a dependable and efficient manner and on cost competitive terms. 9 Containerization 10 and the use of ever larger ships, tankers and bulk ships as well as container ships, represent responses by the shipping industry to these transportation influences. Simply put, larger ships benefit from economies of scale, so that a larger container vessel has lower costs per container and a larger tanker lower costs per unit of crude oil or other cargo. 11 DOT has noted the trend toward the use of mega-container ships, that is ships designed to carry over 4,500 boxes measured in terms of twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs). 12 The Regina Maersk, the first 6,000+ TEU containership, was delivered in early 1996, [table omitted] and in the period of 1997-1999 some thirty five new vessels were ordered with a TEU capacity ranging from 4,500 to 9,000 TEUs. 13 Ships on order now include what will be the two largest containerships in the world, with a capacity of 9,800 TEUs (for the China Shipping Group to be operated between Hong Kong and Los Angeles). 14 Industry sources suggest that in the near future ships with up to 12,000 TEU capacity will enter into service, 15 and DOT expects that, by 2010, almost one third of all general cargo tonnage will be transported on ships with more than 4,000 TEUs. 16 But if larger vessels offer cost efficiencies for ship operators, they present new problems for port managers. As ships have become larger, they have acquired deeper drafts, demanding deeper water to accommodate their hulls. At the start of the twentieth century, navigational channels of thirty 30 feet in depth were sufficient to allow safe movement of almost all ships, 17 but this is no longer the case. Since the introduction of container carrying ships in the 1950s, six generations of such ships have evolved, with successively deeper drafts (Figure 1). 18 It is believed that the drafts of the mega-containerships [table omitted] that will be coming online will not be greater than 14.5 meters, a figure that does not exceed the draft of the largest containerships now in service. 19 Mega container ship operations require a water depth of at least fifty feet in ship channels, turning basins, and ship berths. 20 According to the Maritime Administration, in 1997 only four of the ten major U.S. container ports that collectively loaded and unloaded almost eighty per cent of container traffic had channel and berthing areas deep enough in draft for fully laden megacontainerships. 21 (Table 2). It is not ship draft alone that must be considered in navigational dredging. Other factors, such as increased beam and windage, create maneuverability problems in narrow channels. 22 A particular port’s lack of the clearances needed by these larger, deeper draft vessels undercuts its potential for commercial success. To maximize their attraction for very large containerships, ports must be able to offer easy entrance and departure, the capacity to entertain such vessels even with full loads (high load factors), efficient loading and unloading, and ready access to other forms of transportation as part of the desired seamless network of intermodal carriage. For ship operators, fast turnaround time is essential, as any time lost at ports lessens the time that ships can move cargoes and generate revenues, frustrates the expectations of shippers regarding delivery, and generally raises questions about the reliability of service. In this market, ports with channels or berthing facilities that do not provide needed clearance for these newer and larger vessels may be avoided altogether. Otherwise, they may be left to served only by smaller ships or those that are not fully loaded. In the port of Oakland, for example, deep draft vessels have had to key their arrival times to tidal schedules, and delays in unloading might then cost an additional 10.5-14 hours of waiting for the next high tide. 23 Such scenarios have serious implications for the port, for businesses dependent on maritime transportation, and, ultimately, for the consumer. The needs of ports to accommodate larger vessels with deeper drafts, taken together with the natural process of sedimentation, create demands for the dredging of shipping lanes. As noted by a former DOT official, for ports “ the competition to capture markets by having the deep channels required for mega-ships translates simply and inescapably into millions of tons of dredged materials .” 24 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that the Corps of Engineers annually dredges and disposes of some 300 million cubic yards of material from navigation maintenance and improvement projects. To this figure must be added some 100 million cubic yards of material dredged by port authorities, terminal owners, marinas, and private individuals. 25 In connection with maritime transportation, dredging is needed in three types of situations: to maintain present widths and depths by counteracting the natural redistribution of coastal sediments, to widen and deepen existing channels for access by new, larger vessels, and to create new port facilities where they have not existed before. //
 * First is size limitations and efficiency**
 * Juda and Burroughs 04** – Juda: professor, Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island, Ph.D., Columbia University

//**Second is container immobilization**// // **DOTMA 5** (U.S. department of transportation maritime administration “ REPORT TO CONGRESS ON THE PERFORMANCE OF PORTS AND THE INTERMODAL SYSTEM” http://www.marad.dot.gov/documents/Rpt_to_Congress-Perf_Ports_Intermodal_Sys-June2005.pdf)JC// // Lack of attention to port maintenance and improvement dredging is starting to restrict trade and military movements. Some ports are struggling to keep up with newer, deeper draft container vessels which are now calling on the U nited S tates. Further, military movements onto some deployment docks are restricted to daylight operation because of channel width and depth restrictions. MARAD recommends that some of the most critical dredging and infrastructure projects be identified for the purpose of bringing attention to the areas that may soon restrict military or significant commercial cargo. //

//**That’s the critical internal link into sealift effectiveness**// //**AAPA Seaports Magazine 03 –** (**"**The Impact of War and Terrorism", Fall, [|www.aapaseaports.com/pdf_issues/AAPASeaports_Fall2003.pdf])// NK Vital national efforts such as military cargo moves for Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom would not be possible without U.S. seaports and the people who keep them working. As important as they are in times of peace, ports take on an added significance in wartime, when they provide the conduits for everything from armored vehicles to ammunition to get to battlefield locations on the other side of the planet. Military and civilian leaders agree that a network of multiple ports – each with sufficient rail capabilities and other intermodal infrastructure – is essential to war efforts. But, without proper funding for improvements to rail capacity and other facilities, ports are not able to maximize their ability to handle influxes of thousands of railcars loaded with military cargoes “Ports are absolutely critical,” said Bill Lucas, the top civilian in the U.S. military transportation arena. “We couldn’t do it without them. “We are very, very dependent upon U.S. ports,” added Lucas, who for the past 13 years has served as deputy to the commander of the Alexandria, Va.-based Military Traffic Management Command (MTMC). Lucas noted that ports played an essential role as military loadouts in support of this year’s Iraq conflict moved with much greater efficiency than those associated with Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

Deter major power war**.** No other disruption is as potentially disastrous to global stability as war among major powers. Maintenance and extension of this Nation’s comparative seapower advantage is a key component of **deterring major power war**. While war with another great power strikes many as improbable, the near-certainty of its ruinous effects demands that it be actively deterred using all elements of national power.The expeditionary character of maritime forces—our lethality, global reach, speed, endurance, ability to overcome barriers to access, and operational agility—provide the joint commander with a range of deterrent options. We will pursue an approach to deterrence that includes a credible and scalable ability to retaliate against aggressors conventionally, unconventionally, and with nuclear forces. Win our Nation’s wars. In times of war, our ability to impose local sea control, overcome challenges to access, force entry, and project and sustain power ashore, makes our maritime forces an indispensable element of the joint or combined force. This expeditionary advantage must be maintained because it provides joint and combined force commanders with freedom of maneuver. Reinforced by **a robust sealift capability** that **can concentrate and sustain** forces, **sea control and power projection** enable extended campaigns ashore.
 * Sealift solves great power war and is critical to naval power**
 * Conway et al 7** [James T., General, U.S. Marine Corps, Gary Roughead, Admiral, U.S. Navy, Thad W. Allen, Admiral, U.S. Coast Guard, “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” October, http://www.navy.mil/maritime/MaritimeStrategy.pdf]

NLUS, 12 – a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating our citizens about the importance of sea power to U.S. national security and supporting the men and women of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and U.S.-flag Merchant Marine and their families (Navy League of the United States, “Maritime Primacy & Economic Prosperity: Maritime Policy 2012-13”, Navy League of the United States, 1/21/12, [] | AK) Global engagement is critical to the U.S. economy, world trade and the protection of democratic freedoms that so many take for granted. The guarantors of these vital elements are hulls in the water, embarked forward amphibious forces and aircraft overhead. The Navy League of the United States’ Maritime Policy for 2012-13 provides recommendations for strategy, policy and the allocation of national resources in support of our sea services and essential to the successful execution of their core missions. We live in a time of complex challenges — //terrorism//, //political// and //economic turmoil// , //extremism// , //conflicts// over environmental resources, manmade and natural //disasters// — andpotential //flash points// exist //around the globe//. It is the persistent **forward presence** and engagement **of maritime forces that keep these flash points in** **check**, **prevent conflict** **and crisis escalation**, and allow the smooth flow of goods in a global economy.
 * This solves every transnational threat**

The instrument of foreign policy that works best in that part of the world is the U.S. Navy. The junior officers at the command coined a phrase, “virtual presence equals actual absence.” That is the one point I would emphasize to you when you talk about climate and energy. There is no substitute, in both my personal and my professional opinion, for American forces being present. And as the Navy works through the challenges, and the Air Force works through the challenges, and, to a lesser extent, our Army and Marine Corps, because those forces that are generally in garrison are of less utility to the commander of USPACOM, **unless we have the lift capability to move those forces** out of garrison and be present for exercises and training in the countries of the AOR. If we do not have a Navy of sufficient numbers and an Air Force of sufficient numbers and lift capability, we are not present. We are absent. You can do all of the video teleconferencing you want. You can have as many meetings as you want. But you have to be out there and train with, and develop the trust and confidence of, and build relationships with, the younger men and women in the armed forces of the AOR so that they can grow up knowing that we are not going to leave them high and dry. A great way of manifesting that faith, trust, and confidence that they should have in us is through humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations like those after Katrina. I cannot recount for you the number of times that a hurricane, a typhoon, a cyclone, or an earthquake has hit, or a cold snap has affected hundreds of thousands of people in the USPACOM AOR, and because we are there, because we are present, or we have sufficient reach and lift, we can provide assistance immediately. Such operations have dramatic impact. Several years ago, a devastating tsunami hit the western tip of Indonesia. Although the first forces to get on scene came by air, the second forces and the most sustainable forces came by sea. When Myanmar was hit by a tropical cyclone, I flew out there to offer the use of some of our medium- and heavy-lift helicopters and C-130s. We and our allies had deployed four ships off the coast. But the Myanmar government said, “No thanks, we don’t need the help.” Thousands of lives were lost as a result; it was one of the significant regrets I have in my tour there. When an earthquake and a bout of extremely cold weather occurred in China, the first American expression of support came in the form of two C-17s loaded with relief supplies. We had to get permission to let them land, but that is the authority that we enjoyed at USPACOM. So it is presence. It is readiness. It is partnership. These three essential elements of USPACOM strategy, I am convinced, provide the basis for success in the region.
 * Sealift is also is the foundation of USPACOM effectiveness**
 * Gulledge and Keating 10** [Jay Gulledge, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, served on the faculties of Tulane University and the University of Louisville, Timothy J. Keating, retired United States Navy admiral of PACOM, 2010 “Future Naval Operations in Asia and the Pacific” in “Climate and Energy Proceedings 2010”, Johns Hopkins University, page 344-345, [], DMintz]

The USPACOM Area of Responsibility (AOR) is vital to U.S. national interests. It spans half the earth and is home to more than three billion people living in three dozen nations—five of which are allied with the U.S. and many more of which are important economic and security partners. The region contains the world’s three largest economies, and almost one-third (over $1 trillion) of U.S. two-way trade in goods and services is with nations in the region. Moreover, much of the world’s trade and energy that fuels the world economy moves on Asia’s sea and air lines of communication. The vastness of the region makes permanent and rotational U.S. force presence essential to enabling security and strategic deterrence throughout the region while protecting and defending the homeland. Military construction provides necessary facilities for new weapon systems, supports the Services’ evolution to become more efficient and effective, offers warfighters and their families quality-of-life facilities while at home, and renovates existing facilities that are beyond their useful lives. Thus the MILCON projects in this testimony enhance the capabilities of USPACOM forces that underpin security in this increasingly important and dynamic region. While the region remains relatively secure and stable, th e strategic environment also includes traditional and asymmetric challenges that drive the need for forward presence and the subsequent MILCON recommendations in this testimony. Sustaining the conditions that have underpinned unprecedented prosperity for over six decades remains challenging for a variety of reasons, including the following:  The threat to the United States and its allies posed by North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities, its proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and associated technologies, and its potential for instability  Transnational violent extremist organizations (VEOs) undermine stability and threaten traditional Allies and emerging partners  China’s significant military modernization associated with its unclear intent  Territorial disputes, and increasingly assertive actions to resolve them, present the potential for conflict and instability  Increasingly persistent and sophisticated cyber threats that challenge unencumbered operations.  Transnational criminal activity—to include piracy and trafficking in narcotics and persons—that rejects the rule of law and challenges international order  Humanitarian crises such as pandemics and famines, as well as natural disasters such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes  Environmental degradation caused by poor resource management, the pillaging of natural resources, and disputes over resource sovereignty Despite these many challenges, the region remains one of immense opportunity for peaceful growth, cooperation, and prosperit y. Realizing such opportunity relies upon continued U.S. ability and willingness to underwrite security, extend deterrence, and protect the global commons upon which the region’s livelihood depends. U.S. military strength, presence, and engagement provide the means to ensure security and peace and avoid confrontation and conflict. Secretary of Defense Gates emphasized this point in Singapore in June 2010: ― The strength of the U.S. commitment and deterrent power will be expressed through the continued forward presence of substantial U.S. forces in the region.
 * That solves multiple crises and scenarios for global war – only sea-based power projection sends a credible signal**
 * Willard 11** [Robert F. Willard, //US navy commander, USPACOM,// April 12, 2011, “STATEMENT OF ADMIRAL ROBERT F. WILLARD, U.S. NAVY COMMANDER, U.S. PACIFIC COMMAND BEFORE THE SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE ON U.S. PACIFIC COMMAND POSTURE, [], DMintz]

= 1ac – seaports adv. =


 * Contention two is seaports**

//Since the birth of our nation, U.S. seaports and waterways that connect them have served as a vital economic lifeline by bringing goods and services to people around the world and by delivering prosperity to our nation. U.S. seaports are responsible for moving more than 99 percent of our country’s overseas cargo. Today, international trade accounts for more than a quarter of Americas Gross Domestic Product. Americas seaports support the employment of 13.3 million U.S. workers, and seaport- related jobs account for $649 billion in annual personal income. For every $1 billion in exports shipped through seaports, 15,000 U.S. jobs are created. Seaports facilitate trade and commerce, create jobs, help secure our borders, support our military and serve as stewards of valuable coastal environmental resources. Ports are dynamic, vibrant centers of trade and commerce, but what is most important to understand is that seaports rely on partnerships. Seaports invest more than $2.5 billion every year to maintain and improve their infrastructure. In recent years, however, this commitment has not been adequately matched by the federal government. Federal funding for dredging federal navigation channels has slowed and decreased, //especially for new construction //. Further, maintenance dredging is sorely underfunded, despite a more than $6 billion and growing surplus in the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund. Landside improvements have also been too low a priority, with little of the highway funds going to freight transportation projects. The only bright light has been the newly created TIGER grants, although not enough of this funding benefited ports. Virginia Port Authority received a TIGER grant for its heartland project. As we look to the future, we do know that there are challenges and opportunities. As we recover from this economic downturn, we must make investments today to address the trade realities of the future. Here are some the challenges and we have to ask: are we ready? The Panama Canal expansion is due to be completed in 2014 and is expected to influence trade patterns. VPA and other ports have been making investments, but federal funding has been slow to match these investments. Ship sizes continue to get larger, requiring on-'going modernization of ports and federal navigation channels, even for ports that will not require 50 feet of depth. Canada and Mexico are making investments which could result in losses of maritime jobs in the U.S. as cargo enters the U.S. through these countries. We have already seen this job loss on the West Coast. The U.S. seeks to double exports; however countries like Brazil and Chile, who we compete against the U.S. in terms of agricultural exports, are making investments that could make their exports more competitive. New trade agreements with Korea, Panama and Colombia have been approved, with other trade agreements under negotiations which should result in increased exports and imports through ports. In addition to these near-term challenges, we know that the U.S. population is forecast to grow by 100 million - a 30 percent increase - before the middle of the 2lst century. And many of the goods used by this population will flow through seaports. So are we ready? While ports are planning for the future, the federal government has not kept pace with the industry or our international competitors. The federal government has a unique Constitutional responsibility to maintain and improve the infrastructure that enables the flow of commerce, and much of that infrastructure in and around seaports have been neglected for too long. Many of our land and water connections are insufficient and outdated, affecting the ports' ability to move cargo efficiently into and out of the U.S. This hurts U.S. business, hurts U.S. workers and hurts our national economy. Port projects take decades to plan and build and we cannot wait. Federal investments in seaports are an essential and effective utilization of limited resources, paying dividends through increased trade and commerce, long-term job creation, secure borders, military support, environmental stewardship, and more than $200 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue. Earlier this month, the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness made an urgent plea for improvements in the nation's transportation infrastructure, including landside and waterside access to seaports. We cannot wait.//
 * The Panama Canal expansion fundamentally changes trade**
 * Bridges 2011 –** Chairman of the Board of the American Association of Port Authorities and Executive Director of Virginia Port Authority (Jerry A., “Testimony of Jerry A. Bridges Chairman of the Board of the American Association of Port Authorities and Executive Director of Virginia Port Authority before the United States House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee Hearing: the Economic importance of Seaports: Is the United States Prepared for 21st Century Trade Realities?”, October 26, 2011, http://republicans.transportation.house.gov/Media/file/TestimonyWater/2011-10-26%20Bridges.pdf)//MM//

//**Two internal links – first is foreign customers**//

//**The plan is key to retain them**// //**Calhoun 11**-- President of Cargo Carriers (Cargill) and Chairman of Waterways Council, Inc (Rick, “DREDGING FOR PROSPERITY”, Marine Log, August, ProQuest, http://proxy.lib.umich.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/889143450?accountid=14667”) EL Just like the nation itself, our maritime industry is facing a multitude of challenges like flooding in the Midwest, silting of our major shipping arteries, and the need for recapitalization for our lock and dam infrastructure, to name a few. But these challenges and the solutions to them must be viewed as investments in the future of our nation itself because without a strong, reliable marine transportation industry, we cannot competitively sell our export products in the world marketplace. //Those ////countries ////that ////buy from America ////do so ////because we are ////a //simply //dependable ////supplier of products ////at a competitive price //, thanks in no small part to the existence of our enviable transportation system. If that system becomes compromised, those //foreign buyerswill ////simply ////shop elsewhere // and that will further impact the United States' precarious economic recovery. Witness the dredging situation on the Lower Mississippi River. This year, we have seen unprecedented levels of high water on the Mississippi River carrying millions of tons of silt and debris to the mouth of the River. This silting has resulted in restrictions being imposed for ships and vessels that rely on this passageway to export products to the world market, as well as import goods competitively, via ports in south Louisiana. In the past the Corps of Engineers has been able to manage silting issues with funding for dredging that sometimes required the reprogramming of funds to be sure shortfalls did not occur. This year the Corps has said it can no longer reprogram funds and that a funding shortfall indeed exists on this vital part of the system. Throughout this country's great history, the federal government's role is in part to ensure that the inland navigation system, including the Mississippi River, remains open to transport products such as grain, coal, steel, petroleum and aggregate materials. The federal government now needs to take necessary steps to provide funding for our national transportation asset and to allow the Lower Mississippi River to remain fully open for commerce. We urge the White House to immediately submit an emergency request for supplemental funds to Congress, and we ask that Congress expeditiously process that request for Emergency Supplemental Appropriations funding. All of us who are responsible for managing money have faced times when cutting costs have become necessary, yet those who are successful rarely focus on reducing costs if it results in an even greater loss in the revenue stream. Again, dredging this critical artery should be viewed as an investment, not a cost, in the future of our inland waterways transportation system.

Szakonyi 12 — associate editor of the Journal of Commerce (Mark, “The Hill Ramping Up Dredging Efforts”, Journal of Commerce, 5/7, ProQuest) EL The push by U.S. ports for more federal dredging dollars is finally beginning to make waves in Congress. Language that would require all funds collected through the Harbor Maintenance Tax to be used for navigation projects is likely to be included in the final surface transportation bill. That's a major breakthrough for maritime advocates who argue it's unfair that roughly one-third of the collected taxes are used to plug other budget gaps. The Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund collects roughly $1.5 billion annually from importers, who pay a rate of 0.125 percent of the value of their cargo. The HMTF is expected to have a surplus of nearly $7 billion by the end of fiscal 2013, according to the Association of American Port Authorities. The ports' argument that more money needs to be spent on dredging to create jobs and boost trade also is gaining traction on the front line of congressional funding allocations. Under the latest House energy and water appropriations bill, ports in fiscal 2013 would get $1 billion for maintenance dredging. That's the largest single annual federal award for dredging and about $170 million more than the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received last time around. "This is a significant development. It wasn't so long ago that (the corps) only received $750 million," said Paul Bea, principal of PHB Public Affairs, a maritime consulting firm. Ports will actually get //less ////dredging ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">help // in the next fiscal year than in fiscal 2012, however , said Barry Holliday, executive director of Dredging Contractors of America. Funding tied to military project dredging and disaster relief pushed total maintenance dollars to about $1.1 billion in fiscal 2012. The latest appropriation shows a congressional willingness to spend more, even if the full allocation of HMTF dollars would fall short in tackling port needs, Holliday said. The Realize America's Maritime Promise Act, or RAMP Act, has been the major driver in convincing Congress the HMTF needs reform and more spending is needed. The legislation was included in the House's 90-day extension, which paved the way for the chamber to begin conferencing with the Senate on the surface transportation bill. The Senate has similar but less forceful language in its two-year, $109 billion plan. This boosts the chances that HMTF reform language will make it in the final version of the transportation bill, but it's just the first step in blocking appropriators from shifting money out of the fund for non-dredging purposes. Even if the RAMP Act language is adopted, it's not a mandate. Supporters would have to call a point of order in appropriation committees to slap the hands of would-be siphoners, Bea said. Despite the positive signs for ports, **they are still stifled in getting authorization** and funding for //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">new // major navigation projects. Historically, the Water Resources Development Act has been the vehicle for ports to get authorization for such projects, and funding is granted separately through the annual appropriations process. The last WRDA was in 2007, and **there is no new version** on the horizon. Even if there were, it's unclear how it would proceed under the House's ban on earmarks and the Senate's similar stance. Not only do the earmarks allow legislators to include language relating to their home ports, but they also provide impetus for representatives and senators to back the bill. The //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">federal uncertainty //hits the East Coast particularly hard, because only a few ports have the funding and approval necessary to deepen their channels. Ports such as Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S.C, need deeper harbors to handle larger ships able to pass through the expanded Panama Canal in 2015. That supporters of Charleston and Savannah are preparing to take on the deepening expenses themselves reflects just how little optimism there is for federal help. Bea said maritime advocates and legislators are attempting to figure out how they can get projects funded and authorized in new ways. One such approach is by Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., to create a national assessment of which ports should be deepened. Plans to create a program for prioritization in authorization and funding come with their own set of problems, however, Holliday said. "When you start prioritizing ports, you begin picking winners and losers," he said. Aside from skepticism of the government's ability to discern champions from laggards, prioritization sidesteps the issue that //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">most ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">, if not all, ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">ports // need funding to maintain their infrastructure and grow. Such a prioritization process could dampen efforts to boost overall port spending. That could, unfortunately, fit too well with Congress's history of favoring easy short-term fixes over harder, more meaningful long-term decisions.
 * Uncertain commitment prevents projects – currents funds are not sufficient**


 * Second is light loading –**

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Port-relatedjobs are critical to //augment// <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">our economy //. Direct and indirect jobs generated by ports result in the employment of more than 8 million Americans who earned and spent $314.5 billion in 2006. Every $1 billion in exports alone creates an estimated 15, 000 new jobs. In Texas alone one in every four jobs is linked to trade. America´s deep-draft navigation system is at a crossroads, with a future that can be bright or bleak. Our waterways ´ ability to support the Nation?s continuing growth in trade and in the defense of our Nation, hinges on much-needed Federal attention to unresolved funding needs that are derailing critical channel maintenance and deep-draft construction projects of the water highways to our ports. Because most ports do not have naturally deep harbors, they must be regularly dredged to allow ships to move safely through Federal navigation channels. Also, as modern vessels increase in size, navigation channel depths must increase accordingly, if we are to continue to be a player on the international marketplace. A recent U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study reports that almost 30 percent of the 95, 550 vessel calls at U.S. ports are constrained due to inadequate channel depths. Ladies and gentlemen, these are the things that cause port directors nightmares. Without a channel dredged to its authorized depth //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">, nothing else comes into play //. Attracting new customers, dealing with labor issues, environmental concerns, and the public - all go away - because without a properly-dredged channel, business goes away. Public ports are at a critical state in keeping their channels open for business. We are losing existing business and potential new business to ports outside of the U nited S tates ? and once lost, it is rarely regained.// <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Dredging canliterallymake or break our industry //, and a lack of dredging is an issue throughout the U nited S tates. In fact, it is not an overstatement to say that in many parts of the United States, we face a dredging crisis. On the Great Lakes, as Chairman James L. Oberstar of this Committee and Chairman David R. Obey of the Appropriations Committee well know, decades of inadequate funding for dredging have left a backlog of 18 million cubic yards of sediment. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates removing the backlog will cost more than $230 million on the Great Lakes alone. In some cases, ports on the Great Lakes have actually shutdown due to inadequate dredging. There are similar examples of dredging problems in ports and harbors on all coasts of our Nation. In many cases, vessels must ?//<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">load light //? because of dredging shortfalls. The economic implications of light loading are enormous. On the Great Lakes, for example, **vessels lose** between 50 to **270 tons of cargo** for each inch they must reduce their draft a nd, in some areas, the lost draft is measured in feet, not inches. Light loading because of inadequate dredging impacts everyone. A ship that is light-loaded reduces its efficiencies in the same way that a commercial airplane that is required to set aside seats with no passengers would quickly lose its efficiencies. The Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund The Harbor Maintenance Tax and the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund were established in the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 1986. The Trust Fund (HMTF) applies a 0.125 percent ad valorem tax on the value of commercial cargo loaded or unloaded on vessels using Federally-maintained channels. The tax is only assessed on imports and domestic cargo, as it was ruled as an unconstitutional assessment on exports in a 1998 Supreme Court ruling. This Fund - that you, members of Congress - established, was authorized to be utilized to recover 100 percent of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers eligible Operations and Maintenance (O&M) expenditures for commercial navigation, along with 100 percent of the O&M cost of the St. Lawrence Seaway, certain costs of NOAA, and the costs to Customs to collect the tax. Fixing the Problem Ladies and gentleman - would it surprise you to know that this utilization has not been honored? HMTF revenues exceed transfers for authorized activities by an increasing margin. Yet, our Federal channels are not being maintained at authorized depths. The Fund is being held hostage to paper balance the budget - interestingly, not one of its legal uses. In 2007, the HMTF began with a $3.3 billion surplus and collected an additional $1.4 billion - resulting in a $4.7 billion surplus, while only $751 million was utilized for maintenance dredging. That is incredible. I would ask that you consider this analogy offered by my colleague in a Gulf Coast port: "What would you say to a toll booth operator who took your money to use the toll road only to then tell you that the road was unusable?"? That is what is happening to shippers who pay this tax every day. We must solve this problem. We must draft legislation that mandates that the Fund be utilized for its intended purpose - the maintenance dredging of Federal ports and harbors. There are a number of ways to address this problem. As you know, other modes of transportation - surface transportation and aviation ? have faced similar problems in the past decade. Although we are in the early stages of addressing this problem, our Coalition believes Congress should consider an approach similar to that taken with the Highway Trust Fund in 1998 and with the Airport and Airway Trust Fund in 2000. In those cases, Congress legislatively enacted "firewalls" around the Trust Funds ? essentially guaranteeing minimum levels of spending that could only be used to support eligible projects. Although there are some variations between the Highway, Aviation, and Harbor Maintenance Trust, the point of a firewall in each case is the same - ensuring that monies from a tax would be used for their intended purpose and not merely for deficit reduction.//
 * Lack of port deepening necessitates it – it will break the US shipping industry**
 * Weakley 8** – Realize America’s Maritime promise, Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund Fairness Coalition, testimony of James Weakley the president of the Lake Carriers’ Association (James, “Realize America’s Maritime Promise”, Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund Fairness Coalition, 4/30/08, http://www.ramphmtf.org/speeches_043008.html)//MM//

//**And, the plan is the key internal link to seaport competitiveness**// //**Kiefer et al, 2k** – principal investigator for Planning and Management Consultants– study authorized by Section 401 of the Water Resources Development Act of 1999, report to the US Army Corps of Engineers (Jack, Planning and Management Consultants, “The National Dredging Needs Study of Ports and Harbors Implications to Cost-Sharing of Federal Deep Draft Navigation Projects Due to Changes in the Maritime Industry”, May 2000, http://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/docs/iwrreports/00-R-8.pdf)// CB 2.2.2 Other Tangible Benefits Indirect benefits of Corps projects include gains associated with international trade.Historical expenditures for harbor improvements facilitate international trade by providing ships more efficient access to the Nation's ports. International trade in turn creates and sustains jobs and generates Federal tax revenues. The exact method of computing income and employment associated with international trade is debatable, but one of the best techniques is to calculate the value added by U.S. businesses and households to imports and exports. 5 Computations reveal that nearly 20 percent of all U.S. jobs are directly associated with international trade. A slightly higher percentage of personal income would be associated with international trade because such jobs pay somewhat more than the U.S. average. In addition, about $553 million were collected for the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund in 1999. Some benefits of harbor improvements are difficult or impossible to quantify. For individual projects these are given little attention. Policy decisions concerning project authorizations and appropriations should consider intangible benefits as well as tangible direct and secondary benefits. This idea is particularly applicable to international trade and specifically container trade. For example, America is such a big market, international trade gives the U.S. considerable leverage when dealing with foreign governments. Thus, international trade can enhance the United States’ role as a world leader. National harbors are also a vital part of our military’s power projection platform**.** Economists believe in the law of comparative advantage, which states that nations benefit when they specialize in producing certain goods and services and then trade with each other rather than producing everything themselves. For example, most people perceive that the majority of foreign trade consists of consumer goods such as clothing and televisions. However, as shown in Table 2-2, a significant portion of U.S. foreign trade consists of semi-manufactured commodities and raw materials such as iron and steel or crude petroleum. These products are used to produce other goods, or are further processed in the importing country. For example, in the United States imported car parts are often used to produce exports of finished automobiles. Machinery and electrical equipment are often used the same way. Thus, efficient flow of international commodities is important for all nations including the United States. Global trade is very competitive and profit margins are thin. This is particularly true for maritime transportation including the container shipping industry. . Growth in U.S. foreign trade, even though it is substantial, is not as high as growth in total international trade, particularly with respect to containerships. It is quite possible for some **U.S. trade to be diverted** or to be serviced by less efficient ships. This may occur if American ports and the Federal government are not able to meet current challenges posed by developments in international trade. 2.2.4 Lost Benefits There are lost benefits associated with delays in the construction of harbor improvement projects. Costs increase with delays, not only because of inflation but because the construction process becomes distorted by available funds. Costs associated with delays can and have been estimated. Typically, a year’s delay in schedule leads to a penalty of more than 10 percent of project cost. This is sizable and should be considered when making cost-sharing policies. Cost-sharing policies should seek to insure that both public ports and the Federal government fund projects in a timely manner. There are also benefits foregone due to lost transportation cost savings with project delays. Project delays affect the Nation in another way. Although these benefits are difficult to quantify, such effects are perhaps more important than those that can be measured. Delays create an uncertain atmosphere that can impact decisions to develop infrastructure elsewhere. Container ports are very capital intensive and require long term planning. Massive containerships are rapidly being put into service at ports throughout the world. Without a clear signal of intent to accommodate these vessels in the United States, necessary ports and facilities may be built elsewhere. Once major investments are made elsewhere, the full efficiencies of large containerships in the form of lower transportation costs for general cargo may be lost to the Nation for a long time to come. 2.3 Geographical Incidence of International Trade Public ports generally have a regional or local economic development mandate along with authorizations to improve harbor facilities. This does not mean, however, that local economies near ports capture all or most of the benefits associated with international trade. For example, when a port unloads crude petroleum from a ship, it charges a fee that generates revenues for the port and the local community. But imported oil also fuels cars and homes throughout the Nation. Likewise, when a port loads grain or coal onto a ship for export, farmers in the U.S. heartland benefit as do coal miners in the hills of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Container trade benefits all regions of the country as well. As shown in Table 2-3, fifteen U.S. ports account for about 80 percent of international maritime trade in terms of value. These ports represent only ten states, however much of the cargo they handle flows to other regions. Table 2-4 shows the origin and destination of international cargo for each U.S. state measured in terms of value. On average, any given state uses the services of 15 different ports around the country. For example, the California ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland collectively handle about $187 billion worth of cargo, but the state of California is the origin or destination of only $106 billion. While most container trade flows in and out of ports on the East and West Coasts, it is distributed throughout the Nation as shown in Tables 2-5 and 2-6. For instance, the Port of Charleston, S.C. handled about 800 thousand TEUs in 1996, but the state of South Carolina was the origin or destination of only 160 thousand of these TEUs. Similarly, the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland handled five million TEUs but only 2.5 million originated or were destined to sites within California. [table omitted] 2.4 Conclusion The benefits of harbor improvements are numerous. Expenditures for harbor improvements have facilitated international trade by providing ships more efficient access to the Nation's ports. International trade in turn creates and sustains jobs and generates Federal tax revenues. Foreign commerce has become crucial to the economic well-being of the United States. In 1946, U.S. international trade represented a relatively small portion of the U.S. economy, but today foreign trade accounts for 27 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Harbor improvements also affect prices of U.S. imports and exports. With deeper channels vessel operators can load more cargo onto a ship and sail deeper, or they can use larger more efficient vessels. Unit transportation costs decline and lower transportation costs are reflected in commodity prices. Intangible benefits are also important. Free trade promotes international relations and stability and bolsters the United States’ position as a world leader. Lastly, it is important to stress that the economic benefits of international trade are widespread and are not limited to a handful of coastal states.

