Imperialism K Neg

1NC

The economic intervention of the affirmative into Latin America is a form of
imperialism which precludes self-determination and subjugates recipient countries
Slater, Dept of Geography Loughborough University, 2006(David, Imperial powers and democratic imaginations, Third World
Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 8)

One response to this question is to suggest that, unlike other Western powers, the imperiality of US power emerged out of a postcolonial
anchorage, or, in other words, a project of imperial power gradually emerged out of an initial anti-colonial struggle for independence from
British rule. This fact of emergence has given the USA a contradictory identity of being a 'post-colonial imperial power', with the determining
emphasis falling on the 'imperial' (Slater, 2004a). The postcolonial essentially refers to the specificity of origin, and does not preclude the
possibility of a coloniality of power, as was exemplified in the case of the Philippines, or as is argued continues to apply to Puerto Rico
(Pantojas-Garcia, 2005). Such a paradoxical identity has two significant implications. First, one finds juxtaposed an
affirmation of the legitimacy of the self-determination of peoples with a belief in the geopolitical
destiny of the USA. Such a belief dates at least from the time of 'Manifest Destiny' and notions of
'benevolent assimilation' to the present where, as the Mexican political scientist Orozco (2005: 54)
expresses it, the USA sees itself as the 'first universal nation'. Historically, the contradiction
between support for the rights of people to decide their own fate and a belief in the geopolitical
destiny of 'America' (rather than Jose Marti's nuestra America see Santos de Souza, 2001) has
necessitated a discursive 'bridge'. This bridge has been formed through the invocation of a
democratic mission that combines the national and international spheres. In order to transcend
the contradiction between an identity based on the self-determination of peoples and another rooted
in Empire, a horizon is created for other peoples who are encouraged to choose freedom and
democracy, thereby embedding their own struggles within an Americanising vision and practice.
Second, the primacy of self-determination provides a key to explaining the dichotomy frequently present in the discourses of US geopolitical
intervention, where a split is made between a concept of the people and a concept ofthe rulers. Given the historical differentiation of the New
(American) World of freedom, progress and democracy from an Old (European) World of privilege and colonial power, support for anti-
colonial struggles has been accompanied by a separation between oppressed people and tyrannical rulers. For example, in the case of US
hostility towards the Cuban Revolution, the Helms- Burton Act of 1996 makes a clear separation between the Cuban people who need
supporting in their vulnerability and the Castro government, which is seen as a tyrannical oppressor of its own people and a security threat to the
international community (Slater, 2004b). Similar distinctions have been made in the contexts of interventions in Grenada (1983) and Panama
(1989). Overall it can be suggested that geopolitical interventions have been couched in terms of a prominent
concern for the rights of peoples who are being oppressed by unrepresentative and totalitarian
regimes. The USA is thus represented as a benevolent guardian of the rights of a subordinated
people. An imperial ethic of care is projected across frontiers to provide one form of legitimisation
for interventions. This particular ethic of care needs to be kept in mind as a constitutive feature of
the imperial and, although imperial power includes the capacity for force, equally it requires
discourses of legitimisation wherein ideas of care and guidance continue to play a leading role.
Geopolitical interventions have been a permanent feature of the landscape of North - South
relations and can be viewed in terms of the interconnections between desire, will, capacity and
legitimisation. The will to intervene can be represented as a crystallisation of a desire to expand, expressed for example in the notion of
'Manifest Destiny' (see Pratt, 1927). Such a will can only be made effective when the capacities-military,
economic, political-to intervene are sufficiently developed. Will and capacity together provide a
force, but their effectiveness is only secured as a hegemonic power through the deployment of a
discourse of justification. A political will that focuses desire and is able to mobilise the levers of
intervention seeks a hegemonic role through the ability to induce consent by providing leadership,
while retaining the capacity to coerce. The desire to intervene, to penetrate another society and help
to reorder, readjust, modernise, develop, civilise, democratise that other society is an essential
part of any imperial project. The geopolitical will is provided by changing agents of power working
in and through the apparatuses of the imperial state. The processes of legitimisation for that will
to power are produced within the state but also within civil society (see Joseph et al, 1998; Salvatore, 2005).
In the case of the USA and its relations with the societies of the global South and especially the
Latin South the processes of discursive legitimisation have been particularly significant in
supporting its power and hegemonic ambition. Specifically in this regard the aim of spreading or
diffusing democracy, or a particular interpretation of democracy, has been and remains a
crucial element in the process of justification of geopolitical power.


This imperialism creates a violent global police state which normalizes endless cycles
of racism, sexism, and heterosexism

MOHANTY in 6 (CHANDRA TALPADE, Department of Womens Studies, Syracuse
University, Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 720, February 2006, US Empire and the Project
of Womens Studies: Stories of citizenship, complicity and dissent,
http://www.uccs.edu/~pkeilbac/courses/intlpol/readings/US%20Empire.pdf)
The clearest effects of US empire building in the domestic arena are thus evident in the way
citizenship has been restructured, civil rights violated and borders repoliced since the commencement
of the war of drugs, and now the war on terrorism and the establishment of the homeland security
regime. While the US imperial project calls for civilizing brown and black (and now Arab) men and
rescuing their women outside its borders, the very same state engages in killing, imprisoning, and
criminalizing black and brown and now Muslim and Arab peoples within its own borders. Former
political prisoner Linda Evans (2005) calls the US a global police state one that has adopted a mass
incarceration strategy of social control since the Reagan years. Analyzing the militarization of US
society, Evans argues that the new definition of domestic terrorism heralds the now legal return of
the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that conducted illegal covert operations in the 1960s
and 1970s against the Black Panther party, the American Indian movement, the Puerto Rican
Independence movement, and left/socialist organizations. Racial profiling, once illegal, is now
legitimated as public policy, including a requirement that Arab and Muslim men from over 25 countries
register and submit to INS interrogation. Similarly, Julia Sudbury analyzes the global crisis and rise in the
mass incarceration of women, suggesting that we must be attentive to the ways in which punishment
regimes are shaped by global capitalism, dominant and subordinate patriarchies and neocolonial,
racialized ideologies (see Sudbury, 2005, p. xiii). This prison industrial complex is supported by the
militarization of domestic law enforcement. As Anannya Bhattacharjee (2002) suggests, there have
been dramatic increases in funding, increasing use of advanced military technology, sharing of personnel
and equipment with the military, and the general promotion of a war-like culture in domestic law
enforcement and also in a range of public agencies (welfare, schools, hospitalsand now universities?)
that are subjected to an accelerated culture of surveillance and law enforcement (see Silliman &
Bhattacharjee, 2002). The effects of these conjoined economic/military policies of the US imperial
state represents an alarming increase of violence against women, children and communities bearing
the brunt of US military dominance around the world. In the US, policies clearly target poor and
immigrant communities. In her new work, Jacqui Alexander (2005) analyzes the primacy of processes of
heterosexualization in the consolidation of empire. She suggests that the mobilization of the loyal
heterosexual citizen patriot is achieved through the collapse of constructions of the enemy, the
terrorist and the sexual pervert. Similarly, Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai (2002) analyze the terrorism
industry since 9/11, exploring the production of the monster, the fag, and the terrorist as figures of
surveillance and criminalization. This clearly gendered, sexualized, and racialized culture of militarism
and surveillance is buttressed by a hegemonic culture of consumption and neo-liberal conservatism
wherein discourses of advancement and technological superiority, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim
sentiments dovetail with ideologies of patriotism, and faith-based initiatives and ideologies to justify
the war at home and the war abroad. Take Abu Ghraib for instance.

Alternative: Vote negative to interrogate the epistemological framework of the 1AC.
Breaking down boundaries of knowledge is key to counteract otherwise inevitable
neo-imperialist violence

McLaren and Kincheloe in 5 (Peter Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education and
Information Studies @ UCLA and Joe, professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education,
McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Third
Edition, Eds Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln)
In this context, it is important to note that we understand a social theory as a map or a guide to the
social sphere. In a research context, it does not determine how we see the world but helps us devise
questions and strategies for exploring it. A critical social theory is concerned in particular with issues of
power and justice and the ways that the economy; matters of race, class, and gender; ideologies;
discourses; education; religion and other social institutions; and cultural dynamics interact to construct
a social system (Beck-Gernsheim, Butler, & Puigvert, 2003; Flccha, Gomez, & Puigvert, 2003). Thus, in
this context we seek to provide a view of an evolving criticality or a reconceptualized critical theory.
Critical theory is never static; it is always evolving, changing in light of both new theoretical insights and
new problems and social circumstances. The list of concepts elucidating our articulation of critical
theory indicates a criticality informed by a variety of discourses emerging after the work of the Frankfurt
School Indeed, some of the theoretical discourses, while referring to themselves as critical, directly call
into question some of the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Thus, diverse theoretical
traditions have informed our understanding of criticality and have demanded understanding of diverse
forms of oppression including class, race, gender, sexual, cultural, religious, colonial, and ability-related
concerns. The evolving notion of criticality we present is informed by, while critiquing, the post-
discoursesfor example, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. In this context,
critical theorists become detectives of new theoretical insights, perpetually searching for new and
interconnected ways of understanding power and oppression and the ways they shape everyday life
and human experience. In this context, criticality and the research it supports are always evolving,
always encountering new ways to irritate dominant forms of power, to provide more evocative and
compelling insights. Operating in this way, an evolving criticality is always vulnerable to exclusion from
the domain of approved modes of research. The forms of social change it supports always position it in
some places as an outsider, an awkward detective always interested in uncovering social structures,
discourses, ideologies, and epistemologies that prop up both the status quo and a variety of forms of
privilege. In the epistemological domain, white, male, class elitist, heterosexist, imperial, and colonial
privilege often operates by asserting the power to claim objectivity and neutrality. Indeed, the owners
of such privilege often own the "franchise" on reason and rationality. Proponents of an evolving
criticality possess a variety of tools to expose such oppressive power politics. Such proponents assert
that critical theory is well-served by drawing upon numerous liberatory discourses and including diverse
groups of marginalized peoples and their allies in the nonhierarchical aggregation of critical analysts
{Bello, 2003; Clark, 2002; Humphries, 1997). In the present era, emerging forms of neocolonialism and
neo-imperialism in the United States move critical theorists to examine the wavs American power
operates under the cover of establishing democracies all over the world. Advocates of an evolving
criticality argueas we do in more detail later in this chapterthat such neocolonial power must be
exposed so it can be opposed in the United States and around the world. The American Empires
justification in the name of freedom for undermining democratically elected governments from Iran
(Kincheloe, 2004), Chile, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to Liberia (when its real purpose is to acquire
geopolitical advantage for future military assaults, economic leverage in international markets, and
access to natural resources) must be exposed by critical-ists for what it isa rank imperialist sham
(McLaren, 2003a, 2003b; McLaren & Jaramillo, 2002; McLaren & Martin, 2003). Critical researchers
need to view their work in the context of living and working in a nation-state with the most powerful
military-industrial complex in history that is shamefully using the terrorist attacks of September 11 to
advance a ruthless imperialist agenda fueled by capitalist accumulation by means of the rule of force
(McLaren & Farahmandpur,2003). Chomsky (2003), for instance, has accused the U.S. government of the
"supreme crime" of preventive war (in the case of its invasion of Iraq, the use of military force to destroy
an invented or imagined threat) of the type that was condemned at Kuremburg. Others, like historian
Arthur Schlesinger (cited in Chomsky, 2003), have likened the invasion of Iraq to Japan's "day of infamy''
that is, to the policy that imperial Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor. David G. Smith (2003)
argues that such imperial dynamics are supported by particular epistemological forms. The United
States is an epistemological empire based on a notion of truth that undermines the knowledges
produced by those outside the good graces and benevolent authority of the empire. Thus, in the 21 st
century, critical theorists must develop sophisticated ways to address not only the brute material
relations of class rule linked to the mode and relations of capitalist production and imperialist
conquest (whether through direct military intervention or indirectly through the creation of client
states) but also the epistemological violence that helps discipline the world Smith refers to this
violence as a form of "information warfare" that spreads deliberate falsehoods about countries such
as Iraq and Iran. U.S. corporate and governmental agents become more sophisticated in the use of
such episto-weaponry with every day that passes. Obviously, an evolving criticality does not
promiscuously choose theoretical discourses to add to the bricolage of critical theories. It is highly
suspiciousas we detail laterof theories that fail to understand the malevolent workings of power,
that fail to critique the blinders of Eurocentrism, that cultivate an elitism of insiders and outsiders,
and that fail to discern a global system of inequity supported by diverse forms of ideology and
violence. It is uninterested in any theoryno matter how fashionablethat does not directly address
the needs of victims of oppression and the suffering they must endure. The following is an elastic,
ever-evolving set of concepts included in our evolving notion of criticality. With theoretical innovations
and shifting Zeitgeists, they evolve. The points that are deemed most important in one time period pale
in relation to different points in a new era.


2NC O/V


The K turns the caseimperialist domination is the root cause of all war and violence
Eckhardt 90 (William, Lentz Peace Research Laboratory of St. Louis, JOURNAL OF PEACE RESEARCH, February 1990, p.
15-16)
Modern Western Civilization used war as well as peace to gain the whole world as a domain to benefit itself at the
expense of others: The expansion of the culture and institutions of modern civilization from its centers in Europe was
made possible by imperialistic war It is true missionaries and traders had their share in the work of expanding world civilization, but always with the support, immediate or in the background,
of armies and navies (pp. 251-252). The importance of dominance as a primary motive in civilized war in general was also emphasized for modern war in particular: '[Dominance] is probably the
most important single element in the causation of major modern wars' (p. 85). European empires were thrown up all
over the world in this processof benefiting some at the expense of others, which was characterized by armed violence contributing to structural violence: 'World-empire is built
by conquest and maintained by force Empires are primarily organizations of violence' (pp. 965, 969). 'The struggle
for empire has greatly increased the disparity between states with respect to the political control of resources, since there can
never be enough imperial territory to provide for all' (p. 1190). This 'disparity between states', not to mention the disparity within states, both of which take
the form of racial differences in life expectancies, has killed 15-20 times as many people in the 20th century as have
wars and revolutions (Eckhardt & Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c). When this structural violence of 'disparity between states' created by civilization is taken into account, then the violent
nature of civilization becomes much more apparent. Wright concluded that 'Probably at least 10 per cent of deaths in modern civilization can be attributed directly or indirectly to
war The trend of war has been toward greater cost, both absolutely and relative to population The proportion of the population dying as a direct consequence of battle has tended to increase' (pp. 246, 247). So far
as structural violence has constituted about one-third of all deaths in the 20th century (Eckhardt & Kohler, 1980; Eckhardt, 1983c), and so far as
structural violence was a function of armed violence, past and present, then Wright's estimate was very conservative indeed. Assuming that war is some function of civilization, then civilization is responsible
for one-third of 20th century deaths. This is surely self-destruction carried to a high level of efficiency. The structural situation has
been improving throughout the 20th century, however, so that structural violence caused 'only' 20% of all deaths in 1980 (Eckhardt, 1983c). There is obviously room for more improvement. To be sure, armed violence in the form
of revolution has been directed toward the reduction of structural violence, even as armed violence in the form of imperialism has been directed toward its maintenance. But imperial violence came first,
in the sense of creating structural violence, before revolutionary violence emerged to reduce it. It is in this sense that structural violence was
basically, fundamentally, and primarily a function of armed violence in its imperial form. The atomic age has ushered
in the possibility, and some would say the probability, of killing not only some of us for the benefit of others, nor
even of killing all of us to no one's benefit, but of putting an end to life itself! This is surely carrying self-destruction
to some infinite power beyond all human comprehension. It's too much, or superfluous, as the Existentialists might say. Why we should care is a mystery. But, if we do, then the need for civilized peoples to
respond to the ethical challenge is very urgent indeed. Life itself may depend upon our choice.

The K outweighsimperialism destroys value to life by breaking down society
psychologically and colonizing the mind
Thiongo 86 (Ngugi wa Thiongo Distinguished Professor of University of California, Irvine. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature. 1986.)
The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon
wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of
a cultural bomb is to annihilate a peoples belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their
heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one
wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them
want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples languages
rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which
would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities
of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a
collective death-wish. Amidst this wasteland which it has created, imperialism presents itself as the cure and demands
that the dependant sing hymns of praise with the constant refrain: Theft is holy. Indeed, this refrain sums up the new
creed of the neo-colonial bourgeoisie in many independent African states.






















Links


Economic Engagement

Economic engagement is imperialism
Moon 7 Student of business at Michigan
William J. Moon: The Pillars of American Imperialism:Rationalizing U.S. Cold War Involvement in the
Republic of Korea. Lethbridge Undergraduate Research Journal. 2007. Volume 2 Number 1.

In a bi-polar world, the economic well-being of a nation is intricately linked with security of that nation.
This notion is well explained by Joanne Gowa's security externalities thesis, which argues that economic
engagement between two states can affect not only real income but also the security of the state
concerned. Essentially, economic engagement between two states increases potential military power
for the nations involved in it, and in doing so, it can disrupt the preexisting balance of power among
the contracting states (Gowa 1246). In the bi-polar world created by the Soviet-American conflict, initial
choice of an alliance partner was thus explicitly linked with the economic and security well-being of the
United States. Stabilizing South Korea's political economy, for instance, was an important objective
that would provide the United States with the strategic flexibility to disengage from the peninsula
(Lee, Stevens 31). Thus, giving monetary and military aid to Korea was economically rational, since the
more economic growth Korea experienced, the more potential military power it could contribute to
the American side.


