2015 NDI 6WS Defending

Apocalyptic Reps

Climate

Generic
Even if our representations arent completely accurate- Our framing
drives action
Schatz 12 (Jul. 2012. Dr. JL Schatz is the director of speech and debate at Binghamton University. He has written several
pieces focusing on environmental issues. The Importance of Apocalypse: The Value of End-of-the-World Politics While Advancing
Ecocriticism The Journal of Ecocriticism. A peer reviewed journal.
http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe/article/viewFile/394/382 //HS)

It is no longer a question that human interaction with the world is destroying the
very ecosystems that sustain life1 . Nevertheless, within academic communities people are
divided over which discursive tactic, ontological position, or strategy for activism should be
adopted. I contend that regardless of an ecocritics particular orientation that ecocriticism most
effectively produces change when it doesnt neglect the tangible reality that surrounds any
discussion of the environment. This demands including human-induced ecocidal
violence within all our accounts. Retreating from images of ecological collapse to
speak purely within inner-academic or policymaking circles isolates our
conversations away from the rest of the worldas it dies before our eyes. * J.L. Schatz
(debate@binghamton.edu) Journal of Ecocriticism 4(2) July 2012 The Importance of the Apocalypse (1-20) 21 This is not to
argue that interrogating peoples discourse, tactics, ontological orientation, or anything else
lacks merit. Timothy Luke, Chair and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, explains
that Because nothing in Nature simply is given within society, such terms must be assigned
significance by every social group that mobilizes them[.] Many styles of ecologically grounded criticism
circulate in present-day American mass culture, partisan debate, consumer society, academic discourse, and electoral politics as
episodes of ecocritique, contesting our politics of nature, economy, and culture in the contemporary global system of capitalist
production and consumption. (1997: xi) Luke

reminds us that regardless of how ecocritics advance their

agenda they always impact our environmental awareness and therefore alter our surrounding ecology. In doing
so he shows that both literal governmental policies and the symbolic universe they take place within reconstruct the discourses
utilized to justify policy and criticism in the first place. This is why films

like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 can put

forth realistic depictions of government response to environmental apocalypse . And despite being
fictional, these films in turn can influence the reality of governmental policy . Even the science-fiction of
weather-controlling weapons are now only steps away from becoming reality2 . Oftentimes it takes images of
planetary annihilation to motivate people into action after years of sitting idly by watching things
slowly decay. In reality it takes awareness of impending disaster to compel
policymakers to enact even piecemeal reform. On the screen it takes the actual appearance of ecological
apocalypse to set the plot in motion. What is constant is that as these debates unfold, visions of what is the good or bad life find
many of their most compelling articulations as ecocritiques [that are] mobilized for and against various projects of power and
economy in the organization of our everyday existence (Luke 1997: xi). We

cannot motivate people to change the

ecological conditions that give rise to thoughts of theorization without reference to the concrete
environmental destruction ongoing in reality. This means that, even when our images of
apocalypse arent fully accurate, our use of elements of scientifically-established
reality reconstructs the surrounding power structures in beneficial ways. When we ignore
either ecological metaphors or environmental reality we only get part of the picture.`

Their critique of rhetoric creates procrastination- ensures endless

climate change and extinction
Schatz 12 (Jul. 2012. Dr. JL Schatz is the director of speech and debate at Binghamton University. He has written several
pieces focusing on environmental issues. The Importance of Apocalypse: The Value of End-of-the-World Politics While Advancing
Ecocriticism The Journal of Ecocriticism. A peer reviewed journal.
http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe/article/viewFile/394/382 //HS)

In recent years, many ecocritics have shied away from the very metaphors that compel a sense of
urgency. They have largely done so out of the fear that its deployment will get co-opted by hegemonic
institutions. Such critics ignore how what we advocate alters our understanding of ourselves
to the surrounding ecology. In doing so, our advocacies render such co-optation meaningless because of the
possibility to redeploy our metaphors in the future. In the upcoming sections, I will provide an overview of how

poststructuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger influence some ecocritics
to retreat from omnicidal rhetoric. This retreat minimizes the main objectives of their
ecocriticism. I argue that rather than withdrawing from images of apocalypse that we
should utilize them in subversive ways to disrupt the current relationship people
have to their ecology. Professor of Sociology at York University, Fuyuki Kurasawa argues that instead of
bemoaning the contemporary preeminence of a dystopian imaginary it can enable a novel
form of transnational socio-political action that can be termed preventive foresight. [I]t is
a mode of ethico-political practice enacted by participants in the Journal of Ecocriticism 4(2) July
2012 The Importance of the Apocalypse (1-20) 22 emerging realm of global civil society [by] putting into practice a
sense of responsibility for the future by attempting to prevent global catastrophes (454-455). By
understanding how metaphors around the environment operate we can better utilize discourse
to steer us away from the brink of apocalypse . The alternative of abandoning apocalyptic
deployments is far worse. Put simply, by minimizing the urgency or gravity of potential threats,
procrastination appears legitimate (Kurasawa 462). In the final section of my essay, I outline how ecocritics can utilize
images of omnicide to motivate the evolution of successful tactics that can slow the pace of environmental destruction.

Our rhetoric sparks concern for the climate- spurs action

Hinsliff 06 (Oct. 28, 2006. Gaby Hinsliff is a columnist for The Guardian and is a former political editor of The Observer.
3.68 trillion: The price of failing to act on climate change The Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2006/oct/29/greenpolitics.politics //HS)
Britons face the prospect of a welter of new green taxes to tackle climate change, as the

most authoritative report on

global warming warns it will cost the world up to 3.68 trillion unless it is tackled within a
decade. The review by Sir Nicholas Stern, commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and published
tomorrow, marks a crucial point in the debate by underlining how failure to act would
trigger a catastrophic global recession. Unchecked climate change would turn 200 million people into
refugees, the largest migration in modern history, as their homes succumbed to drought or flood. Stern also warns that a successor
to the Kyoto agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be signed next year, not by 2010/11 as planned. He forecasts
that the world needs to spend 1 per cent of global GDP - equivalent to about 184bn - dealing with climate change now, or face a bill
between five and 20 times higher for damage caused by letting it continue. Unchecked climate change could thus cost as much as
566 for every man, woman and child now on the planet - roughly 6.5 billion people. The