It seems the U nited S tates willingly allows infrastructure to crumble as other countries – particularly the BRICs – bolster the physical support systems that foster economic growth. The American Association of Port Authorities is concerned over the state of America’s aged transportation infrastructure so it’s urging investments in both landside and waterside connections with ports. The burning question on the mind of many US lawmakers, administration officials and others is how best to stimulate the economy and spur job creation. The answer lies in focusing scarce federal resources in areas that will have the greatest impact on economic growth, immediate and long-term job creation, national security, and our current and future competitiveness in the global economy. Enhancements in seaport-related infrastructure should be a high priority among the limited investment options. For centuries, US seaports – and the connecting waterways – have served as a vital economic lifeline, bringing goods and services to people around the world and delivering prosperity to our nation. They facilitate trade and commerce, create jobs, secure our borders, support our military and serve as stewards of valuable coastal environmental resources. Seaports are the primary gateway for overseas trade. They’re essential to economic security. As such, federal funding for infrastructure in and around ports pays dividends. Deep-draft coastal and Great Lakes ports are the nexus of critical transportation infrastructure that connects America’s exporters with markets overseas, and they provide access for imports of raw materials, components and consumer goods that are a key part of US manufacturing and help define our standard of living. Investments in America’s port infrastructure and the intermodal connections that serve seaports – both land and waterside – foster prosperity and provide an opportunity to bolster the country’s economic and employment recovery. ECONOMIC IMPACT: HUGE Currently, international trade accounts for more than a quarter of America’s GDP (gross domestic product). Oceangoing vessels that load and unload cargo at US seaports move **99.4 percent** of the nation’s overseas trade by volume and 65.5 percent by value. Further, customs collections from seaport cargo provide tens of billions of dollars a year to the federal government, including $23.2 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2007, $24.1 billion in FY 2008, $20.3 billion in FY 2009 and $22.5 billion in FY 2010. The latest economic impacts analyses conducted in 2007 indicated that US seaport activities generated $3.15 trillion in annual economic output, with $3.8 billion worth of goods moving in and out of seaports every day. Impact extends far beyond seaport communities. On average, any given state uses the services of 15 different ports around the country to handle its imports and exports. Also, seaports are a proven job creator. In addition to handling international trade, US seaports – and the waterways that serve them – represent important transportation modes for the movement of domestic freight. Greater utilization of America’s coastal and inland water routes for freight transportation complements other surface transportation modes – providing a safe and secure alternative for cargo while offering significant energy savings and traffic congestion relief. VIEW FROM WATERSIDE As US investment in its waterways infrastructure is trending downward, countries like India, Brazil and the U nited K ingdom commit the equivalent of billions of US dollars to port and channel modernization. The expansion of the Panama Canal slated for completion in 2014 – the first major expansion in more than a century – is driving ports around the world to deepen navigation channels and improve harbor facilities. Look at what’s happening: India plans to invest $60 billion – including both public and private funds – to create seven new major ports by 2020. Expect this to have a substantial impact: It will handle the anticipated rapid expansion of merchandise exports, forecasted to triple by 2017. Brazil expects tonnage at its coastal ports to more than double (to 1.7 billion tons) by 2022. In response, the nation is committing $17 billion to port improvements (including $14 billion from the private sector). In Great Britain, DP World (the world’s fourth-largest marine terminal operator) plans to spend $2.5 billion on London’s Deep-Water Gateway, the country’s first such development in the last 20 years. Meanwhile, in the U nited S tates, public funding for new navigation channel improvements has all but dried up. Lawmakers focus on reducing the deficit and eliminating appropriation “earmarks” that have traditionally funded federal navigation deepening projects. At the same time, funding for projects already approved and underway is slow, incremental and insufficient. Insufficient appropriations make it impossible to maintain most federal navigation channels at their authorized and required dimensions. The US Army Corps of Engineers has been commissioned with the responsibility of improving and maintaining the nation’s water access to ports. But while this charge comes from the US government, the federal government is less than supportive. It spends only about half of the tax that it collects specifically directed toward deep-draft channel maintenance. The rest – more than $6 billion since 1986 – has essentially been “disappeared” into the US Treasury while serious dredging needs remain neglected. This is unfortunate at a crucial juncture. Projects to maintain these critical waterways would create jobs immediatelyand would provide transportation savings to benefit US businesses.With decreases in the cost of freight transportation, these sectors can enhance their global competitiveness and create more jobs. The American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) has continually and strongly urged Congress to take action to ensure that 100-percent of the annual amount collected from the Harbor Maintenance Tax (HMT) is utilized to maintain federal navigation channels.
 * Exports represent a quarter of our GDP – ports are key**
 * Nagle, 11** --- president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Port Authorities (December 2011, Kurt, Industry Today, “Association: American Association of Port Authorities; Port-Related Infrastructure Investments Can Reap Dividends,” vol. 14, no. 3, http://www.industrytoday.com/article_view.asp?ArticleID=F370)


 * We will isolate three impacts, first is growth –**

Economic decline triggers nuclear conflict **Harris and Burrows 9** ( Mathew, PhD European History at Cambridge, counselor in the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and Jennifer, member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis” http://www.ciaonet.org/journals/twq/v32i2/f_0016178_13952.pdf, AM) Increased Potential for Global Conflict Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive than ever. While we continue to believe that the Great Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from that period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on the sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to think that this would not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that reason, the ways in which the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem to be even more apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they would be if change would be steadier. In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in 2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established groups inheriting organizational structures, command and control processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks and newly emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that would become narrower in an economic downturn. The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S. military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security arrangements with external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity conflict and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states involved are not well established. The close proximity of potential nuclear rivals combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce inherent difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus on preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises. Types of conflict that the world continues to experience, such as over resources, could reemerge, particularly if protectionism grows and there is a resort to neo-mercantilist practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure their future access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical implications. Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval buildups and modernization efforts, such as China’s and India’s development of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus focus for these countries indeed turns inward, one of the most obvious funding targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions, rivalries, and counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a more dog-eat-dog world.

Almost as informative as the decline in warfare has been where this decline is occurring. Traditionally, nations were constrained by opportunity. Most nations did not fight most others because they could not physically do so. Powerful nations, in contrast, tended to fight more often, and particularly to fight with other powerful states. Modern “zones of peace” are dominated by powerful, militarily capable countries. These countries could fight each other, but are not inclined to do so. At the same time, weaker developing nations that continue to exercise force in traditional ways are incapable of projecting power against the developed world, with the exception of unconventional methods, such as terrorism. The world is thus divided between those who could use force but prefer not to (at least not against each other) and those who would be willing to fight but lack the material means to fight far from home. Warfare in the modern world has thus become an activity involving weak (usually neighboring) nations, with intervention by powerful (geographically distant) states in a policing capacity. So, the riddle of peace boils down to why capable nations are not fighting each other. There are several explanations, as Mack has pointed out. The easiest, and I think the best, explanation has to do with an absence of motive. Modern states find little incentive to bicker over tangible property, since armies are expensive and the goods that can be looted are no longer of considerable value. Ironically, this is exactly the explanation that Norman Angell famously supplied before the World Wars. Yet, today the evidence is abundant that **the most prosperous**, capable **nations prefer to buy rather than take.** Decolonization, for example, divested European powers of territories that were increasingly expensive to administer and which contained tangible assets of limited value. Of comparable importance is the move to substantial consensus among powerful nations about how international affairs should be conducted. The great rivalries of the twentieth century were ideological rather than territorial. These have been substantially resolved, as Francis Fukuyama has pointed out. The fact that remaining differences are moderate, while **the** **benefits of acting in concert** are large (**due to economic interdependence** in particular) **means that** **nations prefer to deliberate rather than fight** **.** Differences remain, but for the most part the capable countries of the world have been in consensus, while the disgruntled developing world is incapable of acting on respective nations’ dissatisfaction. While this version of events explains the partial peace bestowed on the developed world, it also poses challenges in terms of the future. The rising nations of Asia in particular have not been equal beneficiaries in the world political system. These nations have benefited from economic integration, and this has proved sufficient in the past to pacify them. The question for the future is whether the benefits of tangible resources through markets are sufficient to compensate the rising powers for their lack of influence in the policy sphere. The danger is that established powers may be slow to accommodate or give way to the demands of rising powers from Asia and elsewhere, leading to divisions over the intangible domain of policy and politics. Optimists argue that at the same time that these nations are rising in power, their domestic situations are evolving in a way that makes their interests more similar to the West. Consumerism, democracy, and a market orientation all help to draw the rising powers in as fellow travelers in an expanding zone of peace among the developed nations. Pessimists argue instead that capabilities among the rising powers are growing faster than their affinity for western values, or even that fundamental differences exist among the interests of first- and second-wave powers that cannot be bridged by the presence of market mechanisms or McDonald’s restaurants. If the **peace** observed among western, developed nations is to prove durable, it **must be because warfare proves futile as nations transition to prosperity.** Whether this will happen depends on the rate of change in interests and capabilities, a difficult thing to judge. We must hope that the optimistic view is correct, that what ended war in Europe can be exported globally. Prosperity has made war expensive, while the fruits of conflict, both in terms of tangible and intangible spoils have declined in value. These forces are not guaranteed to prevail indefinitely. Already, research on robotic warfare promises to lower the cost of conquest. If in addition, fundamental differences among capable communities arise, then warfare over ideology or policy can also be resurrected. We must all hope that the consolidating forces of prosperity prevail, that war becomes a durable anachronism.
 * Growth eliminates the only incentives for war**
 * Gartzke 11** – associate Professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego PhD from Iowa and B.A. from UCSF Erik, "SECURITY IN AN INSECURE WORLD" [|www.cato-unbound.org/2011/02/09/erik-gartzke/security-in-an-insecure-world/]


 * Second is hegemony –**

Today, economic and fiscal trends pose the most severe long-term threat to the U nited S tates’ position as global leader. While the United States suffers from fiscal imbalances and low economic growth, the economies of rival powers are developing rapidly. The continuation of these two trends could lead to a shift from American primacy toward a multi-polar global system, leading in turn to increased geopolitical rivalry and even war among the great powers. The current recession is the result of a deep financial crisis, not a mere fluctuation in the business cycle. Recovery is likely to be protracted. The crisis was preceded by the buildup over two decades of enormous amounts of debt throughout the U.S. economy — ultimately totaling almost 350 percent of GDP — and the development of credit-fueled asset bubbles, particularly in the housing sector. When the bubbles burst, huge amounts of wealth were destroyed, and unemployment rose to over 10 percent. The decline of tax revenues and massive countercyclical spending put the U.S. government on an unsustainable fiscal path. Publicly held national debt rose from 38 to over 60 percent of GDP in three years. Without faster economic growth and actions to reduce deficits, publicly held national debt is projected to reach dangerous proportions. If interest rates were to rise significantly, annual interest payments — which already are larger than the defense budget — would crowd out other spending or require substantial tax increases that would undercut economic growth. Even worse, if unanticipated events trigger what economists call a “sudden stop” in credit markets for U.S. debt, the U nited S tates would be unable to roll over its outstanding obligations,precipitating a sovereign-debt crisis that would almost certainly compel a radical retrenchment of the United States internationally. Such scenarios would reshape the international order. It was the economic devastation of Britain and France during World War II, as well as the rise of other powers, that led both countries to relinquish their empires. In the late 1960s, British leaders concluded that they lacked the economic capacity to maintain a presence “east of Suez.” Soviet economic weakness, which crystallized under Gorbachev, contributed to their decisions to withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and allow the Soviet Union to fragment. If the U.S. debt problem goes critical, the United States would be compelled to retrench, reducing its military spending and shedding international commitments. We face this domestic challenge while other major powers are experiencing rapid economic growth. Even though countries such as China, India, and Brazil have profound political, social, demographic, and economic problems, their economies are growing faster than ours, and this could alter the global distribution of power. These trends could in the long term produce a multi-polar world. If U.S. policymakers fail to act and other powers continue to grow, it is not a question of whether but when a new international order will emerge. The **closing** of **the gap** between the United States and its rivals **could intensify geopolitical competition among major powers**, increase incentives for local powers to play major powers against one another, and undercut our will to preclude or respond to international crises because of the higher risk of escalation. The stakes are high. In modern history, **the longest period of peace** among the great powers **has been the era of U.S. leadership**. By contrast, multi-polar systems have been unstable, with their competitive dynamics resulting in frequent crises and major wars among the great powers. Failures of multi-polar international systems produced both world wars. American retrenchment could have devastating consequences. Without an American security blanket, regional powers could rearm in an attempt to balance against emerging threats. Under this scenario, **there would be** a heightened possibility of **arms races, miscalc**ulation, **or** **other crises spiraling** **into** **all-out conflict**. Alternatively, in seeking to accommodate the stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their geopolitical posture away from the United States. Either way, hostile states would be emboldened to make aggressive moves in their regions. As rival powers rise, Asia in particular is likely to emerge as a zone of great-power competition. Beijing’s economic rise has enabled a dramatic military buildup focused on acquisitions of naval, cruise, and ballistic missiles, long-range stealth aircraft, and anti-satellite capabilities. China’s strategic modernization is aimed, ultimately, at denying the United States access to the seas around China. Even as cooperative economic ties in the region have grown, China’s expansive territorial claims — and provocative statements and actions following crises in Korea and incidents at sea — have roiled its relations with South Korea, Japan, India, and Southeast Asian states. Still, the United States is the most significant barrier facing Chinese hegemony and aggression.
 * Boosting economic competitiveness is vital to preventing military retrenchment – risks great power wars**
 * Khalilzad 11** – Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the UN and former director policy planning at the DOD (Zalmay, “The Economy and National Security”, National Review, 2-8-11, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/259024/economy-and-national-security-zalmay-khalilzad)

Events in Libya are a further reminder for Americans that we stand at a crossroads in our continuing evolution as the world's sole full-service superpower. Unfortunately, we are increasingly seeking change without cost, and shirking from risk because we are tired of the responsibility. We don't know who we are anymore, and our president is a big part of that problem. Instead of leading us, he explains to us. Barack Obama would have us believe that he is practicing strategic patience. But many experts and ordinary citizens alike have concluded that he is actually beset by strategic incoherence -- in effect, a man overmatched by the job. It is worth first examining the larger picture: We live in a time of arguably the greatest structural change in the global order yet endured, with this historical moment's most amazing feature being its relative and absolute lack of mass violence. That is something to consider when Americans contemplate military intervention in Libya, because if we do take the step to prevent larger-scale killing by engaging in some killing of our own, we will not be adding to some fantastically imagined global death count stemming from the ongoing "megalomania" and "evil" of American "empire." We'll be engaging in the same sort of system-administering activity that has marked our stunningly successful stewardship of global order since World War II. Let me be more blunt: As the guardian of globalization, the U.S. military has been the greatest force for peace the world has ever known. Had America been removed from the global dynamics that governed the 20th century, the mass murder never would have ended. Indeed, it's entirely conceivable there would now be no identifiable human civilization left, once nuclear weapons entered the killing equation. But the world did not keep sliding down that path of perpetual war. Instead, America stepped up and changed everything by ushering in our now-perpetual great-power peace. We introduced the international liberal trade order known as globalization and played loyal Leviathan over its spread. What resulted was the collapse of empires, an explosion of democracy, the persistent spread of human rights, the liberation of women, the doubling of life expectancy, a roughly 10-fold increase in adjusted global GDP and a profound and persistent reduction in battle deaths from state-based conflicts. That is what American "hubris" actually delivered. Please remember that the next time some TV pundit sells you the image of "unbridled" American military power as the cause of global disorder instead of its cure.With self-deprecation bordering on self-loathing, we now imagine a post-American world that is anything but. Just watch who scatters and who steps up asthe Facebook revolutionserupt across the Arab world. While we might imagine ourselves the status quo power, we remain the world's most vigorously revisionist force. As for the sheer "evil" that is our military-industrial complex, again, let's examine what the world looked like before that establishment reared its ugly head. The last great period of global structural change was the first half of the 20th century, a period that saw a death toll of about 100 million across **two world wars**. That comes to an average of 2 million deaths a year in a world of approximately 2 billion souls. Today, with far more comprehensive worldwide reporting, researchers report an average of less than 100,000 battle deaths annually in a world fast approaching 7 billion people. Though admittedly crude, these calculations suggest a 90 percent absolute drop and a 99 percent relative drop in deaths due to war.We are clearly headed for a world order characterized by multipolarity, something the American-birthed system was designed to both encourage and accommodate. But given how things turned out the last time we collectively faced such a fluid structure, we would do well to keep U.S. power, in all of its forms, deeply embedded in the geometry to come. To continue the historical survey, after salvaging Western Europe from its half-century of civil war, the U.S. emerged as the progenitor of a new, far more just form of globalization -- one based on actual free trade rather than colonialism. America then successfully replicated globalization further in East Asia over the second half of the 20th century, setting the stage for the Pacific Century now unfolding.As a result, the vector of structure-building connectivity shifted from trans-Atlantic to trans-Pacific. But if the connectivity push of the past several decades has been from West to East, with little connectivity extended to the South outside of the narrow trade of energy and raw materials, the current connectivity dynamic is dramatically different. Now, the dominant trends are: first, the East cross-connecting back to the West via financial and investment flows as well as Asian companies "going global"; and second, the East creating vast new connectivity networks with the South through South-South trade and investment. The challenge here is how to adjust great-power politics to these profound forces of structural change. Because of the West's connectivity to the East, we are by extension becoming more deeply connected to the unstable South, with China as the primary conduit. Meanwhile, America's self-exhausting post-Sept. 11 unilateralist bender triggered the illusion -- all the rage these days -- of a G-Zero, post-American world. The result, predictably enough for manic-depressive America, is that we've sworn off any overall responsibility for the South, even as we retain the right to go anywhere and kill any individuals -- preferably with flying robots -- that we deem immediately threatening to our narrowly defined national security interests. The problem with this approach is thatChina has neither the intention nor the abilityto step up and play anything resembling a responsible Leviathan over the restive South, where globalization's advance -- again, with a Chinese face -- produces a lot of near-term instability even as it builds the basis for longer-term stability. Libya is a perfect example of where the world is now stuck: America is very reticent to get involved militarily, while China, for the first time in its history, engages in long-range military operations to evacuate its workforce there. Meanwhile, the expanding civil war rages on, to everyone's moral and economic distress.The point is not that America must invade Libya pronto to keep the world as we know it from coming to an end. But if the United States and the West sit by while the Rest, risers that they are, manage nothing more than pious warnings about needlessly butting in, then we all run the risk of collectively making the post-American, G-Zero, do-nothing storyline a self-fulfilling prophecy. While that alone won't stop the world from spinning, if it persists as a pattern, globalization will slide down another path: one of regionalism, spheres of influence and neocolonial burdens that are intuitively hoarded by great powers grown increasingly suspicious of one another. And if you know your history, that should make you nervous.
 * Hegemony is the greatest force for peace**
 * Barnett 11** - chief analyst at Wikistrat, former visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee’s Howard Baker Center for Public Policy (Thomas, World Politics Review, “The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads,” 3/7, http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8099/the-new-rules-leadership-fatigue-puts-u-s-and-globalization-at-crossroads)

The downward spiral the United States has taken was anything but inevitable. Washington has always had a choice in how to approach grand strategy. One popular option among some libertarians is isolationism. This approach is based on the assumption that there is no region outside the Western Hemisphere that is strategically important enough to justify expending American blood and treasure. Isolationists believe that the United States is remarkably secure because it is separated from all of the world’s great powers by two giant moats—the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans— and on top of that it has had nuclear weapons—the ultimate deterrent—since 1945. But in truth, there is really no chance that Washington will adopt this policy, though the United States had strong isolationist tendencies until World War II. For since then, an internationalist activism, fostered by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation, has thoroughly delegitimized this approach. American policy makers have come to believe the country should be militarily involved on the world stage. Yet though no mainstream politician would dare advocate isolationism at this point, the rationale for this grand strategy shows just how safe the United States is. This means, among other things, that it will always be a challenge to motivate the U.S. public to want to run the world and especially to fight wars of choice in distant places. Offshore balancing, which was America’s traditional grand strategy for most of its history, is but another option. Predicated on the belief that there are three regions of the world that are strategically important to the United States—Europe, Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf—it sees the United States’ principle goal as making sure no country dominates any of these areas as it dominates the Western Hemisphere. This is to ensure that dangerous rivals in other regions are forced to concentrate their attention on great powers in their own backyards rather than be free to interfere in America’s. The best way to achieve that end is to rely on local powers to counter aspiring regional hegemons and otherwise keep U.S. military forces over the horizon. But if that proves impossible, American troops come from offshore to help do the job, and then leave once the potential hegemon is checked. Selective engagement also assumes that Europe, Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf are the only areas of the world where the United States should be willing to deploy its military might. It is a more ambitious strategy than offshore balancing in that it calls for permanently stationing U.S. troops in those regions to help maintain peace. For selective engagers, it is not enough just to thwart aspiring hegemons. It is also necessary to prevent war in those key regions, either because upheaval will damage our economy or because we will eventually get dragged into the fight in any case. An American presence is also said to be valuable for limiting nuclear proliferation. But none of these strategies call for Washington to spread democracy around the globe—especially through war. The root cause of America’s troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">rejected all these other avenues //**,** instead **pursuing global dominance**, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda. Global dominance has two broad objectives: maintaining American primacy, which means making sure that the United States remains the most powerful state in the international system; and spreading democracy across the globe, in effect, making the world over in America’s image. The underlying belief is that new liberal democracies will be peacefully inclined and pro-American, so the more the better. Of course, this means that Washington must care a lot about every country’s politics. With global dominance, no serious attempt is made to prioritize U.S. interests, because they are virtually limitless. This grand strategy is “imperial” at its core; its proponents believe that the United States has the right as well as the responsibility to interfere in the politics of other countries. One would think that such arrogance might alienate other states, but most American policy makers of the early nineties and beyond were confident that would not happen, instead believing that other countries—save for so-called rogue states like Iran and North Korea—would see the United States as a benign hegemon serving their own interests.
 * And, the US will never accept anything less than total domination**
 * Mearsheimer 11** – John J. Mearsheimer, the “R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago” Jan/Feb 2011 “Imperial By Design” http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0059.pdf


 * Third is protectionism –**

In the postwar period, US power and prestige, beyond the nation's military might, have been based largely on American relative economic size and success. These facts enabled the US to promote economic openness and buy-in to a set of economic institutions, formal and informal, that resulted in increasing international economic integration. With the exception of the immediate post-Bretton Woods oil-shock period (1974-85), this combination produced generally growing prosperity at home and abroad, and underpinned the idea that there were benefits to other countries of following the American model and playing by American rules. Initially this system was most influential and successful in those countries in tight military alliance with the US, such as Canada, West Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. With the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989, and the concomitant switch of important emerging economies, notably Brazil, China, India, and Mexico, to increasingly free-market capitalism, global integration on American terms through American leadership has been increasingly dominant for the last two decades. The global financial crisis of 2008-09, however, represents a challenge to that world order. While overt financial panic has been averted, and most economic forecasts are for recovery to begin in the US and the major emerging markets well before end of 2009 (a belief I share), there remain significant risks for the US and its leadership. The global financial system, including but not limited to US-based entities, has not yet been sustainably reformed. In fact, financial stability will come under strain again when the current government financial guarantees and public ownership of financial firms and assets are unwound over the next couple of years. The growth rate of the US economy and the ability of the US government to finance responses to future crises, both military and economic, will be meaningfully curtailed for several years to come. Furthermore, the crisis will accelerate at least temporarily two related long-term trends eroding the viability of the current international economic arrangements. First, perhaps inevitably, the economic size and importance of China, India, Brazil, and other emerging markets (including oil-exporters like Russia) has been catching up with the US, and even more so with demographically and productivity challenged Europe and northeast Asia. Second, pressure has been building over the past fifteen years or so of these developing countries' economic rise to give their governments more voice and weight in international economic decision-making. Again, this implies a transfer of relative voting share from the US, but an even greater one from over-represented Western Europe. The near certainty that Brazil, China, and India, are to be less harmed in real economic terms by the current crisis than either the US or most other advanced economies will only emphasise their growing strength, and their ability to claim a role in leadership. The need for capital transfers from China and oil-exporters to fund deficits and bank recapitalisation throughout the West, not just in the US, increases these rising countries' leverage and legitimacy in international economic discussions. One aspect of this particular crisis is that American economic policymakers, both Democratic and Republican, became increasingly infatuated with financial services and innovation beginning in the mid-1990s. This reflected a number of factors, some ideological, some institutional, and some interest group driven. The key point here is that export of financial services and promotion of financial liberalisation on the US securitised model abroad came to dominate the US international economic policy agenda, and thus that of the IMF, the OECD, and the G8 as well. This came to be embodied by American multinational commercial and investment banks, in perception and in practice. That particular version of the American economic model has been widely discredited, because of the crisis' apparent origins in US lax regulation and over-consumption, as well as in excessive faith in American-style financial markets. Thus, American global economic leadership has been eroded over the long-term by the rise of major emerging market economies, disrupted in the short-term by the nature and scope of the financial crisis, and partially discredited by the excessive reliance upon and overselling of US-led financial capitalism. This crisis therefore presents the possibility of the US model for economic development being displaced, not only deservedly tarnished, and the US having limited resources in the near-term to try to respond to that challenge. Additionally, the US' traditional allies and co-capitalists in Western Europe and Northeast Asia have been at least as damaged economically by the crisis (though less damaged reputationally). Is there an alternative economic model? The preceding description would seem to confirm the rise of the Rest over the West. That would be premature. The empirical record is that economic recovery from financial crises, while painful, is doable even by the poorest countries, and in advanced countries rarely leads to significant political dislocation. Even large fiscal debt burdens can be reined in over a few years where political will and institutions allow, and the US has historically fit in that category. A few years of slower growth will be costly, but also may put the US back on a sustainable growth path in terms of savings versus consumption. Though the relative rise of the major emerging markets will be accelerated by the crisis, that acceleration will be insufficient to rapidly close the gap with the US in size, let alone in technology and well-being. None of those countries, except perhaps for China, can think in terms of rivaling the US in all the aspects of national power. These would include: a large, dynamic and open economy; favorable demographic dynamics; monetary stability and a currency with a global role; an ability to project hard power abroad; and an attractive economic model to export for wide emulation. This last point is key. In the area of alternative economic models, one cannot beat something with nothing - communism fell not just because of its internal contradictions, or the costly military build-up, but because capitalism presented a clearly superior alternative. The Chinese model is in part the American capitalist (albeit not high church financial liberalisation) model, and is in part mercantilism. There has been concern that some developing or small countries could take the lesson from China that building up lots of hard currency reserves through undervaluation and export orientation is smart. That would erode globalisation, and lead to greater conflict with and criticism of the US-led system. While in the abstract that is a concern, most emerging markets - and notably Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa, and South Korea - are not pursuing that extreme line. The recent victory of the incumbent Congress Party in India is one indication, and the statements about openness of Brazilian President Lula is another. Mexico's continued orientation towards NAFTA while seeking other investment flows (outside petroleum sector, admittedly) to and from abroad is a particularly brave example. Germany's and Japan's obvious crisis-prompted difficulties emerging from their very high export dependence, despite their being wealthy, serve as cautionary examples on the other side. So unlike in the1970s, the last time that the US economic performance and leadership were seriously compromised, we will not see leading developing economies like Brazil and India going down the import substitution or other self-destructive and uncooperative paths. If this assessment is correct, the policy challenge is to deal with relative US economic decline, but not outright hostility to the US model or displacement of the current international economic system. That is reassuring, for it leaves us in the realm of normal economic diplomacy, perhaps to be pursued more multilaterally and less high-handedly than the US has done over the past 20 years. It also suggests that adjustment of current international economic institutions is all that is required, rather than desperately defending economic globalisation itself. For all of that reassurance, however, the need to get buy-in from the rising new players to the current system is more pressing on the economic front than it ever has been before. Due to the crisis, the ability of the US and the other advanced industrial democracies to put up money and markets for rewards and side-payments to those new players is also more limited than it has been in the past, and will remain so for at least the next few years. The need for the US to avoid excessive domestic self-absorption is a real concern as well, given the combination of foreign policy fatigue from the Bush foreign policy agenda and economic insecurity from the financial crisis. Managing the post-crisis global economy Thus, the US faces a challenging but not truly threatening global economic situation as a result of the crisis and longer-term financial trends. Failure to act affirmatively to manage the situation, however, bears two significant and related risks: first, that China and perhaps some other rising economic powers will opportunistically divert countries in US-oriented integrated relationships to their economic sphere(s); second, that a leadership vacuum will arise in international financial affairs and in multilateral trade efforts, which will over time erode support for a globally integrated economy. Both of these risks if realised would diminish US foreign policy influence, make the economic system less resilient in response to future shocks (to every country's detriment), reduce economic growth and thus the rate of reduction in global poverty, and conflict with other foreign policy goals like controlling climate change or managing migration and demographic shifts. If the US is to rise to the challenge, it should concentrate on the following priority measures.
 * Competitiveness is key to promoting an American economic model – the alternative is mercantilism which destroys cooperation and creates protectionism**
 * Posen 9** – Deputy director and senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Adam, “Economic leadership beyond the crisis,” http://clients.squareeye.com/uploads/foresight/documents/PN%20USA_FINAL_LR_1.pdf)

Continuing calls for curbs on the flow of finance and trade will inspire the U nited S tates and other nations to spew forth protectionist legislation like the notorious Smoot-Hawley bill. Introduced at the start of the Great Depression, it triggered a series of tit-for-tat economic responses, which many commentators believe helped turn a serious economic downturn into a prolonged and devastating global disaster. But if history is any guide, those lessons will have been long forgotten during the next collapse. Eventually, fed by a mood of desperation and growing public anger, restrictions on trade, finance, investment, and immigration will almost certainly intensify. Authorities and ordinary citizens will likely scrutinize the cross-border movement of Americans and outsiders alike, and lawmakers may even call for a general crackdown on nonessential travel. Meanwhile, many nations will make transporting or sending funds to other countries exceedingly difficult. As desperate officials try to limit the fallout from decades of ill-conceived, corrupt, and reckless policies, they will introduce controls on foreign exchange. Foreign individuals and companies seeking to acquire certain American infrastructure assets, or trying to buy property and other assets on the cheap thanks to a rapidly depreciating dollar, will be stymied by limits on investment by noncitizens. Those efforts will cause spasms to ripple across economies and markets, disrupting global payment, settlement, and clearing mechanisms. All of this will, of course, continue to undermine business confidence and consumer spending. In a world of lockouts and lockdowns, any link that transmits systemic financial pressures across markets through arbitrage or portfolio-based risk management, or that allows diseases to be easily spread from one country to the next by tourists and wildlife, or that otherwise facilitates unwelcome exchanges of any kind will be viewed with suspicion and dealt with accordingly. The rise in isolationism and protectionism will bring about ever more heated arguments and dangerous confrontations over shared sources of oil, gas, and other key commodities as well as factors of production that must, out of necessity, be acquired from less-than-friendly nations. Whether involving raw materials used in strategic industries or basic necessities such as food, water, and energy, efforts to secure adequate supplies will take increasing precedence in a world where demand seems constantly out of kilter with supply. Disputes over the misuse, overuse, and pollution of the environment and natural resources will become more commonplace. Around the world, such tensions will give rise to //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">full-scale military encounters, // often with minimal provocation. In some instances, economic conditions will serve as a convenient pretext for conflicts that stem from cultural and religious differences. Alternatively, nations may look to divert attention away from domestic problems by channeling frustration and populist sentiment toward other countries and cultures. Enabled by cheap technology and the waning threat of American retribution, terrorist groups will likely boost the frequency and scale of their horrifying attacks, bringing the threat of random violence to a whole new level. Turbulent conditions will encourage aggressive saber rattling and interdictions by rogue nations running amok. Age-old clashes will also take on a new, more heated sense of urgency. China will likely assume an increasingly belligerent posture toward Taiwan, while Iran may embark on overt coloniz ation of its neighbors in the Mideast. Israel, for its part, may look to draw a dwindling list of allies from around the world into a growing number of conflicts. Some observers, like John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, have even speculated that an “intense confrontation” between the United States and China is “inevitable” at some point. More than a few disputes will turn out to be almost wholly ideological. Growing cultural and religious differences will be transformed from wars of words to battles //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">soaked in blood //. Long-simmering resentments could also degenerate quickly, spurring the basest of human instincts and triggering genocidal acts. Terrorists employing biological or nuclear weapons will vie with conventional forces using jets, cruise missiles, and bunker-busting bombs to cause widespread destruction. Many will interpret stepped-up conflicts between Muslims and Western societies as the beginnings of a new world war.
 * Protectionism causes terrorism and global wars**
 * Panzner 8** – faculty at the New York Institute of Finance, 25-year veteran of the global stock, bond, and currency markets who has worked in New York and London for HSBC, Soros Funds, ABN Amro, Dresdner Bank, and JPMorgan Chase (Michael, “Financial Armageddon: Protect Your Future from Economic Collapse,” p. 136-138)

Second, thetrade policy credibility of the UnitedStateswilltotallyevaporate if it sits on the sidelinesfor the next four years—the minimum result of a failure to win new negotiating authority. The United States led the agreement of the 34 democracies in the Western Hemisphere to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The United States turned the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), whose 18 members comprise half the world economy, into a substantive organisation by initiating annual summit meetings in 1993 and supporting its agreement to achieve “free and open trade and investment” by 2010 (for its industrialised members ) and 2020 (for the rest). The United States insisted that the World Trade Organisation agree to resume negotiations on agriculture, services and other central issues by 2000. American withdrawal from these initiatives would doom them all, threatening a reversal into protectionism. Third,American leadership has been crucial in assuringthecompatibility, indeed the complimentarity,of regional and global liberalisation. Some purists have condemned the United States for deviating from the exclusive pursuit of multilateral agreements.ButAmerican strategy has promoted regional arrangements(starting with its pact with Canada and extending through NAFTA to the current FTAA and APEC initiatives)partlyto press the more inward-looking EU and others to move ahead on the global path. Now that so many regional arrangements are in place or underway,**America's defection could throw the whole process into reverse.** Key groups—the EU, Mercosur and perhaps some new Asian groupings—could forget the global track and bring to life the much feared nightmare of a world of hostile trade blocs. Fourth, American trade policy itself could suffer irreparable harm from a failure of the current legislative effort. The United States is in its seventh year of expansion with unemployment and inflation at their lowest in decades. Its chief competitors in Europe and Japan remain mired in prolonged slumps. President Clinton was decisively re-elected a year ago and remains extremely popular. If the United States cannot pursue trade liberalisation now, when will it ever be able to? A failure, or a severe limitation on the use of new authority (e.g., to add only Chile to NAFTA), would represent a stunning victory for organised labor and others that oppose globalisation. Such a victory would be led by Congressman Richard Gephardt, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, and a likely presidential candidate in 2000. The United States has not had a protectionist President for a century (though Ronald Reagan's wrong-headed macroeconomic policies produced a spate of new import quotas) but such an outcome is by no means impossible if the present debate were to misfire. The countries that have taken out insurance policies against a US reversion to protectionism via free trade agreements, Canada and Mexico, have not idly overcome their historical aversions to getting into bed with their superpower neighbor. The Global Impact Would all this be so serious for the rest of the world?After all, the United States is no longer hegemonic in economic terms. Its share of world output has dropped below a quarter and its share of trade is even less. The EU is larger on both counts and the creation of the euro will end America's monetary dominance. Moreover, globalisation has enormous momentum. Big trade agreements have been proceeding without America. The EU brokered an interim financial services agreement in 1995 when America chose to stay out, is expanding its membership and heading toward mostly free trade with its Mediterranean neighbors by 2010, and is pursuing agreements with Mercosur and Mexico. Subregional pacts such as Mercosur and the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement are moving ahead. Canada and Mexico have concluded their own free trade agreements with Chile. All these deals hurt the United States, by creating or threatening discrimination against it,—but this is nothing more than turnabout for America's own preferential compacts.The global problem is that American disengagement wouldpuncture, and probablydestroy, the prospects for consummating the extraordinarily promising scenario for world trade that has evolved since the end of the Uruguay Round and is now poised to proceed. That scenario has two related elements. The first is credible implementation of the two huge regional free trade agreementslaunched in 1994,the FTAA and APEC. Their conversion from political pledges to practical realities would provide huge new reductions of trade barriers. It would also bring irresistible pressure on the EU and others to avoid the risk of facing costly discrimination by joining a new global liberalisation initiative. APEC is particularly crucial to this strategy. Because of it's size, its pledge in 1994 to achieve free trade in the region is potentially the most far-reaching economic agreement in history. At the same time, its devotion to “open regionalism” means that it will offer to extend its liberalisation to non-members. The EU has always said that “it will not be left behind if APEC does what it says it will do,” as was indeed the case with the Information Technology Agreement (ITA) a year ago. APEC thus dramatically magnifies America's own effort to continue reducing global barriers. The second element in the global scenario would then be a major new effort in the WTO, perhaps the “Millennium Round” called for by Sir Leon Brittan or at least a simultaneous “round-up” of key issues as proposed by my colleague Jeffrey Schott. As in the past, rounds or round-ups that include a number of issues and sectors will be needed to meet the diverse interests of the full WTO membership and permit the necessary tradeoffs across topics that produce far-reaching liberalisation. It is true that the ITA and the telecommunications agreement represented victories for the sectoral approach but talks on maritime services collapsed and the outcome of the current renewed effort on financial services is unclear. A broader approach will almost certainly be required to provide substantial global progress. Once all the regional arrangements are on their way to being realised, about two-thirds of world trade will in fact have achieved, or be headed toward, barrier-free status. The WTO membership would then recognise that global free trade was a practical reality and guide the next round(s) by setting an explicit goal of reaching that milestone—perhaps by 2010 on the APEC and Euromed models. The WTO's director-general Renato Ruggiero, the Canadian government, and the declaration of the WTO's ministerial conference in Singapore last December have all already endorsed variants of that prospect. In addition, this scenario would decisively counter the risk that the regional pacts will become sources of new international conflict. Mr. Ruggiero has put it nicely: regionalism will undoubtedly continue to proliferate so the issue is whether the groupings go off on their own, with possibly disastrous consequences, or increasingly fuse into a common global context that eventually wipes out their preferential features. The latter outcome is obviously superior but the chances of reaching it would be severely jeopardised by a prolonged period of American inaction. There would be even bigger cost to the world from a failureof the Clinton fast-track effort:an enormous boost to the backlash against globalisation. Such a backlash is evident almost everywhere, from striking workers in France to the tirades of Malaysia's prime minister against international investors. There is some justice in the complaints. On balance, globalisation is clearly good for every country, but many governments have been slow to erect the necessary domestic complements. Without adequate safety nets to cushion adjustment burdens, and worker training that will convert potential losers into winners who can take advantage of the better jobs and higher wages that become available, political support for globalisation may be impossible to sustain. In this environment,victory for the anti-globalisation forcesin the United Statescould have terrible global consequences. Defensive reactions would surface almost immediately, especially in the Asian and Latin American countries that dependmostheavily on the American market. China, Russia and others could lose interest in further liberalisation and joining the WTO.A half century of global economic opening could stall or even be thrown into reverse. The broader international credibility of the UnitedStateswouldof coursesuffer severelyas well,with substantial implications forinternational politics and even global security. It would be impossible for America to withdraw from such a central component of international affairs, or indeed repudiate initiatives undertaken with great fanfare by its own president and his predecessors, without jolting confidence in its staying power in other respects.
 * And independently, a collapse of US trade leadership causes trade blocs creating multiple scenarios for global conflict**
 * Bergsten 97**– Peterson Institute for International Economics (Fred C., “Global Trade and American Politics”, September 27, 1997, The Economist,http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/print.cfm?doc=pub&ResearchID=291)