Economic engagement is a form of imperialismcontradictions of capitalism are the
driving factor
Nbete 12- PHD. In philosophy
Alubabari Ogoni as an Internal Colony: A Critique of Imperialism
[http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_2_No_10_Special_Issue_May_2012/6.pdf]

Imperialism is a broad term; it manifests in different forms ranging from literature and culture to
politics and economy, but economic drives usually constitute its most crucial initial impetus. This
partly explains why much of the existing literature on the concept tends to either omit or downplay
other manifestations of it, such as cultural imperialism. Our present work, in suchlike manner,
acknowledges its variety of forms but dwells more on its economic and institutional aspects. It is in
this context that we find much of the causal connection between it and the phenomenon of internal
colonialism or domestic colonialism (or, as Ken Saro-Wiwa also calls it when it occurs within black
countries, black colonialism). Claude Ake defines imperialism as The economic control and
exploitation of foreign lands arising from the necessity for counteracting the impediments to the
accumulation of capital engendered by the internal contradictions of the domestic capitalist
economy.5 There are, according to Ake, about five contradictions of capitalism which tend to lead to
imperialism. One of them arises as the drive for maximization of surplus value leads, necessarily, to
the expansion of production. This occurs because capitalist production goes on in a context in which
capitalists compete among themselves for the market. At the same time, increase in production or
output tends to create excess of supply over demand, which leads to disequilibrium.

USs individualistically economic exploitation of other countries is a form of dangerous
e economic imperialism
Fine, 00 (Ben, Department of Economics, the University of London, Economics Imperialism and
Intellectual Progress: The Present as History of Economic Thought?, History of Economics Review, p. 25)
BF
The alternative is for the re-emergence and strengthening of a genuine political economy, inspired by
the clashes between social theory and economics imperialism. By this, I mean an approach to
economics that is systemic (understands the social as distinct from aggregation over individuals), is
socially and historically specific (as opposed to universal and timeless, thus dealing with the nature of
capital and of capitalism), and addresses issues of class, conflict, power, tendencies, structures, and so
on. In part, this depends upon reclaiming the knowledge lost by social theory in its postmodernist turn
and that lost by the discipline of economics through lack of interest in, and tolerance of, its own
history and traditions. It also depends upon theoretical advance by taking account of the economic
realities of contemporary capitalism, woefully overlooked in the rush to test ever more esoteric
theories against empirical evidence. Whilst economics imperialism has delivered a terrible beating to
political economy, the latter has the opportunity to prosper once more as its host discipline collapses
under the weight of its own ambition and rotten core. The parallel with the rise and fall of the Roman
Empire should not be taken too seriously. But political economy will only prosper if it seizes the initiative
as opportunities open up to raise the economic content of the social sciences. Otherwise, scholarly
barbarism is ready to divide up the analytical spoils, already apparent in case of globalization and social
capital, ultimately relying upon methodological individualism albeit with a protective belt of
eclecticism and empiricism.

Economic engagement including the need for expanding markets is imperialism.
Galtung in '71
[Johan, Chair in peace and conflict studies, at the University of Oslo, A Structural Theory of Imperialism, Volume 8, Number 2]

Thus, imperialism is a species in a genus of dominance and power relationships. It is a subtype
of something, and has itself subtypes to be explored later. Dominance relations between nations and other collectivities will not disappear with
the disappearance of imperialism; nor will the end to one type of imperialism (e.g. political, or economic) guarantee the end to another type of
imperialism (e.g. economic or cultural). Our view is not reductionist in the traditional sense pursued in marxist-leninist theory, which conceive
sod imperialism as an economic relationship under private capitalism, motivated by the
need for expanding markets, and which bases the theory of dominance of a theory of
imperialism. According to this view, imperialism and dominance fall like dominoes when the capitalistic conditions for economic
imperialism no longer obtain. According to the view we develop here, imperialism is a more general structural
relationship between two collectives, and has to be understood at a general level in order to be understood and
counteracted in its more specific manifestations -- just like smallpox is better understood in a context of theory of epidemic diseases, and these
diseases better understood in a context of general pathology.

Empirically, despite the U.S having a reputation as a democracy it still has the potential to
impose imperialism.
Schwarz and Ray in 04
[Henry and Sangeeta, Director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University and Director, Graduate Studies, A Companion to
Postcolinial Studies, Page 206]

Early New England settlers successfully tailed the incorporation of vast expanses of the
natives' geography with this belief. But following the settlers' separation from the "mother country," the religious aspects
of the doctrine of exceptionalism underwent transformation into a state credo. But historical events never in fact
coincided with the credo's idealized image of the US as a democracy founded in defiance of
imperial norms. In accomplishing a position of dominance in the hierarchy of nations,
the US practiced the imperialism that it disavowed in principle.

Foreign aid is a mask for coercive neo-imperialism
DiLorenzo, professor of economics at Loyola College, 1/6/2005 (Thomas, A Foreign Aid Disaster in
the Making, http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1715) Politicians are bound to politicize this
disaster, as they do with all other world events, in a way that helps them accumulate more power and confiscate more
wealth from their citizens. Specifically, now that they are becoming rather fond of portraying themselves as
internationalized Mother Teresas, coming to the aid of anyone, anywhere, as long as it is all paid for by
their hard-working, hapless taxpayers, they will be inclined to become champions of ever-expanding
foreign aid spending. To do this they will have to ignore the truth about foreign aid: For over half a century, it has
been either ineffective or counterproductive in stimulating prosperity. The late Peter Bauer (Lord Bauer) devoted his entire career to
studying the law of unintended consequences as it applied to foreign aid, and many of his conclusions are summarized in his 1991 book, The
Development Frontier. First of all, notes Bauer, foreign aid is not "aid" but a transfer or subsidy. And it is typically not a
transfer to the poor and needy but to governments. Thus, the predominant effect of "foreign aid" has
always been to enlarge the size and scope of the state, which always ends up impairing prosperity
and diminishing the liberty of the people. Worse yet, it leads to the centralization of governmental
power, since the transfers are always to the recipient countrys central government.


Latin America

US economic intervention into Latin America only strengthens the imperialist grasp of
the global ruling class
Petras 11 (James, Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, Social movements in Latin
America: neoliberalism and popular resistance, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 18-19)

The Contras war closed one chapter in US imperialism in Latin America, while the installation of client
collaborator regimes opened another-a chapter characterized not by armed force, the projection of
military power, but rather by what we might term "economic imperialism"-engineering of free marker
"structural reforms" in national policy, the penetration of foreign capital in the form of the
multinationals, and a free trade regime. The agents of this imperialism included the IMF, the World
Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as the host of neoconservative foreign policy
advisors, neoliberal economists, and policy makers who serve the "global ruling class" as described by
Pilger (2003). The new imperial order was made possible not only by a political turn toward
neoconservatism but by a new reserve of ideological power: the idea of globalization, presented as
the only road to "general prosperity," the necessary condition for reactivating a growth and capital
accumulation process. The idea of globalization, used to justify the neoliberal "structural adjustment
program" (SAP), complemented the call for a new world order. The World Bank's 1995 World
Development Report, Workers in an Integrating World, can be seen as one of its most important
programmatic statements-a capitalist manifesto on the need to adjust to the requirements of a new
world order in which the forces of freedom (big business) would be liberated from the regulatory
constraints of the welfare-development state and hold sway over the global economy. Regarding the
need for political adjustments to the "new world order," the United States with its client electoral
regimes firmly ensconced in power in most of Latin America declared its mission to spread democracy
and free markets to make the world safe for freedom, and to support movement in diverse regions
toward pro-US electoral regimes. The stabilization measures and "structural reforms" implemented in
the 1990s were unpopular to say the least, with the core opposition coming from pockets of organized
labor. A few governments put up some resistance but eventually succumbed, as in Jamaica and
Mexico, which were reluctant to sign up for the structural reform agenda. In most cases structural
adjustment programs were introduced by presidential decree or administrative fiat.

The U.S. has empirically treated Latin America as economically backward in hopes to
bring these countries under the umbrella of neoliberalism and colonialism
Petras 11 (James, Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, Social movements in Latin
America: neoliberalism and popular resistance, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 18-19)

The Second World War ended with the United States as a dominant world economic power,
commanding 40 percent of the world's industrial capacity and more than half of the financial
resources. However, conditions were not favorable for the unilateral exercise of its dominant military
power. For one thing, the Soviet Union had emerged from the war with a loss of over twenty million
citizens but with its industrial production apparatus rebuilt and the potential of constituting a major
economic power and as such a major threat to the imperial interests of the United States, forcing the
government to opt for the creation of a multilateral system of military alliances modeled on the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and regional economic treaties designed to facilitate US projections
of power in Europe and the Third World. But Latin America was a different matter. It was historically
within the US sphere of economic and political domination, and the state set about to ensure the
compliance of governments in the hemisphere to US hegemony. First there was the overthrow of
democratic socialist Cheddi lagan in Guyana (1953) and the successful intervention in Guatemala
(1954) to topple democratically elected President Arbenz. But then came Cuba (1959) with a
successful socialist revolution that abrogated the rules of empire, challenging US hegemony and
directly threatening US imperial interests in the country and elsewhere, forcing the US government to
open up another front in the war against social revolution and the lure of "communism." The first
front was established in 1948 in the form of International Cooperation for Development, a system of
bilateral and multilateral support for the economic advancement of the "economically backward"
countries emerging from the yoke of European colonialism pursuing national more than 100 billion
dollars in profit over a decade of neoliberal policies.


Imperialism in the past has helped the underdevelopment of Latin America
Petras 11 (James, Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, Social movements in
Latin America: neoliberalism and popular resistance, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 18-19) JFP

US imperialism has shaped the major conditions for capitalist development or underdevelopment in
Latin America, through direct military intervention and through proxies. Between and against these
imperial intrusions, popular movements based on labor, peasants, and unionized public employees
have succeeded in electing leftist and center-left governments, and in the case of Cuba, Nicaragua,
and Grenada carrying out social revolutions. The outcomes of these epic struggles had enormous
socioeconomic and political consequences in terms of the economic models that subsequently emerged.
The great alterations in income and class inequalities, concentrations to wealth and property, popular
participation and representation, individual freedoms and social rights have been profoundly affected by
the strength and ascendancy of these two determinant forces in Latin America's equation of power.
The rise of neoliberalism and the regressive socioeconomic patterns that dominated the region from
the 1970s to the 1990s were, in the first instance, the result of the violent political triumph of the
United States and its Latin allies over the working class in the great social confrontations of the 1970s.
The defeat of labor laid the groundwork for the implementation of the neoliberal agenda and set the
stage for the rise of rural based social movements as the motor force for social transformations.


Foreign aid is directly associated with the goals of imperialism in Latin America (ODI is the
Overseas Development Institute)

Hayter in '71
[Teresa, Activist on Migration and Anti-Racism Issues, Aid as Imperialism, Page 7 Preface]
Research at the ODI was based on the assumption that 'aid' was good and that the
major objective of 'aid' could reasonably be expected to be 'development' in, and for,
the Third World. Aid could be criticized for falling short of this objective, and proposals
could be made for improving its contribution to development. But the central
assumption was that the imperialist countries were 'helping' the Third World to
develop. The possibility that they were, on the contrary, stunting and distorting development
in the Third World through exploitation, and that the Third World could not develop
until imperialism was destroyed, was not considered. Nor could it be, since ODI, like aid, is merely
the smooth surface of imperialism.

We forced our free-market system on Latin America in the past, we dont need to
make the same mistake twice
Wiarda 05 (Howard, Professor of International Relations at the University of Georgia,
Dilemmas of democracy in Latin America : crises and opportunity, Rowman & Littlefield, p.
155) HJW

Every once in a while in foreign policy, as well as in other policy and scholarly issues, it becomes
necessary to go back to first principles, to reexamine assumptions that have long been taken for
granted. It is now time to do that with regard to the assumptions underlying the so-called Washington
consensus on U.S, policy toward Latin America, which holds that the United States should promote
democracy, open markets, and free trade in the region. We also need to discuss U.S. counternarcotic
policy in the area, the issue is complicated by the fact that few of us disagree with these policy goals
per se. To be opposed to democracy, open markets, free trade, and counternarcotic efforts would be
akin to being against God, motherhood, and apple pie-assuming we still believe in these latter items,
The issues are thus mainly of shadings, nuance, meanings, as well as the ever present traps posed by
the ingrained Wilsonian missionary, patronizing urge to bring the blessings of American civilization to
"less fortunate" peoples, The issue relates also to the deeper difficulty the United States has in
understanding and empathizing with other countries: the ethnocentrism issue.

When the US tries to exploit Latin American countries, success is limited and
imperialism and collapse are the result
Wiarda 05 (Howard, Professor of International Relations at the University of Georgia,
Dilemmas of democracy in Latin America: crises and opportunity, Rowman & Littlefield, p.
155) HJW

The Washington consensus was based on quite a number of very large assumptions about the
economies, societies, and political systems of Latin America and the Third World that in the end
proved not to be true-Or perhaps only partly true. Here we examine what those assumptions were
and why in the developing world they did not work out as expected. First, there was a belief that
freeing up these economies would give rise to a dynamic entrepreneurial class that could substitute
for the state's role in the economy, seize the initiative, and stimulate economic growth. But dynamic
entrepreneurial groups don't emerge out of thin air; they take a long time to develop and their
emergence is related to other changing elements in society-for example, growth of the rule of law,
honesty, and transparency in the administration of the public accounts, protected property rights, and
so forth. In most developing countries, there is no dynamic entrepreneurial class or it is very small. What
passes for entrepreneurs is usually the friends, relatives, and cronies of the regime in power; they
often have special access to government contracts and monopolies. They are parasites whose goal is to
rip off the system to line their own pockets, not to provide jobs and growth to the economy as a whole.
The worst case is Russia, where some 90 percent of the former public patrimony-under socialism owned
by the state-has been diverted in this way, with little or no benefit to the public at large. We may wish
that a dynamic private sector would emerge to replace the state in the developing nations, but the fact
is what passes for a private sector is usually in it mainly, even exclusively, for themselves and not to
benefit society as a whole. A second assumption was that, as these economies were freed up, a host of
financial institutions would emerge that would assist in the development process. But banks, lending
agencies, financial service agencies, capital markets, stock exchanges, and the like in developing
countries also tend to be weak and cannot be created quickly. Generations are required for these
institutions to grow, not a few years. In addition, the few banks and financial institutions that exist in
most developing countries tend not to be in business to give loans to small businessmen and dynamic
start-up companies; rather, they are holding companies, often tied closely with the regimes or elites in
power, that profit from insider connections and monopolistic government contracts. They are
concerned not with changing the system but with protecting their stake in It. Third, the Washington
consensus posited that the freeing up of the economies in the developing world would produce
growth, Jobs, and benefits that would trickle down to the lower and middle classes. But this
assumption ignored the class structure and class attitudes in Latin America and most developing
countries. These tend to be very rigid, elitist, hierarchical, and inegalitarian. In fact, what has
happened in too many cases under the new neoliberal economic order is that the elites, who already
had the money and the political connections described above, have become enormously richer the
small middle classes in the developing nations have been squeezed by salary freezes or job losses in
the face of inflation; and the throbbing lower classes have received few benefits at all and have often
become worse off.
Cuban embargo shields from globalization, prevents exploitation
Huish 08 [ Robert, Assistant Professor, International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Cuba vs. Globalization: Chronicle of
Anti-imperialism, solidarity and Co-operation, Centre for Research Ethics, University of Montreal, Online, 7/6/13
http://globalautonomy.ca/global1/dialogueItem.jsp?index=SN08_Huish.xml ]

While Cuba was forced out of globalization, many countries in the South that were "invited in" have
fared poorly, and the poor of those countries have fared miserably. Case by case, country by country, the story
of globalization from the point of view of the destitute has seen intentional de-investment in public
services in order to repay foreign debts. Restructuring economies and restructuring lives so the
South exports soybeans, flowers, and peanuts but imports milk, medicine, tourists, and TV shows at
extortionist prices. Although the United States is the world's most indebted country no one seems rushed to demand payments from
Washington. Yet, at the turn of the millennium the Global South was repaying its foreign debt at the rate of US $250,000 per minute (Galeano
2000). In India the economy sees children stitch soccer balls rather than go to school. In Ecuador, Honduras, and Nicaragua
the export-oriented economy sees many of tomorrow's scholars go as far as grade six before setting
out on a long-life of banana picking, because from the point of view of financial directors bananas
are more important than public schools. In places like Haiti medical clinics are few and trained
doctors fewer, loan repayments limit the imagination of financial directors to seldom invest in clinics
and rarely train doctors. Within this economic climate, the 800 million souls suffering from chronic hunger are doomed to the fate
of the empty plate until the free market decides to lower food prices.