700-page report argues that

an international framework on climate change covering the globe will be necessary , and that different
countries may opt to reduce emissions differently. Options range from many more green taxes to carbon trading. Stern's
verdict will create fierce political debate, with a growing belief in government that
taxes on activities such as driving or flying will have to rise. A leaked letter from the
Environment Secretary, David Miliband, to the Chancellor, in the Mail on Sunday, proposes a range of 'green' tax increases. Stephen
Byers, the former cabinet minister and member

of an expert panel of international politicians on climate

change, is meanwhile urging new taxes to help change behaviour, including a 'global warming premium' on
exotic fruit, vegetables and flowers flown thousands of miles across the world. 'There will need to be a global
response [to Stern], but it must also filter down to change at domestic level,' he told an audience of businessmen in
China this weekend. 'For the Labour party there must be no no-go areas for policy debate. The politics of taxation is changing and we
need to be leading the debate, not playing catch-up. We should consider how we can change the structure of our tax system in a way
which benefits the lowest-paid and penalises environmentally damaging activity.' Byers is the first of several senior Labour figures
expected to go public over green taxes, reflecting views within Downing Street that the public now fears climate change sufficiently
to pay more for gas-guzzling activities. Charles Clarke, the former Home Secretary, is expected to join the debate, while Alan
Milburn raised the issue in a recent speech. Such interventions will irritate the Chancellor, who regards taxation as his turf,
particularly in advance of his autumn pre-budget report. Air freight is one of the most lightly taxed areas of transport since aviation

fuel is tax-free and there are no passengers to pay duty. Yet green campaigners say the planet can ill afford the thousands of 'food
miles' travelled by exotic produce. One kilo of kiwi fruit flown from New Zealand to Europe discharges 5kg of carbon into the
atmosphere. Other options include hiking car tax on fuel-inefficient vehicles and cutting stamp duty on the purchase of energyefficient houses. Byers will argue tax rises should be offset by cuts elsewhere. The

Stern report will advocate

extending the European 'cap and trade' system - under which carbon emissions are capped at a certain level, with
businesses which need to emit more forced to buy spare emissions quotas from low-polluting businesses around the world,

encouraging industry to find cleaner and cheaper ways of operating. He will also urge a
doubling of investment in energy research and a speedier Kyoto process - meaning that negotiations with the US will have to be
undertaken while George Bush is still president. International governments had hoped to deal with a more sympathetic successor
after 2008. Downing

Street and the Treasury believe that the report marks a decisive
moment in international politics. Stern's is the first heavyweight contribution by an economist rather than a
scientist and senior officials believe he will make what might seem a hopelessly ambitious timetable
credible. 'This will give us an argument to make,' said a Whitehall source. 'I think we are at a tipping point in
terms of the debate, as we were at a tipping point in 2004/05 in terms of the science.' Stern's forecast cost of 1 per cent
of global GDP is roughly the same amount as is spent worldwide on advertising, and half what the World Bank estimates a fullblown flu pandemic would cost. Without early intervention, he estimates the cost would be 5-20 per cent of GDP, some paid by
governments, some by the private sector. But he stresses that unilateral action will not be enough - if Britain shut down all its power
stations tomorrow, the reduction in global emissions would be cancelled out within 13 months by rising emissions from China. Stern
will advocate new funds to help Africa and developing nations adapt, but will argue the key challenge is from emerging nations such
as China and India. Emissions from China are nearly level with the US and likely to increase as the Chinese get more cars and
electrical goods - up to 30 million households are likely to get digital TVs alone in the next few years. Britain will push this week for
more energy-efficient consumer goods. The Tory environment spokesman, Peter Ainsworth, who has argued green tax should rise as
a proportion of overall taxation, said he hoped the

Stern report 'spurs the government into being

much more proactive than it has been'.

AT: Biopolitics
Kritiks are irrelevant- even if we get coopted by institutions, we bring
attention to climate change and catalyze solvency
Schatz 12 (Jul. 2012. Dr. JL Schatz is the director of speech and debate at Binghamton University. He has written several
pieces focusing on environmental issues. The Importance of Apocalypse: The Value of End-of-the-World Politics While Advancing
Ecocriticism The Journal of Ecocriticism. A peer reviewed journal.
http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe/article/viewFile/394/382 //HS)

Any hesitancy to deploy images of apocalypse out of the risk of acting in a biopolitical manner
ignores how any particular metaphorapocalyptic or notalways risks getting co-opted. It does not excuse inaction.
Clearly hegemonic forces have already assumed control of determining environmental practices
when one looks at the debates surrounding off-shore drilling, climate change, and biodiversity
within the halls of Congress. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems will go unsolved only to fester
more ominously into the future. [E]cological crisis cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of
internationalized markets, finance, and communications (Boggs 774). If

it werent for people such as Watson

things like whaling to the end of the world it wouldnt get the needed coverage to
enter into public discourse. It takes big news to make headlines and hold attention spans in the
electronic age. Sometimes it even takes a reality TV show on Animal Planet. As Luke reminds us, Those who dominate
the world exploit their positions to their advantage by defining how the world is known . Unless they
connecting

also face resistance, questioning, and challenge from those who are dominated, they certainly will remain the dominant forces
(2003: 413). Merely

sitting back and theorizing over metaphorical deployments does a

grave injustice to the gains activists are making on the ground . It also allows
hegemonic institutions to continually define the debate over the environment by framing out
any attempt for significant change, whether it be radical or reformist. Only by jumping on every
opportunity for resistance can ecocriticism have the hopes of combatting the current ecological
reality. This means we must recognize that we cannot fully escape the masters house since the
surrounding environment always shapes any form of resistance. Therefore, we ought to act even
if we may get co-opted. As Foucault himself reminds us, instead of radial ruptures more often one is dealing with
mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about[.] And it is doubtless the
strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible , somewhat similar
to the way in which the state relies on the institutional Journal of Ecocriticism 4(2) July 2012 The Importance of the Apocalypse (120) 25 integration of power relationships. It is in this sphere of force relations that we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power

If we take
seriously these notions on the exercise and circulation of power, then we open up the field
of possibility to talk about particular kinds of environmentalism (Rutherford 296). This is not to say that
all actions are resistant. Rather, the revolutionary actions that are truly resistant oftentimes appear
mundane since it is more about altering the intelligibility that frames discussions around the
environment than any specific policy change. Again, this is why people like Watson use one issue as a jumping off
point to talk about wider politics of ecological awareness. Campaigns that look to the government or a
single policy but for a moment, and then go on to challenge hegemonic interactions
with the environment through other tactics, allows us to codify strategic points of
resistance in numerous places at once. Again, this does not mean we must agree with every tactic. It does
mean that even failed attempts are meaningful. For example, while PETAs ad campaigns have drawn
criticism for comparing factory farms to the Holocaust, and featuring naked women whod rather go naked than wear fur, their
importance extends beyond the ads alone6 . By bringing the issues to the forefront they draw
upon known metaphors and reframe the way people talk about animals despite their potentially antiSemitic and misogynist underpinnings. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris theorization of the multitude serves
as an excellent illustration of how utilizing the power of the masters biopolitical tools can
(96-97). Here Foucault asks us to think about resistance differently, as not anterior to power, but a component of it.