= 1ac – solvency =


 * Contention three is solvency**

//<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">With increasingly larger ships calling the East Coast, it is now more crucial than ever for the United States to invest in its gateway infrastructure. This call for federal investment should come as no surprise. Improving our nation’s waterways for navigation and security harkens back to the birth of our country, when General George Washington assigned such missions to the Continental Army. [7] <span class="Underline" style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">In the U.S. Constitution, Congress is charged with the task of regulating commerce <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> in Article I, Section 8. <span class="Underline" style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Yet, the full authorized depths and widths of U.S. waterway navigation channels are available only 35 percent of the time. <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> [8] Harbor projects take an average of 12 years to complete. <span class="Underline" style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The Corps’ cumbersome review procedures are not consistent with the President’s initiative to reduce red tape and streamline preconstruction federal review procedures for major infrastructure “jobs creating” projects <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. The President’s Aug. 31 directive to five federal agencies <span style="font-family: 'Cambria Math',serif;">‐ <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Agriculture, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Interior and Transportation <span style="font-family: 'Cambria Math',serif;">‐ <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">called for identification of high priority infrastructure projects for expedited review. This expedited review initiative should be extended to the Army Corps. Additionally, Independent Peer Review – a procedure required by Sec. 2034 of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2007 – should not be applied to Corps studies begun prior to the two year period preceding enactment of the law, as expressly stated in Sec. 2034 (h). //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Because of procedural delay, //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> most East Coast ports //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">are not authorized //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> to dredge to deep <span style="font-family: 'Cambria Math',serif;">‐ <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">draftrequirements. <span class="Underline" style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Harbor project sponsors attempt to wade through the muddied and shifting approval, authorization and appropriation process, and changing requirements are making it increasingly difficult to move forward with these critical projects <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. In Jacksonville, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently added an additional level of review by requiring “Harbor Sym modeling” for our city’s deep draft navigation project. This new requirement has not been applied to previous deep draft projects, will increase costs to the federal government and the Jacksonville Port Authority, and will extend the timeline for completion of the project by one year. Any business leader assessing the current situation would quickly determine <span class="Underline" style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">our country’s process for prioritizing, approving and funding critical infrastructure projects is //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">fundamentally broken //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">. //
 * Federal regulations prevent other actors – only federal action to streamline the process and increase funding solves**
 * Anderson, 11** –Chief Executive Officer of the Jacksonville Port Authority (JAXPORT) (A. Paul, “testimony of A. Paul Anderson Chief Executive Officer of the Jacksonville Port Authority (JAXPORT) for the Record of the united States House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Subcommittee on Water Resources and the Environment Hearing: “The Economic Importance of Seaports: Is the United States Prepared for 21st Century Trade Realities?””, October 26, 2011, http://republicans.transportation.house.gov/Media/file/TestimonyWater/2011-10-26%20Anderson.pdf)//MM//

//**Projects will take decades without federal expedition**// //**Nagle, 2012**- President and CEO of the American Association of Port Authorities (Kurt J., “Testimony of Kurt J. Nagle President and CEO of the American Association of Port Authorities Before the United States House of Representatives Appropriations Committee Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies Subommittee”, Budget Hearing- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Assistant Secretary, Chief of Engineers, March 7, 2012, http://aapa.files.cms-plus.com/PDFs/EWTestimony%20Mar2012%20Final.pdf)//MM First, the funding level of the Corps of Engineers’ new construction budget has decreased considerably, with the President’s current request at a level that is less than half of what we have seen historically. This decrease comes despite the challenges noted above, the need to be able to handle the current and future World fleet, the expansion of the Panama Canal, our new trade agreements, and America’s international competitiveness. Our neighbors and competitors are not waiting. We must make this a higher priority to avoid negative consequences resulting in job loss, worsening road congestion, and less competitive exports. Some may suggest that we should concentrate federal investment in just a few ports, but we must take a closer look at the diversity of port cargo and the impact of only deepening a few ports. Often a container port doesn’t handle significant bulk cargo, dangerous cargo or refrigerated cargo. Additionally, often smaller ports are located near key U.S. manufacturers to aid in their imports and exports. Each of our 50 states relies on about 15 seaports to handle its imports and exports. Concentrating port activity to a smaller geographic area will result in increased transportation costs and more congestion on roads and rails. Total throughput should not be the only calculation in determining federal investment. The second troubling trend that impacts our ability to be ready for the challenges of the future is the time it takes to complete new projects. Ports are growing increasingly wary of the time it takes to complete a project. //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">The new norm is decades, with costs rising with each delay //. There are a multitude of reasons for these delays, including a //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">long, slow approval process //, lack of funding which results in small amounts of funding for each project, and lack of resources to maintain expertise at the Corps. We must make port modernization a higher priority in our future funding. Maritime movement of cargo is the most cost-effective way to move cargo, and we should be encouraging this through effective federal project development processes, investments and funding .5 As our nation recovers from its economic troubles, we know that cargo growth will expand as well. As our nation invests in infrastructure, we must ensure that ports and their needs are high on the list. We are in a critical time for our nation. We face enormous challenges, and ports are making the necessary investments to build and maintain a world-class maritime transportation system which support U.S. jobs, our global competitiveness, and our economy. We need our federal partner to make that commitment, too. We urge your subcommittee to serve as advocates for waterside port infrastructure so that we can meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

// There are several actions the U.S. Government can take to improve the competitiveness of U.S. ports. The full expenditure of the amounts in the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund HMTF is of primary concern to U.S. ports. As ships become larger it is imperative that U.S. ports are dredged to their authorized depth. The HMTF has a 6 billion surplus yet there are many ports that are functioning with shallow and narrow channels that are in dire need of dredging to service their current customer base. Additionally the federal government needs to find a way to expedite the review approval and eventual funding of projects to deepen federal channels. Without an expedited process many ports will no longer be able to handle the larger ships that are now operating in all trade lanes .//
 * And, expedition solves**
 * Leone, 11** – Port Director of the Massachusetts Port Authority (Michael, Letter to the Federal Maritime Commission, 12/21, http://www.fmc.gov/assets/1/Documents/11-19-comments%20of%20Massachusetts%20Port%20Authority%20(MassPort).pdf)//DH//

//**<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;">The federal government is key – port infrastructure is under federal jurisdiction and federal action is vital to leadership **// //**AAPA, 11** - AAPA represents 160 of the leading seaport authorities in the United States, Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean and more than 300 sustaining and associate members, firms and individuals with an interest in seaports (American Association of Port Authorities, “The U.S. Government’s Historic Role in Developing and Maintaining Landside and Waterside Connections to Seaports”, March 2011, http://aapa.files.cms-plus.com/PDFs/Transportation%20and%20the%20Constitution1.pdf)//GP Over time these constitutional responsibilities have been further defined and our Constitution has formed the basis for the U.S. government to play a significant role in our nation’s transportation and infrastructure system. As established in the timeline on page 2, over the years the leaders of our country saw that it was in the national interest to ensure that our ports, waterways, railways and highways benefited from federal oversight and support. For four centuries, beginning with the founding of the Jamestown colony, seaports have served as a vital economic lifeline for America by bringing goods and services to people, creating economic activity and enhancing the overall quality of life. Seaports continue to be the critical link for access to the global marketplace here in the United States handling more than 99 percent of cargoes. Maintaining our national infrastructure that supports foreign and interstate commerce is not only a federal responsibility but is in the national interest as established by our forefathers. In fact, improving waterways and coastal ports for navigation and national security is the most federal of infrastructure responsibilities, dating to the early missions assigned the Continental Army by then General George Washington. In Federalist Paper #42 written by James Madison, a case is made that the powers conferred by the Constitution for regulating commerce and establishing post roads are essential. He wrote: “Nothing which tends to facilitate the intercourse between the States can be deemed unworthy of the public care.” Back to Basics In these times of a tightening Federal Budget, as Congress and the Administration take on the task of prioritizing expenditures, we need to identify and prioritize core federal missions that are in the national interest and help to revitalize our economy. Modern, navigable seaports are vitalto international commerce and economic prosperity. For this to be a reality, Federal government investment is needed to maintain and strengthen our nation’s infrastructure that supports foreign and interstate commerce— the underpinnings of our economic security. These are wise investments that pay dividends immediately and over time, and form the backbone of our economy and society at large. Investments in port infrastructure are multipliers, as they create infrastructure that allows long-term job creation, //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">positioning ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">the U ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">nited ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">S ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">tates ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">as a leader // in international trade and commerce. Waterways Pursuant to Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, Congress, by statute, has reserved jurisdiction over navigable waters for the federal government, which can determine how the waters are used, by whom, and under what conditions. As a result, the federal government takes the lead in building, maintaining, and operating the nation’s navigation channels. Authority to construct and maintain navigation projects on behalf of the United States was granted to the Corps of Engineers in the General Survey Act of 1824. In 1826, Congress passed the first Rivers and Harbors Act and provided funds to the Corps to make specific navigation improvements to the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers. Congress has continued to appropriate funds for specific navigation projects and the Corps has played a dual role by assessing, as well as implementing, needed projects in federal navigation channels. In 1899, Congress enacted the Rivers and Harbors Act, which makes it unlawful to undertake any modifications of navigable water channels unless authorized by the Secretary of the Army on the recommendation of the Corps of Engineers. It is well established that the Commerce Clause is the basis for //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">exclusive federal jurisdiction // over navigable waterways. The landmark United States Supreme Court case of Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824) found that navigation of vessels in and out of the ports of the nation is a form of interstate commerce and that //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">federal law takes precedence //. Federal authority over navigable waterways has been repeatedly affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Highways and Intermodal Connectors With interstate commerce and connectivity as the impetus, the federal role in ensuring a contiguous system of roads spanning the states has been implicit in our federal government since the writing of the Constitution. These powers were granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution by the clauses describing the regulation of commerce with foreign nations and among the several states …” and the responsibility “to establish Post Offices and Post Roads.” As the timeline illustrates, since the founding of this great nation, our most visionary leaders have engaged in national infrastructure initiatives. The highway system as we know it today was largely borne out of the 1939 Bureau of Public Roads report commissioned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt titled Toll Roads and Free Roads, which proposed a map of a transcontinental national superhighway system. This led to President Eisenhower’s Federal-Aid Highway of 1956 and subsequent development of the Interstate System. Without the federal role in planning, coordinating and providing funding, our current system of inter-regional highways would not have been possible. Today, this federal responsibility continues through the surface transportation programs funded largely by federal gas taxes. Highways, arterials and secondary roads that are identified as being important to the nation's economy, defense, and mobility are classified as part of the National Highway System (NHS) and are eligible for federal funds through the federal-aid program. Road infrastructure that accesses major intermodal terminals, including seaports, are designated NHS connectors by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). While accounting for less than one percent of total NHS mileage, this important infrastructure represents a critical link in the goods movement value chain, carrying truck traffic between transportation modes and to the broader network of the interstate system. According to the Federal Highway Administration, of the 616 total defined NHS intermodal connectors, 253 are connected to ocean and river ports. Of the 1,222 total miles defined as part of the NHS intermodal connectors, 532 miles are port-related infrastructure. Unfortunately, these roads are often inadequate and in poor condition, plagued by inadequate turning radii and shoulder deficiencies and have been found to have twice the percentage of mileage with pavement deficiencies when compared to non-interstate NHS routes according to a study conducted by USDOT. States and MPOs have traditionally assigned freight-focused projects a low priority when compared with passenger-related improvements. Due to their freight-focused nature, NHS connectors generally do not fare well in project selection within the State and MPO planning processes. This critical infrastructure is more important than ever as our nation rebuilds the economy and creates jobs by expanding commerce through free trade agreements and increasing America’s exports and international competitiveness. These roads are key pieces of our connection to the world marketplace. In addition to their national economic importance, NHS Intermodal connectors are vital to defense mobilization and national security. With the military's increasing reliance on strategic ports and commercial trucking for mobility, intermodal connectors are critical to national defense planning. Given the reliance of our national economy and defense on intermodal connectors, it is important that the federal government remain engaged in identifying, prioritizing and funding improvements to this critical infrastructure which has //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">languished when dependent upon State and local planning processes. //Summary From the earliest days of our nation, there has been a clear and consistent federal role and national interest in developing and maintaining landside and waterside connections to America’s seaports. This vital transportation infrastructure literally connects American farmers, manufacturers and consumers to the world marketplace. More than a quarter of U.S. GDP and over 13 million jobs are accounted for by international trade. Especially in challenging fiscal times like today, it is critical that basic, core federal missions such as these, that directly impact America’s economic vitality, jobs, and global competitiveness, be recognized and prioritized.

Like many nations, the United States will be challenged over the next decade to be able to accommodate the projected rapid increases in trade at its harbors. The United States is moving toward an adequate channel infrastructure to handle the larger containerships now being introduced into the world fleet, but in order to handle them we need to: • Provide a reliable funding stream to complete ongoing channel construction projects on optimal schedules; • Work toward **consensus between government agencies** at all levels and with stakeholders on how to move forward on critical authorized or ongoing channel improvements; • Streamline the project study, design and authorization process to the extent possible; • Work with state and local port authorities to move quickly to add additional landside cargo-handling facilities and to improve intermodal connections; and • Explore opportunities for short-sea shipping to minimize the overland move and reduce highway and rail congestion. I submit that the United States needs to be working toward a national commitment to create and maintain a network of harbors equal to or better than any other nation’s. To reach this goal, we should consider establishing multiyear funding streams and project authorizations determined at least three to five years out to enable all stakeholders to plan and react accordingly. Finally, we need a visionary leadership process to balance all multiple demands on use of water.If the Army Corps of Engineers, other federal agencies, states, local governments and the nongovernment sector communicate the state of the nation’s infrastructure to the Congress, we could see a renewed emphasis. Collaboration is key to accomplish this goal – collaboration to modernize our harbors and bring them up to 21st century needs, to deliver environmentally sustainable solutions, and to work alongside other water interests, including government and nongovernment organizations. There are opportunities to change the way we do business, save valuable resources and improve our performance. Together, we can ensure our water transportation systems continue to be our trade window to the world. In so doing, we will do our part to keep America’s economy strong for generations to come.
 * Federal leadership is vital to expediting new projects and coordinating federal agencies – it creates faster infrastructure development**
 * Woodley Jr. 8**— Chairman – PIANC (Permanent International Association of Navigation Congresses) USA (John Paul, “Dredging key to keeping nation’s economy afloat”, Seaports Magazine, http://www.aapaseaports.com/pdf_issues/AAPASeaports_Summer2008.pdf, Summer) EL

//In 2012, as many U.S. ports plan anxiously for the Panama Canal expansion, the federal performance in development and maintenance of the federal channel system is as// <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">unpredictable and as unreliable as ever //. Today, local port authorities pay as much as 60 per cent of the cost of federal channel deepening. With its Harbor Maintenance Tax, the government has collected nearly $6 billion more than it has spent on channel maintenance since 1986. Last year, the Congressional Budget Office concluded, “Full channel dimensions are, on average, available less than about a third of the time at the 59 highest use U.S. harbors.” Despite the promises of the 1986 “reforms” and the well-documented needs for wider and deeper federal channels, there has been one new work authorization bill in the last decade — one! Of the $2.4 billion authorized for deeper channels over the last 12 years, 75 percent was designated for New York Harbor. And by the way, an estimated $15 billion is collected each year at U.S. seaports as Customs duties. Like most major U.S. ports, the Port of Charleston is a “cash cow” for the federal government. Two dollars are collected for every one spent on harbor maintenance with application of the harbor maintenance tax. Customs duties on port cargo at Charleston are estimated to be just under $800 million annually. The simple sorry point is the federal government has done a better job of taxing and collecting at ports than it has in providing the navigation channel capacities our nation so clearly needs. The SPA celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, and never before have its Port of Charleston operations been better recognized and supported throughout the state. Newsome and his team have done a good job of profiling the reward and risk propositions of Charleston’s 50-foot channel plan. And understanding those risks, South Carolina leaders are sending bold signals to the post-Panamax marketplace — and a message to the feds. Last year, Hugh Leatherman of Florence, chairman of the S.C. Senate Finance Committee, stood by Newsome’s side at a press conference and assured the market that $180 million, the state’s 60 percent share of the $300 million 50-foot project in Charleston Harbor, would be provided promptly. Now with the clock ticking on decisions related to the Panama Canal expansion, Sen. Leatherman and his colleagues are quietly raising the ante. Sen. Leatherman confirmed last week that South Carolina is prepared to advance the full $300 million expenditure needed for the Charleston deepening project. “The Port of Charleston is vital to economic strength in all parts of our state,” the senator said. “We don’t know what the federal response will be, but we intend to do all we can to assure that funds are available to make sure this project is not delayed because the federal government can’t fund it in a timely way.” That’s a strong and reassuring message to the market, and one Jim Newsome and his colleagues can readily use. But it should also be a// <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">declaration to the federal government //, from the White House to Capitol Hill, that now is the time for the feds to match the initiative and commitments of public port authorities all over the United States in assuring our nation has the seaport system it requires for national security and economic progress.
 * Current federal investment is unpredictable – only a strong federal signal leverages private investment**
 * Brinson, 2012** – former president of the American Association of Ports Authorities and former president of the Port of New Orleans (Ryan, “Federal ‘reforms’ for port upgrade are long overdue”, The Post and Courier, April 21 2012, http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120421/PC1002/120429847/1023&source=RSS) //MGD//

=Negative=

**1nc – topicality**
What has been neglected in all of the analyses that I have seen is an explicit consideration of maintenance spending, as distinct from investment. Infrastructure, like most engineered systems, requires periodic care to keep it functioning properly. Leaves, trash and other debris clog drains that channel rainwater away from roadways must be cleaned out. Filters that remove silt and bacteria from drinking water must be flushed. The costs of such maintenance effort typically are accrued in different accounts from those the represent “investment .” But if maintenance is neglected, the quality of services and longevity of facilities will be impaired. My discussions with people who manage maintenance in public works agencies suggest that maintenance budgets are often squeezed, forcing neglect.
 * The aff’s not topical – maintenance is distinct from investment**
 * Lemer 11** - worked at The National Academies and studied at Harvard University (Andrew, “How Much Infrastructure Spending Is “Enough?’”, http://www.andrewlemer.com/2011/02/26/how-much-infrastructure-spending-is-%E2%80%9Cenough%E2%80%9D/)


 * That’s a voting issue**
 * a) Limits --- there are dozens of small maintenance programs --- makes it impossible to be neg**


 * b) Ground --- maintenance is too small scale to link to disads --- avoids core disad links**

1nc -- disad
//ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF DREDGING There are environmental resources that may be at risk during dredging activities. Dredging is not a benign activity; it disrupts habitats and redistributes sediments. These activities can significantly effect the coastal ecosystem and destroy marine life, especially sedentary invertebrates. These invertebrates are important parts of the food chain and contribute to the feeding of other fish; fish which are ultimately used for human consumption. Other aquatic impacts of dredging include habitat loss when the sea bottom is altered. This occurs when dredged materials are deposited at a location and its material composition is altered. This decreases the diversity and abundance of certain species. Water circulation can be impacted when mounding occurs. This action can cause different siltation deposits and lead to the elimination of spawning areas. Turbidity, or the suspension of sediments into the water column, can result in reduced light penetration and expose fish to abrasive materials. Most importantly, dredging has the potential of releasing comparatively large doses of toxic substances into a new aquatic environment and to make them available to marine organisms. These materials include heavy metals, PCB's, pesticides, and other toxic materials that are certain to persist in marine life for quite some time. Many species of marine life are sensitive to the impacts of dredging. The testing procedures previously described are designed to preclude the release of materials that could pose an unacceptable risk to marine life. The real dilemma arises as to how much is acceptable to the environment.2//
 * The plan collapses biodiversity**
 * Phernambucq 93** – District Engineer, U.S. Army Engineer (Stanley G, “DREDGING: KEY LINK IN THE STRATEGIC NATIONAL DEFENSE”, 15 April 1993, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA264544) //CB//

//**Extinction**// //**Diner, 94** [David, Ph.D., Planetary Science and Geology, "The Army and the Endangered Species Act: Who's Endangering Whom?," Military Law Review, 143 Mil. L. Rev. 161]// // To accept that the snail darter, harelip sucker, or Dismal Swamp southeastern shrew 74 could save [hu]mankind may be difficult for some. Many, if not most, species are useless to[hu]man[s] in a direct utilitarian sense. Nonetheless, they may be critical in an indirect role, because their extirpations could affect a directly useful species negatively. In a closely interconnected ecosystem, the loss of a species affects other species dependent on it. 75 Moreover, as the number of species decline, the effect of each new extinction on the remaining species increases dramatically. 4. Biological Diversity. -- The main premise of species preservation is that diversity is better than simplicity. 77 As the current mass extinction has progressed, the world's biological diversity generally has decreased. This trend occurs within ecosystems by reducing the number of species, and within species by reducing the number of individuals. Both trends carry serious future implications. 78 [*173] Biologically diverse ecosystems are characterized by a large number of specialist species, filling narrow ecological niches. These ecosystems inherently are more stable than less diverse systems. "The more complex the ecosystem, the more successfully it can resist a stress. . . . [l]ike a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such a fabric can resist collapse better than a simple, unbranched circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks down as a whole." 79 By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined affects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, 80 [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.//

//**The plan exponentially increases CO2 – outweighs a risk of a link turn**// //**Stretesky and Lynch, 8** – *Department of Scoiology, Center for the Stuy of Crime and Justice, Colorado State University **Department of Criminology, University of South Florida (Paul and Michael "A cross-national study of the association between per capita carbon dioxide emissions and exports to the United States", August 28, Socieal Science Research Vol. 38 Issue 1)**// **NK**
 * The analysis reported above supports the hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between exports to the U.S. and CO2 production across a sample of 169 nations covering the years 1989 through 2003. Industry specific import analysis revealed that CO2 production was more strongly impacted by U.S. imports in four industries (oil and gas, petroleum and coal, chemicals, and re-imports). In short, the more oil and gas, petroleum and coal, chemicals, and re-imports products a country exported to the U.S., the more CO2 that country produced. Increased levels of CO2 pollution were observable despite controls for economic conditions like foreign direct investments, population density, and GDP growth. Clearly, these data indicated that U.S. consumption practices have important implications for world production of CO2 . These findings also indicate that policies designed to reduce U.S. contributions to CO2pollution are, perhaps, more important than might ordinarily be expected . To date, however, the U.S. has not attempted to engage in significant efforts to reduce CO2 emissions abroad. Our data contain a very interesting finding that other nations can influence U.S. carbon emissions without the direct assistance of the U.S. or U.S. policy; namely, these nations could systematically begin to reduce exports to the U.S. To be sure, there is some tradeoff here between economic development in peripheral nations and their interest in the health of the world’s environment. But, these data indicate that by using their control over production of export products, developing nations can play a significant role in affecting the production of CO2 pollution. Using world system theory, we argued that the effort of core nations to shift costs and product toward nations where labor costs are lower and raw material and energy resources are less expensive and less well regulated creates the appearance that peripheral nations contribute to escalating levels of carbon pollution. Behind this appearance lays a more complex function where CO2 pollution increases are fuelled by the consumptive practices and economic interests of core nations . Moreover, among all nations, the U.S. stands out for its impact on the expansion of the level of CO2 pollution among peripheral and rapidly industrializing nations. **

Extinction The world’s oceans may be turning acidic faster today from human carbon emissions than they did during four major extinctions in the last 300 million years, when natural pulses of carbon sent global temperatures soaring, says a new study in Science. The study is the first of its kind to survey the geologic record for evidence of ocean acidification over this vast time period. “What we’re doing today really stands out,” said lead author Bärbel Hönisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out—new species evolved to replace those that died off. But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about—coral reefs, oysters, salmon.” That’s the news release from a major 21-author Science paper, “The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification” (subs. req’d). We knew from a 2010 Nature Geoscience study that the oceans are now acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. But this study looked back over 300 million and found that “the unprecedented rapidity of CO2 release currently taking place” has put marine life at risk in a frighteningly unique way: … the current rate of (mainly fossil fuel) CO2 release stands out as capable of driving a combination and magnitude of ocean geochemical changes potentially unparalleled in at least the last ~300 My of Earth history, raising the possibility that we are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change. That is to say, it’s not just that acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century” as a 2010 Geological Society study put it. We are also warming the ocean and decreasing dissolved oxygen concentration. That is a recipe for mass extinction. A 2009 Nature Geoscience study found that ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years.“ And remember, we just learned from a 2012 new Nature Climate Change study that carbon dioxide is “driving fish crazy” and threatening their survival. Here’s more on the new study: The oceans act like a sponge to draw down excess carbon dioxide from the air; the gas reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid, which over time is neutralized by fossil carbonate shells on the seafloor. But if CO2 goes into the oceans too quickly, it can deplete the carbonate ions that corals, mollusks and some plankton need for reef and shell-building.
 * Joe** Romm 12** is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress, “Science: Ocean Acidifying So Fast It Threatens Humanity’s Ability to Feed Itself,” 3/2/2012, http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/02/436193/science-ocean-acidifying-so-fast-it-threatens-humanity-ability-to-feed-itself/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogre

1nc -- disad
The plan drastically boosts domestic LNG exports //The successful export of LNG will depend upon the necessary shipping infrastructure and capacity being in place. Cheniere Energy is looking to export up to 2.2 bcf/day of gas from its Sabine Pass LNG terminal in Louisiana. 39 Depending on the size of the LNG vessel, this would require between three and five supertankers per week. In order to accommodate this volume of large ships, some domestic U.S. ports will require additional dredging. Other shipping-related concerns include security of vessels and the adequacy of Coast Guard capacity to provide that security (exporters must meet Coast Guard Waterway Suitability, Security, and Emergency standards prior to approval); and the capacity of sea lanes, particularly to Asia. Increasing shipments to Asia will depend on the capacity of the Panama Canal, which is currently too small to accommodate most LNG tankers. However, after the planned expansion of the canal is completed—expected to be in 2014—roughly 80 percent of the world’s LNG tankers will be able to pass through the isthmus, resulting in a dramatic decline in shipping costs to Asia. 40//
 * Ebinger 12** -- Task Force Co-Chair of Brookings Institution Natural Gas Task Force("Evaluating the Prospects for Increased Exports of Liquefied Natural Gas from the United States", January, p. 15, Brookings, [|www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/1/natural%20gas%20ebinger/natural_gas_ebinger_2.pdf])//GP//

//**This crushes European dependence on Russia**// //**Hulbert, 5/26** – a Lead Analyst at European Energy Review and consultant to a number of governments, most recently as Senior Research Fellow, Netherlands Institute for International Relations (Clingendael), was previously Senior Research Fellow at ETH Zurich working on energy and political risk. He started work in the City of London, advising on energy markets and political risk, as Senior Energy Analyst at Datamonitor for leading global utilities, and headed up the Global Issues Desk at Control Risks Group, specializing in political risk, geopolitics and security analysis for multinational companies, governments and institutional investors. He was also seconded to work in Washington, D.C., to enhance CRG's political risk offerings in North America. (Matthew, “Why American Natural Gas Will Change The World”, Forbes, 5/26/12, http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewhulbert/2012/05/26/why-american-natural-gas-will-change-the-world/)//GP Europe will watch the debate with considerable interest – not just because the likes of BG Group have a 34% stake in total US LNG export capacity being developed, but because European hub prices currently sit mid-way between the US and Asia. European spot market liquidity has held up reasonably well thanks to Qatari supplies, but Doha is increasingly looking East, a dynamic that could leave Europe with its more traditional Russian, North Sea and North African pipeline mix. If American LNG doesn’t come good, North West European liquidity will dry up quicker than most think – with potentially serious price and dependency implications. Europe will inevitably fail to develop its shale reserves, not unless the states in question happen to be perched on the Russian border. Little wonder serious forecasts already think Europe will end up importing more US LNG by 2020 than it manages to frack in its own backyard.

Europe is an unavoidable partner. The European market consumes 90% of Russia's total gas exports and 60% of its crude oil, which make up only 25 and 15% of Europe's total demand, respectively. Russia presently does not have any viable alternative markets remotely equal in size to Europe. Dependence is a two-Way phenomenon. "40% of Russian public money” comes from the sale of oil and gas to Europe, and at least 75% of Russian export revenues are linked to the EU's energy market in general. Without any extant alternative markets to exploit in the near-term, Moscow requires European gas revenues to preserve its own financial solubility. Energy overshadows other concerns. Paillard believes that while the energy trade has, in the past, been "part of a game of blackmail, lies and fear" between Europe and Russia, its new status as a "question of life or death for Russian revitalization" and its importance to Europe's economic growth mean that neither side can afford to use gas supplies as leverage in other international concerns. In Paillard's estimation, Brussels and Moscow both regard issues such as human rights or the Chechen conflict as not being worth risking the energy trade over. Therefore, Russian and the European Union are inextricably bound to one another by their mutual dependence on the energy trade. Russia cannot absorb the financial consequences of interrupting the EU revenue stream, while the European Union cannot do without Russian gas supplies. Europe has few alternative suppliers, and cannot develop alternative energy sources in the near term. Russia, meanwhile, is unlikely to be able to diversify its economy or target new markets any better than it has in the past.
 * EU gas dependence is good — Russia won’t cut off the supply but it’s key to the Russian economy and perceived as a critical national interest**
 * Weitz, 11** - senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor (Richard, “Can We Manage a Declining Russia?” November, http://www.aei.org/files/2011/12/08/-can-we-manage-a-declining-russia_152701899417.pdf)

Research has measured the potential benefits of using more energy-efficient transportation services. One recent study found that while trucks, on average, can carry one ton of freight for approximately 155 miles on a gallon of diesel fuel (i.e., 155 ton-miles of freight per gallon, equivalent to 842 BTU per ton-mile 55 ), rail achieves 413 ton-miles of freight per gallon (316 BTU per ton-mile), and a tug-and-barge operation can get as much as 576 ton-miles of freight to a gallon of fuel (227 BTU per ton-mile). 56 Additionally, self-propelled oceangoing vessels can have significant energy efficiencies over land-based modes, particularly in the case of larger vessel sizes. 57 Not all studies agree in their estimates of modal fuel efficiencies. 58 Differences in fuel efficiency estimates among studies can be accounted for by numerous factors, including: when the study was conducted (engines are becoming more fuel efficient); haul distances and the availability of backhaul cargoes; the type of commodity being shipped (e.g., coal, grain, or other goods); ship size, hull shape, operating speed, engine type, fuel type, and capacity utilization; dependency on trucks for bringing cargoes to vessel or rail transfer points; assumptions about barge queuing and delays at inland waterway locks and ports; assumptions about bulk trainload and unit-train operations; assumptions about mixed freight carload traffic, trailer-on-flatcar, and container-onflatcar traffic; and other factors that will vary from market to market. Collectively, however, research supports the inherent fuel efficiencies of marine transportation services. As such, shifting cargoes from pure long-distance land movements to water transportation in certain corridors would result in energy savings. These corridors include coastal corridors and those along inland waterways and the Great Lakes. Additional research, some sponsored by MARAD, will identify specific markets and routes within these corridors where shifting from land transportation to water transportation would yield the greatest potential energy savings. Water will not be the most energy-efficient means in all travel corridors, of course, particularly where routes are more circuitous or navigable waterways are not within reasonable proximity to shippers and significant drayage is required. Similarly, origin-todestination trucking can have energy-efficiency advantages over water and rail transportation, particularly for short haul freight movements where goods must be trucked to and from vessel and rail loading facilities. Fewer than 10 percent of large trucks typically travel to places more than 200 miles away, although these trucks account for 30 percent of the large truck mileage. 59 Shifting cargo to more energy-efficient transportation modes could have important long-term social and economic benefits for our nation. Fuel efficiency, however, is but one of an array of considerations that affect the choice of shipping mode by private industry, and even here only indirectly through its impact on shipping costs. In many cases, the quality, convenience, frequency, speed, and reliability of a transportation service are critical factors in shippers’ choices of a transportation mode that outweigh higher costs of a particular service attributable to higher fuel consumption. Accordingly, except under situations of extraordinarily high fuel prices that significantly increase shippers’ costs, the broader range of national benefits associated with reducing fuel consumption by using water transportation will not be realized unless national policies promote the use of America’s Marine Highway
 * Independently, the plan cuts oil needs**
 * DoT 11** (Department of Transportation, “America’s Marine Highway: Report to Congress,” Maritime Administration, April, http://www.marad.dot.gov/documents/MARAD_AMH_Report_to_Congress.pdf)//mat


 * Three impacts—**

In Russia, historically, economic health and political stability are intertwined to a degree that is rarely encountered in other major industrialized economies. It was the economic stagnation of the former Soviet Union that led to its political downfall. Similarly, Medvedev and Putin, both intimately acquainted with their nation's history, are unquestionably alarmed at the prospect that Russia's economic crisis will endanger the nation's political stability, achieved at great cost after years of chaos following the demise of the Soviet Union. Already, strikes and protests are occurring among rank and file workers facing unemployment or non-payment of their salaries. Recent polling demonstrates that the once supreme popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev are eroding rapidly. Beyond the political elites are the financial oligarchs, who have been forced to deleverage, even unloading their yachts and executive jets in a desperate attempt to raise cash. Should the Russian economy deteriorate to the point where economic collapse is not out of the question, the impact will go far beyond the obvious accelerant such an outcome would be for the Global Economic Crisis. There is a geopolitical dimension that is even more relevant then the economic context. Despite its economic vulnerabilities and perceived decline from superpower status, Russia remains one of only two nations on earth with a nuclear arsenal of sufficient scope and capability to destroy the world as we know it. For that reason, it is not only President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin who will be lying awake at nights over the prospect that a national economic crisis can transform itself into a virulent and destabilizing social and political upheaval. It just may be possible that U.S. President Barack Obama's national security team has already briefed him about the consequences of a major economic meltdown in Russia for the peace of the world. After all, the most recent national intelligence estimates put out by the U.S. intelligence community have already concluded that the Global Economic Crisis represents the greatest national security threat to the United States, due to its facilitating political instability in the world. During the years Boris Yeltsin ruled Russia, security forces responsible for guarding the nation's nuclear arsenal went without pay for months at a time, leading to fears that desperate personnel would illicitly sell nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations. If the current economic crisis in Russia were to deteriorate much further, how secure would the Russian nuclear arsenal remain? It may be that the financial impact of the Global Economic Crisis is its least dangerous consequence.
 * Russian economic decline causes nuclear war**
 * Filger, 9** (Sheldon, author and blogger for the Huffington Post, “Russian Economy Faces Disastrous Free Fall Contraction”, http://www.globaleconomiccrisis.com/blog/archives/356)

"Putin still aspires for Russia to be a superpower," says Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. "There are only two ways for Russia to achieve that: nuclear weapons, and oil and natural gas sales." The price of a barrel of oil was nearly $105 at midday Tuesday, steadily climbing from a 52-week low of $76.35 per barrel in October. Oil prices began to rise in late 2010, peaking at $113 per barrel in May 2011, before dipping last summer and then rising again. Russia is the world's second-largest oil exporter at 5 million barrels a day, and its the ninth-leading natural gas exporter at 38.2 billion cubic meters a year, according to the CIA World Factbook. Russia rakes in nearly $500 billion annually in exports, with the CIA listing petroleum and natural gas as its top two commodities. Frances Burwell, vice president of the Atlantic Council, says Russia's oil revenues "give it a comfort zone" from which its leaders feel they have the global cache to make things tough for Washington. Burwell says she "places more weight" for Russia's recent global muscularity on "Putin's re-emergence." The Russian once-and-soon-again president "clearly sees playing the national card as the strong guy internationally benefits him," she says. But, make no mistake, bloated national coffers from high oil and gas prices underwrite Putin's muscle-flexing, experts say. Putin made a number of big domestic promises during the presidential race, including plans to usher in sweeping pension and wage hikes. He also put forth "a rather ambitious military modernization program," Pifer says. "If oil prices remain high, he might be able to do all of those things," Pifer says. "If prices come down, however, Putin will have some very tough decisions to make at home ... between guns versus butter." Should oil and gas prices tumble, experts say Putin would likely pick butter. "In 2007 when oil was doing well, Putin [as president] could have modernized the Russian military," says Pifer. Instead, Putin made a number of economic moves, such as the creation of a rainy day fund that was used during the recent global financial crisis," Pifer notes. What's more, Putin returns to power with his sharp eyes locked on his opposition, which is co mposed of the country's urban, middle-class populations. Experts agree that Putin would be hard-pressed to break his pension and wage promises in favor of a few more missiles. But even an economically weaker Russia would likely pick its spots to block Washington's desires. "They have a very sovereigntist, non-interventionalist view of world affairs," Burwell says. That means Moscow fundamentally opposes Western efforts to boss around the world's strongmen, with which Russian leaders have much in common. "The Russian also have real hard-core, national, commercial and other interests in both Iran and Syria that cannot simply be ignored," Burwell says.
 * Oil and gas prices prices are key to Russian economy and military modernization**
 * Bennett 12** – graduate uchicago and Emory School of Law ( John T. “Oil Prices Fueling Russia's Disruption of U.S. Foreign Policy” April 04, 2012 http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/04/03/oil-prices-fueling-russias-disruption-of-us-foreign-policy ajones)