Immigration
Promoting expansion of visa policies perpetuates imperialism
Campbell 92
[David: An Australian Political scientist he has written four books and has been a professor at several
universities. Book: Writing Security publisher: University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis page number:
42]
To officially join the society of the United States, these are among the questions that you will have to answer. For a citizen of a
country other than the United States wishing to change status from that of 'nonresident alien' to
'permanent resident alien,' document number 1-130 of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
specifies the undesirable qualities that mark those who will not be permitted to enter the indivisible
union which seeks domestic tranquility.l The passage from difference to identity as marked by the rite of citizenship is
concerned with the elimination of that which is alien, foreign, and perceived as a threat to a secure
state. Accordingly, this passage shares a similar purpose to those undertakings we associate with conventional understandings of foreign
policy. Moreover, the figurations of identity/ difference which characterize this process remind us of the texts of foreign policy considered in
the previous chapter. But is there a connection between the daily activities of a domestic government agency which scrutinizes immigration
applications for their evidence of naturalization, and those practices we traditionally associate with foreign policy? Is the foreignness
of 'aliens' something that is qualitatively distinct from the character of the existing citizenry in whose
name presidents, secretaries of states, and diplomats are represented to the world? Does the foreign-ness of the
characteristics indicated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service's questions afflict only those
from the external realm? Does the inside of a state exist in marked contrast to the outside? What is at stake in the
attempt to screen the strange, the unfamiliar, and the threatening associated with the outside from
familiar and safe, which are linked to the inside?

Democracy
Democracy perpetuates imperialismcreates cycles of endless violence and
oppression
Itwaru 09 ( Arnold, psychotherapist, educator, and editorial consultant on the project
named Researching Caribbean Teaching and Learning at the University of the West
Indies, Jamaica Master Race, Murder and Gory Globalization in The White Supremacist State:
Eurocentrism, Imperialism, Colonialism, Racism Arnold H. Itwaru, ed. 2009 p. 25-79 deven)
Democracy" is the globalizational credo of the new Western imperialism. It resounds with the
incessant chant of freedom. It talks of liberating the world. This is its totalitarian thrust. It is about
global control. This means reducing the entire world into a Western capitalist monopoly and the
destruction of other and more humanizing forms of the organization of political and economic
livelihood. But this seems lost to those who are caught the clamor for democracy. We have a
situation where capitalist White supremacist Western liberal democracies are invading and
destroyirlg people and countries to increase their exploitative control while the chant for
democracy goes on in other places. This is an ideologized chant. It is where "democracy" is
erroneously seen as a panacea for the resolution of the forms and practices of oppressive rule
everywhere. The spread of "democracy" is the restructuring of target societies, the re-organization
of political and economic formation in the world to accommodate the interests of the White
supremacist West, united under capital. Democracy is used as the medium for the brutal
globalization of capitalism, and its insertion is enforced by the most undemocratic of measures -
authoritarian, command-obedience violent totalitarian military control. The use of the concept
"democracy" both romanticizes and violates its Greek originary, demos which idealizes the notion of
people's rule - which has never happened in the history of Greek imperial state culture. We should
note that in its political inception in Greece women were not included in the state craft of
"Democracy." Democracy was the purview of the male order of state power. It was the phallocentric
elitist politics of the state rule of people through select male representatives who constituted the
echelon of political power. Far from being people's rule, it was rather the ruling of people by giving
them the illusion that they had a significant say in the rule of the state over them. And its
contemporary Western deployment is. about the regulation of the lives of peoples to ensure their
exploitation. But there is a great deal of dissembling going on. Eurocentric master race culture has
attempted to sanitize itself of the odiousness of racism and the smear of racial mastery in its
development of the discourse of "democracy" which it thinks is the best way to organize the politics
of representationality in state power for the good of all peoples everywhere on earth. This is
presented as being sensible, practical, and "civilized," in fact as the only way to organize political
life. This is the reification of imperialism. It is where the ordinary Western citizen resolutely
believes this and sees it as commonsense and does not understand what all the fuss is about. We
have here the leveling absorption of the imperial patriot-subject who is now passionately committed
and ready to defend and spread Western political control in the enforcement of "democracy" every
where. And if you go along with it, you are likely to conclude that there is no racism here and that it
is simply the best culture on earth, doing the right thing. Armored to the point of having the capacity
to kill everyone in the world several times over, the West has wrapped itself in discourses of
democratizing imperializing "peace"- while it manufactures and exports arms and other weapons
of mass destruction, much of which it has used against many of the racialized peoples of the world.
It organizes, supports and wages war to construct the peace required to facilitate its repressive
order. It talks of freedom when it has been the historical destroyer of the freedoms of the millions it
has used, abused, deprived of their independence, tortured, worked to death, robbed and killed to
acquire wealth. It upholds liberty and fraternity - but only among its own kind - and even here this
civic ideal is differentially implemented. Liberty and fraternity are not meant for the inferiorized
Other. It is for the privileged in the order of White solidarity. And this order of things is disturbed
when its designated inferior tries to change the terms and parameters of the discourse of the West's
claim superiority.
The process of US democratization focuses on top down civil society groups and away
from grassroots organizations, furthering imperialist control
Rachner et al. 2007 (Lise Chr. Michelson Inst., http://www.cmi.no/publications/publication/?2761=democratisations-
third-wave-and-the-challenges-of)

However, donor support during this period faced a number of criticisms. Firstly, critics argued that donors tended to reduce the concept of civil
society to a depoliticised technical tool (Jenkins, 2001; Robinson and Friedman, 2005). Secondly, during this first phase of support donors
relied on a rather limited definition of civil society, equating it with Western-style advocacy
groups or NGOs and leading them to concentrate their assistance on a narrow set of organisations.
In particular, organisations that form an important part of civil society in most advanced democracies, such
as sports clubs, cultural associations and religious associations, have been absent from most programmes
(Carothers and Ottaway, 2000). Thirdly, in many instances, the views of NGOs that have emerged as a response to democracy
promotion programmes reflect donors views of democracy, both in their immediate goals and in the means they use to pursue them.
Fourthly, many of the NGOs favoured by democracy assistance programmes have a small membership and
therefore lack a mandate from a wider constituency, putting both their sustainability and
representativeness in doubt. Finally, there is evidence that donor assistance can actually militate against grassroots participation
because the NGOs it helps to bring about are perceived as depoliticised, too closely aligned with donor service delivery agendas, too dependent
on external funding, and out of touch with the grassroots (Howell and Pearce, 2001). Taken together, these factors meant that donors often
focused on particular types of social organisation (urban-based and poorly rooted in society, top-down
rather than grassroots, trustee rather than representative organisations and heavily reliant
on external funding for their continued existence) and, as a result, bypassed other significant
agents of social and political change.
Democratization creates a violent, disingenuous imperial relation to the countries it
claims to help
Slater, Dept of Geography Loughborough University, 2006(David, Imperial powers and democratic imaginations, Third World
Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 8)

But how do these varied points relate to the question of imperial democracy? In the context of global politics the attempt to export
and promote one vision of democracy as a unifying project across frontiers clashes with the logic of
differences, but in a way that is deeply rooted in nationalist discourses. In the formulations developed by Laclau, Lefort
and Mouffe there is an assumption that one is dealing with a territorially intact polity, that the conceptual terrain can be developed in accordance
with a guiding assumption of territorial sovereignty. However, in the context of imperial powers one needs to remember that the autonomy of
other democratic experiments has been terminated by interventions organised by Washington (eg Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua
during the 1980ssee Slater, 2002). In this sense the internal tension between the logic of unity and the logic of
difference has been overshadowed by an imperial logic of incursion, followed by the imposition of a
different set of political rules. In the example of the USA it can be suggested that there is a logic of democracy for export and a logic of
terminating intervention for other democratic processes that have offered a different political pathway. Furthermore, interventions which have led
to the overthrow of dictatorial regimes, as in Iraq in 2003, ought not to lead us into forgetting the realities of Western support for military
dictatorships in the global South throughout the 20th century.12 Nor, as Callinicos (2003: 24) reminds us, should we turn a blind eye to the fact
that there are contemporary examples of support for non-democratic regimes, as shown in the case of the Bush administrations backing for the
Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, despite its numerous violations of human rights, and for Musharrafs regime in Pakistan, which receives US
support yet is scarcely to be considered a fully fledged democracy. The imperative to democratise, just as the injunction to
globalise, creates, as Dallmayr (2005) suggests, an asymmetry between those announcing the imperative and
those subjected to it, between those who democratise and those who are democratised. Such an
asymmetry has a long history. Jeffersonian notions of both an empire of liberty and an empire for liberty
represented an initial framing of the conflicting juxtaposition of emerging American imperial powerexpressed for
instance in the phrase that the USA has a hemisphere to itselfwith a benevolent belief in Americas mission to spread
democracy and liberty to the rest of the world. This juxtaposition, which is also closely tied to the founding importance of the self-
determination of peoples, is characterised by an inherent tension between strong anti-colonial sentiment and the
projection of power over peoples of the Third World. Discourses of democracy are deployed in ways
that are intended to transcend such dissonances and to justify the imperial relation, even though such a relation is
frequently denied (for a critical review, see Cox, 2005). What is also significant in this context is the idea that democracy US-style is being called
for, being invited by peoples yearning for freedom, so that more generally imperial power is being invited to spread its
wings (see Maier, 2005). Rather than democracy being imposed, it is suggested that the USA is responding to
calls from other societies to be democratised, so that through a kind of cellular multiplication a US model can
be gradually introduced; the owners will be the peoples of other cultures who will find ways of adapting the US
template to their own circumstances. As it is expressed in the National Security Strategy for 2006, it is the
policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and
culture (White House, 2006: 1). What is on offer here is a kind of viral democracy, whereby the politics of guidance
is merged into a politics of benign adaptation.13 Nevertheless, at the same time, a specific form of democratic rule
is being projected and alternative models that include a critique of US power and attempts to introduce
connections with popular sovereignty and new forms of socialism are singled out for opprobrium. This is reflected
in the commentary on Hugo Chavezin Venezuela, a demagogue awash in oil money is undermining democracy and
seeking to destabilize the region (White House, 2006: 15). This is despite the fact that the Venezuelan leader has won
more elections in the past seven years than any other Latin American leader.
Hegemony
U.S. military interventions in foreign countries are steeped in imperialist ulterior
motivesensures backlash and violence
Grossman 02
(Dr. Zoltan, faculty member in Geography and Native American & World Indigenous Peoples Studies at The
Evergreen State College, February 05, 2002 New US Military Bases: Side Effects Or Causes Of
War? http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/grossmanbases.html
Whether we look at the U.S. wars of the past decade in the Persian Gulf, Somalia, the Balkans, or Afghanistan, or at
the possible new wars in Yemen, the Philippines, or Colombia/Venezuela, or even at Bushs new "axis of
evil" of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, the same common themes arise. The U.S. military interventions cannot
all be tied to the insatiable U.S. thirst for oil (or rather for oil profits), even though many of the recent wars do
have their roots in oil politics. They can nearly all be tied to the U.S. desire to build or rebuild military bases.
The new U.S. military bases, and increasing control over oil supplies, can in turn be tied to the historical shift
taking place since the 1980s: the rise of European and East Asian blocs that have the potential to replace the
United States and Soviet Union as the worlds economic superpowers.
Much as the Roman Empire tried to use its military power to buttress its weakening economic and political hold
over its colonies, the United States is aggressively inserting itself into new regions of the world to prevent its
competitors from doing the same. The goal is not to end "terror" or encourage "democracy," and Bush will
not accomplish either of these claimed goals. The short-term goal is to station U.S. military forces in regions
where local nationalists had evicted them. The long-term goal is to increase U.S. corporate control over the oil
needed by Europe and East Asia, whether the oil is in around the Caspian or the Caribbean seas. The ultimate
goal is to establish new American spheres of influence, and eliminate any obstacles-- religious militants,
secular nationalists, enemy governments, or even allies--who stand in the way.
U.S. citizens may welcome the interventions to defend the "homeland" from attack, or even to build new
bases or oil pipelines to preserve U.S. economic power. But as the dangers of this strategy become more
apparent, Americans may begin to realize that they are being led down a risky path that will turn even more
of the world against them, and lead inevitably to future September 11s.

Promotion of US hegemony leads to domination
Flint 2- Student at Pennsylvania university
Colin [http://www.colorado.edu/IBS/PEC/gadconf/papers/flint.html]
In this word-systems analysis interpretation of the current economic processes, the one I adopt in this
paper, the role of hegemonic powers is vital in explaining what is diffused, and why, from where, and
when. In other words, it offers a geohistorical contextualization of contemporary globalization (Taylor,
1999). The world-systems understanding of hegemony has become more complete over time. It began
with an initial concentration upon economic prowess (Wallerstein, 1984), through a connection with the
establishment of geopolitical world-orders (Taylor, 1996; Taylor and Flint, 2000), to the important
inclusion of the role of social and cultural practices defined and disseminated by the hegemonic power
(Taylor, 1999). Hegemony is founded upon the clustering of dominant production processes and
technological innovation within the borders of one state (with intra-state uneven development) that
allow for dominance in commerce that, ultimately provides for global financial domination. Economic
hegemony allows for, and is facilitated by, political domination of the world that is reflected in the
establishment of periods of geopolitical stability, otherwise known as hegemonic geopolitical world
orders. But the power and dominance of the hegemonic power is not just a product of economic
strength or political might. The power base is based upon a subtler tactic the definition of a modern
way of life that is, on the whole, desired and emulated by social groups within the hegemonic power
and across the globe.











Pleas by the U.S. military to help other countries is a mask to expand American
spheres of influence which makes reductions of military presence a sham
Grossman 02
(Dr. Zoltan, faculty member in Geography and Native American & World Indigenous Peoples Studies at The
Evergreen State College, February 05, 2002 New US Military Bases: Side Effects Or Causes Of
War? http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/grossmanbases.html
Since the end of the Cold War a decade ago, the U.S. has gone to war in Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, and
Afghanistan. The interventions have been promoted as "humanitarian" deployments to stop aggression, to
topple dictatorships, or to halt terrorism. After each U.S. intervention, the attention of supporters and critics
alike has turned to speculate on which countries would be next. But largely ignored has been what the U.S.
interventions left behind.
As the Cold War ended, the U.S. was confronted with competition from two emerging economic blocs in Europe
and East Asia. Though it was considered the worlds last military superpower, the United States was facing a decline
of its economic strength relative to the European Union, and the East Asian economic bloc of Japan, China and the
Asian "Four Tigers." The U.S. faced the prospect of being economically left out in much of the Eurasian land
mass. The major U.S. interventions since 1990 should be viewed not only reactions to "ethnic cleansing" or
Islamist militancy, but to this new geopolitical picture. Since 1990, each large-scale U.S. intervention has left
behind a string of new U.S. military bases in a region where the U.S. had never before had a foothold. The
U.S. military is inserting itself into strategic areas of the world, and anchoring U.S. geopolitical influence in
these areas, at a very critical time in history. With the rise of the "euro bloc" and "yen bloc," U.S. economic
power is perhaps on the wane. But in military affairs, the U.S. is still the unquestioned superpower. It has
been projecting that military dominance into new strategic regions as a future counterweight to its economic
competitors, to create a military-backed "dollar bloc" as a wedge geographically situated between its major
competitors. As each intervention was being planned, planners focused on building new U.S. military
installations, or securing basing rights at foreign facilities, in order to support the coming war. But after the
war ended, the U.S. forces did not withdraw, but stayed behind, often creating suspicion and resentment
among local populations, much as the Soviet forces faced after liberating Eastern Europe in World War II. The
new U.S. military bases were not merely built to aid the interventions, but the interventions also conveniently
afforded an opportunity to station the bases. Indeed, the establishment of new bases may in the long run be
more critical to U.S. war planners than the wars themselves, as well as to enemies of the U.S. The massacre
of September 11 was not directly tied to the Gulf War; Osama bin Laden had backed the Saudi fundamentalist
dictatorship against the Iraqi secular dictatorship in the war. The attacks mainly had their roots in the U.S. decision
to leave behind bases in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The permanent stationing of new U.S. forces in and
around the Balkans and Afghanistan could easily generate a similar terrorist "blowback" years from now.
This is not to say that all U.S. wars of the past decade have been the result of some coordinated conspiracy to make
Americans the overlords of the belt between Bosnia and Pakistan.But it is to recast the interventions as opportunistic
responses to events, which have enabled Washington to gain a foothold in the "middle ground" between Europe to the west,
Russia to the north, and China to the east, and turn this region increasingly into an American "sphere of influence." The series of
interventions have also virtually secured U.S. corporate control over the oil supplies for both Europe and East Asia. It's not a
conspiracy; it's just business as usual.
Terrorism
The War on Terror is a guise for imperial euro-supremacismensures continual
violence
Itwaru 09 ( Arnold, psychotherapist, educator, and editorial consultant on the project named Researching
Caribbean Teaching and Learning at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica Master Race, Murder and
Gory Globalization in The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism, Imperialism, Colonialism,
Racism Arnold H. Itwaru, ed. 2009 p. 25-79 deven)
The murderous mode of reasoning is situated in and informs the glorification of mass murder
institutionalized in the West as "war." It has been instrumental in history of the White supremacist
European colonizational practice of murdering people whose land they were occupying and exploiting
wherever they imposed themselves in the world. The gruesome pyres of hundreds of millions of racialized
bodies upon which the empyres of Western supremacy proudly and imperiously stand, grimly attest to this. The
current "War on Terrorism" which has so far killed and maimed more than a million people in
Iraq and Afghanistan alone in this century of Western aggression, is the blatant demonstration of
the murderous means through which the White supremacist American-led West is expanding
its conquest project of global domination. This is the fundamental objective of globalization,
despite the nice ties in which it continues to be dressed and promoted. These self-professed
Christian states have joined forces in what amounts to their unstated but nevertheless holy war against an imputed
terrorism which so far has been aimed at Islamic peoples and cultures for the strategic implementation of additional Western control
and economic gain. New technologies and techniques of terror, torture and killing have been implemented in the
murderous mode of scientific reasoning and used to continue the same heinous historical killing of
racialized peoples. This has been a central feature in the history of Western imperial culture. It has
procured the blood money upon which much of its pompous wealth is based, and has informed much of the
social and political psyche in these racist orders. There is strong support for these atrocities from the
majority of patriotic Western citizens who ironically believe they are bright, informed, free
and peace-loving good people. These constitute the moral cultural force which legitimates the
force of their armies of death in the military industrial complex of ever expanding Western
capitalist exploitation. Proud of their toughness which they uphold as a cruel virtue, they are
unmoved by the slaughter of defenseless men, women, children, the elderly and the ill in the
current invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, or anywhere else for that matter in the racialized
world outside of the White supremacist West. In the murderous mode of reasoning these racialized Others
are not considered human. They are reduced into the dangerous threatening Enemy-Other who must be
killed. The murder of the caricatured terrorist is believed to ensure the safety of all Western citizens. Hence
it has become a matter of patriotic duty for such citizens to believe they are defending their country when
they support the preemptive attacks of the invading American led White West who have been directing
their assaults against the peoples and cultures thousands of miles and continents away from the
domesticities of the imperial Western fortress homeland. The culture informed by this mode of reasoning is
where the murderous patriot-subject is produced and highly exalted. In the supra-militarized, settler-
occupier, armed, aggressive and dangerous, United States of America and its fawning settler-occupier northern
neighbor and reliable ally, the Dominion of Canada, waning troops are tearfully loved and admired by sections of
the patriotic populace as they are deployed to attack the racialized evil Enemy-Other. This emotional display is
in effect the militarization of affection and patriotism in the culture of murderous aggression. These troops are the
state trained military killers who are patriotically loved as "our troops" as they go out in "harm's way" - to do what
they are trained to do - to kill, to maim, to destroy people. These are not the "nice guys" and "nice gals" we are
repeatedly told they are. "Nice guys" and "nice gals" do not undergo military training to go out and kill people.
And we should seriously rethink the repeated claims being made that when these "nice guys" and "nice gals"
slaughter innocent and helpless people in distant regions across the world that they are ensuring safety "at home,"
given that there is no verifiably credible danger "at home" in the first place. The murderous mode of reasoning
celebrates military killers and deifies them as heroes. This mode of reasoning has historically framed the
imposition of the racial mastery of euro-supremacism in its colonial conquests which for hundreds of years
have debased, enslaved, exploited and murdered, willfully and knowingly killed large numbers of people, to
assert its domineering control.