become powerful enough to deconstruct its house despite the risk of co-optation or backlash. For
them, the multitude is defined by the growing global force of people around the world who are linked together by their common
struggles without being formally organized in a hierarchal way. While Hardt and Negri mostly talk about the multitude in relation to
global capitalism, their understanding of the commons and analysis of resistance is useful for any ecocritic. They explain, [T]he
multitude has matured to such an extent that it is becoming able, through its networks of communication and cooperation [and]
its production of the common, to sustain an alternative democratic society on its own. Revolutionary politics must grasp, in the
movement of the multitudes and through the accumulation of common and cooperative decisions, the moment of rupture that can
create a new world. In the face of the destructive state of exception of biopower, then, there is also a constituent state of exception of
democratic biopolitics[,] creating a new constitutive temporality. (357) Once

one understands the world as

interconnectedinstead of constructed by different nation-states and single environments
conditions in one area of the globe couldnt be conceptually severed from any other. In short, wed all
have a stake in the global commons. Ecocritics can then utilize biopolitics to shape discourse and fight
against governmental biopower by waking people up to the pressing need to inaugurate a new
future for there to be any future. Influencing other people through argument and endof-the-world tactics is not the same biopower of the state so long as it doesnt singularize itself but
for temporary moments. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to hope that in a biopolitical future (after the defeat of biopower) war will
no longer be possible, and the intensity of the cooperation and communication among singularities will destroy its [very]
possibility (Hardt & Negri 347). In the Journal of Ecocriticism 4(2) July 2012 The Importance of the Apocalypse (1-20) 26 context
of capitalism, when wealth fails to trickle down it would be seen as a problem for the top since it would stand testament to their
failure to equitably distribute wealth. In

the context of environmentalism, not-in-my-backyard reasoning

that displaces ecological destruction elsewhere would be exposed for the failure that it is. There is
no backyard that is not ones own. Ultimately, images of planetary doom demonstrate how we
are all interconnected and in doing so inaugurate a new world where multitudes, and not
governments, guide the fate of the planet.

AT: Ontology
Ontological thinking is not exclusive with striving for environmental
protection- the perm solves
Schatz 12 (Jul. 2012. Dr. JL Schatz is the director of speech and debate at Binghamton University. He has written several
pieces focusing on environmental issues. The Importance of Apocalypse: The Value of End-of-the-World Politics While Advancing
Ecocriticism The Journal of Ecocriticism. A peer reviewed journal.
http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe/article/viewFile/394/382 //HS)

Beyond the question of discourse, some ecocritics place ontology at the forefront of their
analysis. This approach criticizes those who call for action because of how the desire to fix the environment shapes ones Being in
managerial ways7 . Here the issue is not fixing certain environmental practices. Instead the focus is on
the way people enframe their sense of self to claim the transcendental authority to regulate life. As
Ladelle McWhorter, Professor of Philosophy at Northeast Missouri State University, points out, We are inundated by
predictions of ecological catastrophe and omnicidal doom. Our usual response to such prophecies of doom is to scramble to
find some way to manage our problems[.] But over and over again new resource management
techniques disrupt delicate systems even further, doing still more damage to a planet already dangerously out of
ecological balance. Our ceaseless interventions seem only to make things worse[.] In fact, it would appear that our trying to do
things, change things, fix things cannot be the solution, because it is part of the problem itself. (7-8) The

foundation
behind ontological approaches such as McWhorters is that we should refrain from
acting even when we are met with the possibility of extinction . To clarify, it is not that
current practices arent destructive from this perspective. For such critics, acting to overcome such
destruction participates is the same kind of violence because it causes us to forget our relationship with the
environment as we become actors over it. Heidegger speaks of what he sees as the danger of dangers [in this] kind of
forgetfulness, a forgetfulness that Heidegger thought could result not only in nuclear disaster or environmental catastrophe, but in
the loss of what makes us the kind of beings we are, beings who can think and who can stand in thoughtful relationship to things
(McWhorter 10). Once we forget that we are also part of the environment we empty our Being of any meaning and deprive ourselves
of the very relationships that give us value in the first place. The

question arises, if we cant act then how

can we prevent environmental destruction? The answer for thinkers that center their
criticism on ontology is to rethink the very basis of how we think in the first place. For instance,
William Spanos, one of the worlds leading experts on Heideggerian thought, argues that there is an urgency of
retrieving the unfinished post-structuralist ontological project to rethink thinking itself. By this I
mean the need to dis-close, to open up, to think that which the triumphant metaphysical/calculative-technological-disciplinary logic
of the imperial West has closed off and accommodated or repressed. To rethink thinking means, in short, to liberate Journal of
Ecocriticism 4(2) July 2012 The Importance of the Apocalypse (1-20) 27 precisely that relay of differential forces that the
structuralizing and disciplinary imperatives of the ontotheological tradition has colonized in its final anthropological phase. (22)
Once again, even

for people like Spanos, placing ontology prior to politics does not
deny that present actions are unquestionably destructive. Such an approach also
acknowledges that acting is always inevitable because one is already situated within an
environment. In this context even thinking is action since engaging in ontological examination produces new forms of thought
that alters our will to act. Spanos elaborates that this project is important not simply for the sake of rethinking the question of
being as such, but also to instigate a rethinking of the uneven relay of practical historical imperatives [and] to make visible the
Wests perennial global imperial project (29). He contends

that, once we rethink the way we think, our

actions will evolve because focusing on the way ontology grounds our representations alters the way
we be-in-the-world. However, for this strategy to work ones rethinking of thinking must still
thoughtfully envision a positive future for us to evolve toward. We will be powerless to do anything besides
produce new enframings of the world if our discussions only exist at the level of abstraction. For both Heidegger and revolutionary
environmentalists, there exist possibilities for transformation despite the destructiveness of Enframing. In the midst of technological
peril there emerges a sense of solidarity of human with nonhuman beings. It is precisely the experience of this solidarity which
must be constantly rearticulated in order to provide a historically and ontologically authentic break with the metaphysics of
technical control and capitalist exploitation. Action

will only be truly revolutionary if it revolves around

engagement in solidarity with nature, where liberation is always seen both as human liberation from the confines of
Enframing and simultaneously as liberation of animal nations and eco-regions from human technics. Anything less will always lapse

back into disciplinary control over humans, nonhumans, and the Earth. (Best and Nocella 82) As a result, the problem lies in the
way one enframes other creatures as a standing reserve when they relate to politics, and not in action itself. A deep ecological
perspective that recognizes the interconnectedness of all life could enable the possibility of acting without enframing. People like Ric
OBarry, who was Flippers trainer, serve as excellent examples of how to act while inhabiting such a perspective. Ric used his
popularity to make an award-winning documentary, titled The Cove, which brought awareness to the horrors of dolphin killing and
the similarities we share with these sentient creatures. It was even powerful enough to stir up debate in Japan about the practice of
eating dolphin meat (Becker). It is not that Ric doesnt use his notoriety to push for legislative change at the national and
international level. He certainly does. However, he does so without giving up his personal commitment to directly change things in
the same way as Watson does. This willingness to act directly alters the ontological representations around which such debates take
place by reframing the metaphors policymakers use to justify their legislative initiatives. Despite