The perceived weakness of this triad means that the Kremlin was pleased with the START agreement of March 2010. The treaty limits favor Moscow in that it does not have to cut any of its own nuclear warheads or delivery systems—the numbers of ICBMs and warheads in its own triad are actually below the negotiated caps. Only the United States has had to bring its numbers down.58 Normally, in the arranging of such international security treaties, negotiating from a position of military weakness—as Russia was—is not conducive to the ability to drive a hard bargain. Moscow has been lucky, however, in that Washington seems not to be too interested in the shape of Russia’s current and future nuclear arsenal. Rather, in terms of perceived security threats, Washington has its eye more on the terrorist ball than on the Russian one. Additionally, under STA RT, Russia does not have to reduce the number of its tactical nuclear weapons. It has more of these than the United States. These are prized and important assets to Moscow, and they have become even more prized and important as Russia’s conventional military has become weaker. They are seen more and more as the fallback option if Russia one day faces some sort of defeat in a conventional conflict—against the likes of Georgia or China. In the largest Russian military exercise held since the end of the cold war—conducted recently in the Russian Far East—tactical nuclear weapons (i.e., mines) were notionally “exploded” as part of the exercise play.59 This fact alone seems to confirm that Russia’s conventional military weakness has led to a reduction in its nuclear-use threshold. Conclusion The current modernization in the Russian military is long overdue. Because it is long overdue, it has to be completed in a rushed, haphazard fashion and against a backdrop of a military–industrial complex unable to fulfill its role in the process. Traditionally, military modernization is not achieved lightly, given the bureaucratic inertia and cultural norms that are always present. When, as in the current situation in Russia, such barriers to change are aided and abetted by any number of additional problems (not to mention the rampant corruption that is endemic across all levels of Russian state institutions, including the military), then it must be expected that Russia’s armed forces will be striving for some time to become truly “modern.”60 In essence, what should have been accomplished as an evolution over many years, and should have begun during the Yeltsin era, is now being attempted as a revolution in the post–Georgian war era. As with any revolutionary change, a good deal of disruption and disaffection has been created. Moreover, the current Russian military is a weakened military. The psychology of the tsarist/Soviet/Russian military has always been that numbers counted, that mass would prevail. Numbers inspired confidence, and numbers could deter. But the current Russian military is losing numbers while not making up for them by creating smaller, more professional forces equipped with the requisite technologies. Quality is not replacing quantity. The military is in a state of flux. Russian politicians and military figures both now lack a genuine confidence in the armed forces’ ability to deter. This can have two consequences. Either Russia takes large steps to avoid the possibility of military confrontation by stressing diplomatic solutions to possible threat scenarios (as the tsarist government did in 1914), or it goes the opposite way, fearing that if any state is threatening military action against Russia then the hair trigger comes into operation (Israeli-style). That is, the mentality of the first, preemptive strike becomes paramount—taking advantage of surprise—and using what assets Russia now has. The alternative is to take the risk of waiting to be attacked and maybe “losing.” What is clear is that, with its armed forces currently weakened by the process of change, the sense of vulnerability generated has led Russia, in classic confirmation of the security dilemma concept, to magnify the threats it faces, or thinks it faces. Conscious of its vulnerability to threats, real or imagined, Moscow may begin to look more and more toward the inflexible tool of its tactical nuclear weapons as its principal defense mechanism. While no one really supposes that such weapons will be used in any confrontation with the West, the same cannot be said of any possible conflict with the Chinese. Ironically, Beijing’s military still relies on mass. The best modern military counter to mass is to employ either PGMs or tactical nuclear weapons. The Russian military has hardly any of the former but plenty of the latter. Hair triggers and tactical nuclear weapons are not comfortable bedfellows.
 * massive probability-- Russian threat perception risks nuclear preemption—modernization key to lower nuclear reliance**
 * Renz and Thornton 12** – lecturers on international security in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Nottingham (Bettina., Rod. “Russian Military Modernization Cause, Course, and Consequences” Problems of Post-Communism Volume 59, Number 1 / January / February 2012 Pages: 44 - 54 ajones)

Conversely, a Russia relatively weaker to the United States would have less capability to challenge the United States but can provide less assistance for realizing common U.S.-Russian goals. A weaker Russia may also find it harder to control its WMD assets and become vulnerable to external predators not friendly to the United States (e. g.. China and Iran). But in all probability Russia will still have sufficiently strong nuclear forces to ward off external threats. Most worrisome, a Russian leadership that perceived Russia on a slope toward protracted decline might feel compelled to take drastic measures, internally and externally, to reverse its descent. The German Empire, Imperial Japan, and other great powers in the 20th century attempted to reverse their feared decline in ways that helped precipitate disastrous global wars.
 * Independently — causes lashout — global nuclear conflict**
 * Weitz, 11** - senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor (Richard, “Can We Manage a Declining Russia?” November, http://www.aei.org/files/2011/12/08/-can-we-manage-a-declining-russia_152701899417.pdf)

1nc – counterplan

 * The United States federal government should**
 * --implement the Restoring America’s Future plan**
 * --substantially increase its development and deployment of submarine, surface combatants, and advanced sealift capability**
 * --increase subsidies for domestic soybeans, and wheat production**
 * --substantially increase its investment in international agricultural programs and Collaborative Research Support Programs to $34 Million**

We offer this plan as proof that a group of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents can work together to create a balanced package of spending cuts and revenue increases that solves the debt crisis. Other groups might prefer other combinations of policies to reach the same ends. We created this plan to show that it can be done – and thereby encourage others from both political parties to bring their ideas to a constructive, respectful, and ultimately successful dialogue. Overview America is the strongest, most prosperous, and most resilient nation in history. However, America’s leadership and greatness, our strength and prosperity, are not guaranteed. We face two huge challenges simultaneously. First, we must recover from the deep recession that has thrown millions out of work, slashed home values and closed businesses across the country. Second, we must take immediate steps to reduce the unsustainable debt that will be driven by the aging of the population, the rapid growth of healthcare costs, exploding interest costs, and the failure of policymakers to limit and prioritize spending. These two challenges must be addressed at the same time, not sequentially. We need immediate action to sustain the recovery and create jobs, but we cannot delay putting in place measures that will restrain the buildup of debt. If we do not control the debt, the recovery will not be sustainable. With current policies in place, even when we recover from the recession, the debt will grow far larger than the economy itself, forcing the nation to borrow enormous and unprecedented sums of money, increasing our dependence on China and other foreign lenders, diminishing our living standards, raising risks of an economic crisis, and reducing America to a second-rate power. At stake are both our economic security and our national security. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warns that threats to our economy are “real and growing” and that our path is “unsustainable” because, at some point, our creditors will refuse to lend to us. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen calls the debt “the single biggest threat to our national security.” That’s why we face a fundamental choice: We can close our eyes, keep avoiding the problem, and generate more debt that will threaten our economy, mortgage our children’s future, and diminish our leadership around the world. To arrive at consensus on a plan of this size and complexity, each of the Task Force members made significant compromises. Not every member agrees with every element of this plan. But, each member agrees on the urgency of economic recovery and stabilizing the debt and believes that, as a whole, this plan offers a balanced, effective, and reasonable approach to the twin challenges at hand. Perhaps most importantly, the plan demonstrates that at this time of political uncertainty, a bipartisan group can craft a comprehensive and viable blueprint to tackle the nation’s most serious economic challenges. 8 | P a g e Or, we can choose a new course – one that can revive our economy, create new and better jobs, restore our financial independence, and ensure that America remains the world’s preeminent economic, military, and political power. This report, “ Restoring America’s Future,” is a plan for that new course that we believe will meet both the short- and the longer-run challenges simultaneously. It was developed by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Debt Reduction Task Force, which is chaired by former Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici and former White House Budget Director Alice M. Rivlin and includes 19 leading citizens from across America. The Task Force members are former White House and Cabinet officials, former Members of Congress, former governors and mayors, business and labor leaders, economists and budget experts. They are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. They are Americans from across the country, with widely diverse views about public policy and the role of government. By 2020, the plan will reduce and stabilize the national debt below 60 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) – an internationally recognized standard – and ensure that the debt stops growing faster than our economy. The plan will balance the “primary budget,” the budget other than interest payments, by 2014. On a “unified budget basis,” i.e., including interest, the plan will ensure that future budget deficits are small and manageable. But, above all, it will ensure a strong economy for future generations of Americans. The Task Force approached its task as both a challenge and an opportunity, and recommends significant and sorely needed changes to both taxes and spending. On the spending side, this plan fixes Social Security, which is on an unsustainable path, reins in rising healthcare costs, and freezes both defense and domestic discretionary spending. On the tax side, this plan dramatically simplifies taxes by eliminating years of tax breaks – allowing major tax rate reductions, while raising additional revenues to reduce the debt. Lower corporate rates will make America more competitive, and lower individual rates with a simplified tax system will give taxpayers renewed confidence that our system is fair and understandable. A Debt Reduction Sales Tax (DRST), along with the plan’s spending cuts, will reduce our debt. Reviving the economy and creating up to 7 million new jobs Currently, millions of Americans cannot find jobs or are underemployed. At the same time, we face the long-term problem of soaring deficits and debt. Some politicians and economists present a false choice: reduce unemployment or stabilize the debt. Restoring America’s future, however, requires that we do both – and begin now. The key to both reducing unemployment and stabilizing the debt begins with a strong economy that reignites demand for goods and services and encourages businesses to invest and create jobs. This bipartisan plan calls for (in 2011) – called a “payroll tax holiday” – which will immediately add money to employee paychecks while incentivizing companies to hire new workers. This tax cut of nearly $650 billion will provide a big shot in the arm to revive our economy and create jobs. Restoring America’s Future will: • Revive the economy and create 2.5 to 7 million new jobs over two years with a payroll tax holiday. • Balance the primary budget in 2014, reduce deficits including interest to small and manageable levels, and stabilize the debt below 60 percent of GDP by 2020. • Create a simple, pro-growth tax system that broadens the base, reduces rates, makes America more competitive, and raises revenue to reduce the debt. • Reduce the unsustainable rate of growth in healthcare costs. • Strengthen Social Security to ensure that it will pay benefits for 75 years and beyond, while not increasing the retirement age and protecting the most vulnerable elderly. • Freeze domestic and defense discretionary spending. • Cut other spending, including farm and government retirement programs.
 * Solves the economy and competitiveness internal links and impacts**
 * Minarik** et al **10** - Senior VP and Director of Research, Comm. for Economic Development Former Associate Director for Economic Policy, OMB Former Chief Economist, House Budget Committee <Dr. Joseph Minarik. “Restoring America’s Future Executive Summary” Debt Reduction. November 2010.

Deter major power war. No other disruption is as potentially disastrous to global stability as war among major powers. Maintenance and extension of this Nation’s comparative seapower advantage is a key component of deterring major power war. While war with another great power strikes many as improbable, the near-certainty of its ruinous effects demands that it be actively deterred using all elements of national power. The expeditionary character of maritime forces—our lethality, global reach, speed, endurance, ability to overcome barriers to access, and operational agility—provide the joint commander with a range of deterrent options. We will pursue an approach to deterrence that includes a credible and scalable ability to retaliate against aggressors conventionally, unconventionally, and with nuclear forces. Win our Nation’s wars. In times of war, our ability to impose local sea control, overcome challenges to access, force entry, and project and sustain power ashore, makes our maritime forces an indispensable element of the joint or combined force. This expeditionary advantage must be maintained because it provides joint and combined force commanders with freedom of maneuver. Reinforced by a robust sealift capability that can concentrate and sustain forces, sea control and power projection enable extended campaigns ashore.
 * Sealift solves deterrence – solves the impact**
 * Conway 07** (James T., General, U.S. Marine Corps, Gary Roughead, Admiral, U.S. Navy, Thad W. Allen, Admiral, U.S. Coast Guard, “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” October, http://www.navy.mil/maritime/MaritimeStrategy.pdf)

Investment in global agriculture creates new markets for US exports: The US food sector accounts for approximately 16% of all employment. About 20% of food production is exported, accounting for between 3 and 4% of all US employment. Of all US food exports, over 50% go to lower income countries. Our private sector seeks new markets internationally. These new markets are increasingly located in countries making the transition to the "middle class" of nations. By stimulating development we create wealth that turns the poor into customers for US goods and technologies. We help ourselves by helping others. Goals: Increase funding for international agricultural programs and Collaborative Research Support Programs (CRSPs) beyond the current level. CRSPs should be funded at $34 million. CRSPs are particularly important, as they directly partner universities with local institutions in the developing countries. They conduct pioneering research critical to international development and develop human capacity in developing countries. Human capacity is the fundamental creator of the knowledge, innovation, and technology that drives economic growth in the sector and speeds the transition to industrial growth.
 * Expanding investment solves US agriculture exports and the impact**
 * APLU, 02** – The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, research and advocacy organization of public research universities, land-grant institutions, and state university systems with member campuses in all 50 states, U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. The association is governed by a Chair and a Board of Directors elected from the member universities and university systems. President Peter McPherson directs a staff of about 45 at the national office in Washington, D.C. (Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, “International Development Agricultural Coordinating Committee” 3/31/2002, APLU, []

It all depends on prices, said Mr. Oliveira, 40, who is also president of the São Paulo state cotton growers' association. ''If prices are attractive, people here are going to plant more cotton. And if the United States is forced to get rid of its subsidies, you can bet that prices will go up and you'll see a lot more cotton around here.'' In its W.T.O. complaint, Brazil contended that the more than $3 billion in annual subsidies paid out to American cotton growers led to increased output in the United States and artificially depressed global prices, robbing Brazil of potential export markets and undercutting the livelihood of its farmers. The subsidies have helped make the United States the world's second-largest cotton producer and the leading cotton exporter, with more than 40 percent of the global market.
 * Subsidies solve the agriculture advantage – cotton proves**
 * NYT 04** (New York Times, June 29, Brazil's Big Stake in Cotton Likely to Become Bigger, [])

1nc -- econ adv
When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: •No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); •The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places); •Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); •No great improvement or disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); •A modest scaling back of international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and •No serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal trade order.
 * No impact – no causation and cooperation solves the impact**
 * Barnett 09** – senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC (Thomas, The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis, 25 August 2009, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx, AMiles)

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said on Tuesday he was confident the U.S. and global economies were resilient but welcomed an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve as a helpful move. ADVERTISEMENT The U.S. central bank cut benchmark U.S. interest rates by a steep three-quarters of a percentage point while Paulson while still answering questions after addressing a Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting. Paulson had earlier acknowledged the U.S. economy has slowed "materially" in recent weeks but, despite a meltdown in global stock prices, insisted that the global economy had "underlying resiliency" that would let it weather the storm. The U.S. Treasury chief initially looked surprised when a Chamber of Commerce official said the Fed had just cut rates in a relatively rare move between meetings of its policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee, but praised the action. "This is very constructive and I think it shows this country and the rest of the world that our central bank is nimble and can move quickly in response to market conditions," Paulson said. The U.S. Treasury chief, who headed Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs before taking over Treasury in 2006, said the $145-billion short-term stimulus package that President George W. Bush was asking Congress to work on was needed to minimize the impact of a U.S. economic slowdown. "We need to do something now, because short-term risks are clearly to the downside, and the potential benefits of quick action to support our economy have become clear," Paulson said. But early signs were that Bush's call for bipartisan action -- and a relatively positive Congressional response to it -- were not calming financial markets but might actually be fanning fears that the economy was at greater risk of toppling into recession than officially acknowledged. Stock markets around the world sank sharply on Monday, when U.S. markets were closed for the holiday in observance of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King's birthday. Paulson tried to reassure that there was reason to feel confident in the U.S. economy's long-term prospects, notwithstanding severe problems in the housing sector and other credit-market strains. "The U.S. economy is resilient and diverse," he said. "It's been remarkably robust and it will be again." He added: "The unemployment rate remains low and job creation continues, albeit at a modest pace. The structure of our economy is sound and our long term economic fundamentals are healthy."
 * US institutions check – resiliency and diversity**
 * Somerville 08** (Glenn Somerville "Paulson: Economy resilient but Fed move helpful." Reuters. 22 Jan. 2008. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080122/bs_nm/usa_economy_paulson_dc)

We have seen erroneous predictions of American decline before. In the 1970s, the combination of high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployment, the Vietnam War, political and military challenges from China and the Soviet Union, and the economic rise of Japan led to eerily similar forecasts. Pessimists then, as today, underestimated the longevity of American power. The main reason the United States has continued to occupy a unique place in the international system is because a sufficient number of major and lesser powers have a strong interest in maintaining America at the top of the hierarchy. To bring America down would take a deliberate, coordinated strategy on the part of others and this is simply not plausible. As much as the United States benefits from the space it has carved out for itself in the current world order, its ability to reap unequal gains will remain unless and until allies start to incur heavy losses under American dominance. Even that, by itself, will not be sufficient to sink American hegemony. A strong alternative to American rule will have to come into view for things to fundamentally change. At present, no credible alternative is in sight. The United States is not invincible but its dominance is currently steady. Those who are inclined to think that American hegemony will persist – at least for a while – tend to dwell on the claim that the United States is providing a range of public goods to the benefit of all at its own expense. This is a chimera. The United States is self-interested, not altruistic. The illusion of benevolence has meant that very little attention has been given to uncovering the mechanism through which the United States gains disproportionately from supplying a large open market, the world’s reserve currency, and a military machine capable of stoking or foiling deadly disputes. This book exposes the mechanism through which the United States reaps unequal gains and shows that the current world system, and the distribution of power that supports it, has built-in stabilizers that strengthen American power following bouts of decline. Although all dominant powers must eventually decline, I will show that the downward progression need not be linear when mutually reinforcing tendencies across various power dimensions are at play. Specifically, I will demonstrate how the United States’ reserve currency status produces disproportionate commercial gains; how commercial power gives added flexibility in monetary affairs; and, finally, how military preponderance creates advantages in both monetary and trade affairs.
 * No impact to competitiveness decline – it won’t collapse hegemony**
 * Norrlof 10** - an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto (Carla, “ America’s Global Advantage US Hegemony and International Cooperation” p. 1-2)

A n other argument for high military spending is that U.S. military hegemony underlies global stability. Our forces and alliance commitments dampen conflict between potential rivals like China and Japan, we are told, preventing them from fighting wars that would disrupt trade and cost us more than the military spending that would have prevented war. The theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim is weak. It overestimates both the American military's contribution to international stability and the danger that instability abroad poses to Americans. In Western Europe, U.S. forces now contribute little to peace, at best making the tiny odds of war among states there slightly more so.7 Even in Asia, where there is more tension, the history of international relations suggests that without U.S. military deployments potential rivals, especially those separated by sea like Japan and China, will generally achieve a stable balance of power rather than fight. In other cases, as with our bases in Saudi Arabia between the Iraq wars, U.S. forces probably create more unrestthan they prevent. Our force deployments can also generate instability by prompting states to develop nuclear weapons. Even when wars occur, their economic impact is likely to be limited here.8 By linking markets, globalization provides supply alternatives for the goods we consume, including oil. If political upheaval disrupts supply in one location, suppliers elsewhere will take our orders. Prices may increase, but markets adjust. That makes American consumers less dependent on any particular supply source, undermining the claim that we need to use force to prevent unrest in supplier nations or secure trade routes.9 Part of the confusion about the value of hegemony comes from misunderstanding the Cold War. People tend to assume, falsely, that our activist foreign policy, with troops forward supporting allies, not only caused the Soviet Union's collapse but is obviously a good thing even without such a rival. Forgotten is the sensible notion that alliances are a necessary evil occasionally tolerated to balance a particularly threatening enemy. The main justification for creating our Cold War alliances was the fear that Communist nations could conquer or capture by insurrection the industrial centers in Western Europe and Japan and then harness enough of that wealth to threaten us — either directly or by forcing us to become a garrison state at ruinous cost. We kept troops in South Korea after 1953 for fear that the North would otherwise overrun it. But these alliances outlasted the conditions that caused them. During the Cold War, Japan, Western Europe and South Korea grew wealthy enough to defend themselves. We should let them. These alliances heighten our force requirements and threaten to drag us into wars, while providing no obvious benefit.
 * No impact to retrenchment and their epistemology is flawed**
 * Friedman 10** research fellow in defense and homeland security, Cato. PhD candidate in pol sci, MIT (Ben, Military Restraint and Defense Savings, 20 July 2010, http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-bf-07202010.html)

There was a dog that didn’t bark during the financial crisis: protectionism. Despite much hue and cry about it, governments have, in fact, imposed remarkably few trade barriers on imports. Indeed, the world economy remains as open as it was before the crisis struck. Protectionism normally thrives in times of economic peril. Confronted by economic decline and rising unemployment, governments are much more likely to pay attention to domestic pressure groups than to upholding their international obligations. As John Maynard Keynes recognised, trade restrictions can protect or generate employment during economic recessions. But what may be desirable under extreme conditions for a single country can be highly detrimental to the world economy. When everyone raises trade barriers, the volume of trade collapses. No one wins. That is why the disastrous free-for-all in trade policy during the 1930’s greatly aggravated the Great Depression. Many complain that something similar, if less grand in scope, is taking place today. An outfit called the Global Trade Alert (GTA) has been at the forefront, raising alarm bells about what it calls “a protectionist juggernaut”. The GTA’s latest report identifies no fewer than 192 separate protectionist actions since November 2008, with China as the most common target. This number has been widely quoted in the financial press. Taken at face value, it seems to suggest that governments have all but abandoned their commitments to the World Trade Organization and the multilateral trade regime. But look more closely at those numbers and you will find much less cause for alarm. Few of those 192 measures are, in fact, more than a nuisance. The most common among them are the indirect (and often unintended) consequences of the bailouts that governments mounted as a consequence of the crisis. The most frequently affected sector is the financial industry. Moreover, we do not even know whether these numbers are unusually high when compared to pre-crisis trends. The GTA report tells us how many measures have been imposed since November 2008, but says nothing about the analogous numbers prior to that date. In the absence of a benchmark for comparative assessment, we do not really know whether 192 “protectionist” measures is a big or small number. What about the recent tariffs imposed by the United States on Chinese tires? President Barack Obama’s decision to introduce steep duties (set at 35 per cent in the first year) in response to a US International Trade Commission (USITC) ruling (sought by US labour unions) has been widely criticised as stoking the protectionist fires. But it is easy to overstate the significance of this case, too. The tariff is fully consistent with a special arrangement negotiated at the time of China’s accession to the WTO, which allows the US to impose temporary protection when its markets are “disrupted” by Chinese exports. The tariffs that Obama imposed were considerably below what the USITC had recommended. And, in any case, the measure affects less than 0.3 per cent of China’s exports to the US. The reality is that the international trade regime has passed its greatest test since the Great Depression with flying colours. Trade economists who complain about minor instances of protectionism sound like a child whining about a damaged toy in the wake of an earthquake that killed thousands. Three things explain this remarkable resilience: ideas, politics and institutions. Economists have been extraordinarily successful in conveying their message to policymakers —even if ordinary people still regard imports with considerable suspicion. Nothing reflects this better than how “protection” and “protectionists” have become terms of derision. After all, governments are generally expected to provide protection to their citizens. But if you say that you favour protection “from imports”, you are painted into a corner with Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley, authors of the infamous 1930 US tariff bill. But economists’ ideas would not have gone very far without significant changes in the underlying configuration of political interests in favour of open trade. For every worker and firm affected by import competition, there is one or more worker and firm expecting to reap the benefits of access to markets abroad. The latter have become increasingly vocal and powerful, often represented by large multinational corporations. In his latest book, Paul Blustein recounts how a former Indian trade minister once asked his American counterpart to bring him a picture of an American farmer: “I have never actually seen one,” the minister quipped. “I have only seen US conglomerates masquerading as farmers.” But the relative docility of rank-and-file workers on trade issues must ultimately be attributed to something else altogether: the safety nets erected by the welfare state. Modern industrial societies now have a wide array of social protections – unemployment compensation, adjustment assistance, and other labour-market tools, as well as health insurance and family support — that mitigate demand for cruder forms of protection.
 * No protectionism**
 * Rodrik 09** (Dani Rodrik, professor of political economy at Harvard, recipient of the Social Science Research Council’s Hirschman Prize, 2009 “The myth of rising protectionism”, http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/dani-rodrikmythrising-protectionism/373102/)

1nc -- agriculture adv.
//Analysts and economists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are full of good news about sales prospects for U.S. farm goods. But high up in every glowing estimate is a reminder that agriculture markets are subject to whims and market changes at a moment's notice. Livestock, dairy and poultry exports are expected to reach record levels again in 2012, the USDA said in its latest export forecast report. There are issues, however, that could cloud that sunny forecast, such as the ongoing sanitary and phytosanitary trade issue, changes in overseas handling of mad cow restrictions, and the Chinese demand for dairy and pork products. Any export item is subject to economic realities, trade wars and sudden shifts in supply or demand. But with food and farm items, that list grows to include freezing weather, floods, recalls based on contamination, disease in animal populations, not to mention plant disease or viruses. Last July, New Zealand kiwifruit growers were riding high. In the 2011 shipping season, they filled 63 chartered reefer vessels as well as 7,000 reefer containers with more than 110 million trays of kiwifruit. During one frenetic day in June, Zespri delivered 160 refrigerated containers, containing 832,000 trays of kiwis, to the Port of Tauranga for export in a 12-hour period. At that time, the industry thought 2012 would be even better. Zespri Chairman John Loughlin told shareholders kiwifruit sales in China were up 27 percent and that sales there could grow from 10 million trays annually to 90 million, by increasing consumption per person to just 8.8 ounces each year. The market optimism is gone, at least for the next few years, as New Zealand kiwi growers discovered a vine disease known as PSA in major growing areas that has spread much more quickly than anticipated. As the first shipment of kiwifruit in 2012 left the Port of Tauranga in early April, Zespri had lowered its sales forecast to 95 million trays and sent a group of Maori business and cultural representatives to Japan, its largest market. In addition to a singing group and gifts of Maori carvings, the delegation will take to its top Japanese clients "a subtle message to stick with us" even though the PSA bacterial disease had infected orchards in New Zealand, according to reports in New Zealand newspapers. The industry has identified a new kiwifruit variety it hopes will be resistant to PSA. In the meantime, kiwifruit producers across the Southern Hemisphere hope to increase their exports and gain market share in key markets in Asia and Europe. Mad cow disease, swine flu, hoof and mouth disease and the avian flu have impacted markets in the U.S. and around the globe with trade implications lasting years. But sometimes, a foodborne illness crops up that can disrupt a market overnight though product recalls. Several years ago, every leaf of spinach on grocery store shelves and in restaurants was recalled in the U.S. It took weeks before the tainted product was traced back to a farm in Central California. In the meantime, the entire industry took a financial hit; a number of small farms and packing houses went out of business, even though they had handled none of the tainted product. Chiquita, which had acquired a domestic bagged salad business the year before the spinach outbreak, was forced to sell its famed Great White Fleet of refrigerated vessels because of the financial losses incurred from the spinach recall period. No spinach grown or marketed by Chiquita was ever linked to the outbreak. On its Web side, the Food and Drug Administration lists 20 food product recalls in the 30 days prior to April 5 this year. The most common reason for a recall is an undeclared ingredient that could cause an allergic reaction, but instances of salmonella and listeria monocytogenes are also listed. Weather can also have an unexpected effect, both on the supply and demand side. In 2011, freezing weather in Florida reduced the state's citrus harvest by millions of boxes and reduced U.S. exports of oranges, grapefruit and lemons. But last year, U.S. exporters of beef, pork and vegetables saw increased demand following the earthquake, tsunami and resulting radiation scare in Japan. Key production areas in Japan for the commodities were affected by the extreme climatic situation, and demand for imported food grew.//
 * Multiple alt causes the aff can’t solve**
 * Journal of Commerce, 12** ("Agriculture Trade a 'Risky Business'", April 16, Proquest) //NK//

//**US agriculture decline is inevitable – China fill in also solves the impact**// //**USDA 11** – United States Department of Agriculture (USDA, “Chinese Agricultural Exports Provide Growing Competition,” 2/3/11, [] )// CB

With China becoming the second largest U.S. market in fiscal year 2010, China’s emergence as a major agricultural importer is well-known. While China is a large net food importer, it is also becoming a formidable competitor in the export market with shipments nearly tripling over the past 10 years and market share increasing. While some of China’s exports are bound for the United States, others directly compete with U.S. products in foreign markets. Exports of consumer-oriented high-value products (HVPs) have shown particular growth, especially to nearby markets in Japan and Southeast Asia. Although China faces production constraints and booming domestic consumption, future exports, particularly of high value products, have room for expansion. Chinese agricultural exports began to surge after 1999, with shipments increasing in value from $10.3 billion in 1999 to an estimated $28 billion in 2010. This $18 billion increase is impressive, but as global agricultural trade was also on the rise over this period, perhaps more important was the increase in market share. Chinese exports accounted for 4.5 percent of global agricultural trade in 1999, but climbed to 5 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, over the same period, U.S. export share fell from 22 percent to 18 percent. Although other exporters, particularly Brazil and Argentina, played a larger role in the fall of U.S. share, the growth of Chinese exports likely contributed to the drop, particularly in certain markets for consumer-oriented HVPs.

The efficient and affordable freight transportation system that facilitates the linkage to international markets has always been important drivers for U.S. export-oriented. In turn, the importance of participating in international trade is reflected in increasing exports over the past decades (Figure 2). Despite the sharp decline of the 1980’s and late 1990’s, the value of agricultural exports has exceeded the imports since early 1970’s. The sharpest decline in agricultural commodities exports happened during the economic downturn of 2008 – 2009, followed by a quick recovery in 2010. The positive trade balance since the 1970’s lead to higher farm prices and increased producer revenues. Reasons for exports fluctuations include but are not limited to U.S. dollar’s value against foreign currencies, changes in the economies of importing countries, and foreign countries’ favorable agricultural policies leading to increased competition in the world export markets. The extent to which international markets are important to largely export-oriented agricultural economy can also be reflected in export market shares of major agricultural commodities shown in Table 2. The export share of total agricultural production has gradually increased from 15.9% in 1988 to 21.4% in 1996. Primary crops and meat and livestock categories’ export share increased from 25.8% to 31.1% and 7.4% to 11.1% respectively. The average percentage of export market share is higher in the 1990s’indicating that U.S. farm income becomes more reliant on the foreign trade. In turn, foreign trade relies on cost-effective and timely transportation efficiency. Table 3 shows the export shares for several important agricultural commodities. Excluding grapes, soybeans and sunflower seed categories, the export share of production for other major agricultural commodities was found to be increased from 1988 to 1996. Most notably, the export share for almonds increased from 51.6 to 71.8%, apples shares were 12%, up from 6.2%. Export shares of wheat and soybeans are significant, averaging about 51% and 34% respectively. With increasing world food demand and growing foreign per capita expenditures on U.S. farm products, the positive relationship between agricultural export shares and foreign market dependence has important implications for trade policies. In particular, the pattern in export share of production for agricultural commodities suggests adequate response in investing and increasing transport capacity is needed in order to support uninterrupted trade flow. Recent wheat trade data published by the Foreign Agricultural Service Production, Supply and Distribution (FAS PSD) shows that the U.S. wheat exports have dominated in the top 5 wheat exporting countries (Figure 3). Despite the significant reductions during the last three 18 years, due to the economic downturn, the U.S. is leading exporter with more than 35 million metric tons exported in 2010, the highest. The rest of the major wheat exporting competitor countries listed in the FAS PSD online database are European Union, Canada, Australia, and Argentina. Soybean world exports are largely dominated by U.S. and Brazil, followed by Argentina, Paraguay, and Canada. The U.S. soybean exports increased almost 70% since 2005, reaching more than 43 million metric tons in 2010. Brazil, the second largest producer of soybeans has significantly increased the export levels during the last decade, reaching 32.3 metric million tons in 2010. 1 The trend in key agricultural commodity exports and imports, as well as export share of production for major commodities, speak about certain need for increasing transportation capacity and improving existing infrastructure. 3.2 Freight Services and Modal Share World’s leading economies—U.S., Japan, China, Germany and France cumulatively account for 50% of global gross domestic product (GDP) of $60.9 trillion (TN) and 35% of global goods exports of $16 TN. With its most expensive freight transportation network measured by the length of paved roads, waterways, railroad, pipelines, and number of airports, the U.S. has the highest level of freight activity. Due to relatively larger geographic area and lower population density, goods are shipped comparatively longer destinations from producers to local end-user locations and export ports. Although as a result of emerging economies, the U.S. share of world GDP has declined between 2001 and 2008 (after the “dot-com boom” years), the demand for its freight and port services has significantly increased (Figure 5). After relatively short steady state from 2000 to 2002, the U.S. freight services increased by 69%, reaching $68 B/year in 2008. Compatibly, since 2003, the port services doubled in value, reaching more than $63 B/year in 2008. From 2007 to 2008, the total international merchandise trade and imports passed through U.S. freight system increased about 12% and 7%, respectively. This trend is consistent with the U.S. trade growth of about 7% per year since 1990. The combination of observed and projected increasing trade volumes encourage further development and/or maintenance of transportation facilities that link local producers to foreign markets. The modal share utilization trend is another important consideration for prioritizing transportation infrastructure investments. Almost all of the freight transportation uses some combination of two or more modes of transportation: trucks, trains, barges, and ocean vessels. Depending on distance, a cargo of export goods may be transported from local production area to 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 1990 1993 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 Billion Dollars Freight services Port services22 transshipment locations using trucks, then continue its way by rail or barge to exporting ports. Among other considerations, mode utilization depends on the industry (commodity type) and geographic location (accessibility). For example, rail (generally utilized for long-destination shipments) is the most cost-effective mode for many agricultural products transportation from elevator to transshipment location or exporting port shipments. Truck mode is utilized for shorter-distance, time-dependent shipments. According to freight transportation statistics by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 77.7% (by weight) of U.S. merchandise trade uses waterborne transportation, and 21.7% relies on either truck or rail modes (Figure 6). Only less than 1% of the trade volume is attributed to air transportation. 3.3 Ports and Inland Waterways Ocean ports are one of the most vital hubs for U.S. international trade flows. Congestion and low efficiency result in delays and disruptions, which impact the entire supply chain (Blonigen and Wilson, 2006). Clark et al., (2004) show that an increase in port efficiency from 25th to 75th percentile reduces port shipping costs by 12%. In addition to port efficiency, an increase in the inland transport infrastructure efficiency from 25 th to 75 th percentile improves the bilateral trade by 25%. This estimate is comparable to the estimate of 28% reported in Limao 24.1 44.9 25.1 5.9 21.7 77.7 0.4 0.1 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 U.S. total land trade U.S. total water trade U.S. total air trade Other and unknown Percent Valu e Weight24 and Venables, (2001). Port efficiency can be measured by linking its impact on transportation costs. In their investigation of the transportation cost determinants, Sánchez et al. (2003) found statistically significant positive correlation between transport costs and distance and value per weight variables. The frequency of services and the level of containerization were both negatively correlated, but only the frequency of services was found to be statistically significant. Waterborne imports and exports account for about 1.4 billion tons, an equivalent of $3.95 TN in international trade, and U.S. ports secure about 13.3 million jobs that generate about $649 billion in personal income (AAPA, 2010). Improving the capacity and efficiency of U.S. public ports infrastructure is particularly important given the projected increases in freight shipment for the next decade. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the volume of containerized cargo will double by 2020 (BTS RITA, 2009). U.S. total exports to the top 15 countries for 2000, 2005, and 2010 are compared in Figure 7. Compared to 2000 and 2005 levels, exports in 2010 were increased significant especially for Canada, Mexico and China. Except for Japan, 2010 exports to all 15 countries are increased. This increasing trend in U.S. merchandise is directly comparable to agricultural export statistics discussed above. Figure 8 shows the Pacific region’s top 15 export product categories. Even with a decreased 2010 level, the computer and electronics category still provides the highest exports, followed by the transportation equipment category. Agricultural products exports category is the third, with substantial increases from 2000 to 2010. Among the Pacific ports, Port of Los Angeles provides the highest number of import and export twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) followed by Port of Long Beach, Port of Oakland, Port of Seattle, Port of Tacoma and Port of Portland (Figure 9). With the exception of Port of Oakland, imports exceed exports at all of the Pacific ports. In particular, the three biggest ports import twice of the export volumes. The increased levels of U.S. total merchandise and agricultural commodities exports emphasize the importance of both port and inland waterways infrastructure improvements. One of those improvement projects is the recent lock repair project on Columbia-Snake River System (CSR) by the Army Corps of Engineers that operates about 12,000 miles of waterways in the US. The CSRS links the Pacific Northwest (PNW) economy to the rest of the world through the 16 ports.’
 * US agriculture is resilient**
 * Khachatryan and Casavant 11** — Research Associate and Director/Professor at the Freight Policy Transportation Institute at the School of Economic Sciences at Washington State Unviersity (Hayk and Ken, THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN U.S. TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE, http://wstc.wa.gov/Meetings/AgendasMinutes/agendas/2011/July19-20/documents/11_0719_BP5_FPTIInfrastTrdPolicyRept.pdf)

//Beginning in early 2011, North Korea issued an appeal for international food aid. A subsequent World Food Program (WFP) assessment reported in March that a quarter of the North Korean population nation is facing severe food shortages due to an unusually cold winter, fertilizer shortages, and rising international food prices. A U.S. delegation, led by Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea Robert King, visited// //the nation in May to carry out its own assessment. The United States maintains that its food aid policy follows three criteria: demonstrated need, severity of need compared to other countries, and satisfactory monitoring systems to ensure food is reaching the most vulnerable. Obama Administration officials are reportedly divided on whether to authorize new humanitarian assistance for North Korea. Among critics, strong concerns about diversion of such aid to the elite exist, although assistance provided in 2008-2009 had operated under an improved system of monitoring and access negotiated by the Bush Administration. Another complicating factor involves taking a different stance than South Korea, which explicitly links food aid with diplomatic concerns. Several members of Congress have spoken out against the provision of any assistance to Pyongyang because of concerns about supporting the regime.//
 * The plan lowers food prices – but high food prices force North Korea to seek food aid**
 * Chanlett-Avery 11-** specialist in Asian affairs for the Congressional Research Service, MA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia (Emma “North Korea: U.S. Relations, Nuclear Diplomacy, and Internal Situation,” fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/167870.pdf//MGD)//

//**That gives the US a bargaining chip over North Korea’s nuclear program**// //**CNN 12** (March, “Analysis: North Korea deal promising, but questions persist,” http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/01/u-s-cautiously-optimistic-after-food-aid-deal-with-north-korea///MGD) Never a regime to do something for nothing, North Korea took what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a "modest first step" in agreeing to halt its nuclear and missile program in exchange for food aid. But Clinton knows full well that 20 years of broken promises by North Korea to successive American administrations, both Democrat and Republican, give good reason to pause before celebrating. The deal though is a promising sign, a first step that is conciliatory rather than belligerent, as North Korea agreed to stop nuclear activity at its main facility in Yongbyon and impose a moratorium on nuclear tests and long-range missile launched in exchange for 240,000 tons of food assistance. It also promised to allow international inspectors into nuclear sites that have gone unexamined for close to five years.