Economic Growth
Globalization is a form of imperialism
Vilas 2002 (Vilas, Professor of Sociology and Political science, UNAM, Globalization as Imperialism,
University of Toronto, 70-71)

Considered from a historical perspective, globalization is the present stage of economic imperialism. In accordance
with the definition formulated by Hilferding and Lenin at the beginning of the twentieth century, imperialism is a set of basic characteristics:
the development of monopoly capital, the emergence of finance capital through the fusion of
industrial capital and the banks, the export of investments from the center to the periphery, and
interimperialist competition for the control of foreign markets. In the present circumstances, these features are
exacerbated. Recent technological innovations with regard to the flow of information and immense
international liquidity have favored the increased growth of finance capital and huge transnational
monopoly corporations. The magnitude and rate of international investment flows have also multiplied, and the implosion of the
Soviet bloc has opened new spaces for investment in underdeveloped areas. Capitalist control of the world is greater today than it has ever
been, leading to the intensification of the stratification of international power in which the United
States appears to have unquestionable hegemony.

Economic principles and diplomacy build upon the image of American soft power. This
is used to expand US imperial goals
Kennedy and Lucas in 5 (Liam, Prof at Univ of Birmingham, Scott, Prof at Univ of Birmingham, American
Quarterly, Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign Policy, 57(2)) MAT

Fulbright educational and cultural exchanges, and pointed toward the development of new activities.
(We use the term state-private network to refer to the extensive, unprecedented collaboration
between official U.S. agencies and private groups and individuals in the development and
implementation of political, economic, and cultural programs in support of U.S. foreign policy from
the early cold war period to today.)13 Legislative backing was obtained in 1948 with the U.S.
Information and Educational Exchange Act, popularly known as the Smith-Mundt Act, for the
preparation, and dissemination abroad, of information about the U.S., its people, and its policies,
through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, and other information media, and through
information centers and instructors abroad . . . to provide a better understanding of the U.S. in other
countries and to increase mutual understanding.14 With these mandates, public diplomacy could carry
forth the rhetorical command of the Truman Doctrine to support free peoples who are resisting
attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. In an expansion supporting, but
also constructed as distinct from, the extension of U.S. political and economic influence, U.S. projects
by early 1951 covered ninety-three countries, broadcasting in forty-five languages and disseminating
millions of booklets, leaflets, magazines, and posters. Touring exhibitions, already established by the
late 1940s, received more coherent if often contested support and were common throughout the
1950s.15 In 1953 the organization of public diplomacy moved beyond the State Department with the
formation of the autonomous United States Information Agency (USIA) to tell Americas story to the
world.16 The modern history of U.S. public diplomacy is often focused on the USIA, telling the story
of its contributions to the winning of the cold war and of its decline as the agency was downsized in
the 1990s. This story tends to separate public diplomacy from the system of political warfare that
emerged in the late 1940s, limiting understanding of the intersections between overt and covert
practices. The overt measures of sponsored media production and cultural exhibitions, though central
to the formation of cold war public diplomacy, need, however, to be understood as part of a broader
restructuring of the national security state and of a strategic framework designed to promote an
America that would win a total campaign for hearts and minds. The authority granted to the State
Department by NSC 4, forged in the immediacy of a crisis in which the NSC feared communists might
legitimately take power in France and Italy through elections, was complementary and potentially
secondary to another mandate, NSC 4-A, which directed the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) to initiate and conduct, within the limit of available funds, covert psychological operations
designed to counteract Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities.17 With the threat of French and Italian
communism always at the forefront in the wider American objective of securing Western Europe
through the Marshall Plan, NSC 4-A, like its more mundane counterpart, was the cornerstone of a
regional and indeed global strategy. A special clause in the Marshall Plan, when it was passed in April
1948, set aside 5 percent of counterpart funds for undefined operations under NSC 4-A. This
translated into hundreds of millions of dollars for propaganda and covert action.18 Thus public
diplomacy, beyond providing the informational overlay for containment, was already part of a
broader operational conception for a more ambitious objective. In May 1948, George Kennan, the
head of the State Departments Policy Planning Staff, drafted a proposal for The Inauguration of
Organized Political Warfare against the Soviet Union. The national security state would support
liberation committees and underground activities behind the Iron Curtain as well as indigenous
anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the Free World.19 Victory over the Soviets,
achieved with the liberation of captive peoples, which went beyond containment, would come
not only through the reality of American economic and diplomatic superiority but also through the
projection of that superiority as inherent to the American system and way of life. The sanction of NSC
4-A and the testing grounds of France and Italy were only the first stages of this campaign. The NSC
endorsed Kennans plan in November 1948, and within months the Policy Planning Staff, CIA, and Office
of Policy Coordination (OPC), a new agency created to carry out covert operations, converted the
proposal for a public American organization which will sponsor selected political refugee committees
into the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE). The NCFEs guidelines came from the State
Department and 75 percent of its funding from the CIA; its chief executive officers were psychological
warfare veterans from the army and the CIAs forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Its best-
known operation, Radio Free Europe, was on air in 1951, but even before that, the NCFE was already
promoting the idea of liberation from communism through pamphlets, magazines, books, and a Free
European University in Strasbourg, France.
20



State
State action requires a build up of empire through the militarization of daily life. This
ratchets up racist, sexist, and directly violent policies on the population.
MOHANTY in 6 (CHANDRA TALPADE, Department of Womens Studies, Syracuse
University, Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 720, February 2006, US Empire and the Project
of Womens Studies: Stories of citizenship, complicity and dissent,
http://www.uccs.edu/~pkeilbac/courses/intlpol/readings/US%20Empire.pdf)
In an earlier essay charting the colonial legacies and imperial practices of the late twentieth century US
State, Jacqui Alexander and I (1997) argued that the US State facilitates the transnational movement of
capital within its own borders as well as internationally. We referred to the US State as an advanced
capitalist state with an explicit imperial project, engaged in practices of re-colonization, prompting
the reconfiguration of economic, political, and militarized relationships globally. We argued that
postcolonial and advanced capitalist states had specific features in common. They own the means of
organized violence, which is often deployed in the service of national security. Thus, for instance, the
USA Patriot Act is mirrored by similar post-9/11 laws in Japan and India. Second, the militarization of
postcolonial and advanced capitalist states essentially means the re-masculinization of the state
apparatus, and of daily life. Third, nation-states invent and solidify practices of racialization and
sexualization of their peoples, disciplining and mobilizing the bodies of women, especially poor and
third world women, as a way of consolidating patriarchal and colonizing processes. Thus the
transformation of private to public patriarchies in multinational factories, and the rise of the
international maid trade, the sex tourism industry, global militarized prostitution, and so on. Finally,
nation-states deploy heterosexual citizenship through legal and other means. Witness the US dont
ask, dont tell/gays in the military debate in the Clinton years, and decade-long national struggles over
the Defense of Marriage Act of 1993, as well as similar debates about sexuality and criminalization in the
Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago.3 The deployment of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the
internal and external disciplining of particular groups evident in the Bush/Cheney war state
necessitates looking at these analytic and experiential categories simultaneously, and, since 9/11, the
acceleration of the project of US empire necessitates developing a feminist antiimperialist frame. US
feminists have always engaged the US nation-state, but it was always the democratic nation-state that
merited such attentionnot the imperialist US State. Feminist engagement in the latter context
requires making the project of empire visible in the gendered and sexualized state practices of the US,
looking simultaneously at the restructuring of US foreign and domestic policy. It also requires an explicit
analysis of the complicities and potentially imperialist complicities of US feminism. And it requires
examining feminisms own alternative citizenship projects in relation to racialized stories of the nation,
of home and belonging, insiders and outsiders. Both US foreign policy and domestic policy at this time
are corporate and military driven. Both have led to the militarization of daily life around the world
and in the USspecifically for immigrants, refugees, and people of colorand militarization inevitably
means mobilizing practices of masculinization and heterosexualization.4 Both can be understood
through a critique of the racialized and gendered logic of a civilizational narrative mobilized to create
and recreate insiders and outsiders in the project of empire building. Thus, for instance, as Miriam
Cooke (2002) argues, saving brown women in Afghanistan justifies US imperial aggression (the rescue
mission of civilizing powers), just as the increased militarization of domestic law enforcement, the
border patrol, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) (now renamed the Bureau of
Citizenship and Immigration) can be justified in the name of a War on Drugs, a War on Poverty, and
now a War on Terrorism.


Soft Aid

The help the affirmative attempts to give only serves to foster a savior-victim
relationship. This is a new-age form of imperialism, and only serves neoliberalist,
corporate goals

Vardalos 09 (Marianne, Professor of sociology and cultural studies at Laurentian University, Raising Good global
citizens: Liberal Humanism as a Philanthropic Rationale for Imperialism in The White Supremacist State:
Eurocentrism, Imperialism, Colonialism, Racism Arnold H. Itwaru, ed. 2009 p. 243-260 deven)

It is within this context of spreading liberal humanism as the divine imperative of humankind, that the
act of giving becomes the perfect exercise of power over another. In Foucault's understanding, the
most emblematic feature of power is that it cannot be readily recognized; it is made
inconspicuous- innocuous - and power is truly elegant when those subject to it stubbornly deny its
existence because they are, in fact, deluded by the idea of freedom (Foucault, 1975 ). As such,
colonialism's aggressive strategy of 'taking' has prudently metamorphasized into liberal
humanism's strategy of giving. The Good global citizens do not "rule" as the children of
colonialism did. They "help." And such help is the result of the conscious motivation of one's
own advantage. The need may be to please parents, find meaning, appease guilt, build a resume, or
acquire cultural capital with self-serving benefits into the future. In liberal humanist societies, aid
activities orchestrated and staged by corporations and learning institutions as "causes for kids"
aren't about helping those in need ... they are about helping one's self. Helping the other is
about the conquest of neoliberalism over other ways of doing and other ways of knowing. This
perception is not held so much by the recipients as by the helpers. Recipients of help are not
equal collaborators, rather, their needs are diagnosed from outside the culture, by foreigners
whose social, economic, and political power permits them to judge other cultures by their
external standards of normality. Whoever desires help is agreeing to be made subject to the watchful gaze of the
helper and is made beholden to the helpers assessment and conditions and the kind of help the helpers are prepared to give.
The very act of identifying the need for amelioration in the living standards of another echoes
the universalizing projects of modernization, which predate the neo-liberalism of this age. The
conclusion of these projects is always that the needs of the less fortunate must not only be sated
by foreign goods, money, visits, and leadership, but must also be determined by the moral
values of the white middle classes of the western world. Survivors of earthquakes in India need to be less
vulnerable in times of natural disaster, instead they are 'helped' with shipments of rice in areas where there is no water to cook it.
The children of Afghanistan need Western invaders to leave their country, instead they are
'helped' with air drops of peanut butter and crackers less than kilometers from where the
bombs are dropped. The African girl requires the security that comes with her traditional community being left in tact,
instead she is helped' with birth-control pills. The impoverished and working poor in Ontario need higher incomes, job security
and healthcare instead they are 'helped' with toys and turkeys through the Christmas Cheer Board. The good citizen
thinks, "what possible fate would these less fortunate have had we not acted as their saviors?"
And why not? The good citizen is giving freedom, for It Is their compassion; their visit to the soup
kitchen; their UNICEF collection which offers the possibility for the less fortunate to break out from the
shackles of their culture of poverty and join the ordered, organized abundance of the global
culture. The act of helping, In Its quest for equality and justification, has adopted the
ideological tactics of neoliberalism. In the end, caring for another, turns Into the act of saving
oneself, because help is extended not for the sake of the other, but for the sake of the
achievements of one's own western civilization, raised to the level of a worldwide validity. The
ghost of universality returns. What makes domination through helping more insidious than
through taking is that it eliminates any thought of resistance from either side.


The benevolence of the United States is another form of imperialism.
Kaplan in 4 (Amy, President of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly, Violent
Belongings and the Question of Empire Today Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,
56(1), p. 4-5)pl
Another dominant narrative about empire today, told by liberal interventionists, is that of the
reluctant imperialist.10 In this version, the United States never sought an empire and may even be
constitutionally unsuited to rule one, but it had the burden thrust upon it by the fall of earlier empires
and the failures of modern states, which abuse the human rights of their own people and spawn
terrorism. The United States is the only power in the world with the capacity and the moral authority
to act as military policeman and economic manager to bring order to the world. Benevolence and self-
interest merge in this narrative; backed by unparalleled force, the United States can save the people of
the world from their own anarchy, their descent into an uncivilized state. As Robert Kaplan writesnot
reluctantly at allin Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World: The purpose of power
is not power itself; it is a fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly
world. Those characteristics include basic political stability, the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived;
respect for property; economic freedom; and representative government, culturally understood. At this
moment in time it is American power, and American power only, that can serve as an organizing
principle for the worldwide expansion of liberal civil society.11 This narrative does imagine limits to
empire, yet primarily in the selfish refusal of U.S. citizens to sacrifice and shoulder the burden for others,
as though sacrifices have not already been imposed on them by the state. The temporal dimension of
this narrative entails the aborted effort of other nations and peoples to enter modernity, and its view of
the future projects the end of empire only when the world is remade in our image.


