=== Advantage CP File – CNDI 2019 ===

Africa
Neg
 1NC – Text
Text: The United States Federal Government should
 end small arms sales to Africa
 reinvigorate its foreign aid efforts
 strengthen economic ties through Prosper Africa
 replace the AGOA deal with AfCFTA

The cp solves the root cause of instability

Bello-Schünemann and Moyer 18 (Julia Bello-Schünemann is a Senior Research
Consultant, African Futures and Innovation, ISS. Jonathan D Moyer is a Director, Frederick S
Pardee Center for International Futures, University of Denver. 9-27-2018, "Structural pressures
and political instability: Trajectories for sub-Saharan Africa," ReliefWeb,
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/structural-pressures-and-political-instability-trajectories-sub-
saharan-africa)
Sub-Saharan Africa has made important peace and security gains over the past two decades. Large-scale political violence has
declined and fewer people are dying in wars. But other forms of political violence have increased, and the
region’s future will still be turbulent.
Some countries are more at risk of instability and violent conflict, each with their own unique set
of pressures and potential paths to instability. For example, entirely different factors drive the
civil war in South Sudan, election violence in Kenya, the farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria’s
Middle Belt, and armed conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
A new Institute for Security Studies (ISS) report uses five distinct models from the International Futures forecasting system (IFs) to
explore possible trajectories of political instability in sub-Saharan Africa until 2040.
Understanding these trajectories is key to successful conflict prevention, peacebuilding efforts and long-term development. The ISS
report was written with the Frederick S Pardee Center for International Futures at the University of Denver as part of the Political
Settlements Research Programme.
Inequalities and state-led discrimination are likely to continue to fuel grievances and instability
The ISS assessed the potential impact of various structural pressures on instability and violent conflict. Structural pressures
refer to broad development contexts that can exacerbate or mitigate risk of instability. They are not
immediate drivers or predictors of political instability, which is understood as abrupt regime change, civil war, genocides and the
systematic killings of political opponents.
The key structural pressures that threaten peace and stability in sub-Saharan Africa stem from
demographics, low levels of development, regime type, and horizontal inequalities or cross-
group discrimination. Uneven progress across major development transitions can also heighten
the risk of instability (see Figure 1). Structural pressures tend to change slowly, but not
necessarily evenly.
The findings of the ISS research yield both optimism and uncertainty. Overall, sub-Saharan Africa’s vulnerability to political instability
has declined since the mid-1970s. The region’s current age structure does not promote stability, but Figure 2 shows that
demographic risk has been reducing steadily and will decrease further to 2040.
The risk from low levels of development – a proxy for low state capacity and legitimacy – has also eased and is projected to reduce
more as the region improves its socio-economic performance.
inequalities and state-led discrimination across groups are likely to continue to
On the other hand,
fuel grievances and instability. This is connected to the greatest challenge to future stability across sub-Saharan Africa –
regimes that are neither fully autocratic nor fully democratic, but somewhere in between. Most countries in sub-Saharan Africa fall
into this category of mixed regime type.
The countries that face the greatest demographic risk to 2040 overlap significantly with those where most people died during 2000-
16 from political violence – Sudan, Nigeria, the DRC, Somalia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR).
Nigeria faces the greatest risk from demographic pressures because of its large and rapidly growing young population. And its high
infant mortality rate testifies to a history of governance that has systematically failed to provide basic services.
Larger populations often provide more opportunities for clashes between different regional or ethnic groups. They are also more
difficult for states to control, and opposition groups can more easily mobilise and recruit supporters. Rapidly growing populations
increase competition over land and other resources.
Lastly, youthful populations are more prone to violent conflict than older populations. This risk multiplies when young people are
marginalised and lack opportunities due to poor policy making and failing economic development.
Extreme poverty will remain a key characteristic of sub-Saharan Africa with more than a third of the
region’s population expected to survive on less than US$1.90 per person per day in 2040. Generally, countries with low
levels of GDP per capita, slow GDP per capita growth and low life expectancy are more prone
to instability.
Poor democracies are more vulnerable to political instability than any type of autocratic regime
South Sudan, CAR, Somalia and Burundi face the highest current and future risk for instability associated with poor development.
Southern Africa will remain the region least vulnerable to this type of pressure, while West Africa faces the greatest risk.
Building on the research on regime type and political instability from the Polity IV project, IFs forecasts that Angola, Burundi,
Cameroon, Chad, Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia are facing particularly high pressure due to their mixed regime type.
According to Jack Goldstone et al, mixed regime types are much more unstable than either democracies or autocracies and are
particularly vulnerable to regime change.
Stability in autocracies often comes at the price of repression or co-optation of opposition forces
while democracies rely on political inclusion to mediate diverging interests and societal grievances. Mixed regimes are less
effective in both respects.
At the same time, poor democracies such as Malawi could be more unstable than any type of
autocratic regime. Imbalances can also arise when relatively democratic countries have large youth bulges, such as Kenya. In
most Southern African countries, relatively high levels of GDP per capita are at odds with low life expectancy.
The analysis points to the composite
character of instability and the complexity of systems in which
similar drivers can impact risk in different ways. In the face of such complexity, policy makers benefit from a multi-
dimensional and dynamic understanding of risk. Modelling and forecasting can help identify opportunities for investment in
development and peace.
 2NC – AfCFTA – Solvency
The US must join the AfCFTA to have a reciprocal effect – also removes Africa
from poverty
Hammond 6/12 [Alexander C. R. Hammond is a researcher at a Washington D.C. think tank and Senior Fellow for African
Liberty. He is also a Young Voices contributor and frequently writes about economic freedom, African development, and
globalization. "Africa’s New Free-Trade Area is Great News for America." National Interest, 6-12-2019,
nationalinterest.org/feature/africa’s-new-free-trade-area-great-news-america-62407]
The poorest continent in the world is about to lend a hand to the United States. Last week, Africa implemented the
world’s largest free-trade area , and that’s great news for American foreign policy. Back in December,
U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton unveiled a plan for the Trump administration’s titled the “Africa Strategy.” The plan is
simple—the United States will give less aid to Africa, instead prioritizing enhancing America’s “economic ties with the region.” Now
that many African nations have unified under a single market, trading with the continent will become
far easier—and a trade deal between the United States and Africa would help out everyone involved.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) trade deal officially came into force on May 30, a month after it reached the twenty-two-nation threshold needed to do so.
Now, tariffs on 90 percent of the goods traded among AfCFTA member states will be removed—a move that, according to the UN, will boost intra-African trade by 52 percent in
only a few years.
The AfCFTA members are already planning the next step in economic integration—a customs union enabling African
including the United States, as a bloc.
states to negotiate free trade deals with other countries,
A key component of the Trump administration’s Africa Strategy is to advance “U.S. trade and commercial ties” with Africa by creating “modern comprehensive trade
agreements.” An African customs union would be a far simpler trade partner for America because only one set of trade deals will need to be negotiated with the AfCFTA
countries—as opposed to fifty-five intricately-crafted trade deals with each small African economy. The U.S. Trade Representative has even released a report noting how time-
consuming and costly it is to negotiate trade deals with each African nation. Because trade deals are long and expensive processes, creating a single trade deal with an African
customs union will keep more money in the U.S. government’s purse.

As Bolton notes, another key aim of the Africa Strategy is to create a more “ reciprocal exchange
between the United States and the nations of Africa.” If all fifty-five African nations unite under the AfCFTA, then it’ll do just that. In
fact, it’ll create a market with a shocking GDP of over $3 trillion—the fifth-largest economy in the world. American businesses will
soon find fantastic opportunities to buy cheaper commodities, and to manufacture their goods at a lower cost than would have
otherwise been possible. If the United States imports its low-value goods from Africa, rather than producing them domestically, then
the U.S. economy can focus on what it best produces: high-value specialized goods and services.
If the United States really wants to follow through on its plan to help Africa’s economy thrive, then it is vital
that a U.S.-AfCFTA trade deal replaces existing American preferential trade schemes like the African Growth
and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Right now, AGOA gives developing African countries duty-free access to the U.S. market for
some goods, but the agreement is bogged down with far too many exceptions that can change on a whim—causing havoc for
domestic African industries dependent on the American trade scheme. Last year, for example, the United
States unexpectedly changed AGOA’s terms and suspended Rwanda’s ability to export clothing duty-free, damaging
the Rwandan textile industry and putting hundreds of jobs at risk (mostly women’s jobs). Moving away from
these malevolent trade schemes and toward a more reciprocal agreement with mutual, unchangeable rules would go a long way in
providing economic stability to the poor in Africa.
So far, twenty-four of the fifty-five African member states have ratified the AfCFTA and now that the trade area is operational, many
more African nations are expected to join in the coming months. As more countries join the free trade area, an African customs
union becomes ever more likely, and the potential benefits for both parties to create a U.S.-AfCFTA trade deal
will continue to grow.
While the United States seeks to expand trade with the world’s poorest continent, we should all celebrate the fact that a mutually
beneficial relationship between America and Africa may finally be on the horizon. A trade deal between the United States
and an AfCFTA customs union would would boost the prosperity of all parties involved and in the case of Africa,
potentially lift millions of the world’s poorest people out of extreme poverty . Let’s hope this trade
deal is implemented soon.

Only the cp solves the root causes of African instability

Cilliers 17 (Jakkie Cilliers is the Chair of the Board of Trustees and Head of African Futures &
Innovation at the Institute for Security Studies. Extraordinary Professor in the Centre of Human
Rights, University of Pretoria. 11-28-2017, "What drives instability in Africa and what can be
done about it," Conversation, https://theconversation.com/what-drives-instability-in-africa-and-
what-can-be-done-about-it-87626)
Africa will remain turbulent because it is poor and young, but also because it is growing and dynamic.
Development is disruptive but also presents huge opportunities. The continent needs to plan accordingly.
Levels of armed conflict in Africa rise and fall. Data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the Global Terrorism
Database and others indicate that armed conflict peaked in 1990/91 at the end of the Cold War, declined to 2005/6, remained
relative stable to 2010/11 and then increased to 2015, although it peaked at lower levels than in 1990/91 before its most recent
decline.
there are many more non-state actors involved in armed conflict in
Armed conflict has changed. Today
Africa – representing a greater fracturing of armed groupings. So it’s not a matter of
“government vs an armed group” but a “government vs many armed groups”. Insurgents are often
divided and sometimes even fighting amongst themselves. This greater fragmentation complicates peacemaking.
Terrorism has also increased, but depending on how one defines it, it has always been widely prevalent in Africa both as a tactic to
secure decolonisation as well as between and among competing armed groups. The big question for 2017 is: is violent political
extremism going to move from the Middle East to Africa? Put another way, is it in Africa that Al Qaeda and the Islamic State will find
solid footage as they are displaced from the Middle East?
Anti government turbulence has also increased in recent years. In Africa, this has led to disaffection and violence around elections
that are often rigged rather than free and fair. Generally this is because governance in many African countries present a facade of
democracy but don’t yet reflect substantive democracy.
Seven relationships lie behind patterns of violence on the continent, and provide insights into whether it can be managed better.
Relationships explaining violence
Poverty
Internal armed conflict is much more prevalent in poor countries than in rich ones. This is not because poor
people are violent but because poor states lack the ability to ensure law and order. The impact of poverty is
exacerbated by inequality, such as in South Africa.
Updated forecasts using the International Futures forecasting system indicate that around 37% of Africans live in extreme poverty
(roughly 460 million people).
By 2030, 32% of Africans (forecast at 548 million) are likely to live in extreme poverty. So, while the portion is coming down (around
5% less), the absolute numbers will likely increase by around 90 million. It’s therefore unlikely that Africa will meet the first of the
Sustainable Development Goals on ending absolute poverty on a current growth path of roughly 4% GDP growth per annum.
Democratisation
Democratisation can trigger violence in the short to medium term, particularly around elections. Recent
events in Kenya are an example. Where there is a large democratic deficit, as in North Africa
before the Arab spring, tension builds up and can explode.
And a democratic deficit – where levels of democracy are below what can be expected when
compared to other countries at similar levels of income and education – often leads to instability.
Instability is also fuelled by the manipulation of elections and constitutions by heads of state to extend
their stay in power. Examples include Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) and Uganda.
Regime type
The nature of the governing regime is another structural factor. Most stable countries are either full democracies or full autocracies.
But mostAfrican countries have mixed regimes with some elements of democracy mixed with
strong autocratic features. They present a façade of democracy but lack its substantive
elements. Mixed regimes are inherently more unstable and prone to disruptions than either full
democracies or full autocracies.
Population structure
Africa’s population is young, with a median age of 19. By comparison, the median age is 41 in
France (a relatively young country by European standards). So 22% of adult French are in the
youth bulge of 15-29 years compared to 47% of Africans.
Young countries tend to be more turbulent because young men are largely responsible for
violence and crime. If young people lack jobs and rates of urbanisation are high, social
exclusion and instability follow.
Repeat violence
Countries such as Mali, Central African
A history of violence is generally the best predictor of future violence.
Republic and the DRC are trapped in cycles of violence. This is very difficult to break. It requires
a huge effort and is very expensive, often requiring a large, multi-dimensional peace mission
that only the UN can provide. But, scaling peacekeeping back rather than scaling it up is the order of the day at the UN.
A bad neighbourhood
Where a country is located can increase the risk of violence because borders
are not controlled and rural areas not
policed. Most conflict in Africa is supported from neighbouring countries. Violence spills over national
borders and affects other countries while poorly trained and equipped law and order institutions generally cannot operate regionally.
Slow growth and rising inequality
Africa is quite unequal, so growth does not translate into poverty reduction. In addition, the world is in a
low growth environment after the 2007/8 global financial crisis, with average rates of growth significantly lower than before. Africa
needs to grow at average rates of 7% or more a year if it is to reduce poverty and create jobs, yet current long term forecasts are for
rates significantly below that.
Opportunity amid challenges
These seven related factors indicate that the notion that Africa can somehow “silence the guns
by 2020”, as advocated by the African Union as part of its Agenda 2063 is unrealistic. Violence will
remain a characteristic of a number of African countries for many years to come and Africa should plan accordingly.
In the long term only rapid, inclusive economic growth combined with good governance can chip
away at the structural drivers of violence. It is also clear that middle income countries are making progress in
attracting foreign direct investment but that poor countries will remain aid dependent.
Much more international and regional cooperation will be required as part of this process,
including substantive and scaled up support for peacekeeping.
 2NC – Aid – Solvency
CP removes China and Russian presence which enables economic growth
Holland and Wroughton 18 [Steve Holland is a Correspondent for White House in the Thomson Reuters with seven
videos in the C-SPAN Video Library; the first appearance was a 2002 Speech as a President for the White House Correspondents'
Association. Lesley Wroughton writes about U.S. Foreign Policy for Reuters based in Washington. “U.S. to counter China, Russia
influence in Africa -Bolton.” Reuters, 13 Dec. 2018, af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFKBN1OC1Y3-OZATP]
Washington’s No 1. priority will be developing economic ties with the region to create
opportunities for American businesses and protecting the independence of African countries along with
U.S. national security interests, he said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation.
“Great-power competitors, namely China and Russia, are rapidly expanding their financial and political
influence across Africa,” Bolton said.
“They are deliberately and aggressively targeting their investments in the region to gain a competitive advantage
over the United States.”
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, leaders of the world’s two largest economies, have been trying to
resolve trade disputes that have roiled markets.
“China uses bribes , opaque agreements , and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa
captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands. Its investment ventures are riddled with corruption,” Bolton said. He had equally harsh
words for Russia.
“Across the continent, Russia advances its political and economic relationships with little regard for the rule of law or accountable
and transparent governance,” he said.
He accused Moscow of selling arms and energy in exchange for votes at the United Nations “that keep strongmen in power,
undermine peace and security, and run counter to the best interests of the African people.”
Bolton said “predatory practices” by China and Russia stunt economic growth in Africa and threaten nations’
economic independence.
He said the United States was developing the “Prosper Africa” initiative to support U.S. investment in Africa and a growing middle class in the region. He gave no details.
Landry Signe, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Africa Growth Initiative in Washington, welcomed the administration’s focus on trade and investment as opposed to security, but wanted details on planned U.S.
action.
“The Trump administration’s new Africa Strategy reflects a more accurate understanding of the fast-changing dynamics within Africa,” he said, “but the strategy doesn’t seem sufficient to effectively address the
United States’ threatened economic, security, and influence interests.”
Judd Devermont, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said release of an Africa strategy was welcome after two years of “conflicting narratives” by the
administration.
Devermont said he was disappointed that China dominated Bolton’s presentation, which lacked details on U.S. plans.
“China loomed over everything, and loomed over really important issues on trade and investment, and transparency,” said Devermont. “We didn’t get many details on what the ‘Prosper Africa’ approach looks like
and how it would be resourced. Those should have been the headlines of the strategy.”
“We need a greater articulation on what are the sectors that the U.S. government wants to prioritize in Africa for U.S. investment,” Devermont said, “They should be transparent with the Africans to explain why
certain countries are getting the bulk of the investment.”
China’s policies in Africa have concerned Washington as the United States seeks to ramp up development finance in the face of China’s global ambitions.
In July, the head of the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corp (OPIC) said China was saddling poor nations with unsustainable debt through large infrastructure projects that are not economically viable.
Bolton said the American approach contrasted with China’s “bait and switch” policies. “The way we do business is much more straightforward.”
In October Trump signed legislation overhauling the way the federal government lends money for foreign development, creating a $60 billion agency intended largely to respond to China’s growing influence. The
new U.S. International Development Finance Corp combines OPIC and other government development organizations.
Xi’s “Belt and Road” initiative, unveiled in 2013, aims to build an infrastructure network connecting China by land and sea to Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
Bolton said the lack of economic progress in Africa has created a climate conducive to violent conflict and the proliferation of terrorism.