The international community is increasingly aware that cooperative diplomacy is the most productive way to tackle the multiple, interconnected global challenges facing humanity, not least of which is the increasing proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Korea and Northeast Asia are instances where risks of nuclear proliferation and actual nuclear use arguably have increased in recent years. This negative trend is a product of continued US nuclear threat projection against the DPRK as part of a general program of coercive diplomacy in this region, North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, the breakdown in the Chinese-hosted Six Party Talks towards the end of the Bush Administration, regional concerns over China’s increasing military power, and concerns within some quarters in regional states (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) about whether US extended deterrence (“nuclear umbrella”) afforded under bilateral security treaties can be relied upon for protection. The consequences of failing to address the proliferation threat posed by the North Korea developments, and related political and economic issues, are serious, not only for the Northeast Asian region but for the whole international community. At worst, there is the possibility of nuclear attack1, whether by intention, miscalculation, or merely accident, leading to the resumption of Korean War hostilities. On the Korean Peninsula itself, key population centres are well within short or medium range missiles. The whole of Japan is likely to come within North Korean missile range. Pyongyang has a population of over 2 million, Seoul (close to the North Korean border) 11 million, and Tokyo over 20 million. Even a limited nuclear exchange would result in a holocaust of unprecedented proportions. But the catastrophe within the region would not be the only outcome. New research indicates that even a limited nuclear war in the region would rearrange our global climate far more quickly than global warming. Westberg draws attention to new studies modelling the effects of even a limited nuclear exchange involving approximately 100 Hiroshima-sized 15 kt bombs2 (by comparison it should be noted that the United States currently deploys warheads in the range 100 to 477 kt, that is, individual warheads equivalent in yield to a range of 6 to 32 Hiroshimas).The studies indicate that the soot from the fires produced would lead to a decrease in global temperature by 1.25 degrees Celsius for a period of 6-8 years.3 In Westberg’s view: That is not global winter, but the nuclear darkness will cause a deeper drop in temperature than at any time during the last 1000 years. The temperature over the continents would decrease substantially more than the global average. A decrease in rainfall over the continents would also follow…The period of nuclear darkness will cause much greater decrease in grain production than 5% and it will continue for many years...hundreds of millions of people will die from hunger…To make matters even worse, such amounts of smoke injected into the stratosphere would cause a huge reduction in the Earth’s protective ozone.4 These, of course, are not the only consequences. Reactors might also be targeted, causing further mayhem and downwind radiation effects, superimposed on a smoking, radiating ruin left by nuclear next-use. Millions of refugees would flee the affected regions. The direct impacts, and the follow-on impacts on the global economy via ecological and food insecurity, could make the present global financial crisis pale by comparison. How the great powers, especially the nuclear weapons states respond to such a crisis, and in particular, whether nuclear weapons are used in response to nuclear first-use, could make or break the global non proliferation and disarmament regimes. There could be many unanticipated impacts on regional and global security relationships5, with subsequent nuclear breakout and geopolitical turbulence, including possible loss-of-control over fissile material or warheads in the chaos of nuclear war, and aftermath chain-reaction affects involving other potential proliferant states.
 * Extinction**
 * Hayes** & Hamel-Green**, 10** – *Executive Director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, AND ** Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development act Victoria University (1/5/10, Executive Dean at Victoria, “The Path Not Taken, the Way Still Open: Denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia,” http://www.nautilus.org/fora/security/10001HayesHamalGreen.pdf)

1nc -- politics da
Backers of a revised Senate bill to improve the cybersecurity at power plants, water systems and other critical services are optimistic they can bring the measure to the floor before the August break.¶ A few major hurdles still stand in the way of final passage — the biggest being **persuading** a couple of **Republicans** to switch sides.¶ Some GOP senators say they fear the revised bill introduced Thursday still overburdens industry with new mandates, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce also took aim at the legislation over the weekend.¶ But Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), a lead author of the newly minted Cybersecurity Act of 2012, told POLITICO he thinks fellow lawmakers ultimately will allow the compromise effort to come to the floor.¶ “I’m confident, with this new bill, that we will have 60 votes,” Lieberman said of a motion to proceed. He acknowledged, however, that **supporters “have work to do” to muster the votes** for passage.¶ Lieberman noted at the time of the bill’s introduction that he would have preferred a stronger measure. But the comprehensive reform bill was revised with GOP interests in mind, and Lieberman acknowledged Friday that amendments likely would be essential to securing its final approval. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has long sided with Lieberman on reform, also asked for an open debate in a joint statement with other lawmakers last week.¶ “To me, that is the best and perhaps only way, with that kind of amendment process, that we’re going to get the 60 votes to finally pass a good, strong cybersecurity bill,” Lieberman conceded in an interview.¶ The cybersecurity reform debate this month has galvanized the Senate, where lawmakers began a blitz last week that featured a series of doom-and-gloom speeches on the chamber floor. At one point, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) compared the threat of a cyberattack on the energy grid to the derecho that left over a million Washington residents in the dark earlier this month.¶ President Barack Obama soon after **urged** the Senate to pass cybersecurity reform in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which he too stressed the possible consequences of inaction. “In a future conflict, an adversary unable to match our military supremacy on the battlefield might seek to exploit our computer vulnerabilities here at home,” Obama wrote in a piece that appeared in Friday’s paper. “Taking down vital banking systems could trigger a financial crisis. The lack of clean water or functioning hospitals could spark a public health emergency.”¶ Even in light of the doomsday scenarios, the fight in Congress is not likely to get easier.¶ Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Lieberman, Collins and others don’t want the debate to slip into September, but only a few days remain before the August recess. And before the chamber can even think of tackling cybersecurity, it first has to address the expiring Bush tax cuts — a potentially lengthy political battle.¶ The new cybersecurity bill faces its share of political obstacles, including the same barriers that have prevented Senate progress on the issue since the beginning of the year. Supportive lawmakers must still find a way to mollify critics, while delivering a bill to the president that brings new security protections to critical infrastructure and helps companies and the government share data about emerging digital threats.¶ The new proposal from Senate leaders seeks to court Republicans by eschewing mandates on critical infrastructure, and it instead proposes a measures that would reward power plants, water systems and similar entities that agree to implement new security standards.¶ The provisions are the result of considerable work by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). Kyl, with his staff, even took the duo’s preliminary ideas to the Chamber earlier this month for a briefing. But the business lobby, reacting to the new Lieberman bill this weekend, said it fears the revisions on critical infrastructure might not actually be voluntary.¶ Ann Beauchesne, a top official at the Chamber, said the group is looking at the revised plan and reviewing it with members. But she said she thinks the Chamber “will still have concerns with it.”¶ Some Republicans also are already criticizing the new measure. Indiana Sen. Dan Coats said in a statement he finds troubling provisions that “move beyond voluntary incentives and subject the private sector to mandatory requirements and burdensome regulations.”¶ Coats is a backer of the so-called SECURE IT Act, a Republican-led counterproposal on cybersecurity spearheaded by Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. The measure does not include any provisions on critical infrastructure.¶ Asked last week about the Kyl-Whitehouse compromise that later informed Lieberman’s new bill, McCain told POLITICO he thought it was “no good.” His office would not specify whether the new cybersecurity plan resolved his concerns.¶ To satisfy some Democrats, meanwhile, the new bill includes additional protections for Americans’ privacy and civil liberties. Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Al Franken of Minnesota were among the most active members in pushing for those changes, which have been blessed by the American Civil Liberties Union.¶ But it’s possible that a few Democrats still might try to limit further the ways in which Internet companies under the bill can monitor Web traffic to detect and block cyberthreats.¶ In the end, the coming debate is **going to matter**: While some key Republicans have expressed a willingness to consider a cybersecurity effort with elements on critical infrastructure, others have also said their support may depend on the way the measure is written and the sort of amendments they may be able to offer.¶ Reid indicated in the past that the cybersecurity measure could come to the floor with few restrictions on amendments. His office would not comment for this story.
 * Cybersecurity will pass but it isn’t assured – Obama’s push musters key votes**
 * Romm, 7-22**-12 – Tony, Supporters eager to move cyberbill, POLITICO Pro, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78831.html, for more info on why POLITICO Pro = most qualified to discuss cybersecurity and other tech issues see: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45113.html)

The plan steals jobs and economic growth from Virginia – that decks Obama’s reelection Memoli 5-7 [Michael, “Ohio, Virginia key in 2012 electoral battleground map”, LA Times, 5-7-12, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/07/news/la-pn-obama-ohio-virginia-battleground-map-20120507, javi] It is of course no coincidence that President Obama's first two campaign rallies were in Ohio and Virginia this past weekend. In Ohio, you have the quadrennial bellwether, one of the most fiercely contested states in recent presidential history, and one that has voted for the winning candidate in every election since 1964. And //in Virginia, you have what could be the decisive state in 2012//, one that had been a traditional Republican stronghold until Obama turned it blue in 2008. Ohio is accustomed to its role in the presidential spotlight, but for Virginia, this is all new. As one Democratic strategist put it last week, Ohio has been on a pendulum — swinging from one party to the other — but //Virginia is now solidly purple// and will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future. A senior Obama campaign official believes Virginia will be the epicenter of presidential campaigning possibly for the next two decades. It's been noted often of late that since 1960, no presidential candidate has won the White House without winning two of the following three – Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Which is why the race in Virginia could be pivotal. Senior Romney campaign aides told the Washington Post last week that their path to victory relies on winning three traditional red states that Obama turned blue last election – Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia. Of those three, Virginia seems most favorable to Obama this time around. Should the president indeed carry Virginia again while losing those other two, it leaves open a number of paths to victory for him elsewhere while significantly narrowing Romney’s. It allows him to lose Florida and Pennsylvania, for instance, while otherwise holding on to his other 2008 pickups. If Ohio stays in the fold, too, Romney has to win back western states such as Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico to have a chance. Want to test these theories out? Take a look at the Los Angeles Times’ new interactive electoral map, which lets you forecast the result based on calling winners in what are for the moment the nine states most likely to decide the race. A new USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in these 2012 battlegrounds has a tight race overall. Obama leads Romney 47% to 45%, with 7% undecided.

Advocates of cyber security legislation have advanced the ball to the point where they might score. A new bill intended to win bipartisan support would offer “incentives” to companies that operate vital infrastructure if they participate with government authorities, which would include getting absolved of any liability. ¶ President Obama has come out in favor of the new approach, writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that essentially says that any hacker from anywhere in the world can disrupt critical U.S assets if certain companies have not taken the right steps to address such pitfalls. The time is now to fix the problem, he says, pointing out that water plants in Texas have already been hacked while cyber invaders have also penetrated natural gas pipelines in the United States. ¶ “We need to make it easier for these companies -- with reasonable liability protection -- to share data and information with government when they’re attacked,” the president writes in the paper. “And we need to make it easier for government, if asked, to help these companies prevent and recover from attacks.” ¶ A recent report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Control Systems Security Program says that the number of attacks has jumped from 41 in 2010 to 198 in 2011. Many problems, it adds, could have been prevented using best security practices -- things that may elude a private company but which could be resolved by sharing information. So-called spear phishing tactics where employees are tricked into giving out sensitive info to hackers is a prime problem. ¶ About 85 percent of all critical infrastructure assets are owned and operated by private entities, which have an interest in keeping such attacks secret and which do not want to disclose any proprietary information. That’s why the re-write of the cyber security bill would “hold harmless” these companies that collaborate with the federal government -- either to divulge attacks or to work with authorities to prevent them. Along those lines, owners of critical infrastructure assets would not be obligated to participate but if they do, they would have much flexibility. ¶ “These numbers demonstrate that attackers are increasingly turning their attention to **<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">critical infrastructure ** facilities, and are finding soft targets,” says Brian Ahern, chief executive of Industrial Defender. “Doing nothing about this is like **<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">playing with fire **, leaving power grids, chemical plants, oil and gas facilities, waters supplies and other key systems **<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">at significant risk **.” ¶ Liability Concerns¶ The pending measure defines critical infrastructure as any asset that if brought down would lead to mass casualties, mass evacuation or financial collapse. The power grid fits into that categorization. According to the General Accountability Office, the nation’s wires infrastructure is comprised **<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">of $1 trillion ** in assets that entail 200,000 miles of transmission lines. Altogether, over 800,000 megawatts of power serve more than 300 million people. Because the system is now connected to the outside world, it is open to attack.¶ Consider the smart grid that allows utilities and customers to communicate with each other: A nemesis can manipulate the data and disrupt the network — just as a number of smaller but potent viruses have already done. The big one, of course, has been Stuxnet that this government used in coordination with that of Israel and that was intended to diminish the Iranian nuclear program.¶ For their part, utilities are already required under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to certify with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that they have developed robust systems that can continue to generate and deliver power if attacked. To comply, they are describing their potential risks based on historical accounts. Meantime, nuclear operators have their own separate requirements that they follow and that they report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ¶ That earlier law is one reason why some U.S. senators have been wary about new cyber security legislation. That is, they were concerned about redundancy, higher costs and more burdens. And, according to Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the “voluntary” aspects of the previously considered measures could later become “mandatory,” which would hamstring companies’ latitude. ¶ As such, Murkowski and other ranking Senate Republicans have pushed for an “information sharing” arrangement between the federal government and industry. It is part of the compromise that is winning **<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">bipartisan support ** -- and it could **<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">pass both chambers this year **, says Murkowski’s office. Provisions tied to how and with whom information is shared would still need to reconciled. But, all such bills now provide liability protection for the use and disclosure of cyber threats. ¶ By all accounts, most companies are increasing their cyber security efforts. But some are going to great lengths while others just don’t have the experience to erect better defenses. By opening the lines of communication with government authorities and eliminating the liabilities for doing so, cyber security advocates say that critical infrastructure would be **<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">much better protected **.
 * Solves cybersecurity and turns the case**
 * Silverman, 7-25**-12 – Ken, named one of the Top Economics Journalists by Wall Street Economists, Cybersecurity Bill Now Positioned to Pass. Energy Biz – EnergyBiz Insider is named a 2012 Finalist for Original Web Commentary presented by the American Society of Business Press Editors. The column is also the Winner of the 2011 Online Column category awarded by Media Industry News, http://www.energybiz.com/article/12/07/cyber-security-bill-now-positioned-pass

The US uses the two-man rule to achieve a higher level of security in nuclear affairs. Under this rule two authorized personnel must be present and in agreement during critical stages of nuclear command and control. The President must jointly issue a launch order with the Secretary of Defense; Minuteman missile operators must agree that the launch order is valid; and on a submarine, both the commanding officer and executive officer must agree that the order to launch is valid. In the US, in order to execute a nuclear launch, an Emergency Action Message (EAM) is needed. This is a preformatted message that directs nuclear forces to execute a specific attack. The contents of an EAM change daily and consist of a complex code read by a human voice. Regular monitoring by shortwave listeners and videos posted to YouTube provide insight into how these work. These are issued from the NMCC, or in the event of destruction, from the designated hierarchy of command and control centres. Once a command centre has confirmed the EAM, using the two-man rule, the Permissive Action Link (PAL) codes are entered to arm the weapons and the message is sent out. These messages are sent in digital format via the secure Automatic Digital Network and then relayed to aircraft via single-sideband radio transmitters of the High Frequency Global Communications System, and, at least in the past, sent to nuclear capable submarines via Very Low Frequency (Greenemeier 2008, Hardisty 1985). The technical details of VLF submarine communication methods can be found online, including PC-based VLF reception. Some reports have noted a Pentagon review, which showed a potential “electronic back door into the US Navy’s system for broadcasting nuclear launch orders to Trident submarines” (Peterson 2004). The investigation showed that cyber terrorists could potentially infiltrate this network and insert false orders for launch. The investigation led to “elaborate new instructions for validating launch orders” (Blair 2003). Adding further to the concern of cyber terrorists seizing control over submarine launched nuclear missiles; The Royal Navy announced in 2008 that it would be installing a Microsoft Windows operating system on its nuclear submarines (Page 2008). The choice of operating system, apparently based on Windows XP, is not as alarming as the advertising of such a system is. This may attract hackers and narrow the necessary reconnaissance to learning its details and potential exploits. It is unlikely that the operating system would play a direct role in the signal to launch, although this is far from certain. Knowledge of the operating system may lead to the insertion of malicious code, which could be used to gain accelerating privileges, tracking, valuable information, and deception that could subsequently be used to initiate a launch. Remember from Chapter 2 that the UK’s nuclear submarines have the authority to launch if they believe the central command has been destroyed. Attempts by cyber terrorists to create the illusion of a decapitating strike could also be used to engage fail-deadly systems. Open source knowledge is scarce as to whether Russia continues to operate such a system. However evidence suggests that they have in the past. Perimetr, also known as Dead Hand, was an automated system set to launch a mass scale nuclear attack in the event of a decapitation strike against Soviet leadership and military. In a crisis, military officials would send a coded mesWsage to the bunkers, switching on the dead hand. If nearby ground-level sensors detected a nuclear attack on Moscow, and if a break was detected in communications links with top military commanders, the system would send low-frequency signals over underground antennas to special rockets. Flying high over missile fields and other military sites, these rockets in turn would broadcast attack orders to missiles, bombers and, via radio relays, submarines at sea. Contrary to some Western beliefs, Dr. Blair says, many of Russia's nuclear-armed missiles in underground silos and on mobile launchers can be fired automatically. (Broad 1993) Assuming such a system is still active, cyber terrorists would need to create a crisis situation in order to activate Perimetr, and then fool it into believing a decapitating strike had taken place. While this is not an easy task, the information age makes it easier. Cyber reconnaissance could help locate the machine and learn its inner workings. This could be done by targeting the computers high of level official’s—anyone who has reportedly worked on such a project, or individuals involved in military operations at underground facilities, such as those reported to be located at Yamantau and Kosvinksy mountains in the central southern Urals (Rosenbaum 2007, Blair 2008) Indirect Control of Launch Cyber terrorists could cause incorrect information to be transmitted, received, or displayed at nuclear command and control centres, or shut down these centres’ computer networks completely. In 1995, a Norwegian scientific sounding rocket was mistaken by Russian early warning systems as a nuclear missile launched from a US submarine. A radar operator used Krokus to notify a general on duty who decided to alert the highest levels. Kavkaz was implemented, all three chegets activated, and the countdown for a nuclear decision began. It took eight minutes before the missile was properly identified—a considerable amount of time considering the speed with which a nuclear response must be decided upon (Aftergood 2000). Creating a false signal in these early warning systems would be relatively easy using computer network operations. The real difficulty would be gaining access to these systems as they are most likely on a closed network. However, if they are transmitting wirelessly, that may provide an entry point, and information gained through the internet may reveal the details, such as passwords and software, for gaining entrance to the closed network. If access was obtained, a false alarm could be followed by something like a DDoS attack, so the operators believe an attack may be imminent, yet they can no longer verify it. This could add pressure to the decision making process, and if coordinated precisely, could appear as a first round EMP burst. Terrorist groups could also attempt to launch a non-nuclear missile, such as the one used by Norway, in an attempt to fool the system. The number of states who possess such technology is far greater than the number of states who possess nuclear weapons. Obtaining them would be considerably easier, especially when enhancing operations through computer network operations. Combining traditional terrorist methods with cyber techniques opens opportunities neither could accomplish on their own. For example, radar stations might be more vulnerable to a computer attack, while satellites are more vulnerable to jamming from a laser beam, thus together they deny dual phenomenology. Mapping communications networks through cyber reconnaissance may expose weaknesses, and automated scanning devices created by more experienced hackers can be readily found on the internet. Intercepting or spoofing communications is a highly complex science. These systems are designed to protect against the world’s most powerful and well funded militaries. Yet, there are recurring gaffes, and the very nature of asymmetric warfare is to bypass complexities by finding simple loopholes. For example, commercially available software for voice-morphing could be used to capture voice commands within the command and control structure, cut these sound bytes into phonemes, and splice it back together in order to issue false voice commands (Andersen 2001, Chapter 16). Spoofing could also be used to escalate a volatile situation in the hopes of starting a nuclear war. “ [they cut off the paragraph] “In June 1998, a group of international hackers calling themselves Milw0rm hacked the web site of India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) and put up a spoofed web page showing a mushroom cloud and the text “If a nuclear war does start, you will be the first to scream” (Denning 1999). Hacker web-page defacements like these are often derided by critics of cyber terrorism as simply being a nuisance which causes no significant harm. However, web-page defacements are becoming more common, and they point towards alarming possibilities in subversion. During the 2007 cyber attacks against Estonia, a counterfeit letter of apology from Prime Minister Andrus Ansip was planted on his political party website (Grant 2007). This took place amid the confusion of mass DDoS attacks, real world protests, and accusations between governments.
 * Global nuclear war**
 * Fritz 09** (Jason, Former Captain of the U.S. Army, July, Hacking Nuclear Command and Control, [|www.icnnd.org/Documents/Jason_Fritz_Hacking_NC2.doc])

1nc -- topicality

 * A. Violation –**

//One way to define infrastructure is to describe it in terms of its characteristics. A perhaps sufficiently succinct definition of infrastructure, also called ‘social overhead capital’, is provided by Hirschman (1958). He defines infrastructure as “capital that provides public services”. In essence, infrastructure therefore consists of two elements – ‘capitalness’ and ‘publicness’. The first element is used to distinguish between infrastructure (defined as a stock variable) and public goods (defined as a flow variable) (Rietveld and Bruinsma, 1998:18). The latter element involves the general properties of non-rivalry and non-excludability. A distinction can, thus, be made between infrastructure and public capital where infrastructure would include goods that have a capital character, but are not necessarily public. Such goods could include privately owned telecommunications, butwould exclude publicly owned military equipment (which are public capital, but// does not provide public services//). Thus, a common feature of infrastructure seems to be that there is at least a strong public involvement in the use thereof (Rietveld and Bruinsma, 1998:19). Economists label such goods physical infrastructure, or infrastructure capital, while urban planners might refer to them as transportation modalities and utilitcies.//
 * Infrastructure is physical capital that provides public services – it excludes the military**
 * Fourie 6** – Chief Operating Officer of ArcelorMittal South Africa (Johan, ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE: A REVIEW OF DEFINITIONS, THEORY AND EMPIRICS, 9/06, South African Journal of Economics, Vol 74, Issue 3, Wiley Online Library)//EM//

//**Transportation infrastructure services are strictly limited to facilitating private economic activity**// //**Musick, 10** – Congressional Budget Office’s Microeconomic Studies Division (Nathan, “Public Spending on Transportation and Water Infrastructure,”// //http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/119xx/doc11940/11-17-infrastructure.pdf//

//Although different definitions of “infrastructure” exist, this report focuses on two types that claim a significant amount of federal resources: transportation and water. Those types of infrastructure share the economic characteristics of being relatively capital intensive and// producing services//under public management that// facilitate private economic activity.// They are typically the types examined by studies that attempt to calculate the payoff, in terms of benefits to the U.S. economy, of the public sector’s funding of infrastructure. For the purposes of CBO’s analysis, “transportation infrastructure” includes the systems and facilities that support the following types of activities: The category “water infrastructure” includes facilities that provide the following: Consistent with CBO’s previous reports on public spending for transportation and water infrastructure, this update excludes spending that is associated with such infrastructure but does not contribute directly to the provision of infrastructure facilities or certain //strictly defined////infrastructure services//. Examples of excluded spending are federal outlays for homeland security (which are especially pertinent to aviation), law enforcement and military functions (such as those carried out by the Coast Guard), and cleanup operations (such as those conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers following Hurricane Katrina in 2005).
 * Vehicular transportation: highways, roads, bridges, and tunnels;
 * Mass transit: subways, buses, and commuter rail;
 * Rail transport: primarily the intercity passenger service provided by Amtrak;
 * Civil aviation: airport terminals, runways, and taxiways, and facilities and navigational equipment for air traffic control; and
 * Water transportation: waterways, ports, vessels, and navigational systems.
 * Water resources: containment systems, such as dams, levees, reservoirs, and watersheds; and sources of fresh water such as lakes and rivers; and
 * Water utilities: supply systems for distributing potable water, and wastewater and sewage treatment systems and plants.


 * B. Vote negative to protect limits and ground – non-economic services explode the topic, they allow limitless military, police and homeland security affs, including for US military bases abroad which are legally considered part of the US. The core of neg ground centers on the economics of infrastructure development, the military bypasses all of it – even if they don’t’ spike our ground with military, the aff isn’t substantial enough to solve our offense which is also a voting issue**

We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experience—the one most deeply denied. Catastrophic anxiety is that fear that haunts us from within, the fear that one has already been annihilated ; that, like Beckett, one has “never been born properly” and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyche’s defining condition —a truth attested each time when, striving to cohere as a subject, one collapses before the tidal wave of an aggression against oneself that rises up from within. An unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror. All other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts. There is a threat worse than extinction. The deepest self-knowledge we harbor, the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps our deepest self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being. Death is the icy wind that blows through all we do. This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements, delays, and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror before a dread that is nameless and must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us. In catastrophic anxiety the destruction of one’s power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is experienced as an event that has already happened. That event forms the first self-reference: the negative judgment of an Other on one’s being—internalized as self-undoing. Postmodern posturing before the phrase “I am an other” here receives the concretization that shatters “free play.” There is a wound at the heart of subjectivity, a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world. The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice, in a despair that apparently cannot be mediated: the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake, alone and arrested, all exits barred, facing inner paralysis as the truth of one’s life. We ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more terrifying process begins: an implosion in which one’s subjective being is resolved into fragments of pure anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state descends in a final, chilling recognition—that everything one has done and suffered is but sound and fury, signifying nothing. One has become a corpse with insomnia. Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void. This is the hour of the wolf, where one is arrested before the primary fact: at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror. Fear of psychic dissolution is the ground condition of our being as subjects. Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror, fleeing in panic a voice that has already overtaken us, resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution. At the heart of inwardness a malevolent spirit presides. To put it in nuclear metaphors: catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the other’s unlimited destructiveness. To complete the picture we need only add Winnicott’s point: people live in dread of this situation, projecting fear of a breakdown into the future, because the breakdown has already occurred .8
 * 1nc -- kritik**
 * The aff is wed to a dangerous anxiety of the icy wind of death – this ceaseless terror destroys life and makes catastrophic violence inevitable**
 * Davis 01** (Walter A. Davis, Professor of English at Ohio State, 2001, “Deracination: Historocity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative,” p. 103-104)