Usage of soft power is the basis of imperialism.
Mabee in 4 (Bryan, Sr. lecturer at Oxford Brookes Institute, Third World Quarterly, Discourses of Empire:
The US 'Empire', Globalisation and International Relations, 25(8), p. 1365-1366)pl
In terms of the first, the present system of economic globalisation is often compared to the open
international economy of the late-nineteenth century: as Krugman puts it, 'it is a late twentieth-century
conceit that we invented the global economy yesterday'.43 This has been primarily discussed in terms of
the level of international trade, the mobility of capital and the overall high interdependence of the era
of the Gold Standard. As Hirst and Thompson summarise, 'the level of autonomy under the Gold
Standard up to the First World War was much less for the advanced economies than it is today. This is
not to minimise the level of that integration now ... but merely to register a certain scepticism over
whether we have entered a radically new phase in the internationalisation of economic activity' .4
However, narrowly focusing on the economic openness misses the connection between economic
power and globalisation. Ferguson has described the period as 'Anglobalisation', pointing specifically
to the connection between empire and an open international economy.45 While similar arguments
have been made within international relations regarding the development of hegemonic power, these
arguments tend to avoid the questions concerning the imperial nature of Britain's hegemony in
comparison to today.46 While it is certainly not the case that all historical empires were 'empires of
trade', the comparison between the present system and the nineteenth century is useful for the
parallels with the global economy and the ideology surrounding the pursuit of an open economy. The
guiding role of British informal rule in the nineteenthc entury was to 'open up' states to British
commerce47 A nd the role of this facet of globalisation is no different, according to both proponents
and critics. Along these lines as well, the force of American 'soft power', as Nye has described it, should
not be seen as detrimental to empire, but conducive of it.48 Soft power, in essence, also forms one
part of a drive to gain a legitimate basis for imperial rule.
Link Soft Power
Diplomatic measures of the US disguise neo-imperialism.
Kennedy and Lucas in 5 (Liam and Scott, Dir. of the Clinton Institute for American Studies and dir. Of
Center for US foreign policy, American Quarterly, Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S. Foreign
Policy, 57(2), p. 310-311)pl
Public diplomacywhich consists of systematic efforts to communicate not with foreign governments
but with the people themselveshas a central role to play in the task of making the world safer for the
just interests of the United States, its citizens, and its allies.5 In the last few years, U.S. public
diplomacy has undergone intensive reorganization and retooling as it takes on a more prominent
propaganda role in the efforts to win the hearts and minds of foreign publics. This is not a new role,
for the emergent ideas and activities of public diplomacy as the soft power wing of American foreign
policy have notable historical prefigurations in U.S. international relations. In this essay we situate the
history of the cold war paradigm of U.S. public diplomacy within the broader framework of political
warfare that combines overt and covert forms of information management.6 However, there are
distinctive features to the new public diplomacy within both domestic and international contexts of
the contemporary American imperium. It operates in a conflicted space of power and value that is a
crucial theater of strategic operations for the renewal of American hegemony within a transformed
global order. We consider the relation of this new diplomacy to the broader pursuit of political warfare
by the state in its efforts to transform material preponderance (in terms of financial, military, and
information capital) into effective political outcomes across the globe. In a post-9/11 context, we argue,
public diplomacy functions not simply as a tool of national security, but also as a component of U.S.
efforts to manage the emerging formation of a neoliberal empire. The term public diplomacy was
coined by academics at Tufts University in the mid-1960s to describe the whole range of
communications, information, and propaganda under control of the U.S. government.7 As the term
came into vogue, it effectively glossed (through the implication of both public and diplomatic intent)
the political valence of both its invention and object of study through emphasis on its role as an applied
transnational science of human behaviour.8 The origin of the term is a valuable reminder that
academic knowledge production has itself been caught up in the historical foundations and
contemporary conduct of U.S. public diplomacy, with the American university a long-established
laboratory for the study of public opinion and of cross-cultural knowledge in service of the state.9
American studies, of course, has had a particularly dramatic entanglement with public diplomacy and
the cold war contest for hearts and minds, and legacies of that entanglement still haunt the field
imaginary today.10 We do not intend to directly revisit that history here, but we do contend that the
current regeneration of public diplomacy by the U.S. government is an important topic for critical
study by American studies scholars, in particular as they negotiate the internationalization of their
field in the context of post- and transnational impulses, now conditioned by the new configurations of
U.S. imperialism. In this essay we posit a need to retheorize the modes and meanings of public
diplomacy in order to reconsider the ways in which the power of the American state is manifested in its
operations beyond its national borders, and to examine the conditions of knowledge-formation and
critical thinking shaped by the operations of this power. At issue is not so much the way in which
American studies has been shaped internationally through diplomatic patronage (though this remains an
important and underexamined issue) but rather the articulation of field identities in the expanding
networks of international and transnational political cultures.

Softpower is not benign-the expansion of influence through seemingly harmless
institutions is still intertwined with an oppressive form of power. It limits the scope of
what constitutes legitimate knowledge and allows oppression to seem natural and
inevitable.
McLaren and Kincheloe in 2k5 (Peter Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education and
Information Studies @ UCLA and Joe, professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education,
McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Third
Edition, Eds Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln)
A Reconcept utilized Critical Theory of Power; Hegemony. Our conception of a reconceptualized critical
theory is intensely concerned with the need to understand the various and complex ways that power
operates to dominate and shape consciousness. Power, critical theorists have learned, is an extremely
ambiguous topic that demands detailed study and analysis. A consensus seems to be emerging among
criticalists that power is a basic constituent of human existence that works to shape the oppressive
and productive nature of the human tradition. Indeed, we are all empowered and we are all
unempowered, in that we all possess abilities and we are all limited in the attempt to use our abilities.
Because of limited space, we will focus here on critical theory's traditional concern with the oppressive
aspects of power, although we understand that an important aspect of critical research focuses on the
productive aspects of powerits ability to empower, to establish a critical democracy, to engage
marginalized people in the rethinking of their sociopolitical role (Apple, 19%; Fiske, 1993; A.M.A. Freire.
2000; Giroux, 1997; Macedo, 1994; Nicholson & Seidman, 1995). In the context of oppressive power
and its ability to produce inequalities and human suffering, Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony is
central to critical research. Gramsci understood that dominant power in the 20th century was not
always exercised simply by physical force but also was expressed through social psychological
attempts to win people's consent to domination through cultural institutions such as the media, the
schools, the family, and the church. Gramscian hegemony recognizes that the winning of popular
consent is a very complex process and must be researched carefully on a case-by-case basis. Students
and researchers of power, educators, sociologists, all of us are hegemonized as our field of knowledge
and understanding is structured by a limited exposure to competing definitions of the sociopolitical
world. The hegemonic field, with its bounded sociopsychological horizons, garners consent to an
inequitable power matrixa set of social relations that are legitimated by their depiction as natural
and inevitable. In this context, critical researchers note that hegemonic consent is never completely
established, as it is always contested by various groups with different agendas (Grossberg, 1997; Lull,
1995; McLaren. 1995a, 1995b; McLaren, Hammer, Reilly, & Shollc, 1995; West, 1993). We note here that
Gramsci famously understood Marx's concept of laws of tendency as implying a new immanence and a
new conception of necessity and freedom that cannot be grasped within a mechanistic model of
determination (Bensaid.2002). A Reconceptualized Critical Theory of Power: Ideology. Critical theorists
understand that the formation of hegemony cannot be separated from the production of ideology. If
hegemony is the larger effort of the powerful to win the consent of their "subordinates," then
ideological hegemony involves the cultural forms, the meanings, the rituals, and the representations
that produce consent to the status quo and individuals' particular places within it. Ideology vis-a-vis
hegemony moves critical inquirers beyond explanations of domination that have used terms such as
"propaganda" to describe the ways media, political, educational, and other sociocultural productions
coercively manipulate citizens to adopt oppressive meanings. A reconceptualized critical research
endorses a much more subtle, ambiguous, and situationally specific form of domination that refuses the
propaganda model's assumption that people are passive, easily manipulated victims. Researchers
operating with an awareness of this hegemonic ideology understand that dominant ideological
practices and discourses shape our vision of reality (Lemke, 1995,1998). Thus, our notion of hegemonic
ideology is a critical form of epistemological constructivism buoyed by a nuanced understanding of
powers complicity in the constructions people make of the world and their role in it (Kincheloc, 1998).
Such an awareness corrects earlier delineations of ideology as a monolithic unidirectional entity that
was imposed on individuals by a secret cohort of ruling-class czars. Understanding domination in the
context of concurrent struggles among different classes, racial and gender groups, and sectors of
capital, critical researchers of ideology explore the ways such competition engages different visions,
interesls, and agendas in a variety of social localesvenues previously thought to be outside the
domain of ideological struggle (Brosio, 1994; Steinberg, 2001). <309-310>
Link Soft Power
Soft power disguises the US' cultural imperialism.
Mirrlees in 6 (Tanner, member of York and Ryerson Uni.s Joint Program of Communication and Culture,
Oneworld, The New Imperialists, p. 208-209)pl
Second, Nye describes soft power as the noncoercive means through which the U.S. state struggles to
organize the consent of non-American states, organizations, and populations to the values associated
with American national identity (soft power in the first instance). Soft power is the ability [of the
American state] to get what it want[s] through attraction rather than coercion or payments,29 co-
opts people rather than coerces,30 and has the ability to attract.31 The U.S. states central
instruments of soft power are government communication and cultural agencies and corporate media
industries. Government soft power apparatuses include: the State Departments Office of Public
Diplomacy, the radio station Voice of America, the universities, the military (including psychological
warfare operations), and the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.). Corporate industries of American soft
power include: Hollywood and television, news media, nongovernmental organizations (N.G.O.s), U.S.
corporations and their commodities, and the art market. In Nyes third description, soft power refers to
something akin to U.S. ideological dominance or global hegemony. Soft power describes the extent to
which America is perceived as a morally legitimate global leader by non-American states, organizations,
and populations: The soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in places
where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and
its domestic and foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority).32
Here, soft power (as consent to Americas morally legitimate global leadership) appears as the desired
effect or outcome of soft power in the second sense: the U.S. states strategies and means of ideological
suasion, its struggle on the terrain of communication and media culture to manufacture and organize
international consent to the values of Americas national identity. Nye rationalizes American soft power
by investing it with two moral functions. American soft powers first moral obligation is to rid the world
of the evils of terrorist networks,33 and thus is aligned with the Bush administrations national and
global security imperatives. Soft powers second moral duty is to help the Middle East to modernize
more efficiently,34 and thus bestows America with a new white mans burden, a civilizing mission.
Nyes political solution to the apparent problem of Middle Eastern anti-modernity is soft power, which
must educate people there about the just and benevolent intentions of America. Nye recommends that
the public diplomacy missionaries of American soft power work with Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya to
respond to what he feels is distorted coverage of U.S. intervention, explain U.S. foreign policies more
effectively, and develop a long term strategy of cultural and educational exchanges that develop a
richer and more open civil society in Middle Eastern countries.35 Like the colonialist intelligentsia of
the British Empire that rationalized cultural imperialism as part of a civilizing mission to bring a
backward Other into modernity, Nye imagines America and American soft power as bringing
enlightenment to the Middle East. The process and effect to which Nyes soft power discourse refers
resembles the process and effect once described by the critical discourse of U.S. cultural imperialism.
Government communication apparatuses and corporate media globally export and legitimize
American values to international audiences. The ideal effect of this process is the organization of
international consent to American values, the establishment of Americas moral legitimacy as a global
superpower, and the realization of U.S. foreign policy objectives (which entails the remaking of different
social formations in Americas image).However, by denying the existence of an American empire and
universalizing American multiculturalism as reflective of an emergent global culture, Nye attempts to
differentiate his soft power discourse from the discourse of U.S. cultural imperialism.

Trade


United States trade policies with Latin America only serve to benefit the United States
and put other countries at a disadvantage
Gardini 12 (Gian Luca, University of Bath, Latin America in the 21st Century, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.
99-100)

Trade relations between the United States and Latin America at the beginning of the new millennium
were centered on the plan to build a Free Trade Area of the Americas. Given the difficulties and ensuing
stalling of negotiations, the United States, often with the consent of Latin American countries, has
favored switching to a case-by-case approach. One of the main traits of continuity in the US Latin
American policy is the attempt to propose, if not impose, its approved rules and economic models on
the rest of the continent. The United States, under both Republican and Democratic administrations,
has historically been in favor of free markets and deregulation of international trade, but only as long
as this is beneficial to the United States. The FTAA would provide ample opportunities to expand US
industrial production and services sectors. However, there are still doubts over whether or not Latin
American countries also have relevant interests in and potential benefits to gain from the conclusion of
such an agreement, or a series of bilateral agreements with the same purpose. Critics of the FTAA claim
that it is simply an instrument for the US to perpetuate its economic hegemony over the Americas in
the era of globalization. They claim that it is a tool which uses asymmetric and conditional openness
in markets and Customs barriers to promote the US economy, providing only negligible benefits for
Latin economies. In addition, they state that this openness would result in an intensification of the
imbalanced exchange system between the raw materials and agricultural produce of the South and
the high-added-value manufactured products of the North, thus exacerbating rather than lessening
the disparity in exchange flows, As at the end of the 1800s, Latin American countries, or at least the
leading lights among them, hesitate today when faced with a possible Pan-American agreement.



Impacts
Racism
Imperialism is grounded in racism and strips countries of their culture
Narobi 86.[James, Professor of NHU, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature. July 6
th
, 2013 London:Heinemann Kenya, New Hampshire
http://www.swaraj.org/ngugi.htm ]
For these patriotic defenders of the fighting cultures of African people, imperialism is not a slogan. It is
real; it is palpable in content and form and in its methods and effects. Imperialism is the rule of
consolidated finance capital and since 1884 this monopolistic parasitic capital has affected and
continues to affect the lives even of the peasants in the remotest corners of our countries. If you are
in doubt, just count how many African countries have now been mortgaged to IMF the new
International Ministry of Finance as Julius Nyerere once called it. Who pays for the mortgage? Every
single producer of real wealth (use-value) in the country so mortgaged, which means every single worker
and peasant. Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and psychological
consequences for the people of the world today. It could even lead to holocaust. The freedom for
western finance capital and for the vast transnational monopolies under its umbrella to continue
stealing from the countries and people of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Polynesia is today
protected by conventional and nuclear weapons. Imperialism, led by the USA, presents the
struggling peoples of the earth and all those calling for peace, democracy .and socialism with the
ultimatum: accept theft or death. The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their
defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by
imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to
annihilate a peoples belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their
heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them
see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves
from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from
themselves; for instance, with other peoples languages rather than their own. It makes them identify
with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of
life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or
victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a
collective death-wish. Amidst this wasteland which it has created, imperialism presents itself as the
cure and demands that the dependant sing hymns of praise with the constant refrain: Theft is holy.
Indeed, this refrain sums up the new creed of the neo-colonial bourgeoisie in many independent African
states. The classes fighting against imperialism even in its neo-colonial stage and form, have to
confront this threat with the higher and more creative culture of resolute struggle. These classes
have to wield even more firmly the weapons of the struggle contained in their cultures. They have
to speak the united language of struggle contained in each of their languages. They must discover
their various tongues to sing the song: A people united can never be defeatedColonialism
dehumanizes individuals of all races
Hardt and Negri 2k
*Michael and Antonio, Political Philosopher and Literary Theorist at Duke University, Political Philosopher, Empire, page 129]
The work of numerous authors, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and

Franz Fanon, who have recognized that colonial representations and colonial sovereignty are dialectical in form has proven useful in several
respects. First of all, the dialectical construction demonstrates that there is nothing essential about the identities in struggle.The White
and the Black, the European and the Oriental, the colonizer and the colonized are all
representations that function only in relation to each other and (despite appearances)
have noreal necessary basis in nature, biology, or rationality. Colonialism is an abstract
machine that produces alterity and identity. And yet in the colonial situation these
differences and identities are made to function as if they were absolute, essential, and
natural. The rst result of the dialectical reading is thus the denaturalization of racial
and cultural difference. This does not mean that once recognized as articial constructions, colonial identities evaporate into
thin air; they are real illusions and continue to function as if they were essential. This recognition is not a politics in itself, but merely the sign
that an anti colonial politics is possible. In the second place, the dialectical interpretation makes clear that
colonialism and colonialist representations are grounded in a violent struggle that must
be continually renewed. The European Selfneeds violence and needs to confront its Other to feel and maintain its power, to
remake itself continually. The generalized state of war that continuously subtends colonial representations is not accidental or even
unwantedviolence is the necessary foundation of colonialism itself. Third, posing colonialism as a negative dialectic of recognition makes
clear the potential for subversion inherent in the situation. For a thinker like Fanon, the reference to Hegel suggests that the Master can only
achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to move forward toward full
consciousness. The dialectic ought to imply movement, but this dialectic of European sovereign identity has fallen back into stasis. The failed
dialectic suggests the possibility
of a proper dialectic that through negativity will move history forward.