He said the United States has little to show for the billions of dollars it has poured into Africa. He said the administration will work
to ensure U.S. aid is used more efficiently and effectively, with investments in health, education, government
and fiscal transparency measures and rule of law.
“We will make certain that ALL aid to the region - whether for security, humanitarian, or
development needs - advances U.S. interests,” he said, adding that Washington will also re-evaluate its
support for U.N. peacekeeping missions.
 2NC – Aid – Solvency – Russia + China
That solves – American interests in Africa prevent Russia and China’s “predatory
practices”
Signé and Olander 6/26 [Landry Signé is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Center for African Studies, chairman of the
Global Network for Africa’s Prosperity, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a 2016 Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Fellow, and a professor and senior adviser
on international affairs to the chancellor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He serves as special adviser to world leaders on international and
African affairs. Eric Olander is the founder and Editor in Chief of The China Africa Project. Eric is a veteran international journalist with 20+ years
experience throughout Greater China, Africa, the United States and Europe. Eric is currently based in Shanghai, China where he works in media and
advertising. "Can Trump’s Prosper Africa make America greater than China and other partners in Africa?" Brookings, 6-26-2019,
brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2019/06/26/can-trumps-prosper-africa-make-america-greater-than-china-and-other-partners-in-africa/]
Prosper Africa aligns with the Trump administration’s Africa strategy, introduced by National Security Adviser John Bolton last December,
which aims to promote prosperity, security, and stability in U.S.-Africa relations , and confirms the
administration’s prioritization of trade and investment to reach those three objectives. This strategy might be “one of the most business-friendly U.S.-
the administration has to bridge the gap between its
Africa policies in recent times—at least in principle.” Now, though,
praiseworthy business principles and the policy options needed to turn them into reality.
Bolton initially posed the administration’s Africa strategy as a direct counter to Chinese and Russian
“ predatory practices ” and influence on the continent. Prosper Africa is now, however, presented by U.S. officials as an
innovative method of engaging with African leaders and entrepreneurs through a coordinated effort among U.S. agencies—with less reference to
China. The initiative is a welcome change from the administration’s previous comments about avoiding engagement with some African countries and
intentionally decreasing African immigration into the U.S. Though Prosper Africa cannot entirely make up for this rhetoric, nor the $252 million funding
the strategy is a first step in improving the coordination of U.S.
cuts to Ebola response efforts in early 2018,
efforts toward better trade and investment relations.
Prosper Africa aims to reverse the United States’ eroding ground in African markets by providing
technical assistance for U.S. and African companies in order to double two-way trade and investment. It includes a
special focus on transparent markets and private enterprise as the foundations of economic growth and job creation. According to Deputy Secretary of
Commerce Karen Kelly, Prosper Africa has three coordinated lines of effort: 1) synchronizing the initiatives and capabilities of government
agencies, 2) modernizing and coordinating those agencies’ resources to help companies identify business opportunities in African markets, and 3)
in
building African capacity through private sector strengthening. According to the administration, the presidential initiative will operate
conjunction with the new U.S. International Development Finance Corp, which has already announced that it plans to double its investment in
low-income countries starting in October, and the Access Africa initiative, which focuses on boosting U.S.-African
partnerships in developing sub-Saharan Africa’s information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure.
Prosper Africa represents a step forward in U.S.-Africa trade and investment relations along two main lines. First, Prosper Africa signifies a unique attempt to effectively and permanently formalize the coordination
of all relevant executive agencies to accelerate trade and investment with Africa. As such, it is a pioneering initiative that aligns with the Trump administration’s focus on “making deals” and conducting relations in
a business-like manner. It is also an acknowledgement of African countries’ tremendous business potential.
MAKING AMERICA GREATER THAN CHINA AND OTHER PARTNERS IN AFRICA?
While Prosper Africa is promising, its impact will probably not be strong enough to counterbalance China’s unique influence in the region. China’s success in doing business on the continent has been driven by its
high and diverse financial flows (a complex mix of concessional loans, grants, aid, market loans, etc.) to Africa: Investment from China rose twofold between 2010 and 2016. President Xi Jinping committed an
additional $60 billion in broad and diverse financing—including $10 billion reserved for Chinese buying of African goods, as well as concessional loans, among other things—last September. High-level Chinese
officials, especially Xi, have pushed for strong diplomatic relationships with African leaders.
In contrast, U.S. investment has barely increased since 2010, and President Trump has yet to make an official state visit to any African country.
China’s way of doing business makes it the largest trading partner of several African countries—particularly resource-rich countries like South Sudan,
The Chinese “One
Angola, Eritrea, and the Gambia—and the total volume of two-way trade between China and Africa exceeds $200 billion.
Belt, One Road” initiative has taken flight. China has backed up its claims to increase development financing and cancel or
reschedule debt, canceling $1 billion in debt in Eastern Africa alone between 2000 and 2018.
In addition to China, other countries have been increasing their economic ties with the African continent: Since 2017, Africa’s top three trading partners have included China, India, and France. Successful
examples of investment and business partnerships from these partners can constitute a goal for the Prosper Africa initiative. Emerging trade agreements are putting the U.S. at a disadvantage as they edge the
U.S. out. For instance, 41 African countries have signed Economic Partnership Agreements with the European Union. The EU and Africa are even talking about creating a continent-to-continent free trade
agreement—an initiative that makers Prosper Africa seem modest at best.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR US POLICYMAKERS AND BUSINESS LEADERS

With this increasing competition as well as the needs of the continent in mind, the administrators of Prosper Africa should consider the
following strategies:
U.S. investment should be increased substantially and focus on areas that will foster industrial development and greater intra-African trade to create sustainable growth that is less dependent on commodity
exports elsewhere (e.g., infrastructure related to transport, energy, water, and information and communication technology, or ICTs) and in which the U.S. has a strong competitive advantage compared to China
(ICTs and cybersecurity, among others). Indeed, economic development cannot happen without massive investments—especially in infrastructure—that further unlock the private sector. Right now, Africa is only
able to fund about a third of the $130 billion to $170 billion needed to finance its infrastructure per year. The Program on Infrastructure Development in Africa and the recently inaugurated Africa Investment Forum
provide a comprehensive list of projects.

The U.S. should embrace the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). If the AfCFTA is successfully implemented,the
combined consumer and business spending in 2030 will be $6.7 trillion and the continent’s manufacturing
sector is projected to double in size, with an annual output of $1 trillion by 2025 and over 14 new million jobs. Currently, the AfCFTA, along with
Agenda 2063, is considered by Africans to be the most important tool for fostering their economic prosperity, accelerating industrialization, and
providing jobs to the youth. Thus far, the European Union, China, and other partners have supported the AfCFTA, but the United States is still hesitant,
which seems to be in contradiction to one of the goals of Prosper Africa: to empower Africa to drive its own growth. The U.S. should instead produce a
statement supporting the AfCFTA and should consider strategies for empowering the AfCFTA secretariat, such as capacity building and financing.
The U.S. should reinvigorate its efforts towards governance and private sector engagement,
education, and training—critical long-lived, but currently waning, components of U.S. engagement abroad. Many sub-Saharan African
countries lack mechanisms for effectively and appropriately engaging private sector capabilities, experiences, and interests in policymaking processes.
For instance, in some cases private sector interests are able to capture policymaking, leading to cronyism and corruption. In other cases, the private
the cost of doing
sector is shut out of the policymaking process altogether, and policy is thus not attuned to its needs. As a result,
business in Africa is the highest in the world, and the continent receives the lowest net inflows of
foreign direct investment globally. The U.S. could make a difference by supporting research on
how countries can better balance and integrate the private sector in order to promote inclusive,
participatory governance, thus reducing both perceived and real risks to doing business in Africa.

US soft power is key to stop Chinese and Russian projects that are detrimental to
African development
Einashe 19 [Ismail Einashe is a journalist and writer. He has written for the Guardian, The Sunday Times, NBC News, the
Nation, Foreign Policy, Frieze, NPR and the New York Times, among many other places. He sits on the editorial board of Tate Etc.
the magazine of the Tate Museums, which has the largest print circulation of any art magazine in the world. "America's New Policy
in Africa Is an Attempt to Contain Chinese and Russian Influence." Pulitzer Center, 1-22-2019,
https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/americas-new-policy-africa-attempt-contain-chinese-and-russian-influence]
It is easy to think that this growing threat is why the Trump administration has ramped up its level of engagement in the Horn of
Africa, where the Somalian terror organisation is based. In December, the U.S. unexpectedly instituted a new set of policies for the
whole continent, approved by president Donald Trump and announced by his national security adviser John Bolton. Speaking at the
Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington D.C., Mr Bolton said that America’s priorities included
enhancing economic ties with African nations and combating extremist groups.
However, this new approach has far less to do with developing mutually beneficial economic and security links than
curtailing the ambitions of China and Russia in a rapidly developing and resource-rich territory. This much was
clear when Mr Bolton accused both China and Russia of "deliberately and aggressively targeting their investments in the region to
gain a competitive advantage over the United States”.
China was singled out for particular criticism, with Mr Bolton stating that it has employed bribery, opaque agreements and “strategic
use of debt” to hold African countries “captive to Beijing’s wishes and demands”. By way of example, he referred to two nations:
Zambia and Djibouti.
Copper-rich Zambia has lately witnessed a wave of popular protest over its massive debts and economic
ties to China. Since 2017, the strategically located east African nation of Djibouti has been home to China’s first-ever overseas
military base. It is no coincidence that it also owes 80 per cent of its external debt to China. In September last year, concerned
U.S. senators accused China of engaging in “ economic warfare ” in such countries.
Regardless of the recent reconsideration of his policies, it is worth remembering that Mr Trump’s presidency has been one of the
worst in the history of U.S.-Africa relations. In January last year, he alienated large numbers of people by describing African nations
as “s***hole countries”. Soon after that, he threatened to withdraw aid from states that voted against his controversial decision to
move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. To many observers, his recent manoeuvres look like a desperate
scramble to regain waning influence in a region where much of the goodwill traditionally extended to the U.S. has evaporated.
More importantly, for many, increased U.S. engagement carries chilling Cold War resonances . During that
era, various African states took clear sides in the ideological battle between eastern communism and western capitalism. Wedged
between competing superpowers, ordinary people all too often paid a heavy price, from the Congo crisis (1960 to 1965), to the first
civil war in Chad (1965 to 1979) and the Mozambican civil war (1977 to 1992).
Russia took many observers by surprise last year with its sprint to offer weapons, military support and
nuclear power to nations such as Chad and Zimbabwe. It has also been particularly active in the war-ravaged
Central African Republic – where, in August last year, three Russian journalists were killed while investigating the presence of
mercenaries linked to Kremlin-backed businessmen.
In March last year, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov made a high-profile visit to six African countries, including Ethiopia
and Mozambique. Mr Lavrov’s trip was designed to renew Russia’s economic ties with Africa after a decades-long hiatus following
the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia also wanted to open a military base in Djibouti, but was rebuffed by the government of
president Ismail Omar Guelleh, “so that [it] is not used in the conflict in Syria”.
In many ways, the new Africa programme laid out by Mr Bolton is designed to flesh out what “America First” foreign policy will look
like on the continent. The U.S. has long neglected Africa. Under Barack Obama, it was seen solely through the prism of
international security, rather than as a viable place to invest in. This allowed China to project its will
unchallenged , laying out vast sums in loans and on infrastructure projects in return for access to vital resources, such as oil
from Angola, copper from Zambia and cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
America’s desire to limit China’s economic incursions is clear and understandable. The only problem is that it lacks the economic
might to compete with the colossal amounts of money the Asian giant has funnelled into Africa. In fact, the only real
advantages the U.S. has are its soft power and military expertise .
But the current situation is not all gloom. Regardless of its motivations or its inadequacies, the U.S. is paying real attention to Africa
for the first time in years. That renewed focus gives African nations unprecedented opportunities to pursue their own interests, rather
than simply act as client states. America’s drive to contain both Russian and Chinese influence brings
chances to secure foreign investment and to leverage strategic advantages into a more prominent presence on the
world stage. And, after centuries in the shadow of global powers, it is high time that Africa finally found its own voice.
 2NC – Small Arms – Solvency
Removing small arms solves – they’re the root cause of instability in Africa
Fleshman 11 [Michael Fleshman. “Small arms in Africa.” AfricaRenewal, UN, December 2011,
un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2011/small-arms-africa]
The dry rolling plains of northern Kenya seem an unlikely place for an arms race. But in less than a generation the pastoral
Pokot people and their neighbours have gone from protecting their herds with spears to outfitting their young men with cheap, reliable and deadly
automatic rifles from the war zones of Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan. The impact of modern military weapons on the Pokot and surrounding
communities was brought tragically home in early
2001, when Pokot youth opened fire on a rival settlement,
killing 47 people, burning down the village and transforming the almost-ceremonial tradition of cattle raiding into an occasion for human
slaughter. "Guns are changing things," one young Pokot man told the Washington Post newspaper. "The young ones, they don't respect elders." "If you
don't have a weapon," added another, "your grave is open."
In fact, small
arms, which include rifles, pistols and light machine guns, are filling African graves in ever-increasing
numbers -- from the killing fields of Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the streets of Lagos and
Johannesburg. While the international community searches, so far unsuccessfully, for agreement on the regulation of the global trade in small
arms, a growing number of African countries, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations are grappling with the human and development
consequences of gun violence and seeking to reduce both the supply and the demand for what Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called "the weapons
of choice for the killers of our time."
Reducing the availability and use of small arms in places where fighting has ended has become increasingly
important to Africa's development prospects as the number of conflicts has increased over the past decade. The widespread abuse
of weapons diverts scarce government resources from health and education to public security, discourages investment and economic growth, and
deprives developing countries of the skills and talents of the victims of small arms.
Millions of light arms -- lightweight, highly portable, and devastatingly effective in the hands of even young or poorly trained users -- were shipped to Africa during the Cold War to equip anti-colonial fighters, newly
independent states and superpower proxy forces alike. The collapse of the Soviet bloc saw a new flood of small arms entering Africa as manufacturers put additional millions of surplus Cold War-era weapons on
the international arms market at cut-rate prices.
Years later, these durable killing machines fight on in the hands of insurgents, local militias, criminal organizations and ordinary people left vulnerable to violence by ineffective policing and simmering civil conflict.
In some parts of Africa, a Soviet-designed AK-47 assault rifle, coveted for its simplicity and firepower, can be purchased for as little as $6, or traded for a chicken or sack of grain. In 1999 the Red Cross estimated
that in the Somali capital of Mogadishu alone, the city's 1.3 million residents possessed over a million guns -- among an estimated 550 mn small arms in circulation worldwide.

The widespread abuse of weapons diverts scarce government resources from health and education to
public security, discourages investment and economic growth, and deprives developing countries of the skills and
talents of the victims of small arms.
"The proliferation of light weapons in Africa poses a major threat to development," noted Ms. Virginia Gamba, the former director of the Arms
Management Programme of the South African Institute for Security Studies (ISS). Their low cost, ease of use and availability "may escalate conflicts,
undermine peace agreements, intensify [the] violence and impact of crime, impede economic and social development and hinder the development of
social stability, democracy and good governance." In July 2001 the US government estimated that small arms are fuelling conflicts in 22 African
countries that have taken 7-8 million lives. In Africa guns are not just the weapons of choice but also w eapons of m ass d estruction.
When weapons outlast wars
The development impact of war on individuals, communities and states is unambiguous and well documented. By its nature -- and sometimes by
design -- modern warfare destroys economic and social infrastructure, uproots populations, paralyses economic activity, disrupts vital health and
education services and diverts financial resources from development to defence.
Unlike heavy weapons systems,
Less well understood is the impact of small arms on development in post-conflict situations.
which can be costly to acquire and operate and comparatively easy to decommission or
monitor, the end of a war does not necessarily bring an end to the use of light weapons.
As Robert Muggah and Peter Bachelor, analysts for the Small Arms Survey, a European research institute, report in a recent study, Development Held Hostage: Assessing the Effects of Small Arms on Human
Development, "the durability of small arms ensures that once they are present in a country they present a continuous risk -- especially in societies where there are large accumulations of weapons.... They
frequently outlast peace agreements and are taken up again in the post-conflict period" by criminal gangs, vigilantes, dissidents, and individuals concerned about personal security. In areas where state security is
weak or absent, possession of a gun can be a matter of survival, either to seize food and other vital resources or as protection from attack. In other places the low cost and ready availability of firearms can
promote what experts call a "culture of violence," where gun ownership becomes a symbol of power and status, and gun violence a first resort for the settlement of personal and political disputes
South Africa has suffered considerably from the misuse of small arms since the end of apartheid in 1994, and has moved aggressively to reduce their
availability. Unlike most other African countries, South Africa has a large number of small arms in legal
circulation, with over 4 mn guns registered to private, primarily white, owners at the end of 1999. In common with countries bordering conflict
areas in West and East Africa, however, South Africa has also suffered from the illegal influx from
neighbouring states of weapons that have outlasted the wars they were intended to fight.
In the 1970s, the apartheid government began supplying thousands of tons of arms and ammunition to its domestic and regional allies for the defence of white minority rule. An estimated 30 tonnes of guns and
explosives were smuggled into the country by the anti-apartheid movements, which also left arms stockpiles at their base camps in surrounding countries. As many as 4 mn weapons from various sources have
illegally found their way into the hands of South African civilians. The presence of so many weapons outside government control has overwhelmed law enforcement efforts, contributed to crime and public
insecurity, hampered economic growth and caused tragic and avoidable deaths and injuries.
Measuring the effects

Assessing the peacetime impact of small arms on South Africa and other African countries is difficult. Many countries lack the
capacity to collect and analyze data about the use of small arms. Moreover, many of the greatest costs to development,
such as deferred investment, reduced economic activity and lost productivity due to injury and insecurity, are indirect, and therefore hard to measure.
One of the best indicators, said Dr. Etienne Krug, director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Injuries and Violence Prevention Department, are
public health records. But particularly in developing regions like Africa, WHO cautions in its 2001 report Small Arms and Global Health, "data on the
impact of small arms on the health of individuals are far from complete." Statistics are vital for the development of effective strategies to meet the
medical challenges of guns, he noted, but donors are often unwilling to fund data collection as part of health
projects.
Globally, WHO put the number of violent deaths from all causes in 1998 at 2.3 million. Several hundred thousand of these are believed to be gunshot
victims: 42 per cent as a result of suicide, 32 per cent by murder and 26 per cent by war. The study found a correlation between gun violence and
death rates in low and middle-income countries, at 42 per 100,000 people, were more than double the 17 per
development:
hundreds of thousands more people survive gun injuries, but require costly
100,000 rate found in high-income countries. Many
medical care and often suffer permanent physical and emotional disabilities. The absence of sophisticated emergency medical facilities,
however, means that far more gunshot injuries prove fatal to victims in developing countries than in the industrialized North.
The direct cost can be high. A 1997 study of 1,000 gunshot victims in South Africa put the total cost of hospital treatment at nearly R30 mn (then $6.5 mn). The indirect impact of gun violence on public health
systems, asserts WHO, also is huge. Treating large numbers of patients with gunshot wounds "has a draining effect on basic health care and diverts much-needed resources from other health and social
services."
Crime rates rising
Crime statistics can also provide a measurement of the impact of small arms on development. Because apartheid-era crime reports in South Africa are considered unreliable, ISS researchers analyzed post-
apartheid police records and reported a "marked increase" in the use of firearms to commit murder, from 41.5 per cent of homicides in 1994 to 49.3 per cent in 1998, even as the overall number of murders
decreased. The use of small arms in robberies also increased significantly, from 51,000 incidents in 1996 to 69,500 in 1998, although the overall number of robberies involving weapons of all kinds increased only
marginally.

The increase, the analysts argue, "shows that more criminals are arming themselves " and that " access to firearms
has become easier compared to previous years." By 2000 the South African government found that homicide, primarily involving firearms,
was the leading cause of death among young men aged 15-21 and that gunshots from all causes (murder, suicide and accidents) were the single
largest cause of non-natural death in the country.
The death and injury of so many young people has profound consequences for development -- reducing the number of educated people entering the work force, diverting family and social resources into the care
of those disabled by gun violence and forcing the government to redirect funding from social services to law enforcement. Last year, for example, South Africa spent $1.96 bn on law enforcement and $1.56 bn on
health.