Razinsky 09 (Liran, University of Wisconsin, “How to Look Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille”) Thus we see that the stakes are high. What is at stake is the attempt of the subject to grasp itself in totality. This attempt necessitates bringing death into the account, but death itself hampers this very attempt. One never dies in the first person. Returning to Bataille, why does he believe sacrifice to be a solution to Hegel’s fundamental paradox? For him, it answers the requirements of the human, for Man meets death face to face in the sacrifice, he sojourns with it, and yet, at the same time, he preserves his life. In sacrifice, says Bataille, man destroys the animal within him and establishes his human truth as a “being unto death” (he uses Heidegger’s term). Sacrifice provides a clear manifestation of man’s fundamental negativity, in the form of death (Bataille, “Hegel” 335-36; 286). The sacrificer both destroys and survives. Moreover, in the sacrifice, death is approached voluntarily by Man. In this way the paradox is overcome, and yet remains open. We can approach death and yet remain alive, but, one might ask, is it really death that we encountered, or did we merely fabricate a simulacrum? Bataille insists elsewhere, however, that sacrifice is not a simulacrum, not a mere subterfuge. In the sacrificial ritual, a real impression of horror is cast upon the spectators. Sacrifice burns like a sun, spreading radiation our eyes can hardly bear, and calls for the negation of individuals as such (“The Festival” 313; 215). We did not fool death; we are burned in its fire. Bataille’s idea of the sacrifice also addresses Freud’s paradox. It might be impossible to imagine our own death directly, but it is possible to imagine it with the aid of some mediator, to meet death through an other’s death. Yet on some level this other’s death must be our own as well for it to be effective, and indeed this is the case, says Bataille. He stresses the element of identification: “In the sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies himself with the animal that is struck down dead. And so he dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336; 287). “There is no sacrifice,” writes Denis Hollier, “unless the one performing it identifies, in the end, with the victim” (166). Thus it is through identification, through otherness that is partly sameness, that a solution is achieved. If it were us, we would die in the act. If it were a complete other, it would not, in any way, be our death. Also noteworthy is Bataille’s stress on the involvement of sight: “and so he dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336; 287), which brings him close to Freud’s view of the nature of the problem, for Freud insists on the visual, recasting the problem as one of spectatorship, imagining, perceiving. Bataille’s description recapitulates that of Freud, but renders it positive. Yes, we remain as a spectator, but it is essential that we do so. Without it, we cannot be said to have met death. Significantly, meeting death is a need, not uncalled-for. We must meet death, and we must remain as spectators. Thus it is through identification and through visual participation in the dying that a solution is achieved, accompanied by the critical revaluation of values, which renders the meeting with death crucial for “humanness.” Note that both possibilities of meeting death—in the sacrificial-ritual we have just explored, and in theatre or art, to which we now turn—are social. In Hegel and in Freud the problem was stated as relevant to the individual alone, whether facing reality or within the cosmos of his thought. Bataille’s solution is achieved through an expansion of the horizons into social existence. The two modes through which the contradiction can be avoided involve the presence of other people.8 A Visit to the Theater We have seen that Freud argues that death is ungraspable, and that in his struggle with a related paradox, Bataille offers a solution applicable to Freud’s argument. We shall now see ambiguous hints in Freud’s own text toward a similar solution, and examine the issue of the possible encounter with death in a more modern context than that of sacrifice, perhaps one that is closer to us. Let us first return to Freud’s argument of the impossibility of the representation of death. The point in the argument is that we remain spectators. Not specters, as one could imagine one should be, having survived one’s own death, but spectators. Speculation or thought about death fails because of the position of the spectator. Having tried to mirror ourselves in a specular way and failed, we note that we are still in there, watching. But more than the visual, the use of the term of spectators (Zuschauer) carries us swiftly into the domain of the theater. Less than two pages later, Freud stumbles on the idea of theater more directly. Having described our tendency to push death away from life and thus to live an impoverished life, Freud continues: It is an inevitable result of all this that we should seek in the world of fiction, in literature and in the theatre compensation for what has been lost in life. There we still find people who know how to die— who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else. There alone too the condition can be fulfilled which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death: namely that behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be able to preserve a life intact. For it is really too sad that in life it should be like it is in chess, where one false move may force us to resign the game, but with the difference that we can start no second game, no return-match. In the realm of fiction we find the plurality of lives which we need. We die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him, and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero. (“Thoughts” 291) Although the passage is compelling, one should note that it is marginal in Freud’s text, with much poetic force yet of little relevance to the entire article. Freud does not return to it, does not treat it in depth; neither do those who have studied the question of death in Freud (Rank, Schur, Becker, Lifton, Hoffman, Yalom and Piven, among others). In any event, it is not in relation to the problem of the representation of death that he pens this passage that looks, at least at first, like a burst of literary imagination rather than a serious discussion. More important than the question of its marginality, attention should be given to what Freud does in this passage. For Freud, as can be seen from the context of this passage, what takes places in the theater belongs to the cultural-conventional attitude to death, which tries hard to ignore it. In his description theater is a sort of bourgeois solution, superficial and limited, that replaces meeting death in person. More lip-service to death than a true encounter, it is, again as the context shows, the solution of the coward. He who is unwilling to risk his life, being controlled by fear (Freud’s point in the passage that precedes the one on the theater) finds some surrogate satisfaction, a mild compensation, by proxy, in seeing others pretend to die. Freud’s description stresses another point: the survival of the spectator and the necessary detachment implied by the possibility of replacing one hero for another. Theater does not reveal anything to us about death, for “behind all the vicissitudes of life we should still be able to preserve a life intact.” Thus not only do we survive the hero, we even benefit from his death: this is what we seek, our own survival. In that description, we come to the theater in order to make sure that we keep death away. We come to meet our “aliveness” again, once again to confirm ourselves in our complete rejection of death. Night after night in the theater, we convince ourselves of our immunity and invulnerability. The entire artistic setting helps us: we can always step out of the enchanted dream, out of the willing suspension of disbelief, and tell ourselves: “After all, it is only a show, only a story.”9 Thus there is no real danger, no real undermining of our security. Theater, Freud seems to suggest, is just a play. But is theater really that meaningless? Is the encounter with death there really a missed encounter? We shall now turn to Bataille, who offers an alternative view, where theater is regarded as much more serious. Theatrical art, Bataille reminds, is the heir to religion. Theatrical representation evolved from the sacrificial rite and still maintains its essence, which is, as we have seen, to enable us to come close to death (La Littérature 214; 69). Theater, literature in general, and the sacrificial rituals are essential to us: through them we become human, for we can familiarize ourselves with death and distance ourselves from our animal nature. Theater, according to Bataille’s description, overcomes Hegel’s paradox: “In tragedy, at least, it is a question of our identifying with some character who dies, and of believing that we die, although we are alive (Bataille, “Hegel” 337; 287). Bataille’s phrasing is almost identical to that of Freud. But the perspective differs. It is a delicate yet crucial nuance. Bataille, in contrast with Freud (under the above reading), stresses that we really do get a glimpse of dying there, that it is not merely a game. He also views the encounter with death as an existential necessity, crucial for Man to be human, not as some entertainment. And third, there is a twist of value: for Bataille we actively try to bring death closer, trying to force ourselves to represent it, in various cultural ways (sacrifice, art). Theater, be it tragedy or comedy, is very serious for Bataille, and he attempts to explain why: if, he says, the goal of all life is to push death aside, to head away from it, theater offers an element in life that goes in the opposite direction. Instead of moving us away from death, it brings us nearer. It serves a deep need in us. “…Just as certain insects, in given conditions, flock towards a ray of light,” Bataille writes, “so we all flock to an area at the opposite end of the scale from death. The mainspring of human activity is generally the desire to reach the point farthest from the funeral domain.” Yet it is sometimes necessary for life not to “flee from the shades of death,” but to “allow…them to grow within it” (La Littérature 212-13; 66-67). Moreover, this should not be done passively, in spite of ourselves: “we must,” Bataille insists, “revive [the shades of death] voluntarily.” One of our ways to do so is art. “The arts […] incessantly evoke these derangements, these lacerations, this decline which our entire activity endeavors to avoid,” and it is done in order to arouse anxiety in us. Sacrifice is of the same nature (213-14; 67-68). Not that we die in the theater. Bataille is aware, as is Freud, that by surviving the protagonists we only affirm life once again. Our laughter or our tears signify that for a moment, “death appears light to us” (La Littérature 214; 68). Yet if it appears light, it is because for a moment it is as though we have risen beyond the horror, for a moment we are not busy fearing death: at that moment we come to understand something about the presence of death. It teaches us that “when we flee wisely from the elements of death, we merely want to preserve life,” whereas, by entering those “regions that wisdom tells us to avoid, we really live it.” By coming close to death, to the symbols of its emptiness, we get “a heightened consciousness of being.” When we laugh in the theater, such laughter “brings us out […] from the impasse in which life is enclosed by those whose only concern is to preserve life” (214; 68, italics in original). Theater thus has a liberating power. It frees us from the concern of pushing death aside, it brings us into contact with it and thus illuminates the rest of our life, constantly busy with fleeing death, in a peculiar light. For a moment we are, as it wer*+e, free from that compulsive need, and can have a different perspective on life. Returning to Freud, we can try to read his passage through Bataille’s lens and ask whether the theatrical-artistic possibility is really so superficial. Reading against the grain, we can see that Freud does actually offer something there. Even if what we wish in theater is to “be able to preserve a life intact,” it is noteworthy that we seek it. Although the result is similar to that described in the paradox of the impossibility of the representation of death, namely our survival after the representation, there is a difference. There, it was a limitation we encountered, that we remained alive (or was it? We shall see later), whereas here, concerning the theater, it is something we seek: to meet death and yet “preserve a life intact.” Even if only to reaffirm our “aliveness,” we do display a certain magnetic attraction towards death. We might have remained alive, but with some integration of death into this “aliveness.” Theatrical representation, according to Freud’s text, also provides us with a model for another approach to death, one that does not shun it. “There we still find people who know how to die – who, indeed, even manage to kill someone else.” Those people do not embrace our own cowardly evasive attitude to death, they are not obsessed with keeping themselves at a distance from death. They approach it. Theater may not represent death, but it does manage to present us with a model of how to approach it. The crucial element here is that death, in the theater, is the death of an other. Blind as we are to our own death, and in other circumstances blind to the death of the other, in theater we manage in some way, albeit limited, to experience death. For if we identify, as Freud says, with the hero, it means that there is a certain link between him and us. It means that although the overall outcome is that we are only reassured during the spectacle itself, we might still be temporarily seized with apprehension of death. Although turning to the other looks protective at first, it might still shake our affirmation of ourselves to a certain degree. In part this seems due to the hybrid status—split between otherness and sameness—of the hero in the theatrical representation or the literary work: on the one hand, different, estranged from ourselves; on the other hand, close to us through our identification with him. In a sense, we are the same. This hybrid position seems to be the opening through which recognition of death might enter our sheltered, protective person.10 Thus Freud’s text, although it insists on the irrepresentability of death, actually offers, unintentionally perhaps, a possible way out of the paradox through turning to the other. Death perhaps cannot be looked at directly, but it can be grasped sideways, indirectly, vicariously through a mirror, to use Perseus’s ancient trick against Medusa. The introduction of the other, both similar to and different from oneself, into the equation of death helps break out of the Cartesian circle with both its incontestable truth and its solipsism and affirmation of oneself. The safety that theater provides, of essentially knowing that we will remain alive, emerges as a kind of requirement for our ability to really identify with the other. In that, it paradoxically enables us to really get a taste of death. Bataille radicalizes that possibility. Although Freud deems the estrangement of death from psychic life a problem, as we have seen and shall see, theater is not a solution for him. With Bataille however, theater emerges as a much more compelling alternative. Again, it is a matter of a delicate nuance, but a nuance that makes all the difference. The idea common to both authors—that we can meet death through the other and yet remain alive—is ambiguous. One can lay stress on that encounter or on the fact of remaining alive.11 Freud tends to opt for the second possibility, but his text can also be read as supporting the first. The benefit in bringing Freud and Bataille together is that it invites us to that second reading. An Encounter with Death Death in Freud is often the death of the other. Both the fear of death and the death wish are often focused on the other as their object. But almost always it is as though through the discussion of the other Freud were trying to keep death at bay. But along with Bataille, we can take this other more seriously. Imagining our own death might be impossible, yet we can still get a glimpse of death when it is an other that dies. In one passage in his text, the death of the other seems more explicitly a crucial point for Freud as well—one passage where death does not seem so distant. Freud comments on the attitude of primeval Man to death, as described above—namely that he wishes it in others but ignores it in himself. “But there was for him one case in which the two opposite attitudes towards death collided,” he continues. It occurred when primeval man saw someone who belonged to him die—his wife, his child, his friend […]. Then, in his pain, he was forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself, and his whole being revolted against the admission. (“Thoughts” 293) Freud goes on to explain that the loved one was at once part of himself, and a stranger whose death pleased primeval man. It is from this point, Freud continues, that philosophy, psychology and religion sprang.12 I have described elsewhere (Razinsky, “A Struggle”) how Freud’s reluctance to admit the importance of death quickly undermines this juncture of the existential encounter with death by focusing on the emotional ambivalence of primeval man rather than on death itself. However, the description is there and is very telling. Primeval man witnessed death, and “his whole being revolted against the admission.” ”Man could no longer keep death at a distance, for he had tasted it in his pain about the dead” (Freud, “Thoughts” 294). Once again, it is through the death of the other that man comes to grasp death. Once again, we have that special admixture of the other being both an other and oneself that facilitates the encounter with death. Something of myself must be in the other in order for me to see his death as relevant to myself. Yet his or her otherness, which means my reassurance of my survival, is no less crucial, for if it were not present, there would be no acknowledgement of death, one’s own death always being, says Freud, one’s blind spot.13 I mentioned before Heidegger’s grappling with a problem similar to Bataille’s paradox. It is part of Heidegger’s claim, which he shares with Freud, that one’s death is unimaginable. In a famous section Heidegger mentions the possibility of coming to grasp death through the death of the other but dismisses it, essentially since the other in that case would retain its otherness: the other’s death is necessarily the other’s and not mine (47:221-24). Thus we return to the problem we started with—that of the necessary subject-object duality in the process of the representation of death. Watching the dead object will no more satisfy me than imagining myself as an object, for the radical difference of both from me as a subject will remain intact. But the possibility that seems to emerge from the discussion of Freud and Bataille is that in-between position of the person both close and distant, both self and other, which renders true apprehension of death possible, through real identification.14 As Bataille says, regarding the Irish Wake custom where the relatives drink and dance before the body of the deceased: “It is the death of an other, but in such instances, the death of the other is always the image of one’s own death” (“Hegel” 341; 291). Bataille speaks of the dissolution of the subject-object boundaries in sacrifice, of the “fusion of beings” in these moments of intensity (“The Festival” 307-11; 210-13; La Littérature 215; 70). Possibly, that is what happens to primeval man when the loved one dies and why his “whole being” is affected. He himself is no longer sure of his identity. Before, it was clear—there is the other, the object, whom one wants dead, and there is oneself, a subject. The show and the spectators. Possibly what man realized before the cadaver of his loved one was that he himself is also an object, taking part in the world of objects, and not only a subject. When he understood this, it seems to me, he understood death. For in a sense a subject subjectively never dies. Psychologically nothing limits him,15 while an object implies limited existence: limited by other objects that interact with it, limited in space, limited in being the thought-content of someone else. Moreover, primeval man understood that he is the same for other subjects as other subjects are for him—that is, they can wish him dead or, which is pretty much the same, be indifferent to his existence. The encounter made primeval man step out of the psychological position of a center, transparent to itself, and understand that he is not only a spirit but also a thing, an object, not only a spectator; this is what really shakes him.16 The Highest Stake in the Game of Living Thus far we have mainly discussed our first two questions: the limitation in imagining death and the possible solution through a form of praxis, in either a channeled, ritualized or a spontaneous encounter with the death of an other, overcoming the paradox of the impossibility of representation by involving oneself through deep identification. We shall now turn to our third question, of the value of integrating death into our thoughts. We have seen that Bataille’s perspective continuously brings up the issue of the value of approaching death. The questions of whether we can grasp death and, if we can, how, are not merely abstract or neutral ones. The encounter with death, that we now see is possible, seems more and more to emerge as possessing a positive value, indeed as fundamental. What we shall now examine is Freud’s attempt to address that positive aspect directly, an attempt that betrays, however, a deep ambivalence. As mentioned, Freud’s text is very confused, due to true hesitation between worldviews (see Razinsky, “A Struggle”). One manifestation of this confusion is Freud’s position regarding this cultural-conventional attitude: on the one hand he condemns it, yet on the other hand he accepts it as natural and inevitable. For him, it results to some extent from death’s exclusion from unconscious thought (“Thoughts” 289, 296-97). Death cannot be represented and is therefore destined to remain foreign to our life.17 But then Freud suddenly recognizes an opposite necessity: not to reject death but to insert it into life. Not to distance ourselves from it, but to familiarize ourselves with it: But this attitude [the cultural-conventional one] of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives. Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind. Our emotional ties, the unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us. We dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but in fact indispensable, such as attempts at artificial flight, expeditions to distant countries or experiments with explosive substances. We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to take the son’s place with his mother, the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children, if a disaster should occur. Thus the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions. Yet the motto of the Hanseatic League ran: ‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’ (“It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.”) (“Thoughts” 290-91) Readers unfamiliar with Freud’s paper are probably shaking their heads in disbelief. Is it Freud who utters these words? Indeed, the oddity of this citation cannot be over-estimated. It seems not to belong to Freud’s thought. One can hardly find any other places where he speaks of such an intensification of life and fascination with death, and praises uncompromising risk-taking and the neglect of realistic considerations. In addition to being unusual, the passage itself is somewhat unclear.18 The examples—not experimenting with explosive substances—seem irrelevant and unconvincing. The meaning seems to slide. It is not quite clear if the problem is that we do not bring death into our calculations, as the beginning seems to imply, or that, rather, we actually bring it into our calculations too much, as is suggested at the end But what I wish to stress here is that the passage actually opposes what Freud says in the preceding passages, where he describes the cultural-conventional attitude and speaks of our inability to make death part of our thoughts. In both the current passage and later passages he advocates including death in life, but insists, elsewhere in the text, that embracing death is impossible. In a way, he is telling us that we cannot accept the situation where death is constantly evaded. Here again Bataille can be useful in rendering Freud’s position more intelligible. He seems to articulate better than Freud the delicate balance, concerning the place of death in psychic life, between the need to walk on the edge, and the flight into normalcy and safety. As I asserted above, where in Freud there are contradictory elements, in Bataille there is a dialectic. Bataille, as we have seen, presents the following picture: It might be that, guided by our instincts, we tend to avoid death. But we also seem to have a need to intersperse this flight with occasional peeps into the domain of death. When we invest all of our effort in surviving, something of the true nature of life evades us. It is only when the finite human being goes beyond the limitations “necessary for his preservation,” that he “asserts the nature of his being” (La Littérature 214; 68). The approaches of both Bataille and Freud are descriptive as well as normative. Bataille describes a tendency to distance ourselves from death and a tendency to get close to it. But he also describes Man’s need to approach death from a normative point of view, in order to establish his humanity: a life that is only fleeing death has less value. Freud carefully describes our tendency to evade death and, in the paragraph under discussion, calls for the contrary approach. This is stressed at the end of the article, where he encourages us to “give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due” (“Thoughts” 299). Paradoxically, it might be what will make life “more tolerable for us once again” (299). But since Freud also insists not only on a tendency within us to evade death, but also on the impossibility of doing otherwise, and on how death simply cannot be the content of our thought, his sayings in favor of bringing death close are confusing and confused. Freud does not give us a reason for the need to approach death. He says that life loses in interest, but surely this cannot be the result of abstaining from carrying out “experiments with explosive substances.” In addition, his ideas on the shallowness of a life without death do not seem to evolve from anything in his approach. It is along the lines offered by Bataille’s worldview that I wish to interpret them here. Sacrifice, Bataille says, brings together life in its fullness and the annihilation of life. We are not mere spectators in the sacrificial ritual. Our participation is much more involved. Sacrificial ritual creates a temporary, exceptionally heightened state of living. “The sacred horror,” he calls the emotion experienced in sacrifice: “the richest and most agonizing experience.” It “opens itself, like a theater curtain, on to a realm beyond this world” and every limited meaning is transfigured in it (“Hegel” 338; 288). Bataille lays stress on vitality. Death is not humanizing only on the philosophical level, as it is for Hegel or Kojève. Bataille gives it an emotional twist. The presence of death, which he interprets in a more earthly manner, is stimulating, vivifying, intense. Death and other related elements (violence) bring life closer to a state where individuality melts, the mediation of the intellect between us and the world lessens, and life is felt at its fullest. Bataille calls this state, or aspect of the world, immanence or intimacy: “immanence between man and the world, between the subject and the object” (“The Festival” 307-311; 210-213). Moments of intensity are moments of excess and of fusion of beings (La Littérature 215; 70). They are a demand of life itself, even though they sometimes seem to contradict it. Death is problematic for us, but it opens up for us something in life. This line of thought seems to accord very well with the passage in Freud’s text with which we are dealing here, and to extend it. Life without death is life lacking in intensity, an impoverished, shallow and empty life. Moreover, the repression of death is generalized and extended: “the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions.” Freud simply does not seem to have the conceptual tools to discuss these ideas. The intuition is even stronger in the passage that follows, where Freud discusses war (note that the paper is written in 1915): When war breaks out, he says, this cowardly, conservative, risk-rejecting attitude is broken at once. War eliminates this conventional attitude to death. “Death could no longer be denied. We are forced to believe in it. People really die. . . . Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content” (“Thoughts” 291). Thus what is needed is more than the mere accounting of consequences, taking death into consideration as a future possibility. What is needed is exposure to death, [an] sanguineous imprinting of death directly on our minds, through the “accumulation of deaths” of others. Life can only become vivid,[and] fresh, and interesting when death is witnessed directly.
 * This flee from death flees from life itself – alternatively, in the face of extinction, vote negative to sacrifice the 1AC – only through total sacrifice of the plan can we restore life**

**1nc -- counterplan**

 * The Department of Transportation should submit and recommend a substantial increase in its investment in transportation infrastructure necessary to sustain a home port for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier at Naval Station Mayport for a National Environmental Policy Act Environmental Impact Statement Life Cycle Assessment. The United States federal government should implement the least environmentally damaging alternative identified in the Environmental Impact Statement Life Cycle Assessment.**

There is unquestionably a serious tension between the NEPA process and the type of “collaborative” approach advanced by the Forest Service. As discussed, NEPA is based on the principles that information on environmental impacts is important in making rational choices among options and that the public should have broad access to the decision-making process. The Forest Service’s approach ignores both principles, threatening to recreate the kind of narrow, environmentally-insensitive decision-making that prevailed prior to NEPA’s enactment. By essentially eliminating environmental analysis, the Forest Service’s approach leaves agency personnel and other participants in the planning process effectively blind to the potential effects of a proposed management approach. The agency’s refusal to identify and evaluate alternatives, in particular, will preclude meaningful evaluation of the potential environmental benefits and tradeoffs offered by different management approaches. Furthermore, the Forest Service’s substitution of a vague “collaborative” process for the clearly-defined rights of public involvement under NEPA threatens to limit, and possibly bias, public engagement in the planning process. The Forest Service will itself choose the participants in its collaborative process; it may either deliberately or instinctively select citizens and groups that it views as likely to agree with its views, and exclude those that it anticipates will make reaching “consensus” difficult. Thus, the representativeness and fairness of the agency’s collaborative process will frequently be open to question. Citizens outside the collaborative process, meanwhile, will be denied all the procedural rights afforded by NEPA, including the opportunity to participate in scoping sessions, to receive information on the environmental impacts of the agency’s proposed action, to propose alternative approaches, and to offer comments on the accuracy of the agency’s environmental analysis. Ultimately, the Forest Service’s approach appears to be based on the notion that by embracing a philosophy of “collaboration,” and controlling the range of viewpoints involved in planning, the agency can magically make disputes over management of forest lands disappear. In reality, management of federal lands, like most government actions affecting the environment, inevitably raises conflicts among different values and interests. NEPA is based on the sound premise that these types of conflicts are best resolved through an inclusive, analytically rigorous process, not an artificially-constrained search for consensus. There are other approaches to “collaborative” decision-making that do allow federal agencies to engage the public broadly in their planning processes without undercutting environmental reviews. There is no necessary conflict between a well-managed NEPA process and an effort to arrive at a conclusion supported by broad public consensus. The scoping process that agencies undertake before beginning preparation of an EIS is explicitly intended to be a collaborative process, albeit an open one, drawing together agency planners, concerned citizens, tribes and other affected governments to define the key environmental issues and alternative approaches that should be studied by the agency. Agencies can continue that cooperative approach throughout the EIS process, consulting with the public and with other affected interests to build consensus on a preferred alternative, on mitigation measures, and on issues arising during scientific studies in the course of preparing the EIS. Concurrent with or subsequent to the NEPA process, agencies can employ alternative dispute resolution, negotiated rule-making, or other techniques in an attempt to arrive at a conclusion with broad public support. 55 Such dispute resolution efforts are actually more likely to succeed once disputed issues have been thoroughly aired and narrowed through the NEPA review process. The recent success in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington State, described earlier, illustrates the potential for NEPA to help generate solutions with broad public support. In that case, environmentalists, timber companies, local citizens and the Forest Service used the NEPA process as the springboard for negotiating a new management approach for the national forest that reconciled timber harvesting with ecological goals. A local resident involved in the process concluded: “We were able to get timber out in an environmentally responsible way, and we succeeded in avoiding appeals that plague controversial timber sales.”
 * The CP results the aff and builds public participation – this solves**
 * Dreher 5** – Deputy Executive Director of the Georgetown Environmental Law & Policy Institute. He served as Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Robert, “The Political Assault on the National Environmental Policy Act,” http://www.law.georgetown.edu/gelpi/research_archive/nepa/NEPAUnderSiegeFinal.pdf

Over the last forty years, NEPA has required US government agencies to evaluate the life cycle impacts of government actions. Everything from facility construction to the development of policy instruments is subject to NEPA. Unfortunately, the NEPA compliance infrastructure that has been developed over that time is unwieldy, expensive, and time-consuming and does not cover life cycle issues with any rigor. Of particular concern is the need to evaluate cumulative impact, which the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) does not accommodate well. The calculation engine of life cycle assessment is specifically designed to address cumulative effects: it adds up environmental impacts over the life cycle of a system and across geography and time. As a result, life cycle experts are increasingly looking at global consequences of policy decisions. While LCA is not well suited to address the site-specific NEPA issues such as the management of archeological sites, using LCA in the NEPA process in lieu of many of the EIS environmental analyses would decrease costs, increase the speed and comparability of studies, and address the issue of cumulative effects. It would bring in the best available science to measure the outcomes of government decisions. Finally, LCA is designed to measure environmental performance in relation to the social benefits provided by a system. In this respect it is very different from the NEPA process, which only evaluates the system impacts, not the system benefits. This makes it very difficult to decide among options, and strongly supports the do-nothing option. For example, if one is evaluating a transportation infrastructure, it is important to compare the environmental impacts to the function the system provides, i.e., rapid transportation of people and goods rather than simply building miles of roads and rails. A NEPA process currently focuses on the physical infrastructure impacts without asking how well the infrastructure delivers the transportation service. An LCA study would measure the impacts per unit rapid transportation delivered, and the public could see the services they get for the impacts they absorb.
 * Reforming the process is critical for transportation policy**
 * Schenck 09** – Institute for Environmental Research and Education American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (Rita, February 22nd, “The Business Case for Life Cycle Assessment in US Policy and Legislation” http://lcacenter.org/Data/Sites/1/SharedFiles/whitepapers/thebusinesscaseforlca.pdf)

Third, the global environment affects the U.S. economy. Dealing with largely preventable threats posed by foreign invasive species, such as the super-weed kudzu, costs the U.S. economy several hundred million dollars a year. Dealing with pollution along the U.S.-Mexico border is also costly. In contrast, encouraging other countries to fight environmental ills helps promote U.S. exports as American firms produce some of the most advanced environmentally friendly technology products. Fourth, avoiding international environmental tensions, such as regional conflicts over scarce water in the Middle East and Africa, can contribute to regional stability and enhance our security interests. Finally, nature also has an important independent value for most Americans, who value it the way they value freedom—for its own sake. Human welfare and happiness depend on many nonmonetary intangibles, including a clean environment. Sustainable Development The strong U.S. interest in global environmental protection has meant that U.S. and international development efforts have been organized for more than a decade around the principle of 'sustainable development,' not merely economic growth. While the concept can be difficult to apply in practice and has stirred partisan debate at home, it means roughly meeting the needs of the present generations without compromising the needs of future generations. Because progress against poverty must be sustainable, economic development must be environmentally sustainable. To avoid long-term or irreversible environmental damage, economic growth and environmental protection must be pursued simultaneously. This concept has been enshrined in international thinking on development since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The recent United Nations Millennium Development Goals, an ambitious set of anti-poverty objectives, highlight the centrality of sustainable development and include an extensive set of environmental benchmarks. Despite the fact that President Bush's MCA announcement came on the eve of a major international gathering in Monterrey, Mexico, dedicated to advancing those goals, the administration?s proposal neither acknowledges sustainable development nor the importance of environmental progress. The international consensus around the goal of sustainable development means that developing countries would welcome environmental aid. They lag behind industrialized nations in the adoption of modern energy technologies and are eager to close the gap. Many poor nations have created national parks but lack the capacity to keep away illegal squatters, miners, farmers, poachers, and loggers. Encouraging more action on issues affecting poverty and the environment was the central theme of the World Summit on Sustainable Development last year in Johannesburg, South Africa. The signal from the international community could not be clearer: sustainable development, including its environmental dimension, is the global prio rity. The international emphasis placed on environmental protection is primarily a result of U.S. leadership. The longstanding, bipartisan foreign policy of the United States maintains that economic growth and environmental protection must proceed in tandem. Not only does the United States pursue international environmental protection directly through treaties, trade negotiations, and foreign assistance, but it ensures that its commercial objectives do not produce unintended ecological consequences. Moreover, U.S. policymakers have demonstrated, through domestic policies, that sustained progress on the environment actually contributes to prosperity. For example, air and water have become substantially cleaner over the past two decades, even as the United States has led the developed world in economic growth. Reorienting the MCA Soon Congress will take up the president's MCA proposal with a view to enacting initial authorizing legislation that will define the purpose, scope, and modalities of this new U.S. approach to development. Lawmakers and the administration should use this opportunity to ensure that the MCA builds on U.S. and international sustainable development efforts. In practical terms, this will require the following changes to the administration's initial MCA proposal: Environmental Mandate The central objective of the MCA should be promoting sustainable development rather than economic growth alone. Not only would this bring the MCA in line with widely accepted development policy, but it also would make the MCA consistent with the goals of existing U.S. foreign affairs and development agencies. The State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), and the Export-Import Bank of the United States, for example, have explicit environmental and sustainable development statutory mandates. To help build a culture that values environmental protection, the MCA?s implementing agency should have a statutorily established environmental advisory committee for its first two years of operation. The advisory committee would help the agency establish responsible environmental policies and procedures. Environmental Safeguards The MCA's implementing agency should be required to adopt an extensive set of procedural safeguards to ensure MCA-funded projects are environmentally sensible. It should screen projects for environmental risks and disqualify categorically certain types of environmentally damaging or socially disruptive projects, such as large-scale dams that would forcibly displace thousands of people. The new agency should conduct technical assessments of the likely environmental effects of grant proposals. The MCA program would benefit if the agency monitored its overall environmental track record and prepared annual reports on the long-term environmental consequences of its grants. While the MCA should encourage developing countries to help prepare this analysis and follow similar procedures, the MCA should be responsible for the completeness and accuracy of environmental assessments. Environmental safeguards are a well-established part of U.S. development policy. Since 1979, Executive Order 12114 has required U.S. agencies to assess the environmental effects abroad of "major federal action." Because of the executive order's limited scope, Congress has in recent years required that existing U.S. development agencies follow additional strict environmental assessment and reporting procedures. Almost all U.S. international agencies (including USAID, the EX-IM bank, and OPIC) must screen projects for environmental sensitivity, conduct rigorous assessments of possible environmental consequences, and monitor environmental results. Executive Orders also extend similar requirements to some other U.S. commercial agencies, such as the U.S. Trade Representative. These assessments are performed by the U.S. agencies themselves based in part on information submitted by recipient nations, and they include opportunities for public comment. Importantly, both the environmental and business communities support these procedures. While some environmental organizations believe U.S. environmental assessments should be strengthened, they appreciate that these procedures make government decisions more transparent and participatory. The business community has found that government-sponsored environmental reviews can be commercially timely and add legitimacy to approved projects, which helps win public acceptance. Like existing environmental review processes in OPIC and elsewhere, great attention should be paid to making the MCA?s environmental screening and assessment procedures as simple and streamlined as possible. Given the success of past efforts, this would not be overly difficult. Failing to require the MCA's implementing agency to adopt a rigorous environmental assessment policy not only would depart from general U.S. practice but it would also undermine longstanding, bipartisan efforts by the United States to convince other countries and multilateral institutions to conduct their own environmental assessments. The United States has led global efforts to strengthen the World Bank Group's already extensive environmental assessment procedures. It has also for years urged industrialized countries to require their export credit agencies to adopt environmental criteria similar to those already used by OPIC and the EX-IM bank. As early as 1992, for example, the United States successfully negotiated a common donor statement of the importance of assessing the environmental impact of foreign assistance programs. Allowing U.S. foreign aid to be blind to the environment now would undercut the progress we have made internationally to coordinate donor efforts and ensure a level international playing field for U.S. companies.
 * This signal is critical to global ecological sustainability – prevents environmental harm**
 * Purvis, 03** – Nonresident Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institute (Nigel, “Greening U.S. Foreign Aid through the Millennium Challenge Account” Brookings Institute, June, http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2003/06/energy-purvis SW)

**1nc -- disad**
Recently (and ironically), government projects and programs have been started to restore civil society through state subsidization or coercive mandates. Such coercion cannot create true voluntary associations. Statists who support such projects believe only in the power of political society – they don't realize that the subsidized or mandated activity can be performed voluntarily through the private interaction of individuals and associations. They also don't understand that to propose that an activity not be performed coercively, is not to oppose the activity, but simply its coercion. If civil society is to be revived, we must substitute voluntary cooperation for coercion and replace mandates with the rule of law. According to the Cato Handbook for Congress, Congress should: before trying to institute a government program to solve a problem, investigate whether there is some other government program that is causing the problem ... and, if such a program is identified, begin to reform or eliminate it; ask by what legal authority in the Constitution Congress undertakes an action ...; recognize that when government undertakes a program, it displaces the voluntary efforts of others and makes voluntary association in civil society appear redundant, with significant negative effects; and begin systematically to abolish or phase out those government programs that do what could be accomplished by voluntary associations in civil society ... recognizing that accomplishment through free association is morally superior to coercive mandates, and almost always generates more efficient outcomes. Every time taxes are raised, another regulation is passed, or another government program is adopted, we are acknowledging the inability of individuals to govern themselves. It follows that there is a moral imperative for us to reclaim our right to live in a civil society, rather than to have bureaucrats and politicians « solve » our problems and run our lives.
 * The plan’s overextension of government action is coercive**
 * Younkins, 2k** (Dr. Edward W. Younkins, Professor of Accountancy and Business Administration at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, “Civil Society: The Realm of Freedom,” No 63, 6-10-2000, http://www.quebecoislibre.org/000610-11.htm, JMP)

However, one may still insist, echoing Ernest Hemingway - "I believe in only one thing: liberty." And it is always well to bear in mind David Hume's observation: "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." Thus, it is unacceptable to say that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of no importance because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That road leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration. Ask Solzhenitsyn. Ask Milovan Dijas. In sum, if one believed in freedom as a supreme value and the proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit.
 * Decision rule – reject every instance**
 * Petro 74** [Sylvester, Professor of Law at NYU, Toledo Law Review, Spring, p. 480, http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200304/0783.html]

**1nc -- da**
Here are some other findings in the Navy's draft environmental report: - Dredging the Mayport entrance channel and navigation channel to a depth of 50 feet would create 5.7 million cubic yards of sediment material. Testing shows the material meets federal standards for ocean disposal and may be suitable for "beneficial" uses such as beach renourishment, which would reduce the volume of material to be disposed of. - The most intense level of work would involve about 30 acres of development for the nuclear propulsion plant maintenance facilities, parking and transportation facilities. The nuclear propulsion plant would require electrical, steam, compressed air, water and storm water upgrades. - The base's daily population would increase by 12 percent and 2,873 vehicle trips per day. That could impact Mayport Road north of its split with Florida A1A. However, because traffic in the area improved after the Wonderwood Connector opened in 2005, it's not expected to harm the road's level of service. - The change would bring 1,594 people to Mayport Naval Station, which would mean about 1,107 school-age children. Because that could result in overcrowding, the Navy would help Duval County build new schools. - Dredging activities, at least in the short-term during construction, could harm sea turtles, the northern right whale, humpback whale, Florida manatee and other marine mammals. - There would be minor air pollution increases associated with the propulsion plant boilers. - Construction plans would not harm the area's historical resources, such as the St. Johns Lighthouse, which is listed on the National Register of Historical Places, and the Old Mayport Cemetery, which is beneath Broad Street and is eligible for listing. - The proposal is not projected to harm the area's commercial and recreational fishing. In 2005, Mayport accounted for 4.7 million pounds of commercial fishing catches worth about $8.1 million. In 2006, 33,518 recreational fishing vessels were registered in Duval County.
 * Plan collapses endangered species**
 * BURMEISTER 08 –** Staff Writer for the Florida Times Union (CAREN, “Report looks at impact of nuclear carrier,” April 5, 2008 http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/040508/nes_264826604.shtml)#SPS

**Both are keystone species and spill over** **a) Right whale** **CEC No Date –** (Commission for Environmental Cooperation, North America, http://www.cec.org/soe/files/en/SOE_SpeciesCommon_en.pdf)  Umbrella species are those whose effective conservation will result in the protection of many other species that share the same habitat. For highly migratory animals such as the leatherback turtle, hawksbill turtle, loggerhead turtle, right whale, gray whale, pink-footed shearwater, short-tailed albatross and whooping crane, protection of umbrella species means protecting a whole suite of linked habitats—and the myriad organisms they support.

**Bonde 12 -** employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as part of the Sirenia Project. He continues to work for the Sirenia Project, now under the U.S. Geological Survey, where he has been studying manatee biology for more than 31 years. (Robert Knudsen, “Population genetics and conservation of the Florida manatee: Past, present, and future,” 2012, http://udini.proquest.com/view/population-genetics-and-goid:304666393/)#SPS 25 implemented at the turn of the 19 th century. Following the implementation of the ESA in the United States in 1967, manatees have been afforded protections that have undoubtedly allowed growth in the population. Protections analogous to the ESA were recommended by the United Nation’s International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for manatee populations throughout their range. Hunting during the last couple of centuries significantly reduced the size of the Florida manatee population. However protection measures, coupled with the advent of artificial warm water sites used as cold weather refugia, the accidental introduction of exotic vegetation used as a food source by manatees, and abundant natural vegetation, enabled the population to rebound (Hartman 1974; O’Shea 1988). The historic genetic diversity of the population is unknown, but anthropogenic deaths caused a severe decline in manatee numbers during the last century and affected their distribution. Protected by state and local laws in Florida as far back as 1893, manatees were recognized early on as a **keystone species**, bringing not only their plight to the forefront of the community consciousness, but extending that protection on to many other types of wildlife and habitats. This appreciation of natural, wild areas and diverse speciation was expressed via additional legislation through the decades that followed (O’Shea 1988; O’Shea et al. 2001). Public awareness of the environment during the times of Archie Carr’s treatise “The Sea Turtle: So Excellent a Fishe” was growing, along with public interest in wildlife (Carr 1986). Most significantly, the advent of power plants allowed the manatee population to better survive winters and increase in the southeastern United States from the mid-1900’s to present (Laist & Reynolds 2005). Long-term field observations, aided by photo-identification and radio-tracking technology, have provided invaluable data on the life history of the Florida manatee.
 * b) Florida Manatee**

To accept that the snail darter, harelip sucker, or Dismal Swamp southeastern shrew 74 could save [hu]mankind may be difficult for some. Many, if not most, species are useless to[hu]man[s] in a direct utilitarian sense. Nonetheless, they may be critical in an indirect role, because their extirpations could affect a directly useful species negatively. In a closely interconnected ecosystem, the loss of a speciesaffects other species dependent on it. 75 Moreover, as the number of species decline, the effect of each new extinction on the remaining species increases dramatically. 4. Biological Diversity. -- The main premise of species preservation is that diversity is better than simplicity. 77 As the current mass extinction has progressed, the world's biological diversity generally has decreased. This trend occurs within ecosystems by reducing the number of species, and within species by reducing the number of individuals. Both trends carry serious future implications. 78 [*173] Biologically diverse ecosystems are characterized by a large number of specialist species, filling narrow ecological niches. These ecosystems inherently are more stable than less diverse systems. "The more complex the ecosystem, the more successfully it can resist a stress. . . . [l]ike a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such a fabric can resist collapse better than a simple, unbranched circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks down as a whole." 79 By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, **each new** animal or plant **extinction,** with all its dimly perceived and intertwined affects, **could cause total ecosystem collapse and human extinction.** Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, 80 [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.
 * Extinction**
 * Diner, 94** [David, Ph.D., Planetary Science and Geology, "The Army and the Endangered Species Act: Who's Endangering Whom?," Military Law Review, 143 Mil. L. Rev. 161]

1nc -- navy adv

 * Defense first –**
 * a) Disaster – status quo solves with emergency response strategies – Katrina disproves the impact and our ability to respond**

That's a mistake, because our commitment to naval power today will affect America's standing in the world – and its ability to contain an increasingly aggressive China – for the next half century. Yet this commitment is on //shaky ground// given the out-of-control national //debt//. And the ruling party has few hands on deck to meet this national challenge. One gauge of a great power's military stature is the readiness of its fleet versus that of its likely foes. Deterring an aggressive China According to a 2009 Pentagon report, China has an estimated 260 naval vessels, all concentrated in East Asia. The United States has 288 battle-force ships with 11 carrier task forces and dozens of nuclear submarines as the crown jewels. The US fleet patrols worldwide. China's fleet has been concentrated in its home waters, but its range is rapidly extending to as far as the Middle East. "China seeks domination of the South China Sea to be the dominant power in much of the Eastern Hemisphere," defense expert Robert D. Kaplan has written. As Mr. Kaplan notes, the South China Sea is a vital route for much of Asia's commercial traffic and energy needs. The US and other nations consider it an international passageway. China calls it a "core interest." To maintain naval strength, reduce debt To keep the US blue-water fleet the best in the world costs billions. //A// //debtor nation eventually cuts defense spending////,// and big-ticket items like new ships are the first to go. That is why maritime defense is the sleeper issue of these elections. The party that reduces national debt can maintain naval strength. The party that doesn't allows US naval prominence to sink.
 * b) Navy power – it’s unsustainable and they can’t solve**
 * Bencivenga, 10** [Jim Bencivenga is a former teacher and Monitor staffer, “Will US naval power sink?”http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/1025/Will-US-naval-power-sink,


 * c) Straight turning their Middle East war scenario – we’ll concede that the absence of the plan leads to Middle Eastern disengagement**


 * 1. CX proves that their Primakov evidence proves that US presence in the region leads to entanglement and great power instability**


 * 2. That diffuses Iranian aggression and arms races that guarantee escalation**
 * JONES 2011** (Toby C. Jones, assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, editor, Middle East Report, “Why the US Should Withdraw From the Entire Persian Gulf,” The Atlantic, RSN, December 26, 2011, http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/424-national-security/9111-why-the-us-should-withdraw-from-the-entire-persian-gulf, Sawyer)
 * The presence of the American military in the Gulf has not only done little to deter Iran's ambitions, it has emboldened them.** Surrounding Iran militarily and putting it under the constant threat of American or Israeli military action has failed to deter the country. Instead this approach has strengthened hardliners within Tehran and convinced them that the best path to self-preservation is through defiance, militarism, and the pursuit of dangerous ties across the Middle East. The rivalry between Iran, the U.S., and its regional partners has turned into a political and military arms race, one that could easily spin out of control.