the merits of
ontological ecocriticism, using it to prohibit ecocritical appeals for concrete action
fractures a movement that should work in coalition. We should not approach our
choices as an either/or situation. Strategies of direct action can be compatible with Heideggerian thought so long as we
understand such action as always already inevitable and not a way to enframe others. Deploying Journal of Ecocriticism 4(2) July
2012 The Importance of the Apocalypse (1-20) 28 apocalyptic

threats can challenge hegemonic systems since

they serve as a catalyst for evolving change instead of legislating it. In fact, the pervasiveness of a
dystopian imaginary can help notions of historical contingency and fallibilism gain traction
against their determinist and absolutist counterparts. Once we recognize that the future is uncertain and that
any course of action produces both unintended and unexpected consequences, the responsibility to face up to
potential disasters can act as catalysts for public debate and socio-political action, spurring
citizens involvement in the work of preventive foresight (Kurasawa 458). Put plainly, we must
understand any action in both its social and political dimensions . As the way we confront
environmental challenges change so too does the conditions surrounding ecocriticism . To alter
conditions in the political or social realm is always already to impact the other. This allows us to
redeploy even problematic deployments in order to reshape the public debates surrounding
ecological awareness. Just as discourse can serve governmental biopower or civic biopolitics, our ontological
connections can at any moment serve both as an avenue for repression or a venue for resistance.
It is not the ecocritics task to proscribe how other people should interact with the environment.
Instead they should act within their environment in a way that makes the necessary actions to
save our planet beneficial. Our eco-orientation to the world will evolve our Beings very possibility to act in the same way
language, technology, and species evolve based upon their interactions with living and social organisms. No doubt, the power that is
inherent in language is thus not something that is centralized, emanating from a pre-given subject. Rather, like the discursive
practices in which it inheres, power is dispersed and, most important, is productive of subjects and their worlds (Doty, 1993: 302303). In large part the

current environmental destruction exists because democratic capitalism has

been able to wield its hegemonic influence to exploit the niche of technological production. Sadly, this niche
rewards increased GDP over the planets ecological well-being. The belief that these conditions
cannot be unthought is not merely misplaced but also serves to support the hegemonic myth of
the inevitability of capitalism. It is up to each of us to directly act upon this world only
after we approach the question of acting differently . Only then can we see past the
current imperial enframing and inspire true collective action.

China

China Aggressive/Action Key

China is aggressive action is key to preventing conflict
Auslin 12 Michael Auslin is a resident scholar and the director of Japan studies at the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), where he specializes in Asian regional security and political issues, Beijing Proves its Aggressive
Intentions, 7/27/12, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/312448/beijing-proves-its-aggressive-intentionsmichael-auslin//OF

We now have proof of Chinas intention to assert its territorial claims with military strength. This
week, Beijing set up a new provincial-level city government to administer all its island claims in
the South China Sea, as well as administer all the waters in the Sea, and elected a mayor for its insta-city of Sansha. The
new governing council will represent approximately 1,100 Chinese residents of three island groups, all of which are claimed by

Beijing
is also setting up a military garrison on Yongxing Island, which is also claimed by Vietnam . The
garrison will serve self-defense purposes and carry out military operations, according to Chinese news reports. While it is
unclear now how large the garrison will be, it is a game-changing political decision by Beijing. It
essentially reveals Beijings plan for controlling disputed territory, which was the concern of
those of us who feared what the growth of Chinas military would mean for how nations acted in
Asia. It makes power politics the reality, not just the possibility, in the South China Sea, and it
forces smaller nations to decide if they can in any realistic way continue to oppose Chinas
claims. If accepted by other nations, this weeks moves will signal the beginning of true Chinese hegemony in Asia, and the
creation of a new norm of regional politics based on might. Beijings announcement should put enormous
pressure on Washington. There are times for quiet diplomacy and behind-closed-doors talk, and there are times
to clearly draw a line in the sand. This is not a casus belli, of course; but neither can it be overlooked, for one
garrison can lead to another and then another. It may not happen this year or next, but if the Sansha garrison becomes
an effective power, and is allowed to stand, then it will inexorably spread . Washington must
make clear to Beijing that this course will result in some response from America ,
multiple countries, including Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, in addition to China. The real news, however, is that

such as enhanced military aid to Southeast Asian nations, the end of military-to-military discussions between China and the U.S., or
a refusal to ease export restrictions targeting China. If

we do nothing, and hope its yet another boast from a

paper dragon, we will wake up to a South China Sea that is de facto controlled by China. That
may well lead to an environment in which we will find ourselves pulled into
conflict between China and its neighbors, or one in which we pull up stakes due to the desire to avoid
confrontation, and thereby announce the end of our influence in Asia.

China already views the US as a threat bilateral coop on equal

footing is the only way to maintain balance of power its try or die for
the aff
*This card is really long so I kept it broken up in paragraphs so that you can just use what you
need

Nathan and Scobell 12 Andrew J. Nathan is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University
Andrew Scobell is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, How China Sees America,
September/October 2012, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2012-08-16/how-china-sees-america//OF

Americans sometimes view the Chinese state as inscrutable. But given the way that power is
divided in the U.S. political system and the frequent power turnovers between the two main
parties in the United States, the Chinese also have a hard time determining U.S.

intentions. Nevertheless, over recent decades, a long-term U.S. strategy seems to have emerged out
of a series of American actions toward China. So it is not a hopeless exercise -- indeed, it is
necessary -- for the Chinese to try to analyze the United States.
Most Americans would be surprised to learn the degree to which the

Chinese believe the United States is a

revisionist power that seeks to curtail China's political influence and harm China's
interests. This view is shaped not only by Beijing's understanding of Washington but also by
the broader Chinese view of the international system and China's place in it, a view determined
in large part by China's acute sense of its own vulnerability.
THE FOUR RINGS

The world as seen from Beijing is a terrain of hazards, beginning with the streets outside the
policymaker's window, to land borders and sea-lanes thousands of miles away, to the mines and oil fields of distant continents.
These threats can be described in four concentric rings. In the first ring, the entire territory that China administers or claims,

Beijing believes that China's political stability and territorial integrity are
threatened by foreign actors and forces. Compared with other large countries, China must deal with
an unparalleled number of outside actors trying to influence its evolution, often in ways the
regime considers detrimental to its survival. Foreign investors, development advisers, tourists, and students swarm
the country, all with their own ideas about how China should change. Foreign foundations and governments give financial and
technical support to Chinese groups promoting civil society. Dissidents in Tibet and Xinjiang receive moral and diplomatic support
and sometimes material assistance from ethnic diasporas and sympathetic governments abroad. Along the coast, neighbors contest
maritime territories that Beijing claims. Taiwan is ruled by its own government, which enjoys diplomatic recognition from 23 states
and a security guarantee from the United States.
At China's borders, policymakers face a second ring of security concerns, involving China's relations with 14 adjacent countries. No
other country except Russia has as many contiguous neighbors. They include five countries with which China has fought wars in the
past 70 years (India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and Vietnam) and a number of states ruled by unstable regimes. None of China's
neighbors perceives its core national interests as congruent with Beijing's.
But China seldom has the luxury of dealing with any of its neighbors in a purely bilateral context. The third ring of Chinese security
concerns consists of the politics of the six distinct geopolitical regions that surround China: Northeast Asia, Oceania, continental
Southeast Asia, maritime Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia. Each of these areas presents complex regional diplomatic
and security problems.
Finally, there

is the fourth ring: the world far beyond China's immediate neighborhood . China has
truly entered this farthest circle only since the late 1990s and so far for limited purposes: to secure sources of
commodities, such as petroleum; to gain access to markets and investments; to get diplomatic support for isolating Taiwan and
Tibet's Dalai Lama; and to

recruit allies for China's positions on international norms and legal regimes.