In Kenya, the illegal influx of small arms from surrounding states appears to be fuelling violence far from the volatile
northern border areas. The increased availability of weapons in Nairobi, for example, may be a factor in the rising number of murders and the use of
violence in burglaries, although Kenyan police report that the number of reported robberies themselves has declined. A recent survey by the UN Centre
for Human Settlements (Habitat) and the Kenyan government found that 75 per cent of city residents felt insecure at night despite an increased police
presence in high crime areas.

Small arms and light weapons kill thousands of people in Africa which inhibits
aid projects AND they end up in the hands of the Boko Haram
Guardian Nigeria News 18 [The Guardian is an independent newspaper, established in 1983 for the purpose of
presenting balanced coverage of events, and of promoting the best interests of Nigeria. It owes allegiance to no political party,
ethnic community, religious or other interest group. Its primary commitment is to the integrity and sovereignty of the Federation of
Nigeria, and beyond that to the unity and sovereignty of Africa. "The influx of small arms, light weapons." The Guardian Nigeria, 2-
22-2018, guardian.ng/opinion/the-influx-of-small-arms-light-weapons/]
Although arms proliferation is a global issue, available data on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) show that out of the 640
million circulating globally, it is estimated that 100 million are found in Africa, about 30 million in sub-Saharan Africa
and eight million in West Africa, alone.
The majority of these SALW about 59% are in the hands of civilians, 38% are owned by government armed forces, 2.8 % by police
and 0.2% by armed groups.
This has implications as African countries have experienced direct, indirect and consequential impacts of weapons proliferation:
thousands of people, both civilians and military, are killed or injured every year on the continent.
Even when death or injury is avoided, SALW proliferation and misuse can impact a community, country
or region’s landscape. Indeed illegal arms have led to the rising rate of criminality and citizens are endangered.
Also, the threat and use of SALW prevent the delivery of humanitarian and economic aid and
contribute to refugee and internally displaced persons ( IDP ). The phenomenon is indeed an impediment to the socio-
economic development of countries in Africa.
borders of African countries are porous , allowing
So, it is obvious that despite the efforts of security agencies,
illicit arms trafficking. This has resulted in the proliferation of SALW.
Events in the last years show that Nigeria is a source/origin, transit point and destination of trafficked SALW. The interception of a
consignment of pump action rifles alleged to have originated from China through Turkey, along the Mile 2 – Apapa Road, Lagos by
the operatives of Nigeria Customs Service (NCS); and the discovery of an illegal arms factory in Agbada, Nenwe in Aninri Local
Government Area of Enugu State during the first quarter of 2011 by the State Security Service (SSS), Enugu State Command, are
examples of how endangered Nigeria is.
In addition, Nigeria’s secret service in October 2010 intercepted the shipment of 13 containers filled with
rocket launchers , grenades and other explosives and ammunitions .
The cargo was said to be on its way to Gambia and had begun its journey from a port in Iran. Also, sometime in June 2009, there were several media reports that security
operatives impounded a Ukrainian plane, fully loaded with guns and ammunitions when it made a technical landing at Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport at about
2:00.a.m on Wednesday 17th June.
The unresolved murders of high profile citizens like Chief Bola Ige, Funsho Williams, A.K. Dikibo, Marshal Harry and many others seemed to have had their roots in this jungle-
like life in which Nigerians live. They have also fuelled communal clashes, religious and ethnic crises in Ife, Jos, Kaduna and Taraba, as well as farmers-herdsmen conflicts in
Benue and Nasarwa states, in which hundreds of lives have been lost.
Similarly, the number of recovered arms from robbers; not to mention the lingering militancy, terrorism, herdsmen
and farmers’ conflict and kidnapping further expose the magnitude of the influx of illegal arms in the country.
This situation is frightening and raises serious questions about the security of lives and property in the country.
Therefore, it is heart-warming that the Federal Government has risen up to the occasion by setting up a
committee to transform the Presidential Committee on Small Arms and Light Weapons (PRESCOM) into a National
Commission (NATCOM). This decision is meant to fast-track the process of fighting against
proliferation of arms not only in Nigeria but also in member-countries of the Economic Community of West African States,
particularly because of the regional dimension of the problem of Boko Haram .
 2NC – Aid – Solvency – Russia
Russia is threatening NATO’s southern flank, but they can’t compete with US
foreign aid to Africa
Schmitt 3/31 [Eric Schmitt is a senior writer covering terrorism and national security for The New York Times. Since 2007, he has reported
on terrorism issues, with assignments to Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Africa, Southeast Asia among others. He is the co-author, with The Times’s
Thom Shanker, of “Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda,” published in 2011. “Russia’s Military Mission
Creep Advances to a New Front: Africa.” New York Times, 31 March 2019, nytimes.com/2019/03/31/world/africa/russia-military-africa.html]
OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — Russiahas been steadily expanding its military influence across
Africa, alarming Western officials with increasing arms sales, security agreements and training programs for
unstable countries or autocratic leaders.
In the Central African Republic, where a Russian has been installed as the president’s national security adviser, the government is
selling mining rights for gold and diamonds at a fraction of their worth to hire trainers and buy arms from Moscow. Russia is
seeking to ensconce itself on NATO’s southern flank by helping a former general in Libya fight for control over
his government and vast oil market.
Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, brought in Russian mercenaries in January to help shore up his rule against nationwide
protests. And last spring, five sub-Saharan African countries — Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania —
appealed to Moscow to help their overtaxed militaries and security services combat the I slamic S tate
and Al Qaeda .
Russia, entrenched in Africa during the Cold War’s violent East-West rivalry, largely retreated from the continent after the collapse of
the Soviet Union. But in the past two years, Moscow has rekindled relations with Soviet-era clients like
Mozambique and Angola, and forged new ties with other countries. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will host a
summit meeting between Moscow and African countries later this year.
Expanding Moscow’s military sway on the continent reflects Mr. Putin’s broader vision of returning Russia to its former glory. But it
also illustrates Russia’s opportunistic strategy to carve out logistical and political gains in Africa
wherever and whenever it can.
“Russia is also a growing challenge and has taken a more militaristic approach in Africa,” Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, the head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, told
Congress in March.
The murder of three Russian journalists by unknown assailants in the Central African Republic, a former French colony, last year drew attention to the Kremlin’s return to the
continent.
The journalists were investigating the activities of the Wagner Group, a private military force founded by a former Russian intelligence officer and linked to an associate of Mr.
Putin. Russia said in a statement last year that 175 instructors — believed by Pentagon officials and Western analysts to be employed by the Wagner Group — have trained
more than 1,000 Central African Republic troops. The country has been mired in violence since 2012.
“Moscow and its private military contractors are arming some of the region’s weakest governments and backing the continent’s autocratic rulers,” said Judd Devermont, director
of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “This engagement threatens to exacerbate current conflict zones.”

Late last year, the White

House revamped its economic and security policies toward Africa —
including plans to increase access to financing for projects on the continent — and administration officials have
fanned out on the continent to drum up support for the plan. In March, in Luanda, Angola, John J. Sullivan, the deputy secretary of
state, warned that “Russia often utilizes coercive, corrupt, and covert means to attempt to influence
sovereign states, including their security and economic partnerships.”
Under the Trump administration, the Pentagon has shifted focus to confronting global threats, largely from China and Russia, and
away from fighting terrorist organizations. In December, John R. Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser,
described the new strategy in Africa as a “ great power ” competition and counterbalance to
China and Russia.
The Kremlin, Mr. Bolton said at the time, “continues to sell arms and energy in exchange for votes at the United Nations — votes that keep strongmen in power, undermine
peace and security and run counter to the best interests of the African people.”
But many African nations appeared unconvinced. Some two dozen abstained in December on a motion by the United Nations General Assembly that condemned Russia’s
annexation of Crimea and urged Moscow to withdraw its troops from the Ukranian peninsula.
The United States military has a relatively light footprint across Africa.
About 6,000 United States troops and 1,000 Defense Department civilians or contractors work on a variety of missions throughout Africa, mainly training and conducting
exercises with local armies.

Moscow cannot compete with American foreign aid or China’s sweeping investment efforts on the
continent. But analysts said Russia is driven by both opportunity and necessity to advance in Africa.
Russia is seeking more strategic bases for its troops, including at Libyan ports on the Mediterranean Sea and at naval logistics centers in Eritrea and Sudan on the Red Sea,
according to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a research organization in Washington.
Last year, Russia signed agreements on military cooperation with Guinea, Burkina Faso, Burundi and Madagascar. Separately, Mali’s government has sought help from
Moscow to combat terrorism, despite the thousands of French troops and United Nations peacekeepers who are stationed in the country.
Thirteen percent of Russia’s total arms exports in 2017 were sent to Africa, according to the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute. Russia is courting arms deals across Africa by promising timely deliveries and
flexible terms — a strategy that analysts said is most successful when pitched at states that have few
alternatives to develop defense agreements with other partners because they have been
isolated by the United States and other countries in the West.
Aff
 2AC – Arms Sales Key
Aff solves– weapons are the root cause of instability in Africa 
Fleshman 11 [Michael Fleshman. “Small arms in Africa.” AfricaRenewal, UN, December 2011,
un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2011/small-arms-africa]
The dry rolling plains of northern Kenya seem an unlikely place for an arms race. But in less than a generation the pastoral
Pokot people and their neighbours have gone from protecting their herds with spears to outfitting their young men with cheap, reliable and deadly
automatic rifles from the war zones of Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan. The impact of modern military weapons on the Pokot and surrounding
communities was brought tragically home in early
2001, when Pokot youth opened fire on a rival settlement,
killing 47 people, burning down the village and transforming the almost-ceremonial tradition of cattle raiding into an occasion for human
slaughter. "Guns are changing things," one young Pokot man told the Washington Post newspaper. "The young ones, they don't respect elders." "If you
don't have a weapon," added another, "your grave is open."
In fact, small
arms, which include rifles, pistols and light machine guns, are filling African graves in ever-increasing
numbers -- from the killing fields of Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the streets of Lagos and
Johannesburg. While the international community searches, so far unsuccessfully, for agreement on the regulation of the global trade in small
arms, a growing number of African countries, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations are grappling with the human and development
consequences of gun violence and seeking to reduce both the supply and the demand for what Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called "the weapons
of choice for the killers of our time."
Reducing the availability and use of small arms in places where fighting has ended has become increasingly
important to Africa's development prospects as the number of conflicts has increased over the past decade. The widespread abuse
of weapons diverts scarce government resources from health and education to public security, discourages investment and economic growth, and
deprives developing countries of the skills and talents of the victims of small arms.
Millions of light arms -- lightweight, highly portable, and devastatingly effective in the hands of even young or poorly trained users -- were shipped to Africa during the Cold War to equip anti-colonial fighters, newly
independent states and superpower proxy forces alike. The collapse of the Soviet bloc saw a new flood of small arms entering Africa as manufacturers put additional millions of surplus Cold War-era weapons on
the international arms market at cut-rate prices.
Years later, these durable killing machines fight on in the hands of insurgents, local militias, criminal organizations and ordinary people left vulnerable to violence by ineffective policing and simmering civil conflict.
In some parts of Africa, a Soviet-designed AK-47 assault rifle, coveted for its simplicity and firepower, can be purchased for as little as $6, or traded for a chicken or sack of grain. In 1999 the Red Cross estimated
that in the Somali capital of Mogadishu alone, the city's 1.3 million residents possessed over a million guns -- among an estimated 550 mn small arms in circulation worldwide.

The widespread abuse of weapons diverts scarce government resources from health and education to
public security, discourages investment and economic growth, and deprives developing countries of the skills and
talents of the victims of small arms.
"The proliferation of light weapons in Africa poses a major threat to development," noted Ms. Virginia Gamba, the former director of the Arms
Management Programme of the South African Institute for Security Studies (ISS). Their low cost, ease of use and availability "may escalate conflicts,
undermine peace agreements, intensify [the] violence and impact of crime, impede economic and social development and hinder the development of
social stability, democracy and good governance." In July 2001 the US government estimated that small arms are fuelling conflicts in 22 African
countries that have taken 7-8 million lives. In Africa guns are not just the weapons of choice but also w eapons of m ass d estruction.
When weapons outlast wars
The development impact of war on individuals, communities and states is unambiguous and well documented. By its nature -- and sometimes by
design -- modern warfare destroys economic and social infrastructure, uproots populations, paralyses economic activity, disrupts vital health and
education services and diverts financial resources from development to defence.
Unlike heavy weapons systems,
Less well understood is the impact of small arms on development in post-conflict situations.
which can be costly to acquire and operate and comparatively easy to decommission or
monitor, the end of a war does not necessarily bring an end to the use of light weapons.
As Robert Muggah and Peter Bachelor, analysts for the Small Arms Survey, a European research institute, report in a recent study, Development Held Hostage: Assessing the Effects of Small Arms on Human
Development, "the durability of small arms ensures that once they are present in a country they present a continuous risk -- especially in societies where there are large accumulations of weapons.... They
frequently outlast peace agreements and are taken up again in the post-conflict period" by criminal gangs, vigilantes, dissidents, and individuals concerned about personal security. In areas where state security is
weak or absent, possession of a gun can be a matter of survival, either to seize food and other vital resources or as protection from attack. In other places the low cost and ready availability of firearms can
promote what experts call a "culture of violence," where gun ownership becomes a symbol of power and status, and gun violence a first resort for the settlement of personal and political disputes
South Africa has suffered considerably from the misuse of small arms since the end of apartheid in 1994, and has moved aggressively to reduce their
availability. Unlike most other African countries, South Africa has a large number of small arms in legal
circulation, with over 4 mn guns registered to private, primarily white, owners at the end of 1999. In common with countries bordering conflict
areas in West and East Africa, however, South Africa has also suffered from the illegal influx from
neighbouring states of weapons that have outlasted the wars they were intended to fight.
In the 1970s, the apartheid government began supplying thousands of tons of arms and ammunition to its domestic and regional allies for the defence of white minority rule. An estimated 30 tonnes of guns and
explosives were smuggled into the country by the anti-apartheid movements, which also left arms stockpiles at their base camps in surrounding countries. As many as 4 mn weapons from various sources have
illegally found their way into the hands of South African civilians. The presence of so many weapons outside government control has overwhelmed law enforcement efforts, contributed to crime and public
insecurity, hampered economic growth and caused tragic and avoidable deaths and injuries.
Measuring the effects

Assessing the peacetime impact of small arms on South Africa and other African countries is difficult. Many countries lack the
capacity to collect and analyze data about the use of small arms. Moreover, many of the greatest costs to development,
such as deferred investment, reduced economic activity and lost productivity due to injury and insecurity, are indirect, and therefore hard to measure.
One of the best indicators, said Dr. Etienne Krug, director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Injuries and Violence Prevention Department, are
public health records. But particularly in developing regions like Africa, WHO cautions in its 2001 report Small Arms and Global Health, "data on the
impact of small arms on the health of individuals are far from complete." Statistics are vital for the development of effective strategies to meet the
medical challenges of guns, he noted, but donors are often unwilling to fund data collection as part of health
projects.
Globally, WHO put the number of violent deaths from all causes in 1998 at 2.3 million. Several hundred thousand of these are believed to be gunshot
victims: 42 per cent as a result of suicide, 32 per cent by murder and 26 per cent by war. The study found a correlation between gun violence and
death rates in low and middle-income countries, at 42 per 100,000 people, were more than double the 17 per
development:
hundreds of thousands more people survive gun injuries, but require costly
100,000 rate found in high-income countries. Many
medical care and often suffer permanent physical and emotional disabilities. The absence of sophisticated emergency medical facilities,
however, means that far more gunshot injuries prove fatal to victims in developing countries than in the industrialized North.
The direct cost can be high. A 1997 study of 1,000 gunshot victims in South Africa put the total cost of hospital treatment at nearly R30 mn (then $6.5 mn). The indirect impact of gun violence on public health
systems, asserts WHO, also is huge. Treating large numbers of patients with gunshot wounds "has a draining effect on basic health care and diverts much-needed resources from other health and social
services."
Crime rates rising
Crime statistics can also provide a measurement of the impact of small arms on development. Because apartheid-era crime reports in South Africa are considered unreliable, ISS researchers analyzed post-
apartheid police records and reported a "marked increase" in the use of firearms to commit murder, from 41.5 per cent of homicides in 1994 to 49.3 per cent in 1998, even as the overall number of murders
decreased. The use of small arms in robberies also increased significantly, from 51,000 incidents in 1996 to 69,500 in 1998, although the overall number of robberies involving weapons of all kinds increased only
marginally.

The increase, the analysts argue, "shows that more criminals are arming themselves " and that " access to firearms
has become easier compared to previous years." By 2000 the South African government found that homicide, primarily involving firearms,
was the leading cause of death among young men aged 15-21 and that gunshots from all causes (murder, suicide and accidents) were the single
largest cause of non-natural death in the country.
The death and injury of so many young people has profound consequences for development -- reducing the number of educated people entering the work force, diverting family and social resources into the care
of those disabled by gun violence and forcing the government to redirect funding from social services to law enforcement. Last year, for example, South Africa spent $1.96 bn on law enforcement and $1.56 bn on
health.