Less obvious, the United States' military posture has also emboldened its allies, sometimes to act in counterproductive ways. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain justify their brutal crackdown of Bahrain's pro-democracy movement by falsely claiming Iranian meddling. While American policymakers support democratic transitions in the Middle East rhetorically, their unwillingness to confront long-time allies in the Gulf during the Arab Spring is partly the product of the continued belief that the U.S. needs to keep its military in the Gulf, something that requires staying on good terms with Gulf monarchies. The result is that Saudi Arabia and its allies have considerable political cover to behave badly, both at home and abroad.
 * Presence emboldens allies and increases regional instability**
 * JONES 2011** (Toby C. Jones, assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, editor, Middle East Report, “Why the US Should Withdraw From the Entire Persian Gulf,” The Atlantic, RSN, December 26, 2011, http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/424-national-security/9111-why-the-us-should-withdraw-from-the-entire-persian-gulf, Sawyer)

This would not mean abandoning the region altogether. Given its global reach, the United States will always retain the capacity to project military power, but the terms should be limited. The challenge is less about finding friendly ports to station personnel than it is about charting clearer and more effective terms of political engagement with allies and rivals. And this requires a new strategic doctrine, one that makes clear to regional actors that the era of open security guarantees -- which have proven so dear to both Americans and to the hundreds of thousands who have died since the United States began its military build-up -- is over. This would not mean the loss of leverage or influence, but in fact the opposite. Once it is clear that the United States is not solely committed to preserving the status quo, regional states will no longer believe they can ignore American calls for reform, restraint, and respect for human rights. Indeed, it is the belief in the Gulf States that they have "special relationships" with the United States.
 * Withdrawal boosts stability and regional reform**
 * JONES 2011** (Toby C. Jones, assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, editor, Middle East Report, “Why the US Should Withdraw From the Entire Persian Gulf,” The Atlantic, RSN, December 26, 2011, http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/424-national-security/9111-why-the-us-should-withdraw-from-the-entire-persian-gulf, Sawyer)

Though a difficult task given the present domestic consensus on foreign policy, I would argue the case against attacking Iran on grand strategic grounds: the Middle East is a hornet’s nest we would do well to stay out of. There are certainly nontrivial dangers to Middle Eastern proliferation: military pathologies inimical to deterrence, the difficulties of N-player deterrence and the danger of small numbers of weapons, to name a few. But these dangers are a threat only to regional actors and not to the security of the U.S. homeland. U.S. security guarantees and a military presence in the Middle East are not necessary to ensure the stability of the region. If the United States stops underwriting regional security and the worst-case scenario of Iran going nuclear transpires, the associated problems will help put an end to regional free riding by incentivizing states to provide their own security. As importantly, **it will serve as a source of discipline on our own interventionist proclivities.**
 * It also prevents future interventionism and stops freeriding – bolsters regional credibility**
 * GREEN 2012** (Brendan R. Green, Stanley Kaplan Fellow in Political Science and Leadership Studies at Williams College, PhD, political science, MIT, “Iran, Restraint, and Grand Strategy,” The National Interest, January 18, 2012, http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/iran-restraint-grand-strategy-6381?page=show, Sawyer)

Iran, of course, has a reason to provoke coalition warships. The image of tiny speedboats challenging the mightiest Navy in the world has great propaganda value. It is possible that factions in Iran might attempt to provoke hostilities by getting Americans to shoot first in order to rally support in the Arab and Muslim worlds against the United States. The question is how far authorities in Tehran will go in playing this game of chicken at sea.
 * FYI – our turns are specific to naval presence**
 * WASHINGTON TIMES 2008** (“The Iranian Challenge,” Jan 14, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jan/14/the-iranian-challenge/?page=all)

U.S. naval commanders with the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain have been interested for many months in the possibility of a "naval hotline." They know how quickly an incident in the Gulf could trigger an inadvertent escalation that could push the United States and Iran toward war. U.S. admirals are said to favor some system that would allow them to talk directly with the Iranian navy and, more important, with the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval forces that seized the British sailors. The current system for avoiding confrontations is informal and haphazard. The U.S. Navy, in effect, draws imaginary lines in the Gulf and stays within those boundaries. By repeating the same patterns over and over, it signals to the Iranians that it doesn't have hostile intent. But one unplanned action -- a loose torpedo that strikes an American warship -- and the two nations could be on the verge of war.
 * This leads to full scale war**
 * IGNATIUS 2007** (David, The writer co-hosts, with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues at[], “Calming the Waters in the Gulf,” Washington Post, April 6, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/05/AR2007040501789.html)


 * d) Now hegemony – it’s bad**

A n other argument for high military spending is that U.S. military hegemony underlies global stability. Our forces and alliance commitments dampen conflict between potential rivals like China and Japan, we are told, preventing them from fighting wars that would disrupt trade and cost us more than the military spending that would have prevented war. **The theoretical and empirical foundation for this claim is weak**. It overestimates both the American military's contribution to international stability and the danger that instability abroad poses to Americans. In Western Europe, U.S. forces now contribute little to peace, at best making the tiny odds of war among states there slightly more so.7 Even in Asia, where there is more tension, the history of international relations suggests that without U.S. military deployments potential rivals, especially those separated by sea like Japan and China, will generally achieve a stable balance of power rather than fight. In other cases, as with our bases in Saudi Arabia between the Iraq wars, U.S. forces probably create more unrestthan they prevent. Our **force deployments can also generate instability by prompting states to develop nuclear weapons.** Even when wars occur, their economic impact is likely to be limited here.8 By linking markets, globalization provides supply alternatives for the goods we consume, including oil. If political upheaval disrupts supply in one location, suppliers elsewhere will take our orders. Prices may increase, but markets adjust. That makes American consumers less dependent on any particular supply source, undermining the claim that we need to use force to prevent unrest in supplier nations or secure trade routes.9 Part of the confusion about the value of hegemony comes from misunderstanding the Cold War. People tend to assume, falsely, that our activist foreign policy, with troops forward supporting allies, not only caused the Soviet Union's collapse but is obviously a good thing even without such a rival. Forgotten is the sensible notion that alliances are a necessary evil occasionally tolerated to balance a particularly threatening enemy. The main justification for creating our Cold War alliances was the fear that Communist nations could conquer or capture by insurrection the industrial centers in Western Europe and Japan and then harness enough of that wealth to threaten us — either directly or by forcing us to become a garrison state at ruinous cost. We kept troops in South Korea after 1953 for fear that the North would otherwise overrun it. But these alliances outlasted the conditions that caused them. During the Cold War, Japan, Western Europe and South Korea grew wealthy enough to defend themselves. We should let them. These alliances heighten our force requirements and threaten to drag us into wars, while providing no obvious benefit.
 * No offense and also causes prolif – this card also indicts their epistemology**
 * Friedman 10** research fellow in defense and homeland security, Cato. PhD candidate in pol sci, MIT (Ben, Military Restraint and Defense Savings, 20 July 2010, http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-bf-07202010.html)

3.1 Ensuring that no new states join the ranks of those already nuclear armed must continue to be one of the world’s top international security priorities. Every new nuclear-armed state will add significantly to the inherent **risks – of accident or miscalc**ulation as well as **deliberate use** – involved in any possession of these weapons, and potentially encourage more states to acquire nuclear weapons to avoid being left behind. Any scramble for nuclear capabilities is bound to generate severe instability in bilateral, regional and international relations. The carefully worked checks and balances of interstate relations will come under severe stress. There will be enhanced fears of **nuclear blackmail**, and of irresponsible and unpredictable leadership behaviour. 3.2 In conditions of inadequate command and control systems, absence of confidence building measures and multiple agencies in the nuclear weapons chain of authority, the possibility of an accidental or maverick usage of nuclear weapons will remain high. Unpredictable elements of risk and reward will impact on decision making processes. The dangers are compounded if the new and aspiring nuclear weapons states have, as is likely to be the case, ongoing inter-state disputes with ideological, territorial, historical – and for all those reasons, strongly emotive – dimensions. 3.3 The transitional period is likely to be most dangerous of all, with the arrival of nuclear weapons tending to be accompanied by sabre rattling and competitive nuclear chauvinism. For example, as between Pakistan and India a degree of stability might have now evolved, but 1998–2002 was a period of disturbingly fragile interstate relations. Command and control and risk management of nuclear weapons takes time to evolve. Military and political leadership in new nuclear-armed states need time to learn and implement credible safety and security systems. The risks of nuclear accidents and the possibility of nuclear action through inadequate crisis control mechanisms are very high in such circumstances. If this is coupled with political instability in such states, the **risks escalate** again. Where such countries are beset with internal stresses and fundamentalist groups with trans-national agendas, the risk of nuclear weapons or fissile material coming into possession of non‑state actors cannot be ignored. The action–reaction cycle of nations on high 3.4 alerts, of military deployments, threats and counter threats of military action, have all been witnessed in the Korean peninsula with unpredictable behavioural patterns driving interstate relations. The impact of a proliferation breakout in the Middle East would be much wider in scope and make stability management extraordinarily difficult. Whatever the chances of “stable deterrence” prevailing in a Cold War or India–Pakistan setting, the prospects are significantly less in a regional setting with multiple nuclear power centres divided by multiple and cross-cutting sources of conflict.
 * Global nuclear war**
 * Evans and Kawaguchi –** co-chairs of the International Nuclear Non-Proliferation Disarmament Commission which includes 27 distinguished nuclear experts from around the globe – 12-16-**09**

The same is true for global public health. Globalization is turning the world into an enormous petri dish for the incubation of infectious disease. Humans cannot outsmart disease, because it just evolves too quickly. Bacteria can reproduce a new generation in less than 30 minutes, while it takes us decades to come up with a new generation of antibiotics. Solutions are only possible when and where we get the upper hand. Poor countries where humans live in close proximity to farm animals are the best place to breed extremely dangerous zoonotic disease. These are often the same countries, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, that feel threatened by American power. Establishing an early warning system for these diseases—exactly what we lacked in the case of SARS a few years ago and exactly what we lack for avian flu today—will require a significant level of intervention into the very places that don’t want it. That will be true as long as international intervention means American interference. **The most likely sources of the next** ebola or HIV-like **pandemic are the countries that** simply **won’t let U.S.** or other Western agencies **in,** including the World Health Organization. Yet the threat is too arcane and not immediate enough for the West to force the issue. What’s needed is another great power to take over a piece of the work, a power that has more immediate interests in the countries where diseases incubate and one that is seen as less of a threat. As long as the United States remains the world’s lone superpower, we’re not likely to get any help. Even after HIV, SARS, and several years of mounting hysteria about avian flu, the world is still not ready for a viral pandemic in Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. America can’t change that alone.
 * Transition away from global dominance solves pandemics**
 * Weber et al. 07** (Steven Weber, Professor of Political Science at UC-Berkeley and Director of the Institute of International Studies, Naazneen Barma, Matthew Kroenig, Ely Ratner, “How Globalization Went Bad”, February 2007, Foreign Policy)

A pandemic will kill off all humans. In the past, humans have indeed fallen victim to viruses. Perhaps the best-known case was the bubonic plague that killed up to one third of the European population in the mid-14th century (7). While vaccines have been developed for the plague and some other infectious diseases, new viral strains are constantly emerging — a pro cess that maintains the possibility of a pandemic-facilitated human extinction. Some surveyed students mentioned AIDS as a potential pandemic-causing virus. It is true that scientists have been unable thus far to find a sustainable cure for AIDS, mainly due to HIV’s rapid and constant evolution. Specifically, two factors account for the virus’s abnormally high mutation rate: 1. HIV’s use of reverse transcriptase, which does not have a proof-reading mechanism, and 2. the lack of an error-correction mechanism in HIV DNA polymerase (8). Luckily, though, there are certain characteristics of HIV that make it a poor candidate for a large-scale global infection: HIV can lie dormant in the human body for years without manifesting itself, and AIDS itself does not kill directly, but rather through the kening of the immune system. However, for more easily transmitted viruses such as influenza, the evolution of new strains could prove far more consequential. The simultaneous occurrence of antigenic drift (point mutations that lead to new strains) and antigenic shift (the inter-species transfer of disease) in the influenza virus could produce a new version of influenza for which scientists may not immediately find a cure. Since influenza can spread quickly, this lag time could potentially lead to a “global influenza pandemic, ” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (9). The most recent scare of this variety came in 1918 when bird flu managed to kill over 50 million people around the world in what is sometimes referred to as the Spanish flu pandemic. Perhaps even more frightening is the fact that only 25 mutations were required to convert the original viral strain — which could only infect birds — into a human-viable strain (10).
 * Extinction**
 * Yu 09** — Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science (Victoria, Human Extinction: The Uncertainty of Our Fate, 22 May 2009, http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/spring-2009/human-extinction-the-uncertainty-of-our-fate)

This week the Russian and Chinese militaries are conducting a joint military exercise involving large numbers of troops and combat vehicles. The former Soviet Republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgkyzstan, and Kazakstan are participating. Other countries appear ready to join the military alliance. This new potent military alliance is a real world response to neoconservative delusions about US hegemony. Neocons believe that the US is supreme in the world and can dictate its course. The neoconservative idiots have actually written papers, read by Russians and Chinese, about why the US must use its military superiority to assert hegemony over Russia and China. Cynics believe that the neocons are just shills, like Bush and Cheney, for the military-security complex and are paid to restart the cold war for the sake of the profits of the armaments industry. But the fact is that the neocons actually believe their delusions about American hegemony. Russia and China have now witnessed enough of the Bush administration's unprovoked aggression in the world to take neocon intentions seriously. As the US has proven that it cannot occupy the Iraqi city of Baghdad despite 5 years of efforts, it most certainly cannot occupy Russia or China. That means the conflict toward which the neocons are driving will be a nuclear conflict. In an attempt to gain the advantage in a nuclear conflict, the neocons are positioning US anti-ballistic missiles on Soviet borders in Poland and the Czech Republic. This is an idiotic provocation as the Russians can eliminate anti-ballistic missiles with cruise missiles. Neocons are people who desire war, but know nothing about it. Thus, the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reagan and Gorbachev ended the cold war. However, US administrations after Reagan's have broken the agreements and understandings. The US gratuitously brought NATO and anti-ballistic missiles to Russia's borders. The Bush regime has initiated a propaganda war against the Russian government of Vladimir Putin. These are gratuitous acts of aggression. Both the Russian and Chinese governments are trying to devote resources to their economic development, not to their militaries. Yet, both are being forced by America's aggressive posture to revamp their militaries. Americans need to understand what the neocon Bush regime cannot: a nuclear exchange between the US, Russia, and China would establish the hegemony of the cockroach. In a mere 6.5 years the Bush regime has destroyed the world's good will toward the US. Today, America's influence in the world is limited to its payments of tens of millions of dollars to bribed heads of foreign governments, such as Egypt's and Pakistan's. The Bush regime even thinks that as it has bought and paid for Musharraf, he will stand aside and permit Bush to make air strikes inside Pakistan. Is Bush blind to the danger that he will cause an Islamic revolution within Pakistan that will depose the US puppet and present the Middle East with an Islamic state armed with nuclear weapons? Considering the instabilities and dangers that abound, the aggressive posture of the Bush regime goes far beyond recklessness. The Bush regime is the most irresponsibly aggressive regime the world has seen since Hitler's.
 * The aff guarantees a Sino-Russian super alliance – extinction**
 * Roberts 07** – Economist and Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (Paul Craig, “US Hegemony Spawns Russian-Chinese Military Alliance”, http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=11422)

The restraint strategy distinguishes terrorists who attack the United States from those who do not. We should work with states around the world to combat all terrorists—those who intentionally target noncombatants. The U.S. government should share information on suspected terrorists with other states, track their movements across borders, freeze their bank accounts, arrest them when they enter U.S. territory, and encourage other nations’ counterterrorism efforts. Terrorists who target America and its citizens are another matter. In pursuing them, a restraint strategy would employ all of the above policy tools while also pressuring countries to act against these organizations within their own borders. If a host country is unable or unwilling to hunt terrorists who attack America, the United States itself should act. That could include covert action directed at the terrorists, air strikes, small-scale raids, or in extreme circumstances an invasion. By contrast, declaring war on terrorists who do not target Americans invites obscure violent groups around the world to make us their enemies. A lack of discrimination in choosing whom to attack also strengthens terrorists by granting them recognition and encourages alliances between otherwise separate terror groups. Our enemy today, for instance, is not Islam, not Islamism, not Islamic fundamentalism, not Wahabism, not Salafists, and not even jihadists, per se. Our enemies are those who attack Americans and those who shelter them. Most jihadists are fighting their local governments. In the long term, their struggle will probably fail. But their defeat will have to come at the hands of their compatriots, not from the liberal forces led by the United States. American participation in the political conflicts in the Islamic world makes the United States a target of the terrorists involved in those conflicts, and American involvement feeds the conspiracy theories that make supposed evildoers in Washington the excuse for all that goes wrong in the Middle East. Non-intervention in Middle Eastern politics should not be regarded as appeasement, but as a key component of counterterrorism. In the rare circumstances in which the United States needs to invade or even occupy part of the Muslim world, as in Afghanistan, the U.S. military should diminish its footprint and limit its stay. The United States should not shrink from stating that we believe that liberal democracy is a good form of government, but we should model democracy rather than insisting that others adopt it. Though we should not be mute in the face of egregious human rights violations, Americans should stop telling people in the Muslim world how to run their countries. Overseas, foreign intelligence organizations and policemen collect the most useful counterterrorism intelligence and do most of the work apprehending and interrogating terrorists, because they have local contacts and language skills. The United States should continue to provide intelligence support, particularly technical support, to these foreign counterterrorist agencies. Such cooperation may occasionally cause the kind of blowback that a policy of restraint seeks to avoid, but in cases like Pakistan’s, where the terrorist threat is high enough, the benefit of intelligence cooperation outweighs this cost. In any case, the blowback from cooperation with law enforcement and intelligence agencies will be much less severe than that generated by the current American strategy with its emphasis on military force and occupation. The principal military role in counterterrorism should be the use of special operations forces to assist foreign governments in attacking anti-American terrorists. In some circumstances, U.S. special forces might direct air strikes or directly attack terrorist facilities when local forces are unable or unwilling to do so. But locals should take the lead.
 * The aff increases the risk of terrorism – restraint solves their offense – internal link turns the aff**
 * Sapolsky 09** [Harvey M. Sapolsky is a professor of public policy and organization at MIT. Benjamin H. Friedman is a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at Cato Institute. Eugene Gholz is an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Daryl G. Press is an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College. “Restraining Order: For Strategic Modesty” Fall, http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2009-Fall/full-Sapolsky-etal-Fall-2009.html]

To be sure, the United States should not ignore the potential strategic ramifications of China’s arrival on the world stage as a great power. After all, the lesson of history is that the emergence of new great powers in the international system leads to conflict, not peace. On this score, the notion—propagated by Beijing—that China’s will be a “peaceful rise” is just as fanciful as claims by American policy-makers that China has no need to build up its military capabilities because it is unthreatened by any other state. Still, this **does not mean** that the United States and China inevitably are on a collision course that will culminate in the next decade or two in a war. Whether Washington and Beijing actually come to blows, however, depends largely on **what strategy the U**nited **S**tates **chooses** to adopt toward China, because the United States has the “last clear chance” to adopt a grand strategy that will serve its interests in balancing Chinese power without running the risk of an armed clash with [end page 73] Beijing. If the United States continues to aim at upholding its current primacy, however, Sino-American **conflict is** virtually **certain**.
 * The aff makes US China war inevitable**
 * Layne 7** (Christopher, Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and Research Fellow with the Center on Peace and Liberty at The Independent Institute, literary and national editor of the Atlantic, Review of International Studies (2009), "The Case Against the American Empire," American Empire: A Debate, p. 73-74)

THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and China. If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far and near and -horror of horrors -raise the possibility of a nuclear war. Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In the region, this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order. With the US distracted, Russia may seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase. Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea -truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to resort to nuclear weaponry to defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability, there is little hope of winning a war against China , 50 years later , short of using nuclear weapons. The US estimates that China possesses about 20 nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the nuclear option. A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said military leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that should that come to pass, we would see the destruction of civilization.
 * China war guarantees extinction**
 * Cheong 2k** (Ching, Senior Writer at the Strait Times, “No one gains in a war over Taiwan,” June 25th, Lexis)

1nc -- conditions counterplan vs. alaska ports

 * The United States federal government shall substantially increase funding for the development and construction of deep-water ports in Alaska if and only if all affected ports substantially expand cost-efficient use of US-flag ships for trade and military shipments.**

Resolve Definition - Noun 1 : something that is resolved 2 : a legal or official determination esp : a legislative declaration
 * The CP competes and is theoretically legitimate ---**
 * a) It tests the resolution – that’s key to predictable division of ground for both sides**
 * Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of Law 1** (“Resolve” http://research.lawyers.com/glossary/resolve.html MGE)

When the government provides a benefit to help an American industry export U.S.-made products, it often establishes a quid pro quo that requires a certain portion of the exports to be carried on U.S.-flag vessels — when such vessels are available at fair and reasonable rates. Two or more industries therefore are assisted at the same time. The government recaptures the added cost: (a) through taxes on the total gross revenue of the U.S. carrier and (b) on the taxes generated as that total gross revenue flows through the American economy. Without the combination of the limited direct subsidy and the cargo-preference laws, the already much-diminished U.S.-flag foreign trade fleet might well disappear completely.
 * The plan should be conditioned on increase usage of US flag vessels – ports say yes and this prevents total collapse of the fleet**
 * NLUS 07** (Navy League of the United States, “Maritime Administration,” January 2007, http://navyleague.org/sea_power/jan07-marad.php)

NLUS, 12 – a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating our citizens about the importance of sea power to U.S. national security and supporting the men and women of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and U.S.-flag Merchant Marine and their families (Navy League of the United States, “Maritime Primacy & Economic Prosperity: Maritime Policy 2012-13”, Navy League of the United States, 1/21/12, http://www.navyleague.org/files/legislative_affairs/maritime_policy20122013.pdf | AK) Global engagement is critical to the U.S. economy, world trade and the protection of democratic freedoms that so many take for granted. The guarantors of these vital elements are hulls in the water, embarked forward amphibious forces and aircraft overhead. The Navy League of the United States’ Maritime Policy for 2012-13 provides recommendations for strategy, policy and the allocation of national resources in support of our sea services and essential to the successful execution of their core missions. We live in a time of complex challenges — //terrorism//, //political// and //economic turmoil// , //extremism// , //conflicts// over environmental resources, manmade and natural //disasters// — and potential //flash points// exist //aroundtheglobe//. It is the persistent forward presence and engagement of maritime forces that keep these flash points in check, prevent conflict and crisis escalation, and allow the smooth flow of goods in a global economy. The United States has fought multiple wars and sacrificed much to ensure un challenged access to sea lanes and secure the global commerce upon which the U.S. economy depends. The “persistent naval presence” provided by our forward-deployed Navy and Marine Corps ships, aircraft, Sailors and Marines is the guarantor of that hard-won maritime security and the critical deterrent against those who might seek to undermine that security. Maintaining naval forces that can sustain our national commitment to global maritime security and dissuade transnational aggression in the future must be a national imperative. The No. 1 challenge to that imperative is the lack of a fully funded, achievable Navy shipbuilding program that produces the right quantity and quality of ships, with the right capabilities, for the right costs, in economically affordable numbers over the next 25 years. A shipbuilding plan must be defined and agreed upon by the Navy, the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Homeland Security, Congress and the administration — and executed now. Recognizing that hard choices must be made in a reduction of the defense budget, the Navy League is reducing its recommended funding for the Department of the Navy’s Shipbuilding and Conversion, Navy (SCN), account to $20 billion or more per year. This reduced funding leads to a recommended reduced force level of 305 ships to meet our nation’s global security challenges. This also recognizes that the worldwide commitment of ship deployment must be reduced. America’s amphibious expeditionary force is prepared to engage today’s threats — today. Our Marines remain heavily engaged in Afghanistan and support numerous other small-unit operations that enable nation-building with allies around the globe. The Marine Corps needs the authorization to reduce to an end strength of 186,800 Marines, and this force level must be properly resourced to maintain a balanced air-ground logistics team. The Corps must regain its expertise in amphibious operations and maintain that capability in force structure. The service also must be provided the resources to reset the force, to restore or acquire new equipment and capabilities consumed in the ongoing wars. The Coast Guard is a multimission, worldwide-deployed armed force with broad law enforcement authorities. It operates seamlessly with the DoD services as prescribed by the National Command Authority and is the lead agency for maritime homeland security and law enforcement support to the Navy in deployed operations. In addition, it fulfills several legally mandated missions, including its most employed mission of search and rescue, plus protection of living marine resources, drug interdiction, illegal migrant interdiction, defense readiness, marine safety, ice operations, aids to navigation, marine environmental protection, and ports, waterways and coastal security. The substantial breadth of operations, which has increased markedly in tempo since the 9/11 attacks, continues to overstress aging equipment, resulting in rising maintenance costs and a greater workload for Coast Guard personnel. The Coast Guard must increase its active-duty military strength to at least 45,000, have an operational expense budget of at least $6.7 billion and an Acquisition, Construction and Improvements (AC&I) budget resourced at no less than $2.5 billion per year, of which $2 billion should be dedicated to continuing the recapitalization of the fleet. Skilled Mariners are more critical than ever to ensuring our ability to sustain U.S. national and global security interests. Ninety-five percent of the equipment and supplies required to deploy the U.S. armed forces is moved by sea. The base of skilled U.S. Merchant Mariners is shrinking. The shipping capabilities of the Maritime Administration’s Ready Reserve Force and the DoD’s Military Sealift Command are sized to support routine and some surge logistics and specialized mission requirements. This critical capability must be maintained by ensuring an active commercial U.S.-flag Merchant Marine to support efficient and cost-effective movement of DoD cargo.
 * This collapses naval power projection – merchant marines are critical but on the brink – solves global wars and a litany of transnational threats – turns the case**

1nc -- f-35 tradeoff disad
Capaccio 7-19 [Tony, “Pressure on Lockheed Over F-35 Mandatory, General Says”, Bloomberg, July 19, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-19/pressure-on-lockheed-over-f-35-mandatory-general-says, javi] President Barack Obama’s nominee for Air Force chief of staff said today it’s “mandatory” that the Pentagon put pressure on Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT) (LMT) to control costs for its F-35 fighter jet. “ Our manufacturing process, our assembly line, is not up to speed and running to the level we’d hope it would be at this point in time,” General Mark Welsh told the Senate Armed Services Committee today at his confirmation hearing. This means “ we have not been able to build and deliver jets on schedule or on an accurately predicted cost ,” Welsh, now commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe, said today. Welsh is familiar with weapons acquisition as a former chief of Air Force fighter and bomber programs. In 2003 and 2004, he oversaw the F-22’s development when that Lockheed jet had software failings that had to be overcome before full production. Pentagon officials have promised Congress they would get tougher in negotiations with Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor. The first four contracts for 63 F-35s are exceeding their combined target cost by $1 billion, according to congressional auditors. “Cost is a major concern ,” Welsh said today of the $395 billion development and acquisition program, the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project. ‘Stay Focused’ “If we can’t clearly identify how much this airplane will cost to buy and to fly after we acquire it, then we really have no idea how many airplanes we can afford or how many we should expect to receive,” he said. “ Pressure on the company, on the acquisition process internal to the department is mandatory ,” Welsh said. “ We have to stay focused and if confirmed, that would be a daily event for me,” said Welsh. Even so, Welsh listed the F-35 as the service’s top modernization priority, along with the Boeing Co. (BA) (BA)’s KC-46 tanker and the new Long Range Strike bomber. “There’s some good things happening,” he said. “The aircraft that have been delivered, we’ve flown almost 1,900 hours” and the F-35 Air Force variant “is performing very well in the test programs,” he said. “I am excited about the airplane.” The Air Force plans to buy more than 1,700 of the planned 2,443 production aircraft, which include versions for the Navy and Marine Corps.
 * F-35s are on the chopping block – focus is key to maintain funding**

The near-term fiscal and political environment will make it **difficult to support significant new U.S. Government investments**. This is an assumption, but also serves as a constraint on action. Agencies will only operate in the Arctic to the level to which they are resourced, **meaning that new efforts will likely have to be funded through reallocation of existing resources.** The **Arctic is currently seen as a peripheral interest** by much of the national security community, a situation not likely to change significantly in the next decade or more, absent some external forcing event, such as a major environmental or human disaster or activity in the Arctic viewed as threatening U.S. interests in the
 * The plan trades off**
 * DoD 11** – US Department of Defense (“Report to Congress on Arctic Operations and the Northwest Passage” May 2011; < http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/Tab_A_Arctic_Report_Public.pdf>)//AB


 * That turns the case and prevents widespread Asian war and nuclearization**
 * Boot 9/13** - MA in Diplomatic History, (Max, Council on Foreign Relations, Hearing on the Future of Nationa Defense and the U.S. Military Ten Years After 9/11, “Indefensible Budget Cuts,” http://www.cfr.org/defense-policy-and-budget/indefensible-budget-cuts/p25843?cid=nlc-dailybrief-daily_news_brief-link30-20111003)//DHirsch

We have already cancelled the F-22 and cut back the procurement of the F-35. Is the F-35 to be cancelled altogether or cut back to such an extent that we will have no answer to the fifth-generation fighters emanating from Russia and China? If that were to come to pass, it would signal the death knell for American power in the Pacific. If our power wanes, our allies will have to do what they need to do to ensure their own security. It’s easy to imagine, under such a scenario, states such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan acquiring their own nuclear weapons, thus setting off a dangerous and destabilizing nuclear arms race with China.

While the United States and Russia may be much less likely to lob missiles into each other’s heartland, the chances of a regional nuclear conflict using much smaller weapons has dramatically increased, Toon and coauthors argue. “A de facto nuclear arms race has emerged in Asia between China, India and Pakistan and could expand to include North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan,” they write. “In the Middle East, a nuclear confrontation between Israel and Iran would be fearful. Saudi Arabia and Egypt could also seek nuclear weapons to balance Iran and Israel.” It’s relatively easy to build dozens of 15-kiloton bombs and stockpile them, similar in yield to Hiroshima. Plans can be found on the Internet. The bombs are small enough to be delivered by truck, car, boat, small plane. “The only serious obstacle to constructing a bomb is the limited availability of purified fissionable fuels,” they write. So how bad could it be? If 100 small nuclear bombs blasted cities and set them on fire, 1 to 5 million tons of soot, particles and smoke would spread into the sky. It would impact the atmosphere and darken the sky more than a huge volcanic eruption like Pinatubo in 1991. This would cut growing seasons by 10 to 30 days — especially hitting the Russian Arctic, central Europe and the heartland of North America. Southcentral Alaska — where most people in the state live and the focus of the Alaska’s small agricultural industry — would lose 20 days of growing season. And that’s not all. The authors speak of “climate anomalies” threatening the world in unexpected ways. Droughts, freezes, shifts in storm tracks, heat waves. The threat of such a conflict “may constitute one of the greatest dangers to the stability of society since the dawn of humans,” they conclude.
 * Extinction**
 * O’Harra 07** – (Doug O’Harra is a writer and science journalist based in Anchorage, Alaska, he’s appeared in the Smithsonian and runs a non-profit website; “Threat of Nuclear Autumn”; April 1, 2007; http://www.farnorthscience.com/2007/03/03/news-from-alaska/threat-of-nuclear-autumn/)//GS

1nc -- oil spills adv.
Kho 10- a reporter and editor in The New York Times' Green Inc. blog, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, AOL's DailyFinance, MIT's Technology Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Reuters.com, Earth2Tech (Jennifer, “ Oil Spill's Impact: Bad for the Environment, Good for Clean Energy?”, Daily Finance, 5/5/10, http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/05/05/oil-spills-impact-bad-for-the-environment-good-for-clean-ener/)//RP As Ron Pernick, principal of research firm Clean Edge, puts it, the spill "has the potential to be a watershed moment" that could end up changing the way oil and other fossil fuels are developed and paving the way for cleaner energy. While the story is still unfolding and the full extent of the damage remains unclear, the spill already has exposed some of the vulnerabilities of our reliance on oil, including ever-fluctuating prices based on accidents, military actions and many other variables, Pernick says. "The volatility of fossil fuels is exactly what makes it untenable for our long-term energy supply -- we're one disaster away from pretty significant disruptions in pricing," he says.
 * Oil spills are good – boosts investment in renewables and solves oil dependence**

By not addressing climate change more aggressively and creatively, the United States is squandering an opportunity to secure its global primacy for the next few generations to come. To do this, though, the U.S. must rely on innovation to help the world escape the coming environmental meltdown. Developing the key technologies that will save the planet from global warming will allow the U.S. to outmaneuver potential great power rivals seeking to replace it as the international system's hegemon. But the greening of American strategy must occur soon. The U.S., however, seems to be stuck in time, unable to move beyond oil-centric geo-politics in any meaningful way. Often, the gridlock is portrayed as a partisan difference, with Republicans resisting action and Democrats pleading for action. This, though, is an unfair characterization as there are numerous proactive Republicans and quite a few reticent Democrats. The real divide is instead one between realists and liberals. Students of realpolitik, which still heavily guides American foreign policy, largely discount environmental issues as they are not seen as advancing national interests in a way that generates relative power advantages vis-à-vis the other major powers in the system: Russia, China, Japan, India, and the European Union. Liberals, on the other hand, have recognized that global warming might very well become the greatest challenge ever faced by mankind. As such, their thinking often eschews narrowly defined national interests for the greater global good. This, though, ruffles elected officials whose sworn obligation is, above all, to protect and promote American national interests. What both sides need to understand is that by becoming a lean, mean, green fighting machine, the U.S. can actually bring together liberals and realists to advance a collective interest which benefits every nation, while at the same time, securing America's global primacy well into the future. To do so, the U.S. must re-invent itself as not just your traditional hegemon, but as history's first ever green hegemon. Hegemons are countries that dominate the international system - bailing out other countries in times of global crisis, establishing and maintaining the most important international institutions, and covering the costs that result from free-riding and cheating global obligations. Since 1945, that role has been the purview of the United States. Immediately after World War II, Europe and Asia laid in ruin, the global economy required resuscitation, the countries of the free world needed security guarantees, and the entire system longed for a multilateral forum where global concerns could be addressed. The U.S., emerging the least scathed by the systemic crisis of fascism's rise, stepped up to the challenge and established the postwar (and current) liberal order. But don't let the world "liberal" fool you. While many nations benefited from America's new-found hegemony, the U.S. was driven largely by "realist" selfish national interests. The liberal order first and foremost benefited the U.S. With the U.S. becoming bogged down in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, running a record national debt, and failing to shore up the dollar, the future of American hegemony now seems to be facing a serious contest: potential rivals - acting like sharks smelling blood in the water - wish to challenge the U.S. on a variety of fronts. This has led numerous commentators to forecast the U.S.'s imminent fall from grace. Not all hope is lost however. With the impending systemic crisis of global warming on the horizon, the U.S. again finds itself in a position to address a transnational problem in a way that will benefit both the international community collectively and the U.S. selfishly. The current problem is two-fold. First, the competition for oil is fueling animosities between the major powers. The geopolitics of oil has already emboldened Russia in its 'near abroad' and China in far-off places like Africa and Latin America. As oil is a limited natural resource, a nasty zero-sum contest could be looming on the horizon for the U.S. and its major power rivals - a contest which threatens American primacy and global stability. Second, converting fossil fuels like oil to run national economies is producing irreversible harm in the form of carbon dioxide emissions. So long as the global economy remains oil-dependent, greenhouse gases will continue to rise. Experts are predicting as much as a 60% increase in carbon dioxide emissions in the next twenty-five years. That likely means more devastating water shortages, droughts, forest fires, floods, and storms. In other words, if global competition for access to energy resources does not undermine international security, global warming will. And in either case, oil will be a culprit for the instability. Oil arguably has been the most precious energy resource of the last half-century. But "black gold" is so 20th century. The key resource for this century will be green gold - clean, environmentally-friendly energy like wind, solar, and hydrogen power. Climate change leaves no alternative. And the sooner we realize this, the better off we will be. What Washington must do in order to avoid the traps of petropolitics is to convert the U.S. into the world's first-ever green hegemon. For starters, **the federal government must** drastically **increase investment in energy and environmental research and development** (E&E R&D). This will require a serious sacrifice, committing upwards of $40 billion annually to E&E R&D - a far cry from the few billion dollars currently being spent. By promoting a new national project, the U.S. could develop new technologies that will assure it does not drown in a pool of oil. Some solutions are already well known, such as raising fuel standards for automobiles; improving public transportation networks; and expanding nuclear and wind power sources. Others, however, have not progressed much beyond the drawing board: batteries that can store massive amounts of solar (and possibly even wind) power; efficient and cost-effective photovoltaic cells, crop-fuels, and hydrogen-based fuels; and even fusion. Such innovations will not only provide alternatives to oil, they will also give the U.S. an edge in the global competition for hegemony. If the U.S. is able to produce technologies that allow modern, globalized societies to escape the oil trap, those nations will eventually have no choice but to adopt such technologies. And this will give the U.S. a tremendous economic boom, while simultaneously providing it with means of leverage that can be employed to keep potential foes in check.
 * US renewables solve global war**
 * Klarevas 9** – Professor of Global Affairs, (Louis, Professor at the Center for Global Affairs – New York University, “Securing American Primacy While Tackling Climate Change: Toward a National Strategy of Greengemony”, Huffington Post, 12-15, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/louis-klarevas/securing-american-primacy_b_393223.html)