Ethics
Imperialism destroys ethics by valuing security risks over collateral damage
McNally 6 (David, Professor of political science at York University The new imperialists Ideologies of
Empire Ch 5 Pg 92) JL
Yet, even on Ignatieff s narrow definition, in which human rights are about stopping unmerited cruelty
and suffering, the crucial question is how we are to do so. What if some means to this ostensible end
say, a military invasion can reasonably be expected to produce tens of thousands of civilian casualties
and an almost certain breakdown in social order? Ignatieff s doctrine of human rights provides
absolutely no ethico-philosophical criteria in that regard. Instead, he offers a pragmatic judgement and
a highly dubious one that only U.S. military power can be expected to advance human rights in the
zones where barbarians rule. But note: this is an utterly ad hoc addition to his theory. In no respect
can it be said to flow from any of his reflections on human rights per se. Moreover, others proceeding
from the same principle of limiting cruelty and suffering have arrived at entirely opposite conclusions
with respect to imperial war. Ignatieff s myriad proclamations for human rights thus lack any
demonstrable tie to his support of empire and imperial war. This is convenient, of course, since the
chasm between moralizing rhetoric and imperial advocacy allows Ignatieff to pump out empty
platitudes as if these contained real ethical guidance. Concrete moral choices, involving historical
study and calibrations of real human risk, never enter the equation. So, Ignatieff can drone on about
the world being a better place without Saddam, never so much as acknowledging the cost of this
result: some 25,000 Iraqis killed as a result of armed conflict since the start of the U.S. invasion, and
probably more than 100,000 dead as a result of all the consequences of the U.S. war.24 Nowhere does
he offer any kind of calculus for determining if these tens of thousands of deaths are ethically
justified. Instead, banalities about being rid of Saddam are offered up without even countenancing the
scale of human suffering that Ignatieff s preferred course of action war and occupation has entailed.
But then, Ignatieff shows little regard for ordinary people in the zones of military conflict. His concern is
for the security of the West and of the U.S.A. in particular. Ruminating about Americas new
vulnerability in the world, for instance, he writes, When American naval planners looked south from
the Suez Canal, they had only bad options. All the potential refuelling stops Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti,
Eritrea and Yemen are dangerous places for American warships. As the attack on the U.S.S. Cole made
clear, none of the governments in these strategically vital refuelling stops can actually guarantee the
safety of their imperial visitors.25




Environment
U.S. Imperialism has environmental and lethal consequences
LLCO 2011 [Leading Light Company, Imperialism kills and keeps on killing in Vietnam, Iraq,
etc LLCO Publisher, July 6
th
, 2013 http://llco.org/imperialism-kills-and-keeps-on-killing-in-
vietnam-iraq-etc/]
According to a recent, 2009 study by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and
Vietnams Ministry of Defense, land mines and unexploded ordnance dot the landscape of
Vietnam even though the war ended nearly 35 years ago. More than one third of the land in
six central Vietnamese provinces continues to be a serious hazard. According to Vietnams
Ministry of Defense, 6.6 million hectares (6.3 million acres) are still contaminated. Land mines
have resulted in 42,000 deaths since the wars end in 1975. Quang Tri and Quang Binh are
two provinces that have suffered many deaths. 7,000 deaths in the former, 6,000 in the
latter. Death resulting from such explosions are part of the ongoing legacy of imperialism
in Vietnam. In addition, the Vietnamese people still suffer from the consequences of the
massive amounts of chemical agents dumped into their environment by the US. Millions of
gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed across the Vietnamese countryside. Agent Orange
contained a strain of dioxin known as TCCD which is one of the strongest poisons known to
humanity. In 2003, the soil was sampled in Vietnam and found to contain 180 million times the
safe dioxin levels as prescribed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. There are roughly
150,000 children whose birth defects can be traced to their parents contamination to Agent
Orange. According to the Vietnam Victims of Agent Orange Association, three million
Vietnamese were exposed to the chemical during the war. As a result, serious health
problems affect one million of the victims. The US pays up to 1,500 a month for Americans
who have problems resulting from dioxin exposure during the war. The US refuses to pay
anything to the vast numbers of the Vietnamese victims the underlying assumption by
the US is that a Vietnamese life is worth less than that of an American. According to the
former president of the Vietnamese Red Cross, US tactics were a massive violation of
human rights of the civilian population, and a weapon of mass destruction.
Contaminating the environment of a whole country with explosives and poisons such that,
decades later, people are still suffering in the thousands as a result is tantamount to
genocide. Such actions end up affecting the entire population, including future generations.
Even though imperialism was defeated for a time in, the US continues to kill, cripple, and
maim. Imperialism kills and keeps on killing.
Environmental consequences lead to extinction

Hoah 2006 *Hannah, Published Author, Global Warming Already Causes Extinction, National Geographics News,
July 5
th
, 2013 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/11/061128-global-warming.html]
Parmesan and most other scientists hadn't expected to see species extinctions from global warming
until 2020. But populations of frogs, butterflies, ocean corals, and polar birds have already gone
extinct because of climate change, Parmesan said. Scientists were right about which species would
suffer firstplants and animals that live only in narrow temperature ranges and those living in
cold climates such as Earth's Poles or mountaintops. "The species dependent on sea icepolar
bear, ring seal, emperor penguin, Adlie penguinand the cloud forest frogs are showing massive
extinctions," Parmesan said. Her review compiles 866 scientific studies on the effects of climate change
on terrestrial, marine, and freshwater species. The study appears in the December issue of the Annual
Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. Global Phenomenon Bill Fraser is a wildlife ecologist
with the Polar Oceans Research Group in Sheridan, Montana. "There is no longer a question of whether
one species or ecosystem is experiencing climate change. [Parmesan's] paper makes it evident that it is
almost global," he said. "The scale now is so vast that you cannot continue to ignore climate change,"
added Fraser, who began studying penguins in the Antarctic more than 30 years ago. "It is going to have
some severe consequences." Many species, for example, have shifted their ranges in response to rising
temperatures.

US imperialism creates the most environmental destruction.
Buell in 1 (Frederick, professor of English at Queens College Globalization without Environmental Crisis:
The Divorce of Two Discourses in U.S. Culture, Pg 64
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.foley.gonzaga.edu:2048/journals/symploke/v009/9.1buell.html) JL
The global biodiversity crisis is another multi-source crisis, created by a wide variety of local actors
acting as a part of an extended global system; but the damage these actors do is to local systems, not
to the biosphere as a whole. It becomes global in its accumulation not just of individual actions
(primarily habitat destruction), but localized effects. Many other new global problems resemble the
biodiversity crisis in being globalized through the bootstrapping of local actions and instances of local
damage into a global nightmare. Many of John Bellamy Foster's [End Page 62] long list of "urgent
problems" are global today, thanks to the spread of industrial systems and practices and the worldwide
accumulation of small impacts this creates. These include: loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear
contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil
erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams and rivers, the drawing down
and contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of
coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides
and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable
resources. (Foster 11-2) But environmental crisis has taken on an even more contemporary global feel
as it has begun to share in the contemporary topos of the trans(-): the evocation of the transnational,
transcultural, and (a necessary part of this, though less commonly added) the transgenic. One sign is
that environmental crisis has become hyperaware of global interactions occurring painfully and even
riskily in real time. These days, lungs in the U.S. contract as fearfully at information about the
deforestation of the Amazon as they do at disputes over national clean air standards. In 1932, Aldo
Leopold complained that "when I go birding in my Ford, I am devastating an oil field and re-electing an
imperialist to get me rubber"; he meant this, Lawrence Buell notes, as "a reductio ad aburdam of purist
thinking" (2001, 302). Contemporary globalization, in the meantime, has institutionalized such discourse
as a part of our normality, not something ridiculous. 7 It is now a staple of social justice rhetoric and
global activism, as when Noam Chomsky points out that American children use baseball bats hand-
dipped in toxic chemicals by Haitian women and corporations are scrutinized for their overseas labor
practices. It is equally a staple of environmental crisis thought, expressed in several ways. For example,
environmental imperialism by a resource-hogging, pollution-generating North is now a commonplace
perception ("a baby born in the United States creates thirteen times as much environmental damage
over the course of its lifetime as a baby born in Brazil, and thirty-five times as much as an Indian baby")
(Hertsgaard 196); the huge environmental footprints of consumer items purchased by innocent
consumers extend well across the world, as environmentalists chart these effects; and linkages
between apparently innocent first world choices are exposed as having drastic effects-at-a-distance [End
Page 63] (as when Theordore Roszak unhappily discovers that "the material from which my eyeglass
frames are made comes from an endangered species, the hawksbill turtle" and is told that whenever he
turns on a light bulb powered by nuclear energy, he is "adding to the number of anecephalic babies in
the world" (Rozak 36).



War
Imperialism leads to warWWI proves
TAHC 2012 [The Authentic History Center, The Origins of WWI Primary Source for
American Pop Culture, July 6
th
, 2013, http://www.authentichistory.com/1914-1920/1-
overview/1-origins/index.html]
One of the main causes of the First World War was imperialism: an unequal relationship,
often in the form of an empire, forced on other countries and peoples, resulting in
domination and subordination of economics, culture, and territory. Historians disagree on
whether the primary impetus for imperialism was cultural or economic, but whatever the reason,
Europeans in the late 19th century increasingly chose to safeguard their access to markets,
raw materials, and returns on their investments by seizing outright political and military
control of the undeveloped world. Between the 1850s and 1911, all of Africa was colonized
except for Liberia and Ethiopia. The British, who had imposed direct rule on India in 1858,
occupied Egypt in 1882, probably a strategic necessity to protect their Indian interests. The
French, who had begun missionary work in Indochina in the 17th century, finished their
conquests of the region in 1887, and in 1893 they added to it neighboring Laos and a small sliver
of China.
U.S. Imperialism creates world-wide tensions and fails by every measure

Ottaway and Lacina 2003 [Marina and Bethany, Social Sciences Authors, International
Interventions and Imperialism, Muse, July 6
th
, 2013
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/sais_review/v023/23.2ottaw
ay.html]

First, the United States is seeking to shift final authority for authorizing internal
interventions away from the UN and toward itself, relegating the UN to a position of
secondary importance, to be called upon when convenient as a marginal contributor to
essentially American undertakings. Second, by arguing that the United States has the
right to intervene not only to eliminate threats to itself and international peace, but
also to put in place new regimes, the doctrine of preemptive intervention poses a new
threat to the principle of state sovereignty. Not surprisingly, the debate on imperialism
has intensifiedunilateral American interventionism constitutes a far greater threat
to the foundations of the international system than even the most aggressive
multilateral missions of the 1990s. In [End Page 86] Namibia, Haiti, and Sierra Leone
multilateral interventions supported regime change, but these cases have been justified as
the return of legally recognized powers in place of an illegal de facto regime. The
unilateralist American project appears to go much further. It justifies regime change
not simply as a means of restoring a legitimate government, but as a means of
removing threats to U.S. security interests as defined by the U.S. administration.
Though all states have the right to defend their security interests, U.S. unilateral
interventions, based on preemption of vaguely defined threats and undertaken
without an international process of legitimization, would provoke widespread
international resentment against the United States, as the war in Iraq already has. U.S.
unilateralism may also furnish a license for unilateral interventions by other states, and
thus become a source of instability. In addition to the threat unilateral interventions pose
to the international system and U.S. moral credibility, the experience of multilateral post-
conflict reconstruction during the 1990s should be a major check on such a project. That
experience demonstrates that interventions, even those with imperial characteristics and
significant resources, often result in very little change to internal power dynamics. Even
the tremendous military power and financial resources of the United States cannot
necessarily keep its attempts to rebuild states and support stable, benign, and
democratic regimes from being thwarted by local political realities. Rapidly
transforming rogue and failed states will prove a daunting task, and unilateral
intervention, shackled by international resentment and charges of imperialism, is
especially unlikely to prove an effective tool.
The only thing an imperialist country does is bring violence

Feldman 2008 [Keith, Professor of University of Washington, Black Powers Palestine and the
End(s) of Civil Rights, Muse, July 6
th
, 2013
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v008/8.2.feldman.html]
The concept imperial formation, recently distilled by Ann Laura Stoler, captures the
mobile terrain on which these battles for an anti-racist historical legibility have been
waged. Imperial formation suggests the shifting degrees of rights, scale, rule, and
violence through which the state projects sovereignty both within and outside
internationally agreed upon borders. They are macropolities whose technologies of rule
thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation.
They thrive on turbid taxonomies that produce shadow populations and ever-improved
coercive measures to protect the common good against those deemed threats to it. Finally,
imperial formations give rise both to new zones of exclusion and new sites ofand social
groups withprivileged exemption (2006, 128). This theory of the shifting cartography
of empire as one built on differential forms of exclusion and exemption that operate
through racist social structures begins to help us see how SNCC and, increasingly, many
others involved in the black freedom movement began to see in Palestine facts . . . that
pertain to our struggle here. A critique of the widespread discourse of U.S. support for
Palestines occupation could challenge the staid exceptionalist arguments that the United
States and Israel were somehow unique in achieving their philosophical commitments and
political practices of freedom and democracy. Indeed, U.S. exceptionalist discourse, as
Stoler and David Bond cogently noteand the black freedom movements post-1967
engagement with Palestine gives depth, complexity, and specificity tohas historically
constructed places exempt from scrutiny and peoples partially excluded from rights
(2006, 95), what Etienne Balibar calls a fluctuating combination of continued
exteriorization and internal exclusion

U.S. intervention caused millions of excess deaths in The Korean War
Lucas 2007 [James A., Counter Currents Author, Deaths In Other Nations Since WW II Due To
Us Interventions CCNews, July 6
th
, 2013 http://www.countercurrents.org/lucas240407.htm]
The Korean War started in 1950 when, according to the Truman administration, North Korea
invaded South Korea on June 25th. However, since then another explanation has emerged which
maintains that the attack by North Korea came during a time of many border incursions by both
sides. South Korea initiated most of the border clashes with North Korea beginning in 1948. The
North Korea government claimed that by 1949 the South Korean army committed 2,617 armed
incursions. It was a myth that the Soviet Union ordered North Korea to attack South Korea. (1,2)
The U.S. started its attack before a U.N. resolution was passed supporting our nations
intervention, and our military forces added to the mayhem in the war by introducing the
use of napalm. (1)During the war the bulk of the deaths were South Koreans, North
Koreans and Chinese. Four sources give deaths counts ranging from 1.8 to 4.5 million.
(3,4,5,6) Another source gives a total of 4 million but does not identify to which nation they
belonged. (7) John H. Kim, a U.S. Army veteran and the Chair of the Korea Committee of
Veterans for Peace, stated in an article that during the Korean War the U.S. Army, Air Force
and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about three million civilians both South
and North Koreans at many locations throughout KoreaIt is reported that the U.S.
dropped some 650,000 tons of bombs, including 43,000 tons of napalm bombs, during the
Korean War. It is presumed that this total does not include Chinese casualties.

US imperialism threatens to spur major world conflict
Kuang et al 5 (Xinnian, teaches modern Chinese literature at Tsinghua University, Preemptive War and
a World Out of Control http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/positions/v013/13.1kuang.html) JL
The existing world order was constructed under the leadership of the United States following World War
II. The United Nations, the representative of this order, is certainly not an entirely democratic
organization. Since its inception, the United Nations has been controlled by two superpowers, the
United States and the Soviet Union. These two superpowers used the United Nations as a stage on
which to vie for power. But it is important to note that [End Page 159] neither the United States nor the
Soviet Union doubted the significance or efficacy of the United Nationsand the United States, in
particular, used the United Nations to export its values to the rest of the world. Both their
confrontations and their mutual hold on power gave the second half of the twentieth century a long
peace. However, after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., the surviving hegemon, the United States, no longer
had the patience to use the United Nations to put forward its own values, but rather pursued what
might be referred to as peace under imperial domination (diguo tongzhi xia de heping). America's
invasion of Iraq has damaged the authority of the United Nations and the principle of the inviolability
of national sovereignty. Before the war broke out, Bush repeatedly sent out warnings in which he stated
that if the Security Council refused to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force, the United Nations
would become irrelevant. Some hawks in the administration and conservative newspapers even
threatened that the United States could withdraw from the United Nations, bringing it to an
ignominious end. The strategy of preemption as espoused by American neoconservatism, along with
new interpretations of sovereignty, will bring about a revolution in the twenty-first century, and the
war in Iraq will serve as a model. The United States will use its neo-imperialist imagination in an
attempt to recreate the so-called rogue states and restore world order. The strategy of preemption is
a sign of America's abandonment of both traditional Western international regulatory systems and the
principle of rule by law as established under the U.N. charter. Instead, America is bringing about the
return to an era where naked power takes preeminence. At a press conference held June 27, 2003,
after talks with the French minister of foreign affairs, Dominique de Villepin, Nelson Mandela
commented on this shift: "Since the establishment of the U.N., there have been no world wars;
therefore, anybody, and particularly the leaders of the superpowers, who takes unilateral action outside
the frame of the U.N. must receive the condemnation of all who love peace." On a visit to Ireland on
June 20, 2003, he went on to say, "Any organization, any country, any movement that now decides to
sideline the United Nations, that country and its leader are a danger to the world. We cannot allow
the world to again degenerate into a place where the will of the powerful dominates over all other
considerations."4 [End Page 160] The strategy of preemption is not simply a military strategy, but is,
in fact, a kind of barbaric politics, a serious attack against civilized humanity. It is ultimately tied to the
question of whether the world is seeking civilization and order, or whether it is entering into a period of
violence and chaos. The United States' adoption of this strategy provoked the intense opposition of
Europe and, indeed, the entire world because many believe that a strategy of preemption would take
the world in the latter direction. As a result of the Iraq War, a deep rift was opened up between America
and its western European allies, to which the media now frequently affix the label "Old Europe."
Modern history, beginning in 1492, has been a Eurocentric history of colonialism, imperialism, and
expansion. However, the United States has replaced Europe as imperialist colonizer. The imagination
of American neoconservative politics has inspired the United States to become a tyrannical and self-
appointed hegemon, willfully changing global boundaries, and a particularly intense force for the
destruction of world order. Europe, on the other hand, has become a force for rationality and
civilization. The dispute that arose between Europe and America during the Iraq War was both a conflict
of potential profit and a sign of civilizational disparity.

Imperialist ideals cause us to rush ignorantly into unnecessary violence and wars
Harris, 08 (Jerry, US Imperialism after Iraq, Race & Class, 50(1), p. 41) JH

In light of this assessment, counter-insurgency wars, in Iraq or elsewhere, would clearly lead to attacks
on the local population insofar as it constitutes a support network for insurgents. This review of
changing tactics in Iraq is important because it sets the stage for future wars. Overwhelming force and
counter-insurgency doctrine are strategies for occupation. But all imperialist occupations face the
same political problem. They are opposed by local people who yearn for self-determination. This
fundamental truth is something no Washington think tank or Pentagon general can admit, not even to
themselves. They always believe in the rightness of their cause, be it the white mans burden or the
war against terror. Such hubris blinds military/industrial intellectuals time and time again. Their
understanding of conditions is framed by the bias and dogmas formed in the imperial centre, leaving
them ignorant of the complexities of Third World societies. National chauvinism that originates in
power and wealth never accepts that less powerful, less wealthy and less technologically endowed
societies can run their affairs better than the imperialist centre; consequently, defeat seems
unimaginable. Just listen to the eloquent arrogance of neoconservative Richard Perle shortly before
the war: Those who think Iraq should not be next may want to think about Syria or Iran or Sudan or
Yemen or Somalia or North Korea or Lebanon or the Palestinian Authority if we do it right with
respect to one or two we could deliver a short message, a two-word message, Youre next.