In Kenya, the illegal influx of small arms from surrounding states appears to be fuelling violence far from the volatile
northern border areas. The increased availability of weapons in Nairobi, for example, may be a factor in the rising number of murders and the use of
violence in burglaries, although Kenyan police report that the number of reported robberies themselves has declined. A recent survey by the UN Centre
for Human Settlements (Habitat) and the Kenyan government found that 75 per cent of city residents felt insecure at night despite an increased police
presence in high crime areas.
 2AC – AT Solvency: AGOA Good
AGOA expands and deepens trade relations – Nigeria is just not taking advantage
of it
Alagbe 19 [Jesusegun Alagbe has written for The Punch Newspapers for the past five years, the most widely read newspaper
in Nigeria. They have written general and industry-based news and feature stories. They have written stories on childhood and
maternal health, girl-child poverty, environment, among others. In 2017, they were named the Best Journalist in the Anti-Corruption
Category at the West Africa Media Excellence Conference Awards held in Accra, Ghana. "Nigeria hasn’t taken advantage of
AGOA." Punch Newspapers, 7-25-2019, https://punchng.com/nigeria-hasnt-taken-advantage-of-agoa/]
The United States government says Nigeria has not taken full advantage of the African Growth and Opportunity
Act.
The US government, through its Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Ambassador Tibor Nagy, and the Assistant US
Trade Representative for Africa, Ms Constance Hamilton, said this on Tuesday during a telephone press briefing on the forthcoming
2019 AGOA Forum.
AGOA’s objectives include the expansion and
Signed into law by a former US President Bill Clinton in May 2000,
deepening of the trade and investment relationship of the US with sub-Saharan Africa.
According to a statement on Wednesday by the Public Affairs Section of the US Consulate General, Lagos, Nagy and Hamilton
noted that the AGOA Forum was a key component of the US-Africa relationship.
On why Nigerian companies had not been able to efficiently key into the business opportunities offered by AGOA, Hamilton said
Nigeria needed to diversify its economy to take full advantage of the initiative.
She said, “I think that Nigeria has not taken advantage of AGOA because they send us mainly oil … To
a certain extent, Nigeria is taking advantage of it (AGOA) – probably more than some of the other countries –
but it is petroleum . And oil doesn’t really create the kind of jobs or other benefits from trade that I think that
countries are looking for.”
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Aid Bad
Foreign aid actually hurts Africa
- Makes the rich richer
- Makes the poor poorer
- Boosts corruption
- Discourages development
Lyons 14 [Juliette Lyons directed, filmed, and edited “Notes On Limbo” – a documentary;
edited footage for BBC Africa, worked for Reuters. She worked for Le Journal International , 10-
13-2014, "Foreign aid is hurting, not helping Sub-Saharan Africa," Le Journal International -
Archives, accessed 7-25-2019, https://www.lejournalinternational.fr/Foreign-aid-is-hurting-not-
helping-Sub-Saharan-Africa_a2085.html]
So, richer governments are judged by it and famous faces don’t stop campaigning in plead for it but foreign aid doesn’t
seem to be showing any significant progress to alleviate poverty, in African countries at least, and in Sub-
Saharan Africa more particularly: home to the largest portion on the world’s “bottom million” in extreme poverty. Since the
1950s traditional development economics has been dominated by the idea that large donations
is the solution to the savings gap in developing countries but evidence shows that large
influxes of foreign aid can end up doing more harm than good.
An analysis of the economic growth in Asia over the past decades, which has received little foreign aid in comparison to Africa, is a
good starting point. Reports from the World Bank show that out of the 700 million people who were pulled out of poverty between
1981 and 2010, 627 million of them were in China. That leaves us with 73 million throughout the rest of the world. In other words,
89.6% were from China, giving us a clear indication that foreign aid isn’t the answer. Like Jeffrey Sachs , I thought that foreign aid
was the way forward when it comes to eliminating extreme poverty but since the 2000s the “big push” theory has been subject to
heated debate highlighting the negative consequences of aid which seem to have left developing countries in a worse place than
before. Here is why and here is how changes can be made to see real progress.
Let’s focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. We hear about all these efforts but when we take a look at the statistics
of foreign aid budgets to Chad, Angola or Nigeria , the level of progress suddenly appears to be
very low in comparison to the huge sums received. The continent as a whole receives roughly $50
billion of international assistance annually. Yet, instead of drastically improving the living conditions of the
600 million people who live below the poverty line, this aid makes the rich richer, the poor
poorer and hinders economic growth in the region , not to mention catalysing the vicious
cycle of corruption .
Official Development Aid (ODA) is the official financing that is distributed among developing countries with the aim of promoting
economic development and welfare in these countries. The money that floods into Africa comes not only from individual
government-to-government aid programs but also international development programs such as the World Bank and the IMF, which
act as a channelling intermediate between the donor governments and receiving governments.
FOREIGN AID IS SYNONYMOUS WITH PROMOTION OF CORRUPTION AND DEPENDENCE
Aid strengthens corruption in countries where it is already widespread. Unfortunately this is
the case for many of the countries that make up Sub-Saharan Africa. The largest recipients of foreign aid
are in Sub-Saharan Africa, which happens to be where the world’s lowest ranked countries in many areas of governance are,
especially in terms of corruption, according to Transparency International. This shows that foreign aid simply reinforces
the amount of resources available to already corrupt specific elite groups of people, thus tipping
or keeping the balance of power into the hands of the executive branch of government. There is
a clear correlation between increased aid and statistically significant increase in corruption.
The money is not distributed evenly among the population or used to promote growth and to
help the poor but is instead used on military equipment, white elephant projects,
dishonest procurements, etc . It is also used by leaders who are short of time with policies and
want to achieve them quickly, i.e. : increasing the size of the government with civil servants (who don’t necessarily
contribute anything more to the system or development) to cut down the unemployment rate.
Another consequence is aid dependence. These countries have become used to receiving such large sums
of money that they don’t promote local business because they have “free” money at their
disposal instead. This prevents any form of improvement in terms of human development and per capita income.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Prosper Africa Bad
Prosper Africa makes nonaligned countries pick sides AND Trump has no
intention of helping Africa
Elliott 7/16 [Kimberly Ann Elliott is a visiting scholar at the George Washington University Institute for International Economic
Policy, and a visiting fellow with the Center for Global Development. Her WPR column appears every Tuesday. "Trump’s ‘Prosper
Africa’ Strategy Is Fixated on a Cold War-Like View of China." WPR, 7-16-2019, worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/28036/trump-s-
prosper-africa-strategy-is-fixated-on-a-cold-war-like-view-of-china]
During the Cold War, American policymakers frequently pushed nonaligned countries to take sides. The
Central Intelligence Agency fomented coups against governments that flirted with communism and the Soviet Union, or that just
drifted too far to the left for comfort. The State Department threatened to cut aid flows to countries that voted too often against U.S.
priorities at the United Nations. Could sub-Saharan Africa find itself caught in the middle again if a cold war with
China breaks out?
In a speech at the Heritage Foundation last December, President Donald Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton,
launched a new initiative called “Prosper Africa” that he said was aimed at promoting trade and commercial
ties “to the benefit of both the United States and Africa.” But there are a number of reasons for African governments
to be concerned about what the administration really has in mind.
First of all, Bolton cast the goal of increased economic engagement as something necessary for “safeguarding the
economic independence of African states and protecting U.S. national security interests,” not as something helpful for
African economic development. He pointed to the growing influence of “great power competitors,” China and Russia,
which he suggested were investing in Africa mainly “to gain a competitive advantage over the United States.” While there are
certainly valid concerns about some of China’s foreign aid and lending practices in Africa and other developing countries, African
governments have generally welcomed Chinese aid and investment. It’s not at all clear they would agree that this is
a competition where they must choose one side or the other.
A second reason to be skeptical of how seriously this administration takes the goal of helping Africa
develop is the low level of U.S. engagement to date. President Donald Trump has not visited the continent; his wife
and daughter have in trips heavy on photo ops but light on policy substance. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross—hardly the
most dynamic member of the Cabinet—was supposed to represent the administration last month at the U.S.-Africa Business
Summit in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where details of the Prosper Africa initiative were announced. But he cancelled
at the last minute because of a “scheduling conflict,” according to his office, sending Deputy Secretary of
Commerce Karen Dunn Kelley instead.
By contrast, Chinese President Xi Jinping has visited Africa multiple times and has welcomed a stream of African officials to Beijing. Russian President Vladimir Putin will host 50 African leaders at a summit in
Sochi later this year. Gyude Moore, a former minister of public works in Liberia (he’s now my colleague at the Center for Global Development), called the lack of Cabinet-level U.S. participation at the Maputo
meeting insulting.
There are a number of reasons for African governments to be concerned about what the Trump administration really has in mind.

Trump’s view that trade

Finally, another reason to question the White House’s intentions with respect to trade with Africa is
policy is a zero-sum game: If another country wins, the United States must lose, and vice versa. Indeed, before getting to
the mutual benefit part of his speech last December, Bolton asserted that the administration’s new Africa strategy
would remain true to Trump’s “central campaign promise to put the interests of the American people
first, both at home and abroad .”
So it should be no surprise that when he discussed trade, Bolton emphasized American jobs and exports to Africa. He said that the administration wants to pursue “modern, comprehensive trade agreements…
that ensure fair and reciprocal exchange.” In recent congressional testimony, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer also reiterated the administration’s goal of negotiating a bilateral trade agreement with
an African country that could become a model for others. Negotiators for a little country, negotiating with a big country like the United States, might wonder just what reciprocity means in that context.
If more than two decades of history is any guide, negotiating a trade deal with the United States will mean more or less accepting whatever text American negotiators put in front of their counterparts, including
onerous demands for strict intellectual property protections that could increase prices for drugs and agricultural inputs. Negotiating with one country at a time is also problematic because most African countries
are party to one or more regional communities, which they are stitching together in a single, continent-wide free trade agreement that just formally entered into force. The continent—home to a large number of
small economies, many of them landlocked—desperately needs more regional integration to increase its competitiveness by lowering transportation and other costs of trade and achieving economies of scale.
Beyond these problematic trade plans, what else is in the administration’s Prosper Africa initiative? Its second stated aim is to engage the private sector and double U.S. trade with and investment in Africa.
According to Kelley’s remarks in Maputo, two of the three strands of the program are aimed at helping American companies find and close deals across Africa by streamlining and better coordinating U.S.

“U.S.
government activities that provide information, financing and risk insurance to the private sector. She also suggested that these efforts on behalf of American businesses could include

government advocacy” to “expedite” transactions, which sounds like it might involve a little arm-
twisting if African officials question the terms of a deal.
Helping African countries improve the investment climate, which is Prosper Africa’s third strand, and connecting American investors
to opportunities on the continent, are worthy—and indeed longstanding—goals. Overall, however, the initiative appears to be a mix
of existing programs in shiny new packaging, and with little new money. The $50 million proposed budget for Prosper
Africa is a drop in the bucket compared to the administration’s proposed 9 percent cut in overall
aid to Africa. And efforts to negotiate bilateral trade agreements country by country would undermine the regional integration
that is needed for the continent’s development.
Working behind the scenes won’t be able to counter Russia and China
Paquette 6/19 [Danielle Paquette – West Africa bureau chief. Education: Indiana University, BA in journalism. “Trump
administration unveils its new Africa strategy - with wins and snags.” Washington Post, 19 June 2019,
washingtonpost.com/world/trump-administration-unveils-its-new-africa-strategy--with-wins-and-snags/2019/06/19/c751be4c-91f5-
11e9-956a-88c291ab5c38_story.html]
DAKAR, Senegal - The Trump administration's message to Africa has been blunt: Choose the United States
over China and Russia.
Officials have announced the details of that policy challenge in the southern African nation of Mozambique, urging hundreds of
African business leaders in an economic conference to ramp up partnerships and trade with American companies.
US companies deliver "unrivaled value," Deputy Secretary of Commerce Karen Dunn Kelley told the crowd. "Yet we have lost
ground to the increasingly sophisticated - but too often opaque - business practices of foreign competitors."
The White House's solution is  Prosper Africa  , a new effort that shiftes American focus on the continent from aid
to industry.
The $ 50 million program will offer technical assistance to companies looking to enter or grow in
Africa, which is urbanizing more rapidly than anywhere else on Earth . The region is projected to have 1.52 billion
consumers by 2025 - almost five times the size of the US population.
But Americans are missing out on that market, Kelley said: US exports to Africa have dropped by nearly a third since their 2014
high.
The administration seeks to reverse that trend by searching for business opportunities, trying to reduce trade barriers, connecting
companies to financing and guiding them through bureaucracy, among other commerce-boosting tactics, she said.
Kelley highlighted one example of success: Texas Energy Company Anadarko Petroleum Corp. gave
the green light Tuesday to start building a $ 20 billion gas liquefaction and export terminal in
Mozambique - the largest such project ever approved in Africa.
Meanwhile, the US International Development Finance Corp. , a government agency that will begin operating in
October following a bipartisan congressional push , will double the amount of money available for American
investment in low-income countries, including some in Africa.
"We know that the US government can and must do more to capitalize on the competitive advantage of US companies," Kelley said,
"and the entrepreneurial spirit of the African people."
The Trump's Africa policy emerged six months after the national security adviser John Bolton announced that the
administration was switching gears on the continent - with an emphasis on countering the rising influence
of China and Russia .
The "predatory practices" of those rivals threaten the financial independence of African nations by strapping them with debt, he said
in December - and squash opportunities for the United States to expand its economic footprint.
"They are deliberately and aggressively targeting their investment in the region to gain a competitive
advantage over the United States," Bolton said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, where he mentioned
China 14 times.
The condemnation received mixed reviews in Africa, where China is generally popular as the continent's largest trading partner and
Russia is making aggressive inroads.
Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to meet with 50 African leaders on his home turf in Sochi at the first Russian-African
Summit. The meeting is meant to bolster "Russia's active presence in the region," said the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last year .
And Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged $ 60 billion in September in financial aid to Africa. China will forgive the debt in poorer
countries, he added as Beijing hosted dozens of African dignitaries. The sky was uncharacteristically blue that week because air-
polluting factories had shut down for the summit.
Xi has also visited the continent several times . He arrived in the West African nation of Senegal last year, for example, to hand the
President Macky Sall the keys to a new $ 52 million wrestling stadium , courtesy of China.(Wrestling is huge in Senegal.)
"Say what you want about what the Chinese are doing in Africa, but their leaders will make the effort to go there and build personal
relationships", said Eric Olander, managing editor of China Africa Project , a news site in Shanghai.
US diplomacy is less flashy. American efforts tend to unfold behind the scenes : training
military forces, helping cities rebuild after devastating floods, distributing fertilizer to farmers,
helping regions get rid of disease-spreading flies.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – AfCFTA Fails
AfCFTA cannot improve the infrastructure needed for a unified market
Green 7/12 [Andrew is an American journalist living in Berlin. He was previously based in sub-Saharan Africa for five years,
which included a stint as Voice of America's South Sudan bureau chief. He writes often on systems that perpetuate inequality and
the people looking to disrupt them, with a regular focus on health, human rights and politics. "What Can the African Continental Free
Trade Area Really Deliver?." No Publication, 7-12-2019, worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/28030/what-can-the-african-continental-
free-trade-area-really-deliver]

AfCFTA got a late boost when Nigeria, the largest African economy, agreed Sunday to sign on, but that’s no
assurance that the bid for a single unified market will be a success . Every African nation but
Eritrea has signed the general agreement, but only about half have actually ratified it.
AfCFTA is designed to address lagging intra-regional trade, which accounted for only 17 percent of all African exports in 2017,
according to Reuters. By eliminating tariffs on most goods, AfCFTA’s signatories hope it will not only kick that rate up, but also spur
local production and strengthen supply chains.
Its critics note that it will not improve road or rail links, bring down the disproportionately high
costs of regional flights or immediately erase border restrictions. And despite signing on to the deal, Nigerian
officials expressed concerns shared by many of Africa’s more advanced economies that their markets would be
flooded with cheap goods from neighboring countries, sinking their domestic manufacturers. A tweet from
the Nigerian president’s office promised to “focus on taking advantage of ongoing negotiations to secure the necessary safeguards
against smuggling, dumping and other risks/threats.”