INSCRUTABLE AMERICA

In each of China's four security rings, the United States is omnipresent . It is the most
intrusive outside actor in China's internal affairs, the guarantor of the status quo in Taiwan, the
largest naval presence in the East China and South China seas, the formal or informal military
ally of many of China's neighbors, and the primary framer and defender of existing international
legal regimes. This omnipresence means that China's understanding of American motives
determines how the Chinese deal with most of their security issues.
Beginning with President Richard Nixon, who visited China in 1972, a succession of American

leaders have assured

China of their goodwill. Every U.S. presidential administration says that China's prosperity and
stability are in the interest of the United States. And in practice, the United States has done more than any other
power to contribute to China's modernization. It has drawn China into the global economy; given the Chinese access to markets,
capital, and technology; trained Chinese experts in science, technology, and international law; prevented the full remilitarization of
Japan; maintained the peace on the Korean Peninsula; and helped avoid a war over Taiwan.
Yet Chinese

policymakers are more impressed by policies and behaviors that they

perceive as less benevolent. The American military is deployed all around China's periphery,

and the United States maintains a wide network of defense relationships with China's neighbors.
Washington continues to frustrate Beijing's efforts to gain control over Taiwan. The United States constantly
pressures China over its economic policies and maintains a host of government and private
programs that seek to influence Chinese civil society and politics.
Chinese
analysts see their country as heir to an agrarian, eastern strategic tradition that is pacifistic,
defense-minded, nonexpansionist, and ethical. In contrast, they see Western strategic culture
-- especially that of the United States -- as militaristic, offense-minded,
expansionist, and selfish.
Beijing views this seemingly contradictory set of American actions through three reinforcing perspectives. First,

Second, although China has embraced state capitalism with vigor, the

Chinese view of the United States is still

informed by Marxist political thought, which posits that capitalist powers seek to exploit the rest
of the world. China expects Western powers to resist Chinese competition for resources and
higher-value-added markets. And although China runs trade surpluses with the United States and holds a large amount
of U.S. debt, China's leading political analysts believe the Americans get the better end of the deal
by using cheap Chinese labor and credit to live beyond their means .
Third, American

theories of international relations have become popular among younger Chinese

policy analysts, many of whom have earned advanced degrees in the United States. The most influential body of international
relations theory in China is so-called offensive realism, which holds that a country will try to control its
security environment to the full extent that its capabilities permit. According to this theory, the
United States cannot be satisfied with the existence of a powerful China and therefore seeks to
make the ruling regime there weaker and more pro-American. Chinese analysts see evidence of this
intent in Washington's calls for democracy and its support for what China sees as separatist movements in Taiwan,
Tibet, and Xinjiang.
Whether they see the United States primarily through a culturalist, Marxist, or realist lens, most

Chinese strategists
assume that a country as powerful as the United States will use its power to
preserve and enhance its privileges and will treat efforts by other countries to
protect their interests as threats to its own security. This assumption leads to a
pessimistic conclusion: as China rises, the United States will resist. The United States uses soothing words;
casts its actions as a search for peace, human rights, and a level playing field; and sometimes offers China genuine assistance. But

the United States is two-faced. It intends to remain the global hegemon and prevent China from
growing strong enough to challenge it. In a 2011 interview with Liaowang, a state-run Chinese newsmagazine, Ni Feng,
the deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of American Studies, summed up this view. "On the one
hand, the United States realizes that it needs China's help on many regional and global issues," he said. "On the other hand, the
United States is worried about a more powerful China and uses multiple means to delay its development and to remake China with
U.S. values."

A small group of mostly younger Chinese analysts who have closely studied the United States
argues that Chinese and American interests are not totally at odds. In their view, the two countries are
sufficiently remote from each other that their core security interests need not clash. They can gain mutual benefit from trade and
other common interests.
But those holding such views are

outnumbered by strategists on the other side of the spectrum, mostly

personnel from the military and security agencies, who take a dim view of U.S. policy and have
more confrontational ideas about how China should respond to it. They believe that China must stand up to
the United States militarily and that it can win a conflict, should one occur, by outpacing U.S. military technology and taking
advantage of what they believe to be superior morale within China's armed forces. Their views are usually kept out of sight to avoid
frightening both China's rivals and its friends.
WHO IS THE REVISIONIST?

To peer more deeply into the logic of the United States' China strategy, Chinese analysts, like
analysts everywhere, look at capabilities and intentions. Although U.S. intentions might be
subject to interpretation, U.S. military, economic, ideological, and diplomatic capabilities are
relatively easy to discover -- and from the Chinese point of view, they are potentially devastating.
U.S. military forces are globally deployed and technologically advanced, with massive
concentrations of firepower all around the Chinese rim. The U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) is the largest of
the United States' six regional combatant commands in terms of its geographic scope and nonwartime manpower. PACOM's assets
include about 325,000 military and civilian personnel, along with some 180 ships and 1,900 aircraft. To the west, PACOM gives way
to the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for an area stretching from Central Asia to Egypt. Before
September 11, 2001, CENTCOM had no forces stationed directly on China's borders except for its training and supply missions in
Pakistan. But with the beginning of the "war on terror," CENTCOM placed tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan and gained
extended access to an air base in Kyrgyzstan.
The operational

capabilities of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific are magnified by bilateral defense

treaties with Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea and cooperative arrangements with other partners.
And to top it off, the United States possesses some 5,200 nuclear warheads deployed in an
invulnerable sea, land, and air triad. Taken together, this U.S. defense posture creates what
Qian Wenrong of the Xinhua News Agency's Research Center for International
Issue Studies has called a "strategic ring of encirclement."
Chinese security analysts also take note of the

United States' extensive capability to damage

Chinese economic interests. The United States is still China's single most important market, unless one counts the
European Union as a single entity. And the United States is one of China's largest sources of foreign direct investment and advanced
technology. From time to time, Washington

has entertained the idea of wielding its economic power

coercively. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the United States imposed some limited diplomatic and economic
sanctions on China, including an embargo, which is still in effect, on the sale of advanced arms. For several years after that, Congress
debated whether to punish China further for human rights violations by canceling the low most-favored-nation tariff rates enjoyed
by Chinese imports, although proponents of the plan could never muster a majority. More recently, U.S.

legislators have
proposed sanctioning China for artificially keeping the value of the yuan low to the benefit of
Chinese exporters, and the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has promised that if elected, he will label China a
currency manipulator on "day one" of his presidency.