The continuance of violence causes extinction
Holmes 89 (Robert, Professor at Princeton University, On war and morality, Princeton
University Press, p. 1)

The threat to the survival of humankind posed by nuclear weapons has been a frightening and
essential focus of public debate for the last four decades and must continue to be so if we are to avoid
destroying ourselves and the natural world around us. One unfortunate result of preoccupation with
the nuclear threat, however, has been a new kind of "respectability" accorded to conventional war. In
this radical and cogent argument for pacifism, Robert Holmes asserts that all war--not just nuclear war-
-has become morally impermissible in the modern world. Addressing a wide audience of informed and
concerned readers, he raises dramatic questions about the concepts of "political realism" and nuclear
deterrence, makes a number of persuasive suggestions for nonviolent alternatives to war, and presents
a rich panorama of thinking about war from St. Augustine to Reinhold Niebuhr and Herman Kahn.
Holmes's positions are compellingly presented and will provoke discussion both among convinced
pacifists and among those whom he calls "militarists." "Militarists," we realize after reading this book,
include the majority of us who live a friendly and peaceful personal life while supporting a system
which, if Holmes is correct, guarantees war and risks eventual human extinction.

Imperialism leads to world war
Boyle 12 [ Francis, Professor of international Law, University of Illinois, Unlimited Imperialism and the Threat of World War III. U.S.
Militarism at the Start of the 21st Century, Global Research, Online, 7/6/13, http://www.globalresearch.ca/unlimited-imperialism-and-the-
threat-of-world-war-iii-u-s-militarism-at-the-start-of-the-21st-century/5316852]
This current bout of U.S. imperialism is what Hans Morgenthau denominated unlimited imperialism
in his seminal work Politics Among Nations (4th ed. 1968, at 52-53): The outstanding historic
examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the
Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge
toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a
superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as
there remains anywhere a possible object of dominationa politically organized group of men which by
its very independence challenges the conquerors lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of
moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited
imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind It is the
Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge
of conducting American foreign policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both
the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the
heads of all humanity.






Indigenous Rights
Imperialism deteriorates the culture of indigenous people
Galeota 2004 [Julia, The Humanist, Article Cultural Imperialism: An American Tradition
http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/essay3mayjune04.pdf]
In his 1976 work Communication and Cultural Domination, Herbert Chiller defines cultural
imperialism as: the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern
world system, and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and
sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even to promote, the
values and structures of the dominant center of the system. Thus, cultural imperialism
involves much more than simple consumer goods; it involves the dissemination of
ostensibly American principles, such as freedom and democracy. Though this process
might sound appealing on the surface, it masks a frightening truth: many cultures around
the world are gradually disappearing due to the overwhelming influence of corporate and
cultural America. The motivations behind American cultural imperialism parallel the
justifications for U.S. imperialism throughout history: the desire for access to foreign
markets and the belief in the superiority of American culture. Though the United States
does boast the worlds largest, most powerful economy, no business is completely satisfied
with controlling only the American market; American corporations want to control the
other 95 percent of the worlds consumers as well. However, one must question whether this
projected society is truly beneficial for all involved. Is it worth sacrificing countless
indigenous cultures for the unlikely promise of a world without conflict? Around the world, the
answer is an overwhelming No! Disregarding the fact that a world of homogenized
culture would not necessarily guarantee a world without conflict, the complex fabric of
diverse cultures around the world is a fundamental and indispensable basis of humanity.
Throughout the course of human existence, millions have died to preserve their indigenous
culture. It is a fundamental right of humanity to be allowed to preserve the mental,
physical, intellectual, and creative aspects of ones society. A single global culture would be
nothing more than a shallow, artificial culture of materialism reliant on technology.
Thankfully, it would be nearly impossible to create one bland culture in a world of over six
billion people. And nor should we want to. Contrary to Rothkopf s (and George W. Bushs)
belief that, Good and evil, better and worse coexist in this world, there are no such absolutes in
this world. The United States should not be able to relentlessly force other nations to accept its
definition of what is good and just or even modern. Fortunately, many victims of
American cultural imperialism arent blind to the subversion of their cultures.

Democracy
Imperialism is the greatest enemy of Democracy
Rahman, November 16, 2010 [Fazal PHD War on Iraq in perspective: The developing US
imperialism and demonocracy July 5, 2013 http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/war-on-
iraq-in-perspective-the-developing-us-imperialism-and-demonocracy/]
In the imperialist center itself also, imperialism has been the greatest enemy of democracy, in spite of some
superfluous appearances and contradictions. For example, in the US, American people have been treated
to constant bombardment of lies, hypocrisies, deceptions, secrecies and disinformation by their
leaders to cover up and misrepresent their international imperialist operations. Consenting to such
lies, hypocrisies, and deceptions of the democratic government, some of them of extremely
sinister and evil nature, by the general populace, destroys the very essence of democracy, which
consists of people consenting to policies and actions based upon truth. The dialectical interactions
between imperialism and democracy in the advanced capitalist societies play the most powerful role in the
development and evolution of these, both at the center as well as in the periphery. These play particularly powerful
role in case of the US, which is, by far, the most powerful, militarist, aggressive, conceited, and deceptive imperialism
of all history. Because of its power and its nature, it is wreaking havoc with genuine democracy everywhere, at its
center, in the periphery, in other imperialist countries, and in socialist societies. It is the most powerful distortion,
perversion, erosion, militarization, and imperialismization of democracy everywhere, all over this planet. A more
sinister, evil, and antidemocratic force is hardly imaginable. The reality of democracy is eroded in such a
context even if the mechanical formalities and appearances are maintained. As is self-evident, even
the formalities and appearances of democracy are being greatly eroded at this stage of the
development of US imperialism-democracy complex. US imperialism-democracy system has been
routinely transformed into fascism in various developing countries, e.g., Nicaragua, Brazil,
Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Zaire, Philippines, Iran, Indonesia, El Salvador
etc. etc. under various dictatorships in the service of US imperialism and its big capital. The chickens
are coming home to roost now and the transition to the uniquely American form of fascism has already begun at the
center. Internationally also, the fascist nature of US imperialism is becoming transparent more than
ever. The so-called war on terrorism and war on Iraq are manifestations of the naked fascism
of US imperialism. These are the self-evident expressions of the most brutal, most plunderous, and
most mass murderous domination of rich oil, natural gas, and other resources of Central Asia and
Caspian Sea and of Iraq on behalf of the giant US oil and military-industrial transnational
corporations by the US government and military. Some leftovers may be thrown into the bowls of UK
corporations too for the participation of UK in this imperialist-fascist plunder.

Lack of democracy leads to extinction
Diamond December 1995 [Larry- Senior fellow at the hoover institution, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s:Actors and
Instruments, Issues and Imperatives July 5, 2013
http://carnegie.org/fileadmin/Media/Publications/PDF/Promoting%20Democracy%20in%20the%201990s%20Actors%20and%20Instrument
s,%20Issues%20and%20Imperatives.pdf]
OTHER THREATS this hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well being in the coming
years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and
could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international
crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted
the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to
proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered.
Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the
weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular
sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offer
important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war
with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify
their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they
are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one
another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another.
Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run
they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally
responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction
of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal
obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret.
Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights,
and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of
international security and prosperity can be built.



V2L
Calculating life allows it to be devalued-this justifies the worst atrocities in history and
has real effects on populations
Dillon 99 (Michael, Professor of International Relations at the University of Lancaster, Another Justices
Political Theory, Vol 27, No. 2, 164-5)
Quite the reverse. The subject was never a firm foundation for mono, It was never in possession of that
self-possession which was supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would
enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything The very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave
rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the expendability required of the political
and material economies of mass societies than it did to the singular invaluable and uncanny uniqueness
of the self. The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of
States and the political economies of capitalism'. They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The
technologisation of the political has become manifest and global. Economies of evaluation necessarily
require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation.
Once rendered calculable, however, unit, of amount are necessarily submissible not only to valuation
but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as
nothing. Hence, no mensuration without deaf either. There is nothing abstract about this: the
declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and
emancipating systems of valuerightsmay claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting
out the invaluable. Counted. the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the
necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always
with whatever exceeds whatever exceeds measure. But how do that necessity present itself? Another
Justice answer: as the surplus of the duty to answer to One claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as
with the advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being. The
event of this lack is not a negative experience. Rather, it is an encounter with a reserve charged with
possibility. As possibility, it is that which enables life to be lived in excess without the overdose of
actuality. What also means is that the human is not decided. lt is precisely undecidable. Undecidability
means being in position of having so decide without having already been fully determined end
without being capable of bringing an end to the requirement for decision.

Terrorism

Imperialism encourages fundamentalism which leads to terrorist organizations.

Gagnon 12
*Jean, Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for Greater China Studies, Journal of South Asian Development, The Taliban Did Not Create the
Taliban, Imperialism Did, vol. 7 no. 1+
Sir Karl Poppers (2002) method of historicism has been neglected in the analysis of the radicalization of Afghanistans society in the form of the
Taliban. Poppers historicism is the idea that the past may allow the forecasting of the future by understanding the state of the present in one
specific line of historical inquiry. It is argued herein that by analyzing periods of imperialismthose eras of
social injustice, violence and oppressionit is seen that such imperialism led to radical
fundamentalism, as many had no choice but to lash out. The push to strenuous religious
identity, heavily laden with violent tactics, was the natural response of peoples trying to
maintain their identities and collective destiny from imperial domination. Furthermore,
as evidence continues to show, most often those individuals that are first to radicalize
are the poorest of the poor, the dispossessed, or those who have experienced violent
injustices. Using Poppers method, it is possible to explain how imperialism breeds radicalism
(using Afghanistan as an example) and as such provide some general recommendations to swing the pendulum in reverse
so as to minimize radical behavior. This article has implications for international relations, foreign policies and aid.

Nuclear technology is easily accessible to terrorist groups, enabling them to inflict maximum damage.

O'Neill 97 from the Institute for Science and International Security
*Kevn, Editor at the Institute for Science and International Security, The Nuclear Terrorist Threat
http://www.isisonline.org/publications/terrorism/threat.pdf]

The proliferation of nuclear weapons or radiological dispersal devices to terrorist groups
is perhaps one of the most frightening threats to U.S. security. Nuclear materials,
technologies and know-how are more widely available today than ever before. Small
quantities of both fissile materials and highly radioactive materials, sufficient to
manufacture a radiological dispersal device, are actively traded on the black market. A
nuclear detonation by a terrorist group would likely result in an unprecedented number
of casualties. In contrast, a radiological dispersal attack would probably be less violent,
but could significantly contaminate an urban center, causing economic and social
disruption. Both types of attacks would have significant psychological impacts on the
entire population.

Human Rights

U.S. Imperialism leads to global holocausts
Foster 03
*John, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, The New Age of Imperialism Volume 55, Issue 03 (July-August)]
This new age of U.S. imperialism will generate its own contradictions, amongst them
attempts by other major powers to assert their influence, resorting to similar belligerent
means, and all sorts of strategies by weaker states and non-state actors to engage in
asymmetric forms of warfare. Given the unprecedented destructiveness of
contemporary weapons, which are diffused ever more widely, the consequences for the
population of the world could well be devastating beyond anything ever before
witnessed. Rather than generating a new Pax Americana the United States may be paving the way to
new global holocausts.




Alternative
The alternative is key to break down epistemological boundaries currently
perpetuating violent power dynamics between the US and Latin America
Slater, Dept of Geography Loughborough University, 2006(David, Imperial powers and democratic imaginations, Third World
Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 8)

In the post-9/11 period the 'war on terror', with its attendant corrosion of civil liberties,
denigration of human rights and overall insinuation of a politics of fear, has tended to undermine
the effectiveness of a positive vision on the diffusion of US democracy. Both at home and abroad,
market-based democracy as the universal model for the rest of the world has come to be
associated more with a bellicose unilateralism than with a seductive system for political emulation
and potential hegemony. Moreover, other democratic imaginations emanating from Latin
America have been offering vibrant alternatives to the US model. Most notably, at the national level
Hugo Ch'avez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia have put on to the agenda critiques of US
power in the Americas and are offering different visions of developing democratic polities more
related to policies of redistribution, social justice, indigenous rights and national autonomy.
Transnationally the Hemispheric Social Alliance, which is a large coalition of civil society groups
located throughout the Americas, has argued that the entire process of negotiating trade agreements
should be democratised, just as the World Social Forums, originating in Porto Alegre, have similarly
argued for a democratisation of global organisations such as the World Trade Organiza- tion, World
Bank and IMF (Doucet, 2005).14 While imperial powers are being challenged, there is an
amplification of democratic politics. In the context of US-Latin American relations the mission
to universalise a US model of democracy is being contested by a wide gamut of political forces and
social movements. The promotion of democracy from above may be sustained by imperial
sentiment at home but it is actively called into question in a continent increasingly impatient
with being framed as the passive recipient. For democracy to flourish, it has to be home-grown
and autonomously sustained, not exported as part of a legitimisation of subordinating power.
When the imperial and the democratic are conjoined, a number of unresolveable contradictions
emerges. As was noted above, the imperial relation entails processes of penetration, violation,
imposition and ethno- centric universalism. Equally, such a relation requires legitimisation to
enhance its effectiveness and, in this context, notions of promoting and sustaining a form of democratic
politics assume their central relevance. While imperial power requires a discourse of justification,
the effectiveness of a democratic mantle is continually undermined by the subordinating practices
of the actual deployment of such power. As a consequence, the interface between the imperial and
the democratic is forever characterised by a dynamic series of tensions which can only be resolved
through a democratic geopolitics that challenges and transcends the imperial.

A2 Perm (Do Both)

Any inclusion of state action dooms the permutation to failure
Biswas 07
(Shampa BISWAS, Prof Politics, Whitman, 2007 "Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International
Relations Theorist" Millennium 36 (1))
While it is no surprise that the US academy should find itself too at that uneasy confluence of neoliberal globalising dynamics and exclusivist nationalist agendas that is the predicament of
many contemporary institutions around the world, there is much reason for concern and an urgent need to rethink the role and place of
intellectual labour in the democratic process. This is especially true for scholars of the global writing in this age of globalisation and empire. Edward Said
has written extensively on the place of the academy as one of the few and increasingly precarious spaces for
democratic deliberation and argued the necessity for public intellectuals immured from the seductions of power.14
Defending the US academy as one of the last remaining utopian spaces, the one public space available to real alternative
intellectual practices: no other institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today15, and lauding the remarkable critical theoretical and historical work
of many academic intellectuals in a lot of his work, Said also complains that the American University, with its munificence, utopian sanctuary, and remarkable diversity, has defanged
(intellectuals)16. The most serious threat to the intellectual vocation, he argues, is professionalism and mounts a pointed attack on
the proliferation of specializations and the cult of expertise with their focus on relatively narrow areas of knowledge, technical formalism, impersonal theories and methodologies,
and most worrisome of all, their ability and willingness to be seduced by power.17 Said mentions in this context the funding of
academic programmes and research which came out of the exigencies of the Cold War18, an area in which there was
considerable traffic of political scientists (largely trained as IR and comparative politics scholars) with institutions of policy-making. Looking at
various influential US academics as organic intellectuals involved in a dialectical relationship with foreign policy-makers and examining the institutional relationships at and among
numerous think tanks and universities that create convergent perspectives and interests, Christopher Clement has studied US intervention in the Third World both
during and after the Cold War made possible and justified through various forms of intellectual articulation.19 This is not
simply a matter of scholars working for the state, but indeed a larger question of intellectual orientation. It is not uncommon for IR scholars to feel the need
to formulate their scholarly conclusions in terms of its relevance for global politics, where relevance is measured
entirely in terms of policy wisdom. Edward Saids searing indictment of US intellectuals policy-experts and Middle East experts - in the context of the first Gulf War20
is certainly even more resonant in the contemporary context preceding and following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Total rejection is keycolonizing discourse in any form leads to de-legitimization and
disempowerment
Escobar, 1995
(Arturo, associate professor of anthropology at University of Mass,
Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, p.53)

Even those who opposed the prevailing capitalist strategies were obliged to couch their critique in terms of the need for development, through concepts such as another development, participatory development,
socialist development, and the like. In short, one could criticize a given approach and propose modifications or improvements accordingly, but the fact of development itself, and the need for it, could not be doubted.
Development had achieved the status of a certainty in the social imaginary. Indeed, it seemed impossible to conceptualize social reality in other terms.
Wherever one looked, one found the repetitive and omnipresent reality of development: governments designing and implementing ambitious development
plans, institutions carrying out development programs in city and countryside alike, experts of all kinds studying underdevelopment and producing theories ad nauseam.
The fact that most peoples conditions not only did not improve but deteriorated with the passing of time did not seem to
bother most experts. Reality, in sum, had been colonized by the development discourse, and those who were dissatisfied with this state of affairs had to struggle for
bits and pieces of freedom within it, in the hope that in the process a different reality could be constructed. More recently, however, the development of new tools of analysis, in gestation since the late 1960s but the
application of which became widespread only during the 1980s, has made possible analyses of this type of colonization of reality which seek to account for this very fact: how certain
representations become dominant and shape indelibly the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon. Foucaults
work on the dynamics of discourse and power in the representation of social reality, in particular, has been instrumental in unveiling the mechanisms by which a certain order of discourse
produces permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible.