AfCFTA fails – it faces problems like tariffs, corruption, job loss, and international
antagonism
Talking to DW, Togo's Foreign Minister Robert Dussey hailed the agreement, but did not hide the challenges posed by
implementation. The AfCFTA commits the majority of countries to 90 percent tariff cuts within a five-year
period, thereby reducing barriers to trade on the continent. The deadline had to be prolonged to ten years for those listed as "Least
Developed Countries" by the United Nations. Another half a dozen very recalcitrant countries, including Mozambique, Niger and
Malawi, obtained an extension of 15 years. "It will need an effort to give them the technical tools to meet the
challenges ahead," Foreign Minister Dussey said.
eliminating tariffs could
A former political affairs commissioner of the AU, Aisha Laraba Abdullahi, told DW that fears that
harm some African economies are understandable. "We must not provide an opportunity for other
countries to come and dump their products on the continent and reduce our manufacturing
capacity. We have to be on guard," especially since only a very small number of African countries "have excelled in
manufacturing," Abdullahi added.
Huge obstacles to free trade
But as users on DW Africa's Facebook page pointed out, the problem is not just competition from the outside world. Nigerian Umeh
Chidozie wrote: "We don't have electric power; our manufacturers are still struggling to break even. Companies will go to a more
stable environment where cost of production will be cheap to manufacture and bring it in to Nigeria's large market to sell without
paying duty. We will lose a lot of jobs."
There are more obstacles in the way of AfCFTA than just cutting tariffs, experts say. Lack of infrastructure, a fundamental
condition for the functioning of trade, is a major problem. Aisha Abdullahi stresses that enhancing the continent's
infrastructure is also on the AU's agenda: "Ensuring open skies, accelerating our railways, our roads: there are projects already
happening on the continent." Abdullahi acknowledges that there are further difficulties, like corruption, but sees the
agenda "on course."
Keeping Africa from industrializing
Some in the international community are not as optimistic concerning the African free trade zone
and have not been hiding their skepticism. Togo's Foreign Minister Dussey answers them saying that " African development
is foremost of the responsibility of Africans." He accuses some rich countries of not being too keen on
seeing Africa industrialize: "You know we have a problem with work for our youth. It is important that we have strong
industries to have work for the young," was his veiled warning to an industrialized world scared about mass migration.
AfCTA has met with mixed reactions by Africans themselves. On DW Africa's Facebook page, opinions are manifold, with a slight
tendency to optimism. But even this optimism is tinged with skepticism, when, for example, Kyebakola Caesar writes: "In form and
 If only we […] put rhetoric aside and get into real business, then the world will
substance, this all looks a great deal.
feel us and the African pride will return to us all! African solutions to Africa's problems! "
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Small Arms
The Nigerian army acted on impulse bombing civilians that were not affiliated
with Boko Haram – that made more people join the group. Ending all US
assistance is key
Matfess 15 [Hilary Matfess "In Partnering With Nigeria’s Abusive Military, the U.S. Is Giving
Boko Haram a Lifeline." No Publication, 5-29-2015,
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/insights/23447/in-partnering-with-nigeria-s-abusive-military-
the-u-s-is-giving-boko-haram-a-lifeline]
Given that Maiduguri is where Boko Haram was founded, it might have been reasonable to suspect that the group was behind the
raid. Having formed in the early 2000s as a largely nonviolent dissident sect, Boko Haram launched an insurgency in
2009 that has displaced millions and, according to Amnesty International, killed more than 20,000 people. The
insurgency’s devastation has triggered a broader food shortage and humanitarian crisis in the Lake Chad basin.
As it turned out, however, the assault on the U.N. compound was actually perpetrated by members of the
Nigerian military . According to an internal U.N. memo obtained by AFP, the Nigerian soldiers may have been
acting on a far-fetched rumor circulating on social media that Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, was
being housed there.
Those familiar with humanitarian aid operations in sub-Saharan Africa describe the raid as unprecedented, and say it’s stunning that
the military would engage in such an operation on the basis of nothing more, apparently, than a rash of WhatsApp messages.
Even more shocking, though, is the silence of the international community in the wake of the incident. While a spokeswoman for the
U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the U.N. was “extremely concerned” about what
happened, Nigeria’s other partners kept quiet. Given that the United States is a significant military partner
of Nigeria, the lack of condemnation from U.S. officials of what likely amounted to a violation of international
humanitarian law was especially jarring .
Yet Washington’s silence is consistent with a broader pattern: The U.S. has routinely turned a blind eye to abuses by
the Nigerian military in the northeast of the country despite the fact that the U.S. is supporting Nigerian
forces battling Boko Haram. So far, there is every indication that this bilateral military engagement will continue under
President Donald Trump.
the U.S. approved the sale of some $593 million in
In early August, a little more than a week before the U.N. raid,
military hardware and training to Nigeria. The transaction’s big-ticket item was a dozen A-29 Super Tucano light-attack
aircraft.
The Nigerian government had originally sought permission to procure the aircraft in 2015, but the military’s human rights record
prompted the Obama administration to put the sale on hold. In particular, the Nigerian air force has been accused
of
bombing civilians on multiple occasions, including a January strike on a camp for displaced people in Rann, in the
northeastern state of Borno, that killed at least 100 people, according to The Associated Press.
The Rann bombing is an extreme example of an array of abuses, including arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings, committed by Nigerian security forces in the campaign
against Boko Haram. These abuses persist even as the government of President Muhammadu Buhari has undertaken a concerted effort to lionize Nigerian soldiers as national
heroes.
Tactics used by Nigeria’s military in the fight against Boko Haram make it easier for the group to recruit.
A frequent refrain in Washington policy circles, on the rare occasions when events in Africa manage to break through the frenetic domestic news cycle of the Trump era, is that it
is imperative to depend on “strategic regional partners” to advance America’s security objectives. But while security partnerships, both multilateral and bilateral, are a valuable
component of America’s national security toolkit, events in the Lake Chad basin suggest that Washington’s strategic partners are engaging in counterproductive behavior.
A recent report published by the U.N. Development Program, titled “Journey Into Extremism in Africa,” draws from interviews with
former combatants in Nigeria, Mali and Somalia to show that many people who join extremist groups have
suffered abuses at the hands of the security sector. The takeaway is clear: Combating terrorist
groups with tactics that make it easier for them to recruit is quite literally self-defeating .
The behavior of the Nigerian military, therefore, demands that Washington recalibrate its security strategy in the region,
emphasizing professionalization over weapons acquisition and improved capacity for combat.
As Destructive as Boko Haram
The Nigerian military’s abuses in the fight against Boko Haram are so extensive that they are the subject of an ongoing
Extrajudicial killings and illegal detention practices have
investigation by the International Criminal Court.
been documented at length by several nongovernmental organizations, including Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch.
Among the most comprehensive and distressing accounts was a 2015 report by Amnesty International titled “Stars on Their
Shoulders, Blood on Their Hands,” which tallied more than 7,000 deaths in Nigerian government detention
centers, 1,200 additional extrajudicial killings and the arbitrary arrest of more than 20,000
people in counterterrorism operations. According to Amnesty, the military “extrajudicially executed people after they
had been captured and when they presented no danger.” The victims included people who “were shot dead inside detention
facilities, while others were either shot or had their throats cut after being captured during cordon-and-search operations.”
In one especially gruesome incident, soldiers responding to a Boko Haram attack in the northeastern town of Baga in April 2013 carried out a “mop-up” operation that killed
nearly 200 people. More recent accounts from activist groups and people living in the Lake Chad basin suggest these abusive practices have continued.
A woman I interviewed in December 2015 in the Fufore refugee camp, located in the northeastern state of Adamawa, survived attacks by both Boko Haram and the army. She
said that of the two, the army left more destruction in its wake. “My town was along the Boko Haram route, so they attacked us regularly but never ruled over us,” said the
woman, who is from Borno and who spoke on condition of anonymity for her safety. “We were just trapped in our town.”
But when the soldiers came, the woman said, they “burned all of our houses and our fields.” She said she had no time to collect her possessions before the inferno began.
Nigerian army entered her
Another woman from the town of Walasah, also in Borno, similarly reported that when the
community, “They did not stop to ask who was Boko Haram; they just burned down the whole
village .”
 2AC – BoKo Haram DA
US arms sales are key to fighting Boko Haram
Myers 18 [Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel,
leadership and other issues affecting service members. "Army troops, Special Forces train Nigerian infantry for fight against Boko
Haram, ISIS." Army Times, 2-26-2018, armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/02/23/special-forces-troops-train-nigerian-infantry-for-
fight-against-boko-haram-isis/]
A dozen U.S. troops just wrapped up a seven-week trip to Nigeria, where they trained local soldiers in advanced
infantry tactics that, in all likelihood, they’ll use to beat back religious extremist terror in their country.
The soldiers, some two Green Berets and six conventional troops from Fort Bragg’s Security Assistance Training Management
Organization and four infantrymen from 1st Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, visited the Nigerian Army Infantry School to train 200
soldiers from the 26th Infantry Battalion.
“They face a significant threat from both Boko Haram and ISIS ,” Capt. Stephen Gouthro, the group’s officer-
in-charge, told Army Times in a Feb. 15 phone interview. “We, as Americans, have been working with this country in various
capacities, and this is just one more of those capacities where they would like our assistance with tactics … the way we do
business.”
SATMO, Gouthro’s unit, is mostly known for providing support to f oreign m ilitary s ales. Recently, SATMO
soldiers have gone to countries like Slovakia and Colombia to train their troops on that new equipment.
“What’s unique about the Nigeria mission, for us, is that it’s not tied to any specific type of sale,” Gouthro said.
Instead, the group in Nigeria focused on advanced infantry skills, starting with patrolling and counter-
IED training, working up to movement-to-contact and ambushes or raids with a platoon-sized element.
Russia/Europe
Neg
 1NC – Europe CP
The United States federal government should aid stability of Europe by
 Reenter the Paris Climate Accords
 Co-operate with the E.U. and the broader region on developing sustainable and clean
energy alternatives to oil to solve energy independence
 Establish a joint nuclear control council with Russia and other interested powers
 Substantially increase investment into global public and private joint scientific efforts in
civilian fields
 Establish cybersecurity development integration with the U.N. and Ukraine and norms
discussions within the U.N.
 Encourage N.A.T.O. countries to become self-sufficient either asymmetrically or
conventionally in order to deter Russian aggression
 Proclaim support for the European Union integration and discourage nations from exiting

European’s top security concerns are unanimously Russian meddling, U.S.

commitment to the international order, and cybersecurity threats
Dennison et al. 18 (Susi Dennison is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on
Foreign Relations and the director of ECFR's European Power programme, Dr. Ulrike Franke is
a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and part of ECFR's New
European Security Initiative, "THE NIGHTMARE OF THE DARK: THE SECURITY FEARS
THAT KEEP EUROPEANS AWAKE AT NIGHT," European Council on Foreign Relations, July
2018,
https://www.ecfr.eu/specials/scorecard/the_nightmare_of_the_dark_the_security_fears_that_ke
ep_europeans_awake_at_n)
To the east, a new kind of uneasy neighbourly relationship with Russia is developing – one that appears to involve
Europeans accepting Russian meddling in their political affairs, from deliberate interference in
elections to cyber attacks on European companies, systems, and political machinery. Further east, China continues
to deepen its influence on EU states through trade and investment in the Union and its neighbourhood.
To the south, European countries now rely on cooperation with an increasingly autocratic regime in
Ankara on some of the issues that their citizens are most concerned about, particularly migration and counter-terrorism.
Meanwhile, conflicts and poverty on the other side of the Mediterranean, and the migration that
stems from them, are increasingly challenging Europe’s security and even its solidarity.
Most importantly , to the west, US President Donald Trump is demonstrating a total disregard for the
international agreements and norms that Europeans hold dear. By withdrawing from the Paris climate
change deal, by pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran’s nuclear
programme, and by attacking the integrity of the international trading system through the unilateral imposition
of tariffs, Trump has called into question Europeans’ formerly unshakeable faith in diplomacy as a way to resolve disagreements
and to protect Europe. European leaders now fear that the transatlantic security guarantee will centre not on alliances and common
interests but purchases of American technology and materiel – and on obeisance to an unpredictable president.
Europeans are – understandably – worried about this picture. But they are divided on how to handle it. The political crisis
around immigration into the EU from 2015 onwards has revealed fundamental divisions in the way member states view their
security. As Ivan Krastev has argued, “the refugee crisis exposed the futility of the post-Cold War paradigm, and especially the
incapacity of Cold War institutions and rules to deal with the problems of the contemporary world.” For many Europeans, the
migration crisis has called into question the ability of the EU and the global multilateral system to protect them.
There are divisions not only between but also within member states. In recent years, national elections
across the EU have resulted in intense battles between political movements that favour an open, progressive
agenda and global engagement, and those that prefer a nationalist, inward-looking approach
that is, ultimately, anti-EU. In this unstable political environment, the need to keep citizens safe – a basic responsibility of any
government – has taken on even greater importance. Safety is central to the nationalists’ increasingly popular
arguments. They argue that mainstream EU governments have failed to protect citizens. In power, however, they face the
inescapable dilemma that small European nations (and they are all small) cannot effectively respond to today’s threats through
national policies alone.
Against this backdrop of worry and division, this report aims to understand security perceptions across the EU more fully and to
search for common responses to protect the EU’s citizens. In April and May 2018, ECFR’s network of 28 associate researchers
completed a survey covering all member states, having conducted interviews with policymakers and members of the analytical
community, along with extensive research into policy documents, academic discourse, and media analysis. Based on this pan-
European survey data, ECFR’s new report maps the security profile of all member states, identifying areas of agreement, points of
contention, and issues on which they should cooperate to keep Europe safe.
The results reveal an EU that is fairly united in its understanding of the threats it faces, but that diverges significantly in the
vulnerability it feels to those threats. This is not just a question of geography or size, since France and Germany, neighbours at the
heart of Europe, fall nearly on opposite ends of the spectrum. France feels relatively resilient across the range of threats, while
Germany thinks of itself as relatively vulnerable.
There are also important variations among the member states on what role the EU should play as a security actor. There is a
near unanimous consensus that NATO must remain the backbone of European security, but EU
member states differ significantly on the extent to which, within the NATO framework, Europe can or should begin to develop
autonomy from the United States.
Finally, and somewhat sadly, given that there is no shortage of real threats for Europeans to be concerned about, our research
paints a picture of an EU that is in some ways its own worst enemy. The responses on the preoccupation with immigration highlight
the extent to which it is the political fallout of the migration crisis – its potential to increase support for populist parties and its use as
a weapon in European domestic politics – and not migration itself that currently threatens the EU.
Europeans are united in their fear about the future. There is widespread agreement throughout Europe that security
threats are on the rise: respondents to ECFR’s survey judged that the threats their countries faced intensified between 2008 and
2018, and will intensify further in the next decade. Today, the top five perceived threats are, in descending order: cyber
attacks; state collapse or civil war in the EU’s neighbourhood; external meddling in domestic politics;
uncontrolled migration into the country; and the deterioration of the international institutional order. Respondents
expected the order of these threats to remain largely the same in the next decade (with terrorist attacks joining the deterioration of
the international order in fifth place), and each threat to grow more intense in the period. Our researchers assess that, with the
benefit of hindsight, the situation appeared to be slightly different in 2008, when the top perceived threats were, in descending order:
economic instability and terrorist attacks; instability in the neighbourhood and disruption in the energy supply; and cyber attacks – of
the kind Estonia experienced in April 2007.
 2NC – Europe – Solvency – JCPOA
Scientific Diplomacy offers objective solutions that can continue despite political
variability, the JCPOA’s construction by scientists proves
Berkman 18 (Paul is the Director of the Science Diplomacy Center and Professor of Practice
in Science Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, "Could
science diplomacy be the key to stabilizing international relations?" The Conversation,
06/12/2018,conversation.com/could-science-diplomacy-be-the-key-to-stabilizing-international-
relations-87836)
It’s no secret that United States–Russia relations are currently rife with tension and mistrust. The news is full of
reports of Russia meddling in U.S. elections, seeding U.S. media with fake news, supporting the Syrian regime and so on.
The relationship between the two countries has reached an all-time low since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some going so far as
to call it a new “cold war.” Diplomats have been unable to mend the relationship, as national security interests on each
side are too narrow to provide common ground.
But there are avenues of collaboration beyond the security realm that can help to balance
strained relationships, maintain open channels of communication and build trust, enabling a more positive diplomatic
process overall.
One key avenue is science. As a common and apolitical language, science brings allies and adversaries together with
technology and innovation to address cross-border challenges that exist across the Earth – think climate, disease pandemics and
international trade – which are out of reach for a single nation to address alone.
Since the 1950s, the U.S. and Russia have been cooperating continuously in a four specific international
the mechanism for cooperation has
spaces – the high seas, Antarctica, outer space and deep sea – and
consistently been science. For instance, they cooperate on the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which preserves the continent for
peaceful purposes as the first nuclear arms agreement with scientific research as the basis for international cooperation. Similarly, in
space, collaboration between the U.S. and the Soviet Union on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 led to the design of an
international docking system, creating a physical bridge for subsequent operations and joint experiments that we see with the
International Space Station today.
The term “science diplomacy” is recently coined, with the first book in this new field emerging from the 2009 Antarctic Treaty
Summit. But this diplomatic approach has long existed in practice. As both an academic who studies science diplomacy and a
practitioner who implements it, I suggest that science can help bridge contemporary political differences
between the superpowers as well as other actors, promoting cooperation and preventing conflict across the world.
People usually think of diplomacy as how states represent themselves and negotiate to advance their own interests. These are the
fraught high-level talks between nations that are featured on newspapers’ front pages. Diplomats on each side angle and negotiate
to come out on top of a particular issue with political expediency. Picture the sit-down in Singapore between President Trump and
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Science diplomacy is different, operating across a continuum of urgencies from political to sustainability time scales.
Nations are still coming together to discuss and resolve cross-border issues. But what’s on the
table revolves around common interests revealed across generations by science – including natural sciences
and social sciences as well as indigenous knowledge – providing a foundation for negotiation that is far less politically charged and
divisive to discuss and resolve the topics of the day.
For example, countries came together to share resources and design a joint response to two recent
pandemics: Zika in Latin America and Ebola in West Africa. Following the easing of U.S.-Cuba relations in
December 2014, scientists from the two countries began to collaborate on cancer research.
Science diplomacy also supports economic prosperity, balancing environmental protection and
societal well-being through innovation. Countries are sharing and collaborating on technologies that will help transition
resource-based economies to knowledge-based economies. This kind of cooperation can yield poverty-alleviating
solutions along with progress across a suite of sustainable development goals.
Science diplomacy is also about contributing to informed decision-making by sharing evidence and options, without advocacy. This
kind of exchange helps ensure the diplomatic process is objective and inclusive, relying on our leaders to
make decisions that have legacy value. Imagine if a group of diplomats got together in a negotiating room to assess and design a
response to a pandemic without consulting and involving medical and public health experts. It wouldn’t make sense. The recent
Iran nuclear deal, for instance, relied on scientists’ expertise to build common interests among
nations as the prelude for an agreement, providing an ongoing basis for cooperation despite political
variability.
 2NC – Europe – Solvency – Cyber
Ukrainian infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to Russia hacking attempts and
has empirically been injured
CERULUS 19 (Laurens Cerulus covers cybersecurity, privacy and data protection. Laurens
has a passion for hacks, leaks and how technology is changing society, “How Ukraine became
a test bed for cyberweaponry,” Politico, 02/14/2019, https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-
cyber-war-frontline-russia-malware-attacks/)
KIEV — To see the warfare of the future, head to the top floor of a nondescript office tower on a potholed street on
the scruffy outskirts of Ukraine's capital. There, next to a darkened conference room, engineers sit at dark gray
monitors, waging war with lines of code.
“Attacks are happening every day,” says Oleh Derevianko, founder of the Ukrainian cybersecurity firm that employs
them, Information Systems Security Partners. "We never thought we were going to be the front line of cyber and hybrid war."
There may be no better place to witness cyber conflict in action than Ukraine today. Open warfare with Russia, a highly
skilled, computer-literate pool of talent and a uniquely vulnerable political, economic and IT
environment have made the country the perfect sandbox for those looking to test new cyberweapons, tactics and tools.
"Ukraine is live-fire space," says Kenneth Geers, a veteran cybersecurity expert and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council
who advises NATO's Tallinn cyber center and spent time on the ground in Ukraine to study the country’s cyber conflict. Much like
global powers fought proxy wars in the Middle East or Africa during the Cold War, Ukraine has become a battleground
in a cyberwar arms race for global influence.
Derevianko's outfit works closely with the Ukrainian government and its U.S. and European allies to fend off onslaughts against the
country’s networks. On the other side of the virtual front line: Not just sophisticated Russian-affiliated hacker groups like Fancy Bear,
Cozy Bear and Sandworm — the group behind “NotPetya,” the most devastating cyberattack to date — but also hosts of other
governmental, nongovernmental and criminal players testing out their capabilities on the country’s networks.
Activity has spiked ahead of presidential elections in March, says Derevianko. Since November, hacker groups have
been shelling Ukrainian magistrates, government officials, attorneys and others with emails that contain
attachments with malware and viruses — sometimes disguised as Christmas greetings, or as messages from the prime
minister’s office — in what Derevianko describes as “mass phishing.”
Russian hacker groups are repeatedly attempting to get into the country’s systems, Ukraine’s national security service told
POLITICO. Critical infrastructure and election systems are under constant stress, it said.
“They’re not only testing destruction but also testing your reflexes,” says Derevianko.
The war in eastern Ukraine has given Russian-affiliated hackers the opportunity to perfect their ability to launch cyberattacks with a
series of major intrusions in Ukraine over the past few years.
“The annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas, it has created a volatile political environment," says Merle Maigre, the former head of
NATO’s cyberdefense center in Tallinn who is now executive vice president at the Estonian cybersecurity firm CybExer.
Even as Russian tanks crossed the physical border into eastern Ukraine in the spring of 2014, Russian-affiliated hackers were
sending malicious code onto Ukraine’s IT systems, providing political chaos as a smokescreen.
Three days before the presidential election in May 2014, hackers broke into Ukraine’s Central Election
Commission and disabled parts of the network using advanced cyberespionage malware, according to a
report by the International Foundation of Electoral Systems funded by the U.S. and U.K. and seen by POLITICO. The Central
Election Commission was hit again later that year, when hackers took down its website ahead of a
parliamentary vote in October.
in 2016. The targets, this time, were companies running
Large-scale attacks followed the next year, and again
Ukraine’s power grid. In 2015, hackers used so-called BlackEnergy malware, dropped on companies’ networks
using spear phishing attacks that tricked employees into downloading from mock emails. So-called
KillDisk malware later destroyed parts of the grid.
The resulting blackouts — the world’s first known successful cyberattack on an energy company at scale — affected
about 230,000 Ukrainians for up to six hours. A year later, in December 2016, hackers relied on even more
sophisticated tools to successfully turn off the lights in large parts of the Ukrainian capital yet again.
But the widest-reaching attack — and the world’s most financially damaging to date — took place in 2017, when hackers combined
code tested in the power grid attacks with malware known as “Petya” and a security vulnerability initially discovered by the U.S.
National Security Agency called EternalBlue.
The resulting malware — "NotPetya” — compromised the software of a small tech firm called Linkos Group, providing it
access to the computers of utility companies, banks, airports and government agencies in
Ukraine. It also crippled multinationals like the Danish shipping giant Maersk, logistics giant FedEx, pharma company Merck and
other major corporations.