Although trade hawks in Washington seldom prevail, flare-ups such as these remind Beijing
how vulnerable China would be if the United States decided to punish it economically. Chinese
strategists believe that the United States and its allies would deny supplies of oil and metal ores
to China during a military or economic crisis and that the U.S. Navy could block China's access
to strategically crucial sea-lanes. The ubiquity of the dollar in international trade and finance also gives the United States
the ability to damage Chinese interests, either on purpose or as a result of attempts by the U.S. government to address its fiscal
problems by printing dollars and increasing borrowing, acts that drive down the value of China's dollar-denominated exports and
foreign exchange reserves.

Chinese analysts also believe that the United States possesses potent ideological weapons and
the willingness to use them. After World War II, the United States took advantage of its position as the dominant power to
enshrine American principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments and
to install what China sees as Western-style democracies in Japan and, eventually, South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries. Chinese
officials contend that the United States uses the ideas of democracy and human rights to delegitimize and destabilize regimes that
espouse alternative values, such as socialism and Asian-style developmental authoritarianism. In the words of Li Qun, a member of
the Shandong Provincial Party Committee and a rising star in the Communist Party, the

Americans' "real purpose is not

to protect so-called human rights but to use this pretext to influence and limit China's healthy
economic growth and to prevent China's wealth and power from threatening [their] world
hegemony."
In the eyes of many Chinese analysts, since the end of the Cold War the United States has
revealed itself to be a revisionist power that tries to reshape the global environment even further

in its favor. They see evidence of this reality everywhere: in the expansion of NATO; the U.S.
interventions in Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo; the Gulf War; the war in Afghanistan; and
the invasion of Iraq. In the economic realm, the United States has tried to enhance its advantages by pushing for free trade,
running down the value of the dollar while forcing other countries to use it as a reserve currency, and trying to make developing
countries bear an unfair share of the cost of mitigating global climate change. And perhaps most disturbing to the Chinese, the
United States has shown its aggressive designs by promoting so-called color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. As Liu
Jianfei, director of the foreign affairs division of the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote in 2005, "The U.S.
has always opposed communist 'red revolutions' and hates the 'green revolutions' in Iran and other Islamic states. What it cares
about is not 'revolution' but 'color.' It supported the 'rose,' 'orange', and 'tulip' revolutions because they served its democracy
promotion strategy." As

Liu and other top Chinese analysts see it, the United States hopes "to spread
democracy further and turn the whole globe 'blue.'"
EXPLOITING TAIWAN

Although American scholars and commentators typically see U.S.-Chinese relations in the
postwar period as a long, slow thaw, in Beijing's view, the United States has always treated
China harshly. From 1950 to 1972, the United States tried to contain and isolate China. Among other actions, it prevailed on
most of its allies to withhold diplomatic recognition of mainland China, organized a trade embargo against the mainland, built up
the Japanese military, intervened in the Korean War, propped up the rival regime in Taiwan, supported Tibetan guerillas fighting
Chinese control, and even threatened to use nuclear weapons during both the Korean War and the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis. Chinese
analysts concede that the United States' China policy changed after 1972. But they assert that the change was purely the result of an
effort to counter the Soviet Union and, later, to gain economic benefits by doing business in China. Even then, the United States
continued to hedge against China's rise by maintaining Taiwan as a strategic distraction, aiding the growth of Japan's military,
modernizing its naval forces, and pressuring China on human rights.

The Chinese have drawn lessons about U.S. China policy from several sets of negotiations with
Washington. During ambassadorial talks during the 1950s and 1960s, negotiations over arms control in the 1980s and 1990s,
discussions over China's accession to the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, and negotiations over climate change during the
decade that followed, the

Chinese consistently saw the Americans as demanding and

unyielding. But most decisive for Chinese understandings of U.S. policy were the three rounds of negotiations that took place
over Taiwan in 1971-72, 1978-79, and 1982, which created the "communiqu framework" that governs U.S. Taiwan policy to this day.
When the U.S.-Chinese rapprochement began, Chinese policymakers assumed that Washington would give up its support for Taipei
in exchange for the benefits of normal state-to-state relations with Beijing. At each stage of the negotiations, the Americans seemed
willing to do so. Yet decades later, the United States remains, in Beijing's view, the chief obstacle to reunification.
When Nixon went to China in 1972, he told the Chinese that he was willing to sacrifice Taiwan because it was no longer strategically
important to the United States, but that he could not do so until his second term. On this basis, the Chinese agreed to the 1972
Shanghai Communiqu, even though it contained a unilateral declaration by the United States that "reaffirm[ed] its interest in a
peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question," which was diplomatic code for a U.S. commitment to deter any effort by the mainland
to take Taiwan by force. As events played out, Nixon resigned before he was able to normalize relations with Beijing, and his
successor, Gerald Ford, was too weak politically to fulfill Nixon's promise.
When the next president, Jimmy Carter, wanted to normalize relations with China, the Chinese insisted on a clean break with
Taiwan. In 1979, the United States ended its defense treaty with Taiwan but again issued a unilateral statement restating its
commitment to a "peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue." Congress then surprised both the Chinese and the administration by
adopting the Taiwan Relations Act, which required the United States to "maintain [its] capacity . . . to resist any resort to force or
other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security . . . of the people on Taiwan." Once again, the deterrent intent was clear.
In 1982, when President Ronald Reagan sought closer relations with Beijing to ramp up pressure on Moscow, China prevailed on the
United States to sign another communiqu, which committed Washington to gradually reducing its weapons sales to Taiwan. But
once the agreement was in place, the Americans set the benchmark year at 1979, when arms sales had reached their highest level;
calculated annual reductions at a small marginal rate, adjusting for inflation so that they were actually increases; claimed that the
more advanced weapons systems that they sold Taiwan were the qualitative equivalents of older systems; and allowed commercial
firms to cooperate with the Taiwanese armaments industry under the rubric of technology transfers rather than arms sales. By the
time President George W. Bush approved a large package of advanced arms to Taiwan in April 2001, the 1982 communiqu was a
dead letter. Meanwhile, as the United States prolonged its involvement with Taiwan, a democratic transition took place there,
putting unification even further out of Beijing's reach.