The permutation promotes an imbalanced relationship in where there is always a
giver and a recipientthis creates cycles of dependence and debt which prevent
autonomy and justice
Arrigo and Williams 2k
(Bruce A., Christopher R., professor of @ the University of North Carolina, associate professor of criminology @ the University of West Georgia, Possibility of
Democratic Justice and the "Gift" of the Majority : On Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Search for Equality Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice)
Derrida's explication of the gift provides an insightful metaphor with which to analyze the current state of
sociopolitical affairs regarding traditionally subjugated populations. The advances made by the state regarding
minority citizen groups, particularly within the context of employment (economic) and education (social), are gifts.13
Legislative enactments designed to foster the growth of equality and thereby democratic justice (i.e., standards of
what is "right and fair") produce hegemonic effects constitutive only of narcissistic power.14 These effects are
eclipsed by counterfeit, although impactful, offerings. The omnipotence of majority sensibilities in Western cultures,
particularly in the United States, has produced an exploitative and nongiving existence for under- and nonrepresented
citizen groups. Despite the many rights-based movements during the past several decades that have ostensibly
conferred to minorities such abstract gifts as liberty, equality, and freedom, there remains an enduring wall dividing
the masses from those on whom such awards are bestowed. This fortified separation is most prominent in the (silent)
reverberations of state and federal legislative reforms.15 Relying on Derrida's (1991,1992,1997) critique, we can regard
such statutory reform initiatives as gifts; that is, they are something given to non-majority citizens by those in power;
they are tokens and emblems of empowerment in the process of equality and in the name of democratic justice. The
majority is presenting something to marginalized groups, something that the giver holds in its entirety: power.16 The
giver or presenter of such power will never, out of capitalistic conceit and greed, completely surrender that which it
owns. It is preposterous to believe that the narcissistic majority would give up so much as to threaten what they
own; that is, to surrender their hospice and community while authentically welcoming in the other as stranger. This
form of open-ended generosity has yet to occur in Western democratic societies and, perhaps, it never will. Thus, it is
logical to assume that, although unconscious in some respects, the efforts of the majority are parsimonious and
intended to secure (or accessorize) their own power.17 The following two means by which a gift enables self-
empowerment were already alluded to by Derrida (1997): (a) the giver (i.e., the sender or majority) either bestows to
show off his or her power or (b) gives to mobilize a cycle of reciprocation in which the receiver (i.e., the minority) will
be indebted. It is for these reasons that the majority gives. This explanation is not the same as authentically supporting
the cause of equality in furtherance of a cultural politics of difference and recognition.

Imperialism K AFF
Perm

Their protest against imperialism empirically fails and creates the illusion that they
create change only the perm solves

Clammer 07,*Chelsey How nonviolence protects the state,
http://feministreview.blogspot.com/2007/07/how-nonviolence-protects-state.html]

Do anti-war protests really stop the United States from invading another country?
Do pro-choice marches affect legislation on abortion? Did sit-ins during the Civil Rights
movement help to end racism? These are the questions that Peter Gelderloos asks in his new
book How Nonviolence Protects the State. With a wealth of experience in anti-prison work,
prisoner support organizations,and the anti-war and anti-globalization movements, Gelderloos
brings his seasoned perspective to these important issues. Drawing on large historical
events, such as the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, Gelderloos
shows how pacifists and nonviolent protests have not achieved the same results
that active resistance has. At a time when everyone in the world, except for the US
government, is realizing that US troops need to leave Iraq now, Gelderloos book argues how
ineffective the current peace movement has been at stopping the war and creating any sort of
political change. Before the war broke out over four years ago, *s+ome groups, like United for
Peace and Justice, suggested the protests might avert the war. Of course, they were totally
wrong, and the protests totally ineffective. The invasion occurred as planned, despite the millions of
people nominally, peacefully, and powerlessly opposed to it. So how do we switch our peace
movement from marching in the streets to actually resisting our government and creating
change? It is this question that Gelderloos has a difficult time answering. How Nonviolence
Protects the State is not meant to change any minds. Instead, it reads as a reassurance for
those who already know the ineffectiveness of peace movements. Gelderloos language is
aggressive at times, as he conflates peace activists with good sheep. But perhaps this is his
point. Maybe if we started to realize that marches and nonviolent protests were ultimately
tools of society to make people feel as if they are creating change, then we would actually
find a way to resist our government and create the change we want on our own terms.
Covering a diverse range of topics, from how nonviolence is racist to how nonviolence is
patriarchal, How Nonviolence Protects the State is an important book to read for anyone who
recognizes the ineffectiveness of peace activism today. And while the text doesnt provide
many answers, it does inspire the reader to reconsider her notions of activism and change.



Imperialism Impact Answers
Imperialism Good

Imperialism is necessary to solve poverty, democracy, human rights, warwe are not
the type of empire the neg claims
Barnett, Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, U.S. Naval War
College, 11
(Thomas P.M.,The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at
Crossroads, March 7 http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8099/the-new-rules-
leadership-fatigue-puts-u-sand- globalization-at-crossroads,)


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.

US imperialism is benevolentnot the same type of imperialism your authors are
talking about

Bil 2006 (Max, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, "Power for Good", The Weekly Standard. 10
April. Vol. 11, Issue 28, Factiva)

Ever since the end of the Cold War, experts of various stripes have been grappling with the
nature of American power. Clearly, with the demise of its only major rival, the United States
became really, really powerful. So powerful that the old term superpower doesnt seem to
cut it anymore. A French foreign minister suggested that hyperpower was more appropriate,
but that hasnt caught on. Other analysts have called the United States a hegemon, a global
policeman, even an empire. Ive been known to use the latter label myself, even though the
United States is no longer a territorial empire of the Roman type (as it was in the days of
Manifest Destiny). Michael Mandelbaum, professor of American foreign policy at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, doesnt think much of those who want to
cloak the old Republic in imperial ermine. American influence in the world is certainly
considerable, he writes, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the
politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special
cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule. He prefers to label the United
States the worlds government, though its hard to see why thats much of an improvement.
As Mandelbaum himself admits, There aremany governments in the world and the global
role of the United States, expansive though it is, does not look much like any of them. His
case for labeling the United States a global government, rather than a global empire, rests on a
rickety foundation. Traditionally, he notes, the imperial power has been seen as a
predator, drawing economic profit and political gain from its control of the imperial
possession, while the members of the society it controls suffer. The United States, he
correctly notes, does not exploit any states in this way. Instead, it provides the whole world
with valuable public goodsprincipally protection from predatorsthat are welcomed by
most of the worlds states. But that hardly makes it that different from the British Empire,
which also performed all sorts of public services, such as stamping out the slave trade and
piracy. Mandelbaum may see the United States as a particularly benign great power, and he is
not wrong to do so; but most empires of the past also saw themselves as advancing a mission
civilisatrice. His assurance that the United States means ithonestly!is not likely to mollify
Americas critics. Nor is his choice of terminology particularly reassuring. I cant see some
mandarin at the Quai dOrsay (the French foreign ministry) slapping himself on the forehead
and exclaiming, So they are not an empire after all. Theyre only the worlds government.
What a relief. Vive les Etats-Unis! The value of The Case for Goliath does not lie in its central
conceitthe United States as the worlds governmentbut in the arguments Mandelbaum
advances for why American power serves the interests of other countries. The case he makes
is not particularly novel (William Odom and Robert Dujarric made similar points in their 2004
book, Americas Inadvertent Empire), but it bears repeating at a time when the publishing
industry is churning out reams of paranoid tomes with titles like Rogue Nation, The Sorrows of
Empire, and The New American Militarism. Mandelbaum begins by listing five security
benefits the United States offers the world. First, the continuing deployment of American
troops in Europe is a reassurance that no sudden shifts in Europes security arrangements
would occur. Second, the United States has reduced the demand for nuclear weapons, and
the number of nuclear-armed countries, to levels considerably below what they otherwise
have reached, both by attempting to stop rogue states from acquiring nukes and by providing
nuclear protection to countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan that would
otherwise go nuclear. Third, the United States has fought terrorists across the world and
waged preventive war in Iraq to remove the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Fourth, the
United States has undertaken humanitarian interventions in such places as Bosnia and Kosovo,
which Mandelbaum likens to the practice, increasingly common in Western countries, of
removing children from the custody of parents who are abusing them. Fifth, the United
States has attempted to create the apparatus of a working, effective, decent government
in such dysfunctional places as Haiti and Afghanistan. Mandelbaum also points to five
economic benefits of American power. First, the United States provides the security
essential for international commerce by, for instance, policing Atlantic and Pacific shipping
lanes. Second, the United States safeguards the extraction and export of Middle Eastern oil,
the lifeblood of the global economy. Third, in the monetary realm, the United States has
made the dollar the worlds reserve currency and supplied loans to governments in the
throes of currency crises. Fourth, the United States has pushed for the expansion of
international trade by midwifing the World Trade Organization, the North American Free
Trade Agreement, and other instruments of liberalization. And fifth, by providing a ready
market for goods exported by such countries as China and Japan, the United States became
the indispensable supplier of demand to the world. Naturally, the United States gets scant
thanks for all these services provided gratis. But Mandelbaum points out that, for all their
griping, other countries have not pooled their resources to confront the enormous power of
the United States because, unlike the supremely powerful countries of the past, the United
States [does] not threaten them. Instead, the United States actually helps other nations
achieve shared goals such as democracy, peace, and prosperity.


A2 Root Cause

Saying imperialism is the root cause for all oppression masks more violent forms of
oppression

Halliday 99
*Fred, Middle East Report, The Middle East at the Millennial Turn
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer213/213_hallliday.html]

Recent developments in the Middle East and the onset of new global trends and uncertainties pose a
challenge not only to those who live in the region but also to those who engage it from outside. Here,
too, previously-established patterns of thought and commitment are now open to question. The context
of the l960s, in which journals such as MERIP Reports (the precursor of this publication) and the Journal
of the North American Committee on Latin America (NACLA) were founded, was one of solidarity with
the struggles of Third World peoples and opposition to external, imperialist intervention. That agenda
remains valid: Gross inequalities of wealth, power and access to rightsa.k.a. imperialismpersist. This
agenda has been enhanced by political and ethical developments in subsequent decades. Those who
struggle include not only the national groups (Palestinians and Kurds) oppressed by chauvinist regimes
and the workers and peasants (remember them?) whose labor sustains these states, but now also
includes analyses of gender oppression, press and academic suppression and the denial of ecological
security. The agenda has also elaborated a more explicit stress on individual rights in tandem with the
defense of collective rights. History itself and the changing intellectual context of the West have,
however, challenged this emancipatory agenda in some key respects. On the one hand, oppression,
denial of rights and military intervention are not the prerogative of external states alone: An anti-
imperialism that cannot recognizeand denounceindigenous forms of dictatorship and aggression, or
that seeks, with varying degrees of exaggeration, to blame all oppression and injustice on imperialism,
is deficient. The Iranian Revolution, Bathist Iraq, confessional militias in Lebanon, armed guerrilla
groups in a range of countries, not to mention the Taliban in Afghanistan, often represent a much
greater immediate threat to human rights and the principles in whose name solidarity was originally
formulated than does Western imperialism. Islamist movements from below meet repressive states
from above in their conduct. What many people in the region want is not less external involvement but
a greater commitment by the outside world, official and non-governmental, to protecting and realizing
rights that are universally proclaimed but seldom respected. At the same time, in a congruence
between relativist renunciation from the region and critiques of "foundationalist" and Enlightenment
thinking in the West, doubt has been cast on the very ethical foundation of solidarity: a belief in
universal human rights and the possibility of a solidarity based on such rights. Critical engagement with
the region is now often caught between a denunciation of the West's failure actively to pursue the
democratic and human rights principles it proclaims and a rejection of the validity of these principles as
well as the possibility of any external encouragement of them. This brings the argument back to the
critique of Western policy, and of the relation of that critique to the policy process itself. On human
rights and democratization, official Washington and its European friends continue to speak in
euphemism and evasion. But the issue here is not to see all US involvement as inherently negative, let
alone to denounce all international standards of rights as imperialist or ethnocentric, but rather, to hold
the US and its European allies accountable to the universal principles they proclaim elsewhere. An anti-
imperialism of disengagement serves only to reinforce the hold of authoritarian regimes and
oppressive social practices within the Middle East.




Neoliberalism Good

United states economic dominance prevents conflict
Griswold, Associated Director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the CATO
Institute in Washington, 02
(Daniel, seven Moral Arguments for Free Trade, The Insider, 01 May,
http://www.insideronline.org/feature.cfm?id=106)

In an 1845 speech in the British House of Commons, Richard Cobden called free trade
that advance which is calculated to knit nations more together in the bonds of peace by
means of commercial intercourse. Free trade does not guarantee peace, but it does
strengthen peace by raising the cost of war to governments and their citizens. As nations become
more integrated through expanding markets, they have more to lose should trade be disrupted.
In recent years, the twin trends of globalization and democratization have produced
their own peace dividend: since 1987, real spending on armaments throughout the
world has dropped by more than one-third. Since the end of the Cold War, the threat of major
international wars has receded. Those nations most closely associated with international
terrorism Libya, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea are among
the least globalized countries in the world in terms of non-oil trade and foreign
investment. Not one of them belongs to the World Trade Organization. During the
1930s, the industrialized nations waged trade wars against each other. They raised
tariffs and imposed quotas in order to protect domestic industry. The result, however,
was that other nations only raised their barriers even further, choking off global trade
and deepening and prolonging the global economic depression. Those dark economic
times contributed to the conflict that became World War II. Americas post-war policy of encouraging
free trade through multilateral trade agreements was aimed at promoting peace as much as it was
prosperity.

Neoliberalism is key to democracychecks war
Griswold, Associated Director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the CATO
Institute in Washington, 2007
(Daniel, Trade, Democracy and Peace: The Virtuous Cycle, 20 April 2007,
http://www.freetrade.org/node/681)

The good news does not stop there. Buried beneath the daily stories about suicide
bombings and insurgency movements is an underappreciated but encouraging fact: The
world has somehow become a more peaceful place. A little-noticed headline on an Associated
Press story a while back reported, "War declining worldwide, studies say." In 2006, a survey by
the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute found that the number of armed
conflicts around the world has been in decline for the past half-century. Since the early 1990s,
ongoing conflicts have dropped from 33 to 17, with all of them now civil conflicts within
countries. The Institute's latest report found that 2005 marked the second year in a row
that no two nations were at war with one another. What a remarkable and wonderful
fact. The death toll from war has also been falling. According to the Associated Press report,
"The number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period,
dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions, meanwhile, are
growing in number." Current estimates of people killed by war are down sharply from
annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990s, and from a peak of 700,000 in
1951 during the Korean War. Many causes lie behind the good news--the end of the
Cold War and the spread of democracy, among them--but expanding trade and
globalization appear to be playing a major role in promoting world peace. Far from stoking a
"World on Fire," as one misguided American author argued in a forgettable book,
growing commercial ties between nations have had a dampening effect on armed conflict and war. I
would argue that free trade and globalization have promoted peace in three main ways. First, as I
argued a moment ago, trade and globalization have reinforced the trend toward democracy, and
democracies tend not to pick fights with each other. Thanks in part to globalization, almost
two thirds of the world's countries today are democracies--a record high. Some studies
have cast doubt on the idea that democracies are less likely to fight wars. While it's true
that democracies rarely if ever war with each other, it is not such a rare occurrence for
democracies to engage in wars with nondemocracies. We can still hope that has more
countries turn to democracy, there will be fewer provocations for war by non-
democracies.

Neoliberalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty
Pipe, staff writer at The South Australia Globalist, 2011
(Nicholas, The South Australia Globalist, "The Global Financial Crisis", 2011,
perspectivist.com/business/the-global-financial-crisis)

When assisted by the other neo-liberal views of globalisation and foreign investment, this economic
growth leads to other social benefits; it trickles down to marginalised populations, while open
borders ensure the most efficient distributions of goods worldwide. As a result, closing the gap
between affluent and marginalised populations is encouraged. Ergas summarises the effects of this
phenomenon as: (liberalism) works, while the interventionist prescription doesnt. Ask the hundreds of
millions of Chinese, Indians and Vietnamese whom liberalisation has lifted out of poverty. The benefits
of neo-liberalism are clear, and it is fallacious to overlook them when judging the system itself in the
wake of the GFC. Yet there is something else that any critic of neo-liberalism must consider the fact
that, like it or not, neo-liberalism is here to stay. As Chris Brown notes, the system has become
hegemonic and so deeply entrenched in society that its ideals are now part of how things really are. You
only have to look at the US Governments need to bail out and protect several corporations at the
height of the GFC to see how deep rooted the neo-liberalism system is, and how its influence lives on.