Cybersecurity talks could set a global precedent for cybersecurity norms and
already aid in securing the cyber domain
CFR 18 (Council on Foreign Relations, (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership
organization, think tank, and publisher, "Increasing International Cooperation in Cybersecurity
and Adapting Cyber Norms," 02/23/2018, https://www.cfr.org/report/increasing-international-
cooperation-cybersecurity-and-adapting-cyber-norms)
Governments, global industry, and experts from academia and civil society should work together
to prevent cyberwar, restrict offensive cyber operations by nonstate actors, and mitigate the daily economic
threats that ICTs pose to the global economy. The following recommendations seek to maximize international
cooperation while minimizing politicization and cyber risk.
Restart the U.S.-Russia dialogue on cyber issues. The relationship between the United States
and Russia is of crucial importance for the whole ecosystem of cyber policy and diplomacy. The two countries are
among the most advanced cyber powers and were the first to develop ICT confidence-building measures
(a “cyber nonaggression pact”), and they remain the front-runners on global cyber-policy discussions.
Disagreements and accusations between the United States and Russia have been escalating for three years and
are partly responsible for the lack of progress on the establishment of cyber rules for responsible state behavior. The
United States is aligned with a group of countries that insists that existing international law fully applies to
cyberspace, whereas Russia is aligned with another group that wants a new treaty tailored specifically to
this domain. As long as they run in different directions, no major progress on cyber norms can be achieved.
U.S.-Russia cyber negotiations could still be successful.
Critics may argue that new agreements between Washington and Moscow are impossible, given the accusations that Russia used
ICTs to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and that the United States used ICTs for its own geopolitical and surveillance
goals, as exposed by Edward Snowden. However, U.S.-Russia cyber negotiations could still be successful. The United States
found itself in a similar position in 2015, when the Barack Obama administration was close to imposing
broad sanctions against China in retribution for hackers (allegedly supported by the Chinese government) stealing
industrial secrets, costing the U.S. economy billions of dollars in damages. Rather than cutting off dialogue on cyber
issues, however, Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping were able to sign a substantial cyber economic-
espionage agreement that sharply curtailed China-based cyberattacks on the United States. The U.S.-China agreement
was realistic and limited in scope, something the United States and Russia should also strive to achieve. For example, the two
powers could aim for an agreement limited to the prevention of dangerous military activities in cyberspace, similar to the U.S.-Soviet
Incidents at Sea Agreement of 1972.
Reconvene UN experts and implement existing norms. In 2004, the UN Group of Government Experts on
Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security (UN
GGE) was
established to develop a common approach to how governments should behave in cyberspace. Its
2015 report provided the foundation for an internationally recognized governmental cyber code of conduct.
The 2015 report recommended eleven basic but important norms, including determinations that states should not knowingly allow
their territory to be used for internationally wrongful cyber acts; should not conduct or knowingly support ICT activities that
intentionally damage critical infrastructure; and should seek to prevent the proliferation of malicious technologies and the use of
harmful hidden functions. In this consensus document, existing and emerging threats in cyberspace were spelled out; basic norms,
rules, and principles for responsible behavior were proposed; and confidence-building measures, international cooperation, and
capacity-building were given the attention they deserve.
Unfortunately, the UN GGE failed to reach a consensus in June 2017 on a successor to the 2015 report.
However, the group is not defunct, and it should reconvene as soon as possible. Instead of attempting to expand on the
2015 report, it should be given stronger official status, for instance as a UN General Assembly resolution. If it was
coauthored by all the permanent members of the UN Security Council, it would likely get broad
support from other countries. Although a UN resolution would be nonbinding, it would serve as a step toward
institutionalizing cyber norms.
Conflict with China over cybersecurity threatens to create a technological rift that
creates conflict no matter what level of integration with China exists
CFR 19 (Council on Foreign Relations, (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership
organization, think tank, and publisher, "Will the Future Bring Digital Trench Warfare Between
the EU and China?" 06/26/2019, thttps://www.cfr.org/blog/will-future-bring-digital-trench-warfare-
between-eu-and-china)
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s placement of Huawei on the Entity List, effectively banning U.S. suppliers
from trading essential components like chips and software with the company, has seriously escalated the technological
conflict with Beijing. European countries, more reliant on Huawei and trade with China than the United
States, risk getting caught between the two superpowers. The European Union (EU) has named China as a “systemic rival,”
in part because of mounting concerns about discriminatory industrial policies but many European countries are
reluctant to follow U.S. warnings to completely cut ties with Huawei and suffer the technological and
economic consequences of a decoupling from China.
With a lot more to lose through confrontation, Europe has to carefully consider when and how to press on
privacy, fair competition, ownership of core technologies, and other issues with China. Beijing should make
sure that its pursuit of “internet sovereignty” and technology leadership do not harm European security and business interests.
To understand the forces driving the relationship, SWP and the European University Viadrina invited 30 experts from Europe and
China to participate in a scenario analysis workshop under the guidance of the Deloitte Center for the Long View on the future of
China-EU digital geopolitics over the next 15 years. The group differentiated the scenarios around two axes: the degree of
transnational interoperability between social and technical systems (fragmentation vs. integration of global networks) and
sustainability of digital ecosystems (vulnerability vs. resilience). The result of the workshop was the following four fictional, but
plausible scenarios.
Scenario 1: Cyber Peace (integration, resilience)
In the least confrontational future scenario “Cyber Peace,” a series of criminal cyberattacks on household systems, public transport,
and the operating software of medical devices pressured European governments and the PRC to find common solutions to digital
threats. The EU and China developed new joint institutions such as a Sino-European Council on Cybersecurity and issued the
“Shenzhen Agreement” with promised joint financing for the cooperative development of cybersecurity technologies. The rate of
technological innovation and levels of trust are high in both economies, and Beijing and Brussels remain in productive competition
over standards and regulatory practices.
Scenario 2: Collapse of Digital Commons (integration, vulnerability)
The “Collapse of Digital Commons” scenario assumes a high degree of technical and economic
integration, but with vulnerable digital and social systems. Cyberattacks launched by states, terrorists, and criminals are
daily occurrences. China and Europe still benefit from highly integrated markets and production chains, but the
tense security situation causes political and social upheavals. European politicians prioritize security over
social justice, rule of law, privacy, individual rights, and democracy. Instability leads to political radicalization in
Europe, coupled with open hostility toward China.
Scenario 3: Vulnerable Digital Islands (fragmentation, vulnerability)
In this scenario, there is high vulnerability to cyberattacks even though global trade has shrunk as
protectionism advances. Mistrust is omnipresent and international arms control efforts are diminished. European data and
security guidelines were passed, but they were not further implemented by companies or countries outside of Europe. European
tech companies cannot keep up with those operating in larger protected markets abroad. The “Block of Independent States” (BIS),
the successor organization to the EU, completely depends on the United States for security cooperation and
on Chinese suppliers for hardware and software development.
Scenario 4: Digital Trench Warfare (fragmentation, resilience)
The scenario experts deemed most plausible was “Digital Trench Warfare.” Here, global socio-technical
fragmentation meets high levels of social and technological resilience. In this world, the United States, China, and Europe
hide behind impenetrable digital barriers, along with escalating differences in rules and standards for privacy, access, and content.
They compete globally for natural resources like rare earths and wage proxy wars in third countries. In this
world, the internet has been replaced by incompatible state cyberspaces, and the differences in the
systems are accelerated by digital research strategies striving for autarky. Supply chains have been largely re-shored and foreign
technology outlawed. States are dominant in this economy because every aspect of technology is tightly regulated. A sharp decline
in commercial, cultural, and scientific exchanges is the result. It is a poorer but more secure world inside the respective
blocks.
The gloomy world painted by three of these four scenarios is troubling, and current diplomatic efforts such as a bilateral cyber
dialogue and business to business relations are failing in the task of achieving sustainable cooperation between China and Europe.
This scenario-based effort suggests that Europe should upgrade the bilateral cyber dialogue with China,
which currently only exists at the Council level, to involve heads of state and heads of government as well as increase the staffing,
financing, and technical support of the delegations.
 2NC – Europe – Solvency – Russia Key
Russia poses a large threat to European stability
Heritage Foundation 18 (The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank founded in 1973,
"Assessing Threats To U.S. Vital Interests: Europe," 10/04/18, https://www.heritage.org/military-
strength/assessing-threats-us-vital-interests/Europe)
Russia remains an acute and formidable ‌threat to the U.S. and its interests in Europe. From the Arctic
to the Baltics, Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and increasingly the Mediterranean Sea, Russia
continues to foment instability in Europe. Despite economic problems, Russia continues to
prioritize the rebuilding of its military and funding for its military operations abroad. Russia’s military and political
antagonism toward the United States continues unabated, and its efforts to undermine U.S. institutions and the NATO
alliance are serious and troubling. Russia uses its energy position in Europe along with espionage,
cyberattacks, and information warfare to exploit vulnerabilities and seeks to drive wedges into the
transatlantic alliance and undermine people’s faith in government and societal institutions.
Overall, Russia has significant conventional and nuclear capabilities and remains the top threat to European
security. Its aggressive stance in a number of theaters, including the Balkans, Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine, continues both to
encourage destabilization and to threaten U.S. interests.
Russian Military Capabilities. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), among the key weapons in Russia’s
inventory are 313 intercontinental ballistic missiles; 2,780 main battle tanks; and more than 5,140 armored infantry fighting vehicles,
more than 6,100 armored personnel carriers, and more than 4,328 pieces of artillery. The navy has one aircraft carrier; 62
submarines (including 13 ballistic missile submarines); five cruisers; 15 destroyers; 13 frigates; and 100 patrol and coastal
combatants. The air force has 1,176 combat-capable aircraft. The IISS counts 280,000 members of the army. Russia also has a
total reserve force of 2,000,000 for all armed forces.1 Russian deep-sea research vessels include converted ballistic missile
submarines, which hold smaller auxiliary submarines that can operate on the ocean floor.2
To avoid political blowback from military deaths abroad, Russia has increasingly deployed paid private volunteer
troops trained at Special Forces bases and often under the command of Russian Special Forces. Russia has used such
volunteers in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine because “[t]hey not only provide the Kremlin with plausible political deniability but
also apparently take casualties the Russian authorities do not report.”3 In December 2017, it was reported that
3,000 mercenaries from one private company, the Wagner Group, which is closely tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin, have
fought in Syria since 2015.4

Russia has continuously sought to exploit geo-political issues to destroy EU

credibility and to push a nationalist run world
Miller 16 (Christopher, Christopher is Mashable's Senior Correspondent covering world news,
particularly the post-Soviet space and especially Ukraine, where he lived and worked for more
than five years, "How disunity and instability in Europe benefits Vladimir Putin," Mashable,
"https://mashable.com/2016/02/26/russia-europe-brexit/)
Russia is using a variety of different methods to undermine the EU and push it to the brink of collapse, experts
say.
For years, Moscow has bankrolled radical far-right political parties and fringe groups to exploit popular
dissent against the EU.
SEE ALSO: Why Russian nationalists are celebrating the far-right's win in France
In 2014, at the same time Russian forces were seizing control Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, Political Capital, a Budapest-based
research institute that has tracked the extent of Moscow's reach in Western Europe, published a report showing just how many such
groups it was funding.
Since then, Moscow has given large sums of cash to Marine Le Pen's French far-right National Front party,
among many others.
More recently, Moscow has been accused of "weaponizing" Syrian refugees and using them as a
geopolitical tool to undermine the EU.
Aslund alleged that Russian forces are deliberately bombing civilian areas in the war-torn country to "increase the
stream of refugees to Europe, which brings the EU out of balance."
Aiding Putin, of course, is his powerful propaganda machine that is state-run media. Kremlin-funded outlets have
been working in overdrive in recent months, according to StopFake, a Ukrainian fact checking site that exposes biased
and fake Russian news reports. StopFake said that from Feb. 1-8, Sputnik, Russia's English-language news site for
Western audiences, published 14 stories on the Brexit issue, including eight with overtly negative headlines.
They also propagate those stories on social media. For example:
Over the same period this month, the Kremlin-sponsored RT.com also published biased coverage while giving
air-time only to commentators who were heavily in favor of a Brexit, StopFake found.
Both outlets, which promise readers an "alternative opinion" to mainstream Western media, continue to publish similar reports and
op-eds almost daily.
Putin's recent actions in Ukraine and Syria, and his current efforts in exploiting the refugee crises for Russia's gain, Aslund said,
show Putin has orchestrated an organized destabilization campaign against the EU, and he is willing to see
it through.
"The worse it is [in Europe], the better it is for Putin," Aslund said.

Russian interference in European domestic politics is ongoing

Liik 18 (Kadri, Kadri Liik is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Her research focuses on Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic region, "Winning the normative
war with Russia: An EU-Russia Power Audit," European Council on Foreign Relations,
05/21/2018,
https://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/winning_the_normative_war_with_russia_an_eu_russ
ia_power_audit#)
Two recent images from the 2017 French election capture the current EU-Russia relationship. The
first, from 24 March, shows Russian President Vladimir Putin receiving French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in
the Kremlin. With a smile, Putin approvingly declared that the far-right Le Pen represented a range of political forces gaining
momentum across Europe. This meeting epitomised Europe’s darkest fears: the European project drowning in a nationalist-populist
tsunami cheered on by the Kremlin.
The second image, however, shows Europe’s resilience despite these fears. Just two months later, Putin stood
uncomfortably in the Palace of Versailles next to Emmanuel Macron, the new pro-European French president who had
just defeated Le Pen. Macron stated bluntly that Russian propaganda channels had spread false
information during the election, but he did so in a matter-of-fact manner, without succumbing to the hysteria that so often
characterises Western discussions on Russia in general and its meddling in particular. The French government had elegantly
ignored a hacking attack on the eve of the election and Macron prevailed anyway. Looking at Putin’s
impenetrable expression, one could almost hear his unspoken message: “Chapeau! You have won this round. But
there will be more.”
These two meetings show both the highs and the lows of Europe’s current struggle with Russia. Since Russia’s annexation of
Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, the EU and Russia have become locked in an open battle
over the norms of international conduct. They disagree on some of the most fundamental normative elements
of the post-cold war international order – its Western-led “unipolar” nature; its emphasis on human rights and
democracy; and the idea that countries have the right to choose their own alliances and join once they
qualify. It is normative war, and neither side is ready to retreat.
Domestic politics in Europe has become one of the front lines in this struggle. Moscow makes use of forces
inside Europe that might erode the EU’s confidence and position. But these efforts, while state-approved in the broadest
sense, do not necessarily amount to well-coordinated and meticulously planned operations with concrete
political aims. Insiders confess that such operations often come from disparate agents of Moscow doing their
routine work, and soldiers of fortune trying their luck in an improvised, ad hoc manner. Europeans need to be aware of
such attempts, but obsessive attention to Russian efforts might prove counterproductive: it could lead to
fighting raindrops instead of fixing the roof.
The French experience shows the path. Thanks to Russia’s earlier interference in Germany and the United States, the French
government knew what to expect. It kept an eye on Russia and its agents. At least once, the Quai d’Orsay contacted the Russian
ambassador to remind him of the rules of the game.[1] But Macron wisely avoided making Russian interference
a central topic in the campaign. Instead,
he focused on France’s problems and how to reinvigorate Europe. This
combination – keep an eye on Russia but focus on home – proved an effective way to both win
French voters and handle Russian meddling.
Cooperative Research between Russia and other countries drives down risk of
conflict and ensures clean energy research is globally produced
ASP 17 (American Security Project, The American Security Project (ASP) is a nonpartisan
organization created to educate the American public and the world about the changing nature of
national security in the 21st Century, "US-Russia Cooperation in Science," 04/19/2017,
https://www.americansecurityproject.org/us-russia-cooperation-in-science/)
The US and Russia should continue to pursue joint-research projects across a number of scientific disciplines to reduce the
economic costs of research, benefit from one another’s scientific expertise, and increase diplomatic engagement on
uncontroversial issues. Projects should be limited to civilian technologies and objectives that can improve the
lives of American and Russian citizens while having limited to no utility for either country’s military . By working
together, the US and Russia can forego the need to build expensive, specialized research complexes or develop scientific
expertise that might already exist in the other country. US-Russo science diplomacy has a long history dating back to the early years
of the Cold War and can play an important role in enhancing the quality and quantity of avenues of communication in Track-Two Talks.
Maintain US Funding to the ITER Fusion Project
The ITER project is an international effort between 35 nations, including the US and Russia, to develop and build a fusion
reactor capable of producing more electricity than it receives, a mission that has so far eluded the scientific community. The US and
Russia previously committed to provide 9.1% of the funding for the project with the other participating nations providing the
remainder of the funds. The US should maintain its commitment to the project and work to ensure that other member nations do the same.
Why?
Fusion is energy released by forcing atomic nuclei together – the same process that powers the sun. If successful, this project would be a major
breakthrough in the development of fusion energy. This is significant because fusion energy is sustainable, safe, and clean. If harnessed, fusion has
the potential to provide an effectively limitless source of energy without environmental drawbacks. This project is one of the premier examples of
international scientific cooperation and cutting back or abandoning US support for the project could encourage other
countries to do the same; given prevailing political sentiments across Europe, the EU likely would not be able to replace the US’ share of
funding and ITER could be suspended or ended altogether. If this occurred, the US would lose access to a valuable research project that it paid
relatively little for while also losing access to the scientific expertise the project has already attracted. Even if the project ultimately fails, the US still
benefits from the connections and relationships that develop between American scientists and their international counterparts. Additionally, the
knowledge gained from a hypothetical failed ITER could be applied by the American scientific community to future fusion projects.
This plan has some risk
While the US only pays 9.1% of ITER’s budget, those payments have still amounted to a cumulative total of $3.9 billion from 2003-2014 and is
expected to cost at least $230 in 2018. At the same time, the project’s timeline has been extended and estimates for when initial experiments begin
range from 2020 to 2025. Despite this, the Department of Energy has recommended continuing funding due to the effectiveness of reforms in the ITER
project instituted by its new Director-General, Bernard Bigot. Concerns over the project should not deter the US from maintaining current levels of
funding; the US does not need to commit funds on a long-term basis, so if further problems with the ITER project emerge in 2017 or 2018, the US has
the option to pull out of the project then. Research and development in any field are inherently expensive, and fusion research is more expensive than
most. ITER is still the most promising fusion project currently in existence, and the US currently pays a relatively small share of the project’s costs while
having full access to any breakthroughs it produces.
Continue US-Russian Cooperation with the International Space Station
The US and Russia should continue their cooperation in space, especially with regards to the International Space Station (ISS), through crew
exchanges, cost-sharing, and joint space research projects.
Why?
The ISS remains the most well-known example of international scientific collaboration and has taken on symbolic importance. US withdrawal from the
project, or efforts to force a Russian withdrawal, would be significantly damaging to the US-Russia relationship. Continued cooperation is important to
minimizing the costs of getting into orbit, maintaining and supplying the station, and conducting research. The facilities necessary for launches,
production of specialized equipment, astronaut training, etc. are all expensive, and, while NASA developed strong domestic capabilities throughout the
Cold War, the ISS has facilitated the use of equipment and facility sharing to bring down the total cost of space missions.
While the entry of American space companies such as SpaceX and BlueOrigin to the space market removes US dependence on the Russian-supplied
Soyuz launch capsule, an open, competitive procurement process for components related to the ISS mission is more in line with American interests. By
remaining open to the use of Russian components, the US will benefit from the increased rate of innovation and cost-saving that comes from market
competition between commercial suppliers and Russia. Also, maintaining open competition for ISS missions raises the likelihood that other
participating countries, Russia included, will use commercial components, benefiting the US economy.
On top of these benefits, crew exchanges and public diplomacy efforts involving astronauts and
cosmonauts can mitigate the decline in US-Russian relations. Crew exchanges provide important contacts and
relationships between the US and Russian space administrations. Astronauts and cosmonauts can hold joint press
conferences and host events that can diminish hostile public sentiment that limit the options available to
foreign policy decision makers. Cooperation aboard the ISS remains one of the few bright spots in US-Russia relations and it should be protected.
This plan is low risk
The US and Russia both benefit immensely from the ISS and the project itself has taken on symbolic importance in both countries. The US has already
developed policies and protections to mitigate the risk of unwanted technology transfers to Russia that can be updated if deemed necessary. Research
aboard the ISS is exclusively civilian in nature, and the US-Russian cooperation on the project has a strong, positive record.
Continued Joint Research Initiatives
The US and Russia should continue to promote joint research initiatives between the two countries because
they drive down the cost of research, establish links between the two societies, and advance the
rate of research and standards of living in both countries. Past examples include a joint effort to identify and combat “black
carbon” in the Arctic, basic research in chemistry, and the development and use of the Borexino detector (pg 65).
Why?
The pursuit of civilian research between the US and Russia has a longstanding history that dates back to the Cold War and has long been a durable
source of cooperation between the two countries. By taking advantage of one another’s specialized facilities and personnel, otherwise impossible
tying up scientific personnel in
research breakthroughs are able to occur much earlier than they otherwise would have. Additionally,
research projects
with peaceful purposes reduces the available stock of scientists that could be put onto
military projects
 2NC – Europe – AT: Ukraine Key
Ukraine’s status quo is stable and is already seeking peace, only the
counterplan’s purely defensive measures can achieve
Arutunyan 19 (Anna Arutunyan joined Crisis Group in December 2017 as Senior Analyst for
Russia. She is based in Moscow and provides coverage of Russian political and social conflict,
“Is Russia Changing Its Calculus in Eastern Ukraine?” International Crisis Group, 11/06/2019,
https://www.crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/eastern-europe/ukraine/russia-changing-its-
calculus-eastern-ukraine)
While Ukrainians are surely right to distrust Russia’s intentions in the east, Moscow’s actions so far do not suggest
a plan of escalation. The passport move does signal Moscow’s resolve to bolster ties with Russian speakers in Ukraine. But
Zelenskyy’s election was likely not its impetus. “We’re not orienting our policy around Zelenskyy”, a Russian official said.
Overestimating Moscow’s appetite for escalation could have its own negative consequences. If
Kyiv interprets Moscow’s move to expedite passports as escalatory and pushes back, even if only
rhetorically, it risks feeding a spiral of both words and action, rendering the escalation prophecy self-fulfilling.
Instead, the new administration in Kyiv and its European supporters could take advantage of Moscow’s
waiting game, and use the time to construct a better policy for engaging the people of the east. Kyiv should also
decide on what terms it wants to deal with Moscow in order to move toward real peace,
including how it wants to move forward on Minsk. Zelenskyy’s administration is already taking
tentative steps in this direction: at a 5 June meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group, formed in 2014 to broker Russian-
Ukrainian talks over the rebel-held east, Kyiv’s representatives explored several proposals for a truce,
including lifting the embargo. Moscow sounded encouraged, but said it wanted to hear more specifics.