Reviewing this history, Chinese strategists ask themselves why the United States remains so
committed to Taiwan. Although Americans often argue that they are simply defending a loyal
democratic ally, most Chinese see strategic motives at the root of Washington's behavior. They
believe that keeping the Taiwan problem going helps the United States tie China down . In the words

of Luo Yuan, a retired general and deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Society of Military Science, the United States has long
used Taiwan "as a chess piece to check China's rise."
THE PERILS OF PLURALISM
The Taiwan Relations Act marked the beginning of a trend toward congressional assertiveness on U.S. China policy, and this
continues to complicate Washington's relationship with Beijing. Ten years later, the 1989 Tiananmen incident, followed by the end
of the Cold War, shifted the terms of debate in the United States. China had been perceived as a liberalizing regime; after
Tiananmen, China morphed into an atavistic dictatorship. And the collapse of the Soviet Union vitiated the strategic imperative to
cooperate with Beijing. What is more, growing U.S.-Chinese economic ties began to create frictions over issues such as the dumping
of cheap manufactured Chinese goods on the U.S. market and the piracy of U.S. intellectual property. After decades of consensus in
the United States, China quickly became one of the most divisive issues in U.S. foreign policy, partially due to the intense advocacy
efforts of interest groups that make sure China stays on the agenda on Capitol Hill.
Indeed, since Tiananmen, China

has attracted the attention of more American interest groups than any
other country. China's political system elicits opposition from human rights organizations; its population-control policies anger
the antiabortion movement; its repression of churches offends American Christians; its inexpensive exports trigger demands for
protection from organized labor; its reliance on coal and massive dams for energy upsets environmental groups; and its rampant
piracy and counterfeiting infuriate the film, software, and pharmaceutical industries. These specific

complaints add
strength to the broader fear of a "China threat," which permeates American political discourse -a fear that, in Chinese eyes, not only denies the legitimacy of Chinese aspirations but itself
constitutes a kind of threat to China.
Of course, there are also those in Congress, think tanks, the media, and academia who support positions favorable to China, on the
basis that cooperation is important for American farmers, exporters, and banks, and for Wall Street, or that issues such as North
Korea and climate change are more important than disputes over rights or religion. Those advocates may be more powerful in the
long run than those critical of China, but they tend to work behind the scenes. To

Chinese analysts trying to

make sense of the cacophony of views expressed in the U.S. policy community, the
loudest voices are the easiest to hear, and the signals are alarming.
SUGARCOATED THREATS
In trying to ascertain U.S. intentions, Chinese analysts also look at policy statements made by senior figures in the executive branch.
Coming from a political system where the executive dominates, Chinese analysts consider such statements reliable guides to U.S.
strategy. They find that the statements often do two things: they seek to reassure Beijing that Washington's intentions are benign,
and at the same time, they seek to reassure the American public that the United States will never allow China's rise to threaten U.S.
interests. This combination of themes produces what Chinese analysts perceive as sugarcoated threats.
For example, in 2005, Robert Zoellick, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, delivered a major China policy statement on behalf of the
George W. Bush administration. He reassured his American audience that the United States would "attempt to dissuade any military
competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United
States or other friendly countries." But he also explained that China's rise was not a threat because China "does not seek to spread
radical, anti-American ideologies," "does not see itself in a death struggle with capitalism," and "does not believe that its future
depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system." On that basis, he said, the two sides could have "a
cooperative relationship." But cooperation would depend on certain conditions. China should calm what he called a "cauldron of
anxiety" in the United States about its rise. It should "explain its defense spending, intentions, doctrine, and military exercises";
reduce its trade surplus with the United States; and cooperate with Washington on Iran and North Korea. Above all, Zoellick
advised, China should give up "closed politics." In the U.S. view, he said, "China needs a peaceful political transition to make its
government responsible and accountable to its people."
The same ideas have been repeated in slightly gentler language by the Obama administration. In the administration's first major
policy speech on China, in September 2009, James Steinberg, then deputy secretary of state, introduced the idea of "strategic
reassurance." Steinberg defined the principle in the following way: "Just as we and our allies must make clear that we are prepared
to welcome China's 'arrival' ... as a prosperous and successful power, China must reassure the rest of the world that its development
and growing global role will not come at the expense of [the] security and well-being of others." China would need to "reassure
others that this buildup does not present a threat"; it would need to "increase its military transparency in order to reassure all the
countries in the rest of Asia and globally about its intentions" and demonstrate that it "respects the rule of law and universal norms."
To Chinese analysts, such statements send the message that Washington wants cooperation on its own terms, seeks to deter Beijing
from developing a military capability adequate to defend its interests, and intends to promote change in the character of the Chinese
regime.
To be sure, Beijing's suspicion of Washington must contend with the fact that the United States has done so much to promote
China's rise. But for Chinese analysts, history provides an answer to this puzzle. As they see it, the United States contained China for
as long as it could. When the Soviet Union's rising strength made doing so necessary, the United States was forced to engage with
China in order to reinforce its hand against Moscow. Once the United States started to engage with China, it came to believe that

engagement would turn China toward democracy and would win back for the United States the strategic base on the mainland of
Asia that Washington lost in 1949, when the Communists triumphed in the Chinese Civil War.

In the Chinese view, Washington's slow rapprochement with Beijing was not born of idealism
and generosity; instead, it was pursued so that the United States could profit from China's
economic opening by squeezing profits from U.S. investments, consuming cheap Chinese goods,
and borrowing money to support the U.S. trade and fiscal deficits . While busy feasting at the Chinese table,
U.S. strategists overlooked the risk of China's rise until the late 1990s. Now that the United States perceives
China as a threat, these Chinese analysts believe, it no longer has any realistic way
to prevent it from continuing to develop. In this sense, the U.S. strategy of engagement failed,
vindicating the advice of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who in 1991 advocated a strategy of
"hiding our light and nurturing our strength." Faced with a China that has risen too far to be
stopped, the United States can do no more than it is doing: demand cooperation on U.S. terms,
threaten China, hedge militarily, and continue to try to change the regime.
HOW DO YOU HANDLE AN OFFENSIVE REALIST?
Despite these views, mainstream Chinese strategists do not advise China to challenge the United States in the foreseeable future.
They expect the United States to remain the global hegemon for several decades, despite what they perceive as initial signs of
decline. For the time being, as described by Wang Jisi, dean of Peking University's School of International Studies, "the superpower
is more super, and the many great powers less great." Meanwhile,

the two countries are increasingly

interdependent economically and have the military capability to cause each other harm. It is
this mutual vulnerability that carries the best medium-term hope for cooperation.
Fear of each other keeps alive the imperative to work together.
In the long run, however, the better alternative for both China and the West is to create a new
equilibrium of power that maintains the current world system, but with a larger role for China .
China has good reasons to seek that outcome. Even after it becomes the world's largest economy, its
prosperity will remain dependent on the prosperity of its global rivals (and vice versa), including the
United States and Japan. The richer China becomes, the greater will be its stake in the security of sea-lanes, the stability of the world
trade and financial regimes, nonproliferation, the control of global climate change, and cooperation on public health. China will not
get ahead if its rivals do not also prosper. And

Chinese strategists must come to understand that core U.S.

interests -- in the rule of law, regional stability, and open economic competition -- do not
threaten China's security.
The United States should encourage China to accept this new equilibrium by
drawing clear policy lines that meet its own security needs without threatening
China's. As China rises, it will push against U.S. power to find the boundaries of the United
States' will. Washington must push back to establish boundaries for the growth of Chinese
power. But this must be done with cool professionalism, not rhetorical belligerence. Hawkish campaign talk about
trade wars and strategic competition plays into Beijing's fears while undercutting the necessary
effort to agree on common interests. And in any case, putting such rhetoric into action is not a realistic option. To do
so would require a break in mutually beneficial economic ties and enormous expenditures to encircle China strategically, and it
would force China into antagonistic reactions.