Energy dependence could draw the United States into a conflict in which a regional power was interrupting, or threatening to interrupt, the flow of oil. The economic costs of a disruption would determine whether the costs of fighting were justified. Similarly, the potential economic costs of a disruption would determine whether U.S. foreign and military policy should be devoted to deterring states from interrupting the flow of oil; more precisely, these economic costs would determine how much the United States should invest in the policies required for deterrence.<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;"> Given the geographical distribution of oil, such a conflict would likely occur in the Persian Gulf. The greatest danger is probably posed by Iran —the Iraq War has greatly increased Iran’s power relative to Iraq, and Iran is acquiring improved missile capabilities and making progress toward having the capability to build nuclear weapons. The most disruptive Iranian action would be closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which the vast majority of Persian Gulf oil must pass. Having identified the danger posed by dependence on oil that transits this strait (as well as the Strait of Malacca), a recent Council on Foreign Relations study concluded that the “United States should take the lead in building an infrastructure protection program that would be based on practical steps by relevant countries and address critical infrastructures and transit routes. Initial efforts should focus on joint planning, technical assistance, and military exercises, especially involving naval units operating near ports or along critical sea-lanes.”<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;"> Although difficult to estimate the probability that Iran would attempt to close the strait, analysts have offered reasons for expecting the probability to be quite low: Iran would lose the oil revenue from its own exports; and Iran would likely be deterred by the probable costs of U.S. intervention, which could include the destruction of key military bases and occupation of some of its territory. **Because so much oil flows through the strait, the U** nited **S** tates **would** almost **certainly respond to keep it open.** Nevertheless, there are plausible scenarios in which Iran blocks the strait, for example, as retaliation for an attack against is nuclear weapons program or as a coercive measure if losing a conventional war.<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;"> Careful analysis suggests that the United States would prevail, but that a successful campaign could take many weeks or more, and that oil prices would increase significantly during this period.<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;"> Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons would increase the risk of this scenario in two basic ways. First, Iran might believe that the possibility of escalation to nuclear weapons would deter the United States from responding, making Iran more willing to interrupt tanker traffic. Although basic deterrence logic says this calculation points in the correct direction, the United States might nevertheless intervene. The United States would question Iran’s willingness to escalate to nuclear use because America’s far larger and more capable nuclear forces would pose a formidable retaliatory threat. In addition, the United States would have incentives to make clear that possession of a small number of nuclear weapons by a much weaker state would not deter the United States from using conventional weapons in a limited war. Being deterred by the Iranian nuclear force would suggest that small nuclear arsenals provide tremendous potential for launching conventional aggression. As Barry Posen argued in a related context (the counterfactual case in which Iraq possessed nuclear weapons before deciding to invade Kuwait), “If the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait is permitted to stand, nuclear weapons will come to be viewed as a shield that protects conventional conquests from any challenger, including a great power heavily armed with its own nuclear weapons.”<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;"> Consequently, the U nited S tates would have incentives to respond to Iranian aggression both to preserve its ability to deter conventional aggression by small nuclear states and to support its nonproliferation policy. Second, once a conventional conflict occurred, there would be the danger that **U.S.** conventional **operations could increase the probability [of] nuclear war.** A number of paths are possible. The U.S. mine clearing operation required to open the strait would likely be accompanied by attacks against land-based Iranian targets. The U nited S tates would want to destroy the land-based anti-ship cruise missiles that Iran could use to threaten U.S. mine clearing ships; in addition, the United States would want to destroy Iranian air defenses that could be used to protect these missiles. These U.S. strikes would require large numbers of carrier-based aircraft flying sorties over a period of a few weeks or more.<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;"> If Iran lacked confidence that U.S. aims were limited, it could feel compelled to put its nuclear forces on alert to increase their survivability, which would increase the probability of accidental or unauthorized nuclear attack. The United States could then have incentives to attack Iran’s nuclear force, either preemptively because it believed Iran was preparing to launch an attack or preventively because it faced a closing window of opportunity after which Iran’s nuclear forces would be survivable.<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;"> A more subtle danger is the possibility of inadvertent nuclear escalation resulting from a situation in which Iranian leaders decide to escalate because they believe, incorrectly, that the U nited S tates has decided to destroy their nuclear force (or ability to launch it).<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;"> U.S. conventional operations could create this danger by destroying Iranian radars, and command and control systems, leaving Iranian leaders unable to assess the U.S. conventional campaign and fearing that the United States was preparing to launch a full-scale invasion or a conventional attack against their nuclear forces.
 * Oil dependence makes conflict over the Strait of Hormuz inevitable – that escalates and goes nuclear**
 * GLASER 2011** (Professor of Political Science and International Relations Elliot School of International Affairs The George Washington University, “ Reframing Energy Security: How Oil Dependence Influences U.S. National Security,” August 2011, http://depts.washington.edu/polsadvc/Blog%20Links/Glaser_-_EnergySecurity-AUGUST-2011.docx, Sawyer) ***note – added [of] for grammar

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 11pt;">While fishermen and shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico worry about losing their livelihoods, others may be on the verge of a windfall. Experts talk about how the ocean and the oil and gas industry will be impacted by BP's spill, but little attention has been paid to the economics of a spill cleanup. Some jobs will no doubt be lost because of the spill, **but others will be created**. Workers are now being hired all over the Gulf region to lay down boom, clean up oil, provide security, and prepare for further damages. Many of these **workers are finding jobs in economies that were weak**. Alaska was in a similar situation when the Exxon Valdez oil tanker hit Bligh Reef in 1989. Oils prices had slumped, and the Alaska economy was suffering. More than 20,000 jobs had been lost in 1986 and 1987. The **economy was sputtering back to life** by 1988, but it too**k off with the oil spill. No year since the spill has seen a larger growth rate in the Alaska economy** than occurred in 1989, according to Neal Fried at the Alaska Department of Labor. The Gulf could see a similar boost. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist on June 17 unveiled a [|website] directing Floridians to more than 3,500 jobs associated with the cleanup, although to this point the tens of thousands of gallons gushing from BP's undersea crude oil volcano have largely missed the Sunshine State. The Deepwater site has now gushed at least 42 million gallons, almost four times the 11 million gallons with which Exxon smeared Prince William Sound. Immediately after that accident, the call went out across Alaska for workers to help clean up and contain the spill. According to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council [|website], 10,000 workers and 1,000 boats were mobilized at a cost of $2.1 billion. Spill cleanup workers made $16.69 an hour ($29.34 today, adjusted for inflation). Spill jobs helped pull Alaska's unemployment rate down from 7.2 percent in May 1989 to 6.9 percent in September 1989, when cleanup operations ended, according to the Alaska Department of Labor. And the amount of money spent to equip the cleanup operation created an economic wave that rippled through Alaska as fishing boats were leased, pilots hired, workers fed, equipment maintained and lawyers retained. Some lawyers had to hire additional staff to handle compensatory claims eventually totaling over $900 million. Most of those claims were paid off over the next 10 years. The spill jobs, while temporary, gave many people the means to put a down payment on a house or purchase a car. Fried said the increase in purchasing power helped pull the economy out of what had been the worst recession in 20 years. Some economic benefits have continued for decades. Scientific grants to study the damage to Prince William Sound have continued to this day, making the spill one of the most researched in history, according to the EVOSTC. And in 2008 Exxon settled punitive claims in the case Baker vs. Exxon Valdez Shipping Co. The company was required to pay fishermen and others another $995 million over 10 years.
 * Economy turn – the plan decks overall growth**
 * Levine 10** – Staff Writer for Alaska Dispatch (Thomas, “Economics of an Oil Spill Cleanup”, 6/27/10; < www.alaskadispatch.com/article/economics-oil-spill-cleanup>)//AB

And, the impact is great power nuclear war Austin ‘09 (Michael, Resident Scholar – American Enterprise Institute, and Desmond Lachman, Resident Fellow – American Enterprise Institute, “The Global Economy Unravels”, Forbes, 3-6, http://www.aei.org/article/100187) Conversely, global policymakers do not seem to have grasped the downside risks to the global economy posed by a deteriorating domestic and international political environment. If the past is any guide, the souring of the political environment must be expected to fan the corrosive protectionist tendencies and nationalistic economic policy responses that are already all too much in evidence. After spending much of 2008 cheerleading the global economy, the International Monetary Fund now concedes that output in the world's advanced economies is expected to contract by as much as 2% in 2009. This would be the first time in the post-war period that output contracted in all of the world's major economies. The IMF is also now expecting only a very gradual global economic recovery in 2010, which will keep global unemployment at a high level. Sadly, the erstwhile rapidly growing emerging -market economies will not be spared by the ravages of the global recession. Output is already declining precipitously across Eastern and Central Europe as well as in a number of key Asian economies, like South Korea and Thailand. A number of important emerging-market countries like Ukraine seem to be headed for debt default, while a highly oil-dependent Russia seems to be on the cusp of a full-blown currency crisis. Perhaps of even greater concern is the virtual grinding to a halt of economic growth in China. The IMF now expects that China's growth rate will approximately halve to 6% in 2009. Such a growth rate would fall far short of what is needed to absorb the 20 million Chinese workers who migrate each year from the countryside to the towns in search of a better life. As a barometer of the political and social tensions that this grim world economic outlook portends, one needs look no further than the recent employment forecast of the International Labor Organization. The ILO believes that the global financial crisis will wipe out 30 million jobs worldwide in 2009, while in a worst case scenario as many as 50 million jobs could be lost. What do these trends mean in the short and medium term ? The Great Depression showed how social and global chaos followed hard on economic collapse. The mere fact that parliaments across the globe, from America to Japan, are unable to make responsible, economically sound recovery plans suggests that they do not know what to do and are simply hoping for the least disruption. Equally worrisome is the adoption of more statist economic programs around the globe, and the concurrent decline of trust in free-market systems. The threat of instability is a pressing concern. China, until last year the world's fastest growing economy, just reported that 20 million migrant laborers lost their jobs. Even in the flush times of recent years, China faced upward of 70,000 labor uprisings a year. A sustained downturn poses grave and possibly immediate threats to Chinese internal stability. The regime in Beijing may be faced with a choice of repressing its own people or diverting their energies outward, leading to conflict with China's neighbors. Russia, an oil state completely dependent on energy sales, has had to put down riots in its Far East as well as in downtown Moscow. Vladimir Putin's rule has been predicated on squeezing civil liberties while providing economic largesse. If that devil's bargain falls apart, then wide-scale repression inside Russia, along with a continuing threatening posture toward Russia's neighbors, is likely. Even apparently stable societies face increasing risk and the threat of internal or possibly external conflict. As Japan's exports have plummeted by nearly 50%, one-third of the country's prefectures have passed emergency economic stabilization plans. Hundreds of thousands of temporary employees hired during the first part of this decade are being laid off. Spain's unemployment rate is expected to climb to nearly 20% by the end of 2010; Spanish unions are already protesting the lack of jobs, and the specter of violence, as occurred in the 1980s, is haunting the country. Meanwhile, in Greece, workers have already taken to the streets. Europe as a whole will face dangerously increasing tensions between native citizens and immigrants, largely from poorer Muslim nations, who have increased the labor pool in the past several decades. Spain has absorbed five million immigrants since 1999, while nearly 9% of Germany's residents have foreign citizenship, including almost 2 million Turks. The xenophobic labor strikes in the U.K. do not bode well for the rest of Europe. A prolonged global downturn, let alone a collapse, would dramatically raise tensions inside these countries. Couple that with possible protectionist legislation in the United States, unresolved ethnic and territorial disputes in all regions of the globe and a loss of confidence that world leaders actually know what they are doing. The result may be a series of small explosions that coalesce into //a big bang//.


 * Logistical challenges prevent an increase in human activity there was a spill in 2010 – your 1ac author**
 * O’Rourke 6/15** – Specialist in Naval Affairs (Ronald, “Changes in the Arctic: Background and Issues for Congress”, 6/15/12; <http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41153.pdf>)AB

Climate change impacts in the Arctic, particularly the decline of sea ice and retreating glaciers, have stimulated human activities in the region, many of which have the potential to create oil pollution. A primary concern is the threat of a large oil spill in the area. Although a major oil spill has not occurred in the Arctic region,82 recent economic activity, such as oil and gas exploration and tourism (cruise ships), increases the risk of oil pollution(and other kinds of pollution) in the Arctic. Significant spills in high northern latitudes (e.g., the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and spills in the North Sea) suggest that the “potential impacts of an Arctic spill are likely to be severe for Arctic species and ecosystems.”83A primary factor determining the risk of oil pollution in the Arctic is the level and type of human activity being conducted in the region. Although climate changes in the Arctic are expected to increase access to natural resources and shipping lanes, the region will continue to present logistical challenges that may hinder human activity in the region. For example (as discussed in another section of this report),84 the unpredictable ice conditions may discourage trans-Arctic shipping. If trans-Arctic shipping were to occur on a frequent basis, it would represent a considerable portion of the overall risk of oil pollution in the region. In recent decades, many of the world’s largest oil spills have been from oil tankers, which can carry millions of gallons of oil.85 Although the level of trans-Arctic shipping is uncertain, many expect oil exploration and extraction activities to intensify in the region.86 Oil well blowouts from offshore oil extraction operations have been a source of major oil spills, eclipsing the largest tanker spills. The largest unintentional oil spill in recent history was from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico.87 During that incident, the uncontrolled well released (over an 84-day period) approximately 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf.88 The second-largest unintentional oil spill in recent history—the IXTOC I, estimated at 140 million gallons—was due to an oil well blowout in Mexican Gulf Coast waters in 1979.89

** Their impact evidence – ** ** a. National Academy of Engineers says one spill is key but it is from 2003 – empirically disproven ** ** b. Dorsett evidence discusses the consequences of the ** //Exxon// ** oil spill – it’s from 2 years ago ** ** c. Adams says the Gulf spill threatens extinction – hello! your aff is about cleaning up Alakas ports **
 * Your 1ac evidence concedes that the status quo solves and there are alternative causes**

//Conathan et. al. 12// //–// //writers for the Center of American Progress, an independent nonpartisan educational institute dedicated to critique and analysis of policy. Individual cites are below. “Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling America’s Inability to Respond to an Oil Spill in the Arctic,” February 2012, americanprogress.org/issues/2012//**HO**

The decision to move forward with drilling in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth has deeply divided Alaska Native communities, drawn stark criticism from environmental groups, and caused other federal agencies such as the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to raise concerns about the glaring absence of sound science in the region. This is highlighted in a recent letter to the Obama administration, signed by nearly 600 scientists from around the world, calling on the president and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to follow through on their commitment to science and enact recommendations made by the U.S. Geological Survey before approving any drilling activity in the Arctic.3 In addition to the lack of a scientific foundation,the Arctic has inadequate infrastructure to deal with an oil spill, and response technologies in such extreme environmental conditions remain untested. 2 Center for American Progress | Putting a Freeze on Arctic Drilling As we detail in this report, the resources and existing infrastructure that facilitated a grand-scale response to the BP disaster differ immensely from what could be brought to bear in a similar situation off Alaska’s North Slope. Even the well-developed infrastructure and abundance of trained personnel in the Gulf of Mexico didn’t prevent the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. Our Arctic response capabilities pale by comparison. There are no U.S. Coast Guard stations north of the Arctic Circle, and we currently operate just one functional icebreaking vessel. Alaska’s tiny ports and airports are incapable of supporting an extensive and sustained airlift effort. The region even lacks such basics as paved roads and railroads. T his dearth of infrastructure would severely hamper the ability to transport the supplies and personnel required for any large-scale emergency response effort

** They don’t have a piece of evidence that the oil spills the plan claims to solve would kill a keystone species, which is the magnitude of their impact evidence. ** ** Their Cornwell evidence disproves the entire advantage – it is from 2004 and cites the ** **Selendang Ayu oil spill which occurred almost 10 years ago.**

OAA is a leader in providing quality MTS products and services. Applying the range of NOAA skills developed for the contiguous U.S. to the ever-more accessible Alaskan north and Arctic, where there is an urgent need for the infrastructure and information NOAA provides, is a natural and essential path to take. Loss of sea ice and permafrost, rising sea levels and eroding coasts are all occurring at unprecedented rates, and the status quo – limited NOAA service delivery to the region -- is no longer acceptable. A modest investment – on the order of $15M in FY2011 - in the geospatial infrastructure that the rest of the nation takes for granted will enable both the economic promise of the region and environmental protections to unfold. From accurate positioning capability to accurate maps and nautical charts, marine weather forecasts and spill response, NOAA has the opportunity to apply the skills of its oldest, most fundamental missions to maximum return in Alaska and the Arctic. Investing in this suite of services will add immediate benefit to a host of other federal missions dependent upon the same infrastructure to achieve their goals, including Homeland Security, coastal and ocean management, fisheries stewardship, climate change monitoring, and tsunami/ storm surge readiness. The first and most critical step – an improved geo-spatial framework -- will enable NOAA and its partners to monitor and describe the physical changes impacting the natural and socioeconomic environment and aid coastal communities with decisions on flood protection infrastructure; harden roads, bridges and observing systems; ensure safe and efficient marine transportation ; plan evacuation routes; model storm surge; and monitor sea-level. Improving the vertical geospatial infrastructure will eliminate meter errors in heights and allow efficient, centimeter-level measurement of heights using GPS. NOAA's 1998 Height Modernization Report to Congress estimated a $12 billion constituent benefit from national height modernization, including $9.6 billion for maritime safety; this investment will realize similar benefits for Alaska. Further, GPS-based coastal mapping will be tied more accurately to true elevation (orthometric heights), allowing production of more accurate coastline delineations and map products and improved modeling of storm surge and coastal erosion. Tsunami inundation models and wild fire predication/ control will also be improved through this accurate positioning framework. Active mining claims currently cover 3.6 million acres of land in Alaska. The improved geospatial infrastructure will allow precision mining and increased efficiencies in tapping Alaska’s zinc, lead, gold, silver, and coal reserves. Eliminating the large gaps in shoreline, hydrography, tide and current information, and other MTS geospatial data sets will greatly advance NOAA’s ability to fulfill its statutory responsibilities to support safe navigation in the emerging Arctic marine transportation corridor through accurate, timely and reliable products and services such as charts, tidal datums, and precise marine boundaries. Lack of adequately maintained decision support tools will increase the risk of accidents as vessel traffic expands, with potentially catastrophic effects on a pristine environment. The most effective way to mitigate an accident is to prevent it. In addition, lack of accurate MTS geospatial information may impact the award/management of oil and other offshore leases for energy and mineral exploration and extraction as jurisdiction over offshore submerged lands is determined from baseline marine boundaries. Significant revenues can be involved based on where lines are drawn. One such disputed case went all the way to the Supreme Court (521 U.S. 1 (1997)) and NOAA provided the tidal and shoreline information used in the adjudication.
 * They don’t solve data shortages, which is an alt cause to the aff – their 1ac evidence**
 * NOAA 8** – Federal Scientific Agency within US Department of Commerce (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Internal Strategy Paper: Transportation; A Strategy for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration” July 2008; < [] >)//AB

Alaska’s North Slope is underlain by permafrost— a thick layer of earth material that stays frozen year round. The permafrost is covered by a thin active layer that thaws each summer and supports plant growth for a brief period. If permafrost thaws, the ground surface and the structures it supports will settle. To minimize disruption to the ground surface, the North Slope industrial infrastructure is specially built—pipelines are generally elevated rather than buried, and roads and industrial facilities are raised on thick gravel berms. For a variety of reasons, nearly all of the roads, pads, pipelines and other infrastructure ever built are still in place. The environmental effects of such structures on the landscape, water systems, vegetation, and animals are manifest not only at the “footprint” itself (physical area covered by the structure) but also at distances that vary depending on the environmental component being affected. The petroleum industry continues to introduce technological innovations to reduce its footprint, for example, directional drilling and the use of ice roads and pads, drilling platforms, and new kinds of vehicles. For some areas of concern, the committee found no evidence that effects have accumulated. For example, despite widespread concern regarding the damaging effects of frequent oil and saltwater spills on the tundra, most spills to date have been small and have had only local effects. Moreover, damaged areas have recovered before they have been disturbed again. However, a large oil spill in marine waters would likely have substantial accumulating effects on whales and other receptors because current cleanup methods can remove only a small fraction of spilled oil, especially under conditions of broken ice.
 * Alaskan infrastructure has minimal environmental impacts.**
 * National Academy of Engineering** **03** – American National Academies (“Cumulative Environmental Effects of Oil and Gas Activities on Alaska’s North Slope”, 2003; < http://dels-old.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/north_slope_final.pdf>)//AB


 * Deforestation makes biodiversity loss inevitable**
 * Cardillo, 06** (Marcel, Division of Biology, Imperial College London, 2006, “Disappearing forests and biodiversity loss: which areas should we protect?,” //International Forestry Review// Volume 8, Issue 2, http://www.tempoandmode.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/int-forestry-review-june-2006-cardillo.pdf, Hensel)
 * The destruction of forests and other habitats is the single most important cause of biodiversity loss** (IUCN 2004), and it is inevitable that the massive loss of forests that will occur over the next few decades will result in widespread extinctions. The magnitude of this impending extinction event can be estimated, roughly, using the species-area relationship. The species-area relationship describes the increase in species richness (S) with area of habitat (A), which can usually be modelled as a power function of the form S = cAz, the value of z indicating the slope of the increase. The expected loss of species from time t to t+1 can therefore be estimated as a function of habitat loss, using the equation St+1/St = (At+1/At)z. Using this method it has been predicted, for example, that endemic mammal species richness in the Brazilian Amazon could be reduced by 518% under different modelled scenarios of forest loss to 2020 (Grelle 2005).

A RARE piece of good news from the world of conservation: the global extinction crisis may have been overstated. The world is unlikely to lose 100 species a day, or half of all species in the lifetime of people now alive, as some have claimed. The bad news, though, is that the lucky survivors are tiny tropical insects that few people care about. The species that are being lost rapidly are the large vertebrates that conservationists were worried about in the first place. This new view of the prospects for biodiversity emerged from a symposium held this week at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, but the controversy over how bad things really are has been brewing since 2006. That was when Joseph Wright of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Helene Muller-Landau of the University of Minnesota first suggested that the damage might not be as grim as some feared. They reasoned that because population growth is slowing in many tropical countries, and people are moving to cities, the pressure to cut down primary rainforest is falling and agriculturally marginal land is being abandoned, allowing trees to grow. This regrown “secondary” forest is crucial to the pair’s analysis. Within a few decades of land being abandoned, half of the original biomass has returned. Depending on what else is nearby, these new forests may then be colonised by animals and additional plants, and thus support many of the species found in the original forest. Dr Wright and Dr Muller-Landau therefore reckon that in 2030 reasonably unbroken tropical forest will still cover more than a third of its natural range, and after that date its area—at least in Latin America and Asia—could increase. Much of this woodland will be secondary forest, but even so they suggest that in Africa only 16-35% of tropical-forest species will become extinct by 2030, in Asia, 21-24% and, in Latin America, fewer still. Once forest cover does start increasing, **the rate of extinction should dwindle**.
 * And, loss doesn’t cause extinction**
 * The Economist, 09** (The Economist, January 15, 2009, “Second life: Biologists debate the scale of extinction in the world’s tropical forests,” http://www.economist.com/node/12926042, Hensel)

1nc -- deterrence adv.
As global warming opens the Arctic Ocean to commercial and industrial traffic, // the U.S. Navy is pushing to catch up with Russia //, Canada and even Denmark // in // its // Arctic ability. // // If a crisis were to happen now, the Navy lacks the ability to act // in the Arctic without the help of one of those countries or the Coast Guard //. Last year, the Navy asked the War Gaming Department of the U.S. Naval War College to find out what the Navy needs for sustained operations in the Arctic. In the resulting 2011 Fleet Arctic Operations Game, the // Navy learned how big its Arctic shortcomings are //. // As a force, // the Navy lacks // everything from // bases // // and Arctic-capable ships to reliable communications and cold-weather clothing.... The game’s conclusions: the // Navy is // not // adequately // prepared to conduct long-term maritime Arctic operations; Arctic weather conditions increase the risk of failure; and most critically, to operate in the Arctic, the Navy will need to lean on the U.S. Coast Guard, countries like Russia or Canada, or tribal and industrial partners. To sustain operations in the Arctic, the Navy needs ice-capable equipment, accurate and timely environmental data, personnel trained to operate in extreme weather, and better communications systems. Much of the environmental data will come from other Arctic nations.... Navy officials understand the need to conduct exercises in the Arctic so they can get ready for the real thing, but they don't have a strategy. “We are the only Arctic nation without an Arctic strategy,” said U.S. Navy Cmdr. Blake McBride, Arctic Affairs officer for Task Force Climate Change. “The Coast Guard and Department of Defense are working on a strategy to help answer the issue, and advocate for capabilities.” //
 * Once again here are a litany of alt causes in their 1ac evidence**
 * O’Rourke 6/15** – Specialist in Naval Affairs (Ronald, “Changes in the Arctic: Background and Issues for Congress”, 6/15/12; < [] >)AB

// Their next piece of 1ac ORouke evidence cites a list of tasks that are key to solving deterrence – they don’t have a piece of evidence that makes the claim that new ports are the key internal link. //

The extent, impact, and rate of climate change in the Arctic are uncertain, and may not unfold in a linear fashion. This will make it challenging to plan for possible future conditions in the region and to mobilize public or political support for investments in U.S. Arctic capabilities or infrastructure absent a clear and immediate need for them. The general assumption that climate change will occur gradually, allowing plenty of time to adapt, may be overturned by periods of rapid change punctuated by episodes of climatic stability, or by unexpectedly severe impacts from the change. Part of the challenge will be the variable pace of climate change: several relatively ice-free summers may be followed by a number of unusually cold years during which the sea ice remains throughout the year. Relationships among the Arctic nations will remain generally stable and cooperative. All five littoral nations (United States, Russian Federation, Canada, Norway, and Denmark on behalf of Greenland) have already established the groundwork of common approaches to managing the region within the framework of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the Arctic Council, and other international forums. All of the Arctic states (the five littoral nations plus Iceland, Sweden, and Finland) have shown through their participation in the Arctic Council, the Barents Euro-Arctic Council, the IMO, and other international organizations a willingness and ability to manage and resolve disputes through established international diplomatic mechanisms. This **provides a sound basis to anticipate** that **the security environment** in the Arctic **will be defined by cooperation rather than conflict** in the future. Should military security issues arise, they will be addressed with the appropriate stakeholders through the network of relevant bilateral and multilateral relationships.
 * Specifically in the context of an Arctic oil rush, Arctic nations will cooperate.**
 * DoD 11** – US Department of Defense (“Report to Congress on Arctic Operations and the Northwest Passage” May 2011; < http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/Tab_A_Arctic_Report_Public.pdf>)//AB

Since 2007, the U.S. Coast Guard has deployed cutters, aircraft, boats, and special detachments to northern Alaska during the summer season to increase competencies and develop Arctic partnerships. One area for future assessment might be the need for a co-located airport and port facility suitable for deployment of undersea search and rescue assets. Given the paucity of suitable sites and existing infrastructure, it is likely that any future infrastructure, at least initially, will consist of dual-use military-civilian facilities. In summary, with the low potential for armed conflict in the region in the foreseeable future, the existing defense infrastructure (e.g., bases, ports, and airfields)is adequate to meet near- to midterm U.S. national security needs. Therefore, DoD does not currently anticipate a need for the construction of additional bases or a deep draft port in Alaska between now and 2020. Given the long lead times for basing infrastructure in the region, DoD will periodically re-evaluate this assessment as activity in the region gradually increases and the CCDRs review and update their regional plans as the security environment evolves.
 * Port not key for defense**
 * DOD 11**- (“report to congress on arctic operations and the northwest passage”, May 11, [])//MSO

That's a mistake, because our commitment to naval power today will affect America's standing in the world – and its ability to contain an increasingly aggressive China – for the next half century. Yet this commitment is on ////shaky ground//// given the out-of-control national ////debt////. And the ruling party has few hands on deck to meet this national challenge. One gauge of a great power's military stature is the readiness of its fleet versus that of its likely foes. Deterring an aggressive China According to a 2009 Pentagon report, China has an estimated 260 naval vessels, all concentrated in East Asia. The United States has 288 battle-force ships with 11 carrier task forces and dozens of nuclear submarines as the crown jewels. The US fleet patrols worldwide. China's fleet has been concentrated in its home waters, but its range is rapidly extending to as far as the Middle East. "China seeks domination of the South China Sea to be the dominant power in much of the Eastern Hemisphere," defense expert Robert D. Kaplan has written. As Mr. Kaplan notes, the South China Sea is a vital route for much of Asia's commercial traffic and energy needs. The US and other nations consider it an international passageway. China calls it a "core interest." To maintain naval strength, reduce debt To keep the US blue-water fleet the best in the world costs billions. ////A debtor nation eventually cuts defense spending//////,// and big-ticket items like new ships are the first to go. That is why maritime defense is the sleeper issue of these elections. The party that reduces national debt can maintain naval strength. The party that doesn't allows US naval prominence to sink.
 * And, debt is an alternate cause to naval collapse**
 * Bencivenga, 10** [Jim Bencivenga is a former teacher and Monitor staffer, “Will US naval power sink?”http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/1025/Will-US-naval-power-sink,

This article examines American federalism through the prism of the surface transportation program, one of the nation's largest grant-in-aid programs. No matter how pragmatic or intense the desire to express assessments in simple terms, federalism is a time-sensitive reflection of our collective experiential understanding. Facts, values, hypotheses, and concepts are derived from this collective understanding. The experience of the **surface transportation** program under ISTEA and TEA-21 **illustrates the challenge of** achieving a clear picture of **federalism** when radical changes occur. ISTEA **and** TEA-21 **have** **significantly altered traditional intergovernmental relationships,** particularly as the federal role in transportation appears to have become more ambiguous than at any time in the past 45 years. Thus, at the outset of the twenty-first century, the federal role in transportation is shifting, becoming far less focused. Other goals are emerging, leading the federal transportation role to become more of a means to an end than the central focal point. During the past two decades, American federalism has been anything but static. Efforts at reform have been many; taking the pulse of the system has been difficult. Contending political agendas in and between presidential administration's and Congress have wrought significant changes in the character and direction of federalism. Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Bill Clinton each sought reforms to simplify intergovernmental relationships and return some responsibilities to the states, but these efforts remain a work in progress. Coupled with continuing crosscurrents in congressional actions, these presidential efforts have combined to further stir the batter in America's marble-cake federalism. The outcomes have been hard to characterize with clarity. **Transportation** is one of the policy areas that **has been a bellwether in characterizing the status of the federal-state relationship.**
 * The plan skirts balance of power over transportation – this spills over and collapses federalism**
 * Edner and McDowell 02** (Sheldon Edner, Director, Center for Federal Management Leadership, George Mason University, former Associate Director for Financial Management at the Department of Transportation, Bruce D. McDowell, President, Intergovernmental Management Associates, Project Director, National Academy of Public Administration, “Surface-Transportation Funding in a New Century: Assessing One Slice of the Federal Marble Cake,” JSTOR, Publius, The Journal of Federalism, Vol. 32, No. 1, Winter 2002, pp. 7-24, Sawyer)

First, the rules of constitutional federalism should be enforced because federalism is a good thing, and it is the best and most important structural feature of the U.S. Constitution. Second, the political branches cannot be relied upon to enforce constitutional federalism, notwithstanding the contrary writings of Professor Jesse Choper. Third, the Supreme Court is institutionally competent to enforce constitutional federalism. Fourth, the Court is at least as qualified to act in this area as it is in the Fourteenth Amendment area. And, fifth, the doctrine of stare [*831] decisis does not pose a barrier to the creation of any new, prospectively applicable Commerce Clause case law. The conventional wisdom is that Lopez is nothing more than a flash in the pan. 232 Elite opinion holds that the future of American constitutional law will involve the continuing elaboration of the Court's national codes on matters like abortion regulation, pornography, rules on holiday displays, and rules on how the states should conduct their own criminal investigations and trials. Public choice theory suggests many reasons why it is likely that the Court will continue to pick on the states and give Congress a free ride. But, it would be a very good thing for this country if the Court decided to surprise us and continued on its way down the Lopez path. Those of us who comment on the Court's work, whether in the law reviews or in the newspapers, should encourage the Court to follow the path on which it has now embarked. The country and the world would be a better place if it did. We have seen that a desire for both international and devolutionary federalism has swept across the world in recent years. To a significant extent, this is due to global fascination with and emulation of our own American federalism success story. The global trend toward federalism is an enormously positive development that greatly increases the likelihood of future peace, free trade, economic growth, respect for social and cultural diversity, and protection of individual human rights. It depends for its success on the willingness of sovereign nations to strike federalism deals in the belief that those deals will be kept. 233 The U.S. Supreme Court can do its part to encourage the future striking of such deals by enforcing vigorously our own American federalism deal. Lopez could be a first step in that process, if only the Justices and the legal academy would wake up to the importance of what is at stake.
 * Modeled globally and solves war and trade – turns the case**
 * Calabresi 95** (Steven G., Assistant Prof – Northwestern U., Michigan Law Review, Lexis)


 * Rd 1 ---**
 * 1nc**
 * --topicality -- maintenance**
 * --biodiversity disad**
 * --advantage cp**
 * --russia lng disad**
 * --case**
 * 2nc**
 * --advantage cp**
 * --biodiversity disad**
 * --case**
 * 1nr**
 * --russia lng disad**
 * 2nr**
 * --russia lng disad**
 * --case**


 * Rd 4 ---**
 * 1nc**
 * --topicality -- military/substantial**
 * --cybersecurity disad**
 * --bataille kritik**
 * --eis counterplan**
 * --coercion disad**
 * --endangered species disad**
 * --case -- navy bad, heg bad**
 * 2nc**
 * --bataille kritik**
 * --case -- navy bad, heg bad**
 * 1nr**
 * --t substantial**
 * --eis counterplan**
 * 2nr**
 * --eis counterplan (condo)**


 * Rd 6 ---**
 * 1nc**
 * --inherency**
 * --topicality -- no ports**
 * --bataille kritik**
 * --cybersecurity disad**
 * --conditions counterplan**
 * --f-35 tradeoff dsiad**
 * --case -- oil spills good**
 * 2nc**
 * --bataille kritik**
 * --case -- oil spills good**
 * 1nr**
 * --conditions counterplan**
 * 2nr**
 * --bataille kritik**


 * Past 2NR's**
 * --Oil DA and Case**
 * --Oil DA and Advantage CP**
 * --Politics DA and States CP**
 * --Federalism DA and States CP**
 * --EIS CP**
 * --Consumption Kritik**
 * --Dredging Environment Turns and Advantage CP**
 * --Consumption turns vs. Russia Scifi aff**
 * --Russia LNG DA and Case**