Russia’s actions in Ukraine are purposed to push Ukraine from the West and to
gain influence
Polyakova 19 (Alina Polyakova is the founding director of the Project on Global Democracy
and Emerging Technology and a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the
Brookings Institution, “Want to know what’s next in Russian election interference? Pay attention
to Ukraine’s elections,” Brookings Institution, 03/28/2019)
No one knows who will come out on top among the 39 candidates running for president in this Sunday’s election in Ukraine, but one
thing is nearly certain: The winner won’t be a pro-Russian candidate. As Ukraine marks five years since its democratic revolution,
Russia’s war against Ukraine has solidified the country’s path toward Euro-Atlantic integration.
Despite differences on domestic policies, the top contenders all support Ukraine’s eventual
membership in NATO and the EU.
With Russia’s continued occupation of Crimea and war in the Donbas, Ukraine also remains a key arena of contestation between
Russia and the West. Ukraine is a large European country with a population of 45 million people. It is rich in natural resources and
human capital, and its success or failure in achieving long-lasting democratic and economic reforms can tip the balance in great
power contestation. The Kremlin seeks to prevent Ukraine from moving toward the West by keeping it
in a permanent “grey zone.” To achieve that goal, Russia continues to destabilize Ukraine
through conventional and nonconventional military means while seeking to undermine Ukraine’s
democratic and economic reform process. Deterring an increasingly aggressive Russia must
start in Ukraine.
Continued Russian military operations in the Donbas have cost over 13,000 Ukrainian lives and displaced over 1.5 million
Ukrainians since 2014. Moscow opened a new front against Ukraine in November 2018. In that attack, the Russian coast guard fired
on and seized three Ukrainian naval vessels and detained 24 Ukrainian crew members as they transited the Kerch Strait. This
followed a months-long Russian effort to control the Sea of Azov through regular harassment and detention of Ukrainian commercial
ships, as well as foreign vessels seeking passage to Ukrainian ports.
Russia has also used Ukraine as a test-lab for its arsenal of political warfare. This includes information
warfare, cyberattacks, the use of energy supplies for political ends, and the export of corruption
to gain a foothold in politics. While Russian interference in Western elections came as a surprise to many, Russia has a long track
record of intervening in Ukraine’s elections since 2004. Ukraine’s experience is thus a bellwether for assessing the Russian tactics
that may be deployed against the West.
 2NC – Europe – AT: Paris DA
Paris Climate Accord doesn’t force requirements and allows involved countries to
set their own goals, and also has no form of punishment beyond peer pressure
Denchak 18 (Melissa Denchak Melissa Denchak is an author and freelance editor based in
Brooklyn, New York who writes for various publications and organizations, "Paris Climate
Agreement," National Resource Defense Council, 12/12/2018,
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/paris-climate-agreement-everything-you-need-know)
In an effort to “significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change,” the accord calls for limiting
the global average temperature rise in this century to well below 2 degrees Celsius, while pursuing efforts to limit
the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. It also asks countries to work to achieve a leveling-off of global greenhouse gas emissions as
soon as possible and to become carbon neutral no later than the second half of this century. To achieve these objectives, 186
countries—responsible for more than 90 percent of global emissions— submitted carbon reduction targets ,
known as “intended nationally determined contributions” (INDCs), prior to the Paris conference. These targets outlined
each country’s commitments for curbing emissions (including through the preservation of carbon sinks) through 2025 or
2030, including both economy-wide carbon-cutting goals and the individual commitments of some 2,250 cities and 2,025
companies.
There are no
INDCs turn into NDCs—nationally determined contributions—once a country formally joins the agreement.
specific requirements about how or how much countries should cut emissions, but there have been political expectations
about the type and stringency of targets by various countries. As a result, national plans vary greatly in scope and
ambition, largely reflecting each country’s capabilities, its level of development, and its contribution to emissions over time. China,
for example, committed to leveling off its carbon emissions no later than 2030 and reducing carbon emissions per unit of gross
domestic product (GDP) by 60 to 65 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. India set its sights on cutting emissions intensity by 33 to 35
percent below 2005 levels and generating 40 percent of its electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources by 2030.
The United States—the world’s largest historical emitter and the second-biggest current carbon emitter after China—committed
initiatives to achieve the
to cutting overall greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. U.S.
target include the Clean Power Plan (a state-by-state program to cut carbon pollution from the
power sector) and the tightening of automotive fuel economy standards to reduce transportation emissions—
both policies the Trump administration is working hard to roll back.
The Paris Agreement includes a series of mandatory measures for the monitoring, verification, and public
reporting of progress toward a country’s emissions-reduction targets. The enhanced transparency rules apply common
frameworks for all countries, with accommodations and support provided for nations that currently lack the capacity to enable them
to strengthen their systems over time.
Among other requirements, countries must report their greenhouse gas inventories and progress relative to
their targets, allowing outside experts to evaluate their success. Countries are also expected to revisit their pledges by 2020 and put
forward new targets every five years, with the goal of further driving down emissions. They must participate in a “global stocktake” to
measure collective efforts toward meeting the Paris Agreement’s long-term goals as well. Meanwhile, developed countries
also have to estimate how much financial assistance they’ll allocate to developing nations to help
them reduce emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
These transparency and accountability provisions are similar to those in the frameworks of other international agreements. While
the system doesn’t include financial penalties, the requirements are aimed at making the progress of
individual nations easy to track and fostering a sense of global peer pressure, discouraging any dragging of feet
among countries that may consider doing so.

Clean energy offers a far stronger economy and already provides more jobs than
fossil fuels, contradictory articles are based off a flawed study
Denchak 18 (Melissa Denchak Melissa Denchak is an author and freelance editor based in
Brooklyn, New York who writes for various publications and organizations, "Paris Climate
Agreement," National Resource Defense Council, 12/12/2018,
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/paris-climate-agreement-everything-you-need-know)
There’s a lot of misinformation out there about the Paris Agreement, including the idea that it will
hurt the U.S. economy. That was among a number of unfounded claims Trump repeated in his 2017 Rose
Garden address, arguing that the accord would cost the U.S. economy $3 trillion by 2040 and $2.7
million jobs by 2025, making us less competitive against China and India. But as fact checkers noted, these
statistics originated from a debunked March 2017 study that exaggerated the future costs of
emissions reductions, underestimated advances in energy efficiency and clean energy
technologies, and outright ignored the huge health and economic costs of climate change itself.
In fact, research makes clear that the cost of climate inaction far outweighs the cost of reducing carbon pollution.
One recent study suggests that if the United States failed to meet its Paris climate goals, it could cost the
economy as much as $6 trillion in the coming decades. A worldwide failure to meet the NDCs currently laid out
in the agreement could reduce global GDP more than 25 percent by century’s end. Meanwhile, another study estimates that
meeting—or even exceeding— the Paris goals via infrastructure investments in both clean energy and
energy efficiency could have major global rewards—to the tune of some $19 trillion.
In terms of employment, the clean energy sector already employs more than 3 million Americans—about
14 times the number of coal, gas, oil, and other fossil fuel industry workers—and has the
potential to employ many more with further investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electric grid
modernization to replace the aging coal-powered infrastructure. Indeed, moving forward with the Clean Power Plan alone could
deliver more than a half-million new jobs by 2030. Meanwhile, coal jobs aren’t so much being transferred “out of America”—another
Trump claim—as they are falling victim to market forces as renewable and natural gas prices decline.
Finally, rather than giving China and India a pass to pollute, as Trump claims, the pact represents the
first time those two major developing economies have agreed to concrete and ambitious climate
commitments. Both countries, which are already poised to lead the world in renewable energy, have made significant progress
to meet their Paris goals. And since Trump announced his intent to withdraw the United States from the accord, the leaders of China
and India have reaffirmed their commitment and continued to implement domestic measures toward achieving their targets.
Aff
 2NC – AT: Solvency – Paris
Leaving the climate accord doesn’t impact credibility
Ponnuru 17 (Ramesh Ponnuru is an American conservative political pundit and journalist. He
is a senior editor for National Review magazine, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, a columnist for Bloomberg View, and a contributing editor to the domestic policy
journal National Affairs, “Reaction to Trump pulling out of Paris climate agreement is
overblown,” THE DENVER POST https://www.denverpost.com/2017/06/02/reaction-to-trump-
pulling-out-of-paris-climate-agreement-is-overblown/)
Reactions to President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord on climate change are — forgive me —
overheated. The ACLU is calling it an “assault on communities of color,” for some reason, and environmental activist Tom
Steyer says it’s a “traitorous act of war against the American people.” For his part, Trump says that staying in the agreement would
have assured us a future of “lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production.”
Yet Trump and his critics alike know that very little in the accord is binding on the parties to it. As a result, withdrawing from it can’t
have major consequences by itself.
Listen carefully to the agreement’s supporters, and their real argument becomes clear: For them, staying in it increases the
likelihood that the world’s governments will take future steps to avert what they believe will be a climate catastrophe.
The best argument for leaving, meanwhile, is that these steps would be costly overreactions to that threat —
climate change will have catastrophic effects justifies
and reducing such consequences is a good thing. The risk that
investing to predict, mitigate and adapt to those effects. It doesn’t justify restrictions on the use
of energy.
The argument that leaving the Paris agreement will jeopardize America’s global leadership also
seems overblown. The decision dismays many people around the world, to be sure, just as other
American decisions have dismayed many of the same people over the years. We are told that other governments
will no longer trust America to keep its commitments. But it would not be a bad thing for other countries to learn that a president’s
say-so can’t always bind future presidents.
It’s a mistake, too, to see Trump’s decision as a turn toward isolationism. It’s true that the step
cheers those in his coalition who want the U.S. to weaken its alliances and enact tariffs. But it
also has the support of conservatives and Republicans who oppose those policies. That breadth of
support helps explain why Trump made this move while so far refraining from tearing up NAFTA and the like.
Trump has even talked, albeit very vaguely and implausibly, about renegotiating the Paris agreement. It would be better to take a
different path altogether. But we are free to go in any number of directions, since we are essentially in
the same place we were when we were in the agreement.
 2NC – AT: Solvency – Sci Dip
Scientific diplomacy fails to achieve legitimate diplomatic goals
Dickson 10 (David is a science journalist and director of SciDev.net, “Science in diplomacy:
‘On tap but not on top’”, Science and Development Network, 6/28/10
http://scidevnet.wor...onference-2010/)
There’s a general consensus in both the scientific and political worlds that the principle of science
diplomacy, at least in the somewhat restricted sense of the need to get more and better science into international
negotiations, is a desirable objective. There is less agreement, however, on how far the concept
can – or indeed should – be extended to embrace broader goals and objectives, in particular attempts
to use science to achieve political or diplomatic goals at the international level. Science, despite
its international characteristics, is no substitute for effective diplomacy. Any more than diplomatic
initiatives necessarily lead to good science. These seem to have been the broad conclusions to emerge from a three-day meeting at
Wilton Park in Sussex, UK, organised by the British Foreign Office and the Royal Society, and attended by scientists, government
officials and politicians from 17 countries around the world. The definition of science diplomacy varied widely among participants.
Some saw it as a subcategory of “public diplomacy”, or what US diplomats have recently been promoting as “soft power” (“the carrot
rather than the stick approach”, as a participant described it). Others preferred to see it as a core element of the broader concept of
“innovation diplomacy”, covering the politics of engagement in the familiar fields of international scientific exchange and technology
transfer, but raising these to a higher level as a diplomatic objective. Whatever definition is used, three particular aspects of the
debate became the focus of attention during the Wilton Park meeting: how science can inform the diplomatic process; how
diplomacy can assist science in achieving its objectives; and, finally, how science can provide a channel for quasi-diplomatic
exchanges by forming an apparently neutral bridge between countries. There was little disagreement on the first of these. Indeed for
many, given the increasing number of international issues with a scientific dimension that politicians have to deal with, this is
essentially what the core of science diplomacy should be about. Chris Whitty, for example, chief scientist at the UK’s Department for
International Development, described how knowledge about the threat raised by the spread of the highly damaging plant disease
stem rust had been an important input by researchers into discussions by politicians and diplomats over strategies for persuading
Afghan farmers to shift from the production of opium to wheat. Others pointed out that the scientific community had played a major
role in drawing attention to issues such as the links between chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere and the growth of the ozone
hole, or between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. Each has made essential contributions to policy decisions.
Acknowledging this role for science has some important implications. No-one dissented when Rohinton Medhora, from Canada’s
International Development Research Centre, complained of the lack of adequate scientific expertise in the embassies of many
countries of the developed and developing world alike. Nor – perhaps predictably – was there any major disagreement that
diplomatic initiatives can both help and occasionally hinder the process of science. On the positive side, such diplomacy can play a
significant role in facilitating science exchange and the launch of international science projects, both essential for the development
of modern science. Europe’s framework programme of research programmes was quoted as a successful advantage of the first of
these. Examples of the second range from the establishment of the European Organisation of Nuclear Research (usually known as
CERN) in Switzerland after the Second World War, to current efforts to build a large new nuclear fusion facility (ITER). Less
positively, increasing restrictions on entry to certain countries, and in particular the United States after the 9/11 attacks in New York
and elsewhere, have significantly impeded scientific exchange programmes. Here the challenge for diplomats was seen as helping
to find ways to ease the burdens of such restrictions. The broadest gaps in understanding the potential of scientific diplomacy lay in
the third category, namely the use of science as a channel of international diplomacy, either as a way of helping to forge consensus
on contentious issues, or as a catalyst for peace in situations of conflict. On the first of these, some pointed to recent climate change
negotiations, and in particular the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a good example, of the way that the
scientific community can provide a strong rationale for joint international action. But others referred to the failure of the Copenhagen
climate summit last December to come up with a meaningful agreement on action as a demonstration of the limitations of this way of
thinking. It was argued that this failure had been partly due to a misplaced belief that scientific consensus would be sufficient to
generate a commitment to collective action, without taking into account the political impact that scientific ideas would have. Another
example that received considerable attention was the current construction of a synchrotron facility SESAMEin Jordan, a project that
is already is bringing together researchers in a range of scientific disciplines from various countries in the Middle East (including
Israel, Egypt and Palestine, as well as both Greece and Turkey). The promoters of SESAME hope that – as with the building of
CERN 60 years ago, and its operation as a research centre involving, for example, physicists from both Russia and the United
States – SESAME will become a symbol of what regional collaboration can achieve. In that sense, it would become what one
participant described as a “beacon of hope” for the region. But others cautioned that, however successful SESAME may turn out to
be in purely scientific terms, its potential impact on the Middle East peace process should not be exaggerated. Political conflicts
have deep roots that cannot easily be papered over, however open-minded scientists may be to professional colleagues coming
from other political contexts. Indeed,  there was even a warning that in the developing world, high profile
scientific projects, particular those with explicit political backing, could end up doing damage by
inadvertently favouring one social group over another. Scientists should be wary of having their
prestige used in this way; those who did so could come over as patronising, appearing unaware
of political realities. Similarly, those who hold science in esteem as a practice committed
to promoting the causes of peace and development were reminded of the need to take into
account how advances in science – whether nuclear physics or genetic technology – have also
led to new types of weaponry. Nor did science automatically lead to the reduction of global
inequalities. “Science for diplomacy” therefore ended up with a highly mixed review. The
consensus seemed to be that science can prepare the ground for diplomatic initiatives – and
benefit from diplomatic agreements – but cannot provide the solutions to either. “On tap but not
on top” seems as relevant in international settings as it does in purely national ones. With all the
caution that even this formulation still requires.
 2NC – AT: Paris – Econ DA
The Paris Climate Accord would drastically hinder the U.S. economy
Loris & Tubb 17 (Nicolas Loris is Deputy Director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for
Economic Policy Studies and Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in Energy and Environmental
Policy, Katie Tubb is a Senior Policy Analyst, Center for International Trade and Economics,
The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank founded in 1973, " 4 Reasons Trump Was
Right to Pull Out of the Paris Agreement," 06/01/17,
https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/4-reasons-trump-was-right-pull-out-the-paris-
agreement)
If carried out, the energy regulations agreed to in Paris by the Obama administration would destroy hundreds of
thousands of jobs, harm American manufacturing, and destroy $2.5 trillion in gross domestic product by
the year 2035.
In withdrawing from the agreement, Trump removed a massive barrier to achieving the 3 percent economic
growth rates America is accustomed to.
Simply rolling back the Paris regulations isn’t enough. The Paris Agreement would have extended long beyond the Trump
administration, so remaining in the agreement would have kept the U.S. subject to its terms.
Those terms require countries to update their commitments every five years to make them more ambitious, starting in 2020.
Staying in the agreement would have prevented the U.S. from backsliding or even maintain the
Obama administration’s initial commitment of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent.