Space

Space Mil real

Space militarization is real lack of a legal framework means
countries are beginning an arms race
Kamocsai 15 Peter Kamocsai is a graduate student at the George Washington University specializing in space
policy, Op-Ed | Why the U.S. Should Be a Leader in Space Weaponization, 1/10/15,
http://spacenews.com/commentary-why-the-u-s-should-be-a-leader-in-space-weaponization//OF

Nations are already using the opportunity that the Outer Space Treaty presents to
weaponize space. As some scholars observed, although we are yet to deploy space-based
weapons, we have already made the first steps . The Soviet Union was building a secret
military space station under the Almaz (Diamond) program and was also designing an antisatellite spacecraft called Polyus. Currently, the Chinese are testing advanced anti-satellite
weaponry and the Russians are building a system to neutralize space weapons . These
countries are preparing for a space arms race. They will surpass the United States if it allows them to do
so. The cost of space weaponization might not seem justifiable in the short term, but in the long
term the cost of inaction is higher. The public is not yet involved in the space weaponization debate, and therefore
explaining the reasons for deploying space weapons to taxpayers is moot. Moreover, the costs of developing, deploying and
maintaining space weapons can seem prohibitive. According to some estimates, the Brilliant Pebbles space-based anti-missile
weapon proposed in the 1980s would have cost around $20 million apiece in todays dollars.

Space militarization threats are real tech developments and lack of

governance
Haas 15 Michael Haas is a researcher with the Global Security Team at the Center for Security Studies (CSS). He
specializes in air and sea power, military innovation, and U.S. defense planning, Vulnerable Frontier: Militarized
Competition in Outer Space, 3/2/15, http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?
lng=en&id=189524//OF
Critical dependencies on space-based infrastructure have grown dramatically in recent decades, and now extend to small states and
the global economy as a whole. However, as

geopolitical rivalries re-emerge in more traditional domains of

interstate conflict, the prospects for future stability in space appear increasingly dim . While the
consequences of a great-power clash in space could be ruinous, a shared
understanding of the perils involved has yet to take hold. Strategic interaction
along the final frontier is set to enter a period of considerable danger. Among the
various environments into which humans have expanded their economic, military, and scientific activities, outer space is easily the
most unwelcoming and inhospitable. Impossible to access except through massive expenditures of energy per unit of mass to be
placed into orbit, and utterly hostile to human life as well as to many types of man-made machinery, the maintenance of a
permanent presence outside Earths protective atmosphere remains a highly ambitious undertaking. Despite various complications,
however, this presence which, in most cases, has entailed the placement of unmanned artificial satellites in earth-centric orbits
has become an essential pillar of the global economic and security systems in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. From highly
specialized scientific and commercial services to everyday applications of information technology (IT), space-based

infrastructures now form part of the life-support system of a civilization that has tied its
economic well-being and, indeed, its very survival to global connectivity. However, while the
economically most developed societies in particular have come to accept this state of dependence on space-based systems as fairly
natural and unproblematic, the

space domain is, in fact, highly vulnerable to the direct and

indirect effects of reckless behavior on the part of both commercial and
governmental entities. Instances of overcrowding are already in evidence within certain orbital planes, increasing the
likelihood of serious accidents, such as the 2009 collision between the Iridium 33 and Cosmos-2251 communications satellites in
low-earth orbit. Decades of ill-regulated activities in space have created millions of pieces of orbital debris, many of which have
sufficient kinetic energy to permanently disable a satellite. However, the

most serious threat to the

continued accessibility of the space environment by far is the pros pect of a military

confrontation, involving the use of kinetic anti-satellite (ASAT) weaponry by any of the growing number
of states that now possess the technological wherewithal to field such capabilities.
As was rather vividly demonstrated by the Chinese test of a direct-ascent ASAT missile in January 2007, which is estimated to have
created more than two million pieces of debris up to ten centimeters in size as well as 2,500 larger objects that can be routinely
tracked by earth-based sensors, such a conflict would probably result in massive environmental damage. Depending on the number
and position of satellites destroyed, the utilization of affected orbital planes could be severely impaired. In a worst-case scenario,
these orbits could become virtually unusable for extended periods of time, as most of the debris would remain in place for decades or
even centuries, with serious implications for both commercial and military users. Unfortunately,

several trends point

in the direction of an increased risk over the next 10 20 years of terrestrial con flict that may
involve attacks on space systems, including the use of kinetic ASAT weaponry . These trends are
primarily the results of the re-emergence of sustained strategic rivalries among some great and
medium-sized powers including the US and China in East Asia, the US and Russia in Eurasia, and potentially the ChinaIndia-Pakistan triangle in South Asia. With the exception of Pakistan, all of these states have already demonstrated a basic antisatellite capability, and the

US and China in particular are integrating space warfare

scenarios into their military planning.

Threats are real militarization and debris make the risk mutually
reinforcing
Gallagher 15 Nancy Gallagher is interim director of the Center for International and Security Studies at
Maryland and a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. Previously, she was
executive director of the Clinton administration's task force for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, an arms
control specialist in the State Department, and a faculty member at Wesleyan University, Antisatellite warfare
without nuclear risk: A mirage, 5/29/15, http://thebulletin.org/space-weapons-and-risk-nuclearexchanges8346//OF
But even

if the norm against attacking another countrys satellites is never broken,

developing and testing antisatellite weapons still increase the risk of nuclear war.
If, for instance, US military leaders became seriously concerned that China or Russia were
preparing an antisatellite attack, pressure could build for a pre-emptive attack against Chinese
or Russian strategic forces. Should a satellite be struck by a piece of space debris during a
crisis or a low-level terrestrial conflict, leaders might mistakenly assume that a space war had
begun and retaliate before they knew what had actually happened . Such scenarios may seem
improbable, but they are no more implausible than the scenarios that are used to justify the development and use of antisatellite
weapons.

The plans dialogue can de-securitize space development

Chunsi 15 Wu Chunsi is director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for
International Studies. Her research interests include Chinese-US relations, Chinas foreign strategy, arms control, and
regional security in Asia. In 2012, she was a visiting research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington, New circumstances, new approaches, 7/27/15, http://thebulletin.org/space-weapons-andrisk-nuclear-exchanges8346//OF

China understands why some in the international community are calling for a revival of arms
control processes surrounding antisatellite weapons and other outer space issues . And China is
generally supportive of arms control in outer space. But as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. The real question is
not whether individual countries support arms control efforts and desire strategic
stabilitybut rather, how these goals will be pursued , according to which principles, and in pursuit
of what priorities. As circumstances change in space, the nature of nations' arms control
engagements must change as well. But if the major players fail to reach a clear, common
understanding of new realities in space, it will be difficult to establish constructive
dialogue.