It’s a bad deal for the developing world if these countries choose to deny their citizens affordable,
reliable energy sources. Sure, some of these countries may receive money to build new renewable-energy generation, but
mandating a shift away from natural resources that power 80 percent of the world is going to make them worse off.
Despite arguments to the contrary, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is not about prioritizing
the
economy over the planet. Rather, the administration recognized that the climate accord is a costly non-
solution, regardless of one’s position on climate change.
It’s no surprise that many countries are talking the climate talk, but not walking the walk. The true nature of the agreement has been
revealed by the contradictory actions of other nations.
The wishful platitudes and ambitious goals of the Paris climate agreement have begun to meet the realities of a complex, energy-
dependent world.
The stark reality is that healthier economies mean more energy use, and consequently, rising emissions (though not always). When
economies were in a slump, it was easier to commit to emissions reductions. When countries’ economies began to grow, many saw
emissions rise.

Econ decline causes world war – there’s no buffer now

Sundaram and Popov 2/12/19 [Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, was
United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the
Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2007. Vladimir
Popov, a former senior economics researcher in the Soviet Union, Russia and the United
Nations Secretariat, is now Research Director at the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute
in Berlin. Economic Crisis Can Trigger World War. February 12, 2019.
www.ipsnews.net/2019/02/economic-crisis-can-trigger-world-war/]
KUALA LUMPUR and BERLIN, Feb 12 2019 (IPS) - Economic recovery efforts since the 20 08 -2009 global financial crisis
have mainly depended on unconventional monetary policies . As fears rise of yet another
international financial crisis, there are growing concerns about the increased possibility of large-scale
military conflict .
More worryingly, in the current political landscape , prolonged economic crisis , combined with rising
economic inequality, chauvinistic ethno-populism as well as aggressive jingoist rhetoric , including
threats , could easily spin out of control and ‘morph’ into military conflict, and worse, world war .
Crisis responses limited
The 2008-2009 global financial crisis almost ‘bankrupted’ governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers managed to
pull the world economy from the brink, but soon switched from counter-cyclical fiscal efforts to unconventional monetary measures,
primarily ‘quantitative easing’ and very low, if not negative real interest rates.
But while these monetary interventions averted realization of the worst fears at the time by turning the US economy around,
they did little to address underlying economic weaknesses , largely due to the ascendance of finance in
recent decades at the expense of the real economy. Since then, despite promising to do so, policymakers have not seriously
pursued, let alone achieved, such needed reforms.
Instead, ostensible structural reformers have taken advantage of the crisis to pursue largely irrelevant efforts to further ‘casualize’
labour markets. This lack
of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented liquidity central
banks injected into economies has not been well allocated to stimulate resurgence of the real economy.
From bust to bubble
Instead, easy credit raised asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing before 2008. US house prices are now 8% more
than at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, while its price-to-earnings ratio in late 2018 was even higher than in 2008 and in
1929, when the Wall Street Crash precipitated the Great Depression.
As monetary tightening checks asset price bubbles, another economic crisis — possibly more severe than the last, as the economy
has become less responsive to such blunt monetary interventions — is considered likely. A decade of such unconventional
monetary policies, with very low interest rates, has greatly depleted their ability to revive the economy.
The implications beyond the economy of such developments and policy responses are already being seen. Prolonged economic
distress has worsened public antipathy towards the culturally alien — not only abroad, but also within. Thus, another round of
economic stress is deemed likely to foment unrest , conflict , even war as it is blamed on the
foreign .
International trade shrank by two-thirds within half a decade after the US passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, at the start of
the Great Depression, ostensibly to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition!
Liberalization’s discontents
Rising economic insecurity, inequalities and deprivation are expected to strengthen ethno-populist
and jingoistic nationalist sentiments, and increase social tensions and turmoil, especially among the
growing precariat and others who feel vulnerable or threatened.
Thus, ethno-populist inspired chauvinistic nationalism may exacerbate tensions, leading to
conflicts and tensions among countries, as in the 1930s . Opportunistic leaders have been
blaming such misfortunes on outsiders and may seek to reverse policies associated with the perceived causes,
such as ‘globalist’ economic liberalization.
Policies which successfully check such problems may reduce social tensions, as well as the likelihood of social turmoil and conflict,
including among countries. However, these may also inadvertently exacerbate problems. The recent spread of anti-globalization
sentiment appears correlated to slow, if not negative per capita income growth and increased economic inequality.
To be sure, globalization and liberalization are statistically associated with growing economic inequality and rising ethno-populism.
Declining real incomes and growing economic insecurity have apparently strengthened ethno-populism and nationalistic chauvinism,
threatening economic liberalization itself, both within and among countries.
Insecurity, populism, conflict
Thomas Piketty has argued that a sudden increase in income inequality is often followed by a great
crisis . Although causality is difficult to prove, with wealth and income inequality now at historical highs, this should give cause for
concern.
Of course, other factors also contribute to or exacerbate civil and international tensions, with some due to policies intended for other
purposes. Nevertheless, even if unintended, such developments could inadvertently catalyse future
crises and conflicts .
Publics often have good reason to be restless, if not angry, but the emotional appeals of ethno-populism and jingoistic nationalism
are leading to chauvinistic policy measures which only make things worse.
At the international level, despite the world’s unprecedented and still growing interconnectedness, multilateralism is increasingly
being eschewed as the US increasingly resorts to unilateral, sovereigntist policies without bothering to even build coalitions with its
usual allies.
Avoiding Thucydides’ iceberg
Thus, protracted economic distress, economic conflicts or another financial crisis could lead to military
confrontation by the protagonists, even if unintended . Less than a decade after the Great Depression started, the
Second World War had begun as the Axis powers challenged the earlier entrenched colonial powers.

Many nations in the climate accord are failing to meet emission requirements and
will be punished
Loris 18 (Nicolas Loris is Deputy Director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy
Studies and Herbert and Joyce Morgan Fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy, The
Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank founded in 1973, “Some of the Loudest Backers
of Paris Climate Accords Are Bucking the Agreement," 06/01/18,
https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/commentary/some-the-loudest-backers-paris-
climate-accords-are-bucking-the)
Overall, global coal demand rose about 1 percent in 2017, largely because of Asian countries
building more coal-fired electricity generation.
In fact, the Berlin-based organization Urgewald projects that 1,600 new coal-fired generating plants under construction or planned
will result in 840,000 megawatts of new capacity.
Smaller, less developed countries have not been the only countries that have struggled to meet their
emissions goals. Some nations, such as Turkey and Indonesia, have even expanded their use of coal power to
satisfy growing energy needs.
Pakistan, in its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, quite bluntly stated, “Given the future economic
growth and associated growth in the energy sector, the peaking of emissions in Pakistan is expected to take
place much beyond the year 2030. An exponential increase of [greenhouse gas] emissions for many decades is likely
to occur before any decrease in emissions can be expected.”
Even some of the most climate progressive nations on earth have struggled as well.
Germany, a world leader on climate action, has failed to cut emissions and has actually seen emissions rise
during the past two years. Germany may even have to buy its way out of a binding European Union agreement to
lower emissions in the coming years.
In Brazil, emissions in most sectors are expected to rise at least until 2030. In Japan, political issues with nuclear energy will likely
cause the use of coal for energy to increase by 2030. Poland and South Korea also have plans for coal expansions.
Compliance with the Paris Agreement globally has been nothing short of dismal. In fact, most nations will soon fail to
meet their agreement-defined deadlines.
Middle East
Neg
 1NC – Israel/Palestine CP
Text: The United States Federal Government should:
 Help Establish a joint Palestinian National Authority with Jordan, Egypt, and the GCC,
formalized by all parties, the UN General Assembly and Security Council
 Have the PNA take control over the Gaza Strip with GCC military forces
 Merge PNA and GCC with the Hamas
 Cease PNA tunnel digging and dispose of rockets
 Open ports in Gaza and Rafah

That solves Israel-Palestine

Melamed 16 (Avi Melamed is the fellow of Intelligence and Middle East Affairs at the
Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, "A Realistic Solution To The Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict", 4/5/16, Forbes Magazine, https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/04/05/a-realistic-
solution-to-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/#10ddda257631) Swu

A generation has passed since the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians. The Oslo Accords were guided by
the concept that the two-state solution would finally resolve the conflict—but two decades later,
Israelis and Palestinians remain caught in a sad, frustrating and vicious cycle that must be
broken. Dramatic events in the Middle East offer unprecedented conditions for such a breakthrough, because
today, for the first time , Israel and major Arab states share long-term strategic interests :
blocking Iran's expansion; fostering stability; and diminishing militant Islamic momentum.
A constructive breakthrough requires an outside-the-box approach based upon three major premises. First, it is
time to cast aside the concept of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in favor of an Israeli-Arab agreement
as the only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) must
be partners to the agreement. Second, the two-state solution is the end objective, but achieving this
goal is unrealistic in the near future. Third, the only realistic goal at this juncture is to create interim
arrangements to set the ground for a final agreement.
In order to move forward, it’s crucial to form a joint Palestinian National Authority (PNA)-Jordan-
Egypt-GCC team, formally authorized by the parties involved to negotiate with Israel on all
aspects of arrangements, as well as the final agreement. Agreements must formally be approved by the
parties involved, including the UN General Assembly and Security Council.
In order to implement this solution, the first phase must make arrangements regarding the Gaza Strip .
Negotiations should result in several specific outcomes within a given timeframe. PNA must first restore its control over the Gaza
Strip. GCC military forces should deploy in the Gaza Strip together with PNA forces, and Hamas’ military
force should be merged within the formal PNA force. All rockets must be disposed of and tunnel digging
shall cease. A port shall be created in the Gaza Strip and the Rafah crossing shall be opened.
Once stability is obtained in the Gaza Strip, negotiations regarding the final Israeli-Arab agreement should begin. The negotiations should address all
relevant issues (borders, refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, land and natural resources use, etc.) This plan is likely to succeed because ending the
conflict is a strategic interest of the GCC, Egypt and Jordan—and they have the keys needed to succeed. The plan echoes core ideas of the Saudi
peace initiative, yet also reflects the dramatic changes that took place in the Middle East since (Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip, the outbreak of
events in the Arab world, the war in Syria, the emergence of ISIS, the widening and intensifying Iran-Arab power struggle, the Vienna agreement). The
plan also addresses the core challenges that perpetuate the vicious cycle of violence and conflict that confront Israelis and Palestinians .
Security is the most important issue to Israel. Due to the increasing threat to Israeli civilians posed by Hamas and other militant Islamist Palestinian
groups, Israelis do not trust Palestinians and are thus unwilling to make any concessions that will further compromise Israel's security. The involvement
of Arab states as reliable counterparts will strengthen Israeli willingness to compromise if they have reason to believe that a stable and enduring
agreement is achievable.
On the Palestinian side, a lack of internal consensus remains challenging—especially the ideological and political gaps between the two major
Palestinian camps, Hamas and Fatah. As a result, Palestinians are unable to make inevitable compromises .
Hamas' extreme ideology holds all sides hostage. Ironically, its extremism also holds Hamas itself hostage. Hamas desperately needs a ladder that
enables it to adopt a more pragmatic approach that will allow it to compromise its control in Gaza without formally compromising its ideology. The
involvement of proactive Arab states will provide that crucial ladder .
Arab involvement will also enable Palestinians to exit the Cul-de-Sac by broadening the consensus base; Palestinians can digest compromises on
issues that are at the core of a Palestinian narrative (primarily the Palestinian narrative known as the right of return, that is totally unacceptable to
Israel) if this is done within a larger Arab consensus framework .
Hopelessness and endless conflict can be replaced by a peaceful future, but only if we act differently. We must put aside the concept of an Israeli-
Palestinian agreement in favor of an Israeli-Arab agreement as the only realistic means to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such agreement is
conflict can be replaced by a peaceful future, but only if
achievable today more than ever before.Hopelessness and endless
we act differently. We must put aside the concept of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in favor of an
Israeli-Arab agreement as the only realistic means to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .
Such agreement is achievable today more than ever before.

Foreign actors WILL comply because it’s in line with their interests
Melamed 16 (Avi Melamed is the fellow of Intelligence and Middle East Affairs at the
Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, "A Realistic Solution To The Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict", 4/5/16, Forbes Magazine, https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/04/05/a-realistic-
solution-to-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/#10ddda257631) Swu

Once stability is obtained in the Gaza Strip, negotiations regarding the final Israeli-Arab agreement should begin. The
negotiations should address all relevant issues (borders, refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, land and
natural resources use, etc.) This plan is likely to succeed because ending the conflict is a
strategic interest of the GCC, Egypt and Jordan—and they have the keys needed to succeed.
The plan echoes core ideas of the Saudi peace initiative , yet also reflects the dramatic
changes that took place in the Middle East since ( Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip, the outbreak of events in
the Arab world, the war in Syria, the emergence of ISIS, the widening and intensifying Iran-Arab power struggle, the Vienna
agreement). The plan also addresses the core challenges that perpetuate the vicious cycle of
violence and conflict that confront Israelis and Palestinians.

Specifically, Israel will comply to maintain security

Melamed 16 (Avi Melamed is the fellow of Intelligence and Middle East Affairs at the
Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, "A Realistic Solution To The Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict", 4/5/16, Forbes Magazine, https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/04/05/a-realistic-
solution-to-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/#10ddda257631) Swu

Security is the most important issue to Israel. Due to the increasing threat to Israeli civilians
posed by Hamas and other militant Islamist Palestinian groups, Israelis do not trust Palestinians
and are thus unwilling to make any concessions that will further compromise Israel's security.
The involvement of Arab states as reliable counterparts will strengthen Israeli willingness to
compromise if they have reason to believe that a stable and enduring agreement is
achievable.

Specifically, the Hamas will comply

Melamed 16 (Avi Melamed is the fellow of Intelligence and Middle East Affairs at the
Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College, "A Realistic Solution To The Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict", 4/5/16, Forbes Magazine, https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/04/05/a-realistic-
solution-to-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/#10ddda257631) Swu

On the Palestinian side, a lack of internal consensus remains challenging—especially the

ideological and political gaps between the two major Palestinian camps, Hamas and Fatah. As a
result, Palestinians are unable to make inevitable compromises.
Hamas' extreme ideology holds all sides hostage. Ironically, its extremism also holds Hamas
itself hostage. Hamas desperately needs a ladder that enables it to adopt a more pragmatic
approach that will allow it to compromise its control in Gaza without formally compromising
its ideology . The involvement of proactive Arab states will provide that crucial ladder .
Arab involvement will also enable Palestinians to exit the Cul-de-Sac by broadening the
consensus base; Palestinians can digest compromises on issues that are at the core of a
Palestinian narrative (primarily the Palestinian narrative known as the right of return, that is
totally unacceptable to Israel) if this is done within a larger Arab consensus framework.

Israel-Palestine peace spills over to the entire Middle East

UNSC 15 (United Nations Security Council 7562nd Meeting AM, "Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Cannot Be Separated from Global Terrorism Threat, Security Council Hears in Briefing on
Middle East", 11/19/2015, the United Nations Press Release,
https://www.un.org/press/en/2015/sc12126.doc.htm) SWu

Recent Attacks Reinforce Reality that Borders Cannot Contain Extremism, Says Secretary-General’s Special Coordinator for Peace Process The
abhorrent terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula reinforced the reality that the extremism and terrorism infecting many parts of the
Middle East was not constrained by borders, and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could not be separated from the
global threat of terrorism, the Secretary-General’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process told the Security Council this
morning. “Establishing a Palestinian State, while addressing Israel’s substantial security concerns, would yield
major dividends not only for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but for the entire region ,” Nickolay
Mladenov said while briefing Council members, via video-teleconference from Jerusalem, on the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian
question. Over the past month, Palestinians had carried out 35 reported attacks, including stabbings, shootings and car-rammings against Israelis
inside Israel and in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The attacks had left six Israelis dead and 36 injured. He went on to say that the two
apparent sniper attacks in Hebron on 10 November and the drive-by shooting south of that city on 13 November were worrying signs of escalation from
knives to firearms. Of the suspected Palestinian assailants, 24 had been killed. In clashes across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 11 Palestinians
had been killed and more than 3,500 injured, with seven others wounded in settler-related violence, he added. Calling upon political, community and
religious leaders on all sides to speak out against terror and all forms of violence, he said the epicentre of violence had moved to Hebron, which had
holy sites revered by both Muslims and Jews. Hebron was also the heart of the Palestinian economy and an
industrial and commercial engine, but its streets were barricaded and unnaturally cut off, he said.
Over the past 20 years, the city’s Palestinian and Jewish populations had been physically separated, he noted, adding that the economic
impact of the current violence had been severe for the entire district. However, ending the violence
and de-escalating the overall situation in Jerusalem, Hebron and other areas could not be achieved through
security measures alone, he cautioned. All parties must play a part in implementing measures that
could have a positive impact, including immediate efforts by all political, religious and community leaders to stop the hate-fuelled incitement that
glorified the murder of Jews or branded all Palestinians terrorists. The recent understandings on upholding the status quo at Haram al-Sharif/Temple
Mount should be implemented and the apparent impunity favouring settler violence should be addressed, he said, emphasizing that the sanctity of
burial rituals must be recognized and Hebron’s main commercial artery, Al Shudada Street, re-opened. Security coordination between Israel and the
Palestinian Authority must be bolstered and Israeli security forces should only use firearms to address imminent threats of death or serious injury. The
reality in which a settler State was emerging in the occupied West Bank must be reversed if hope for a two-State solution was to be reignited, he
stressed. Concerned about the decision to issue tenders for 436 housing units in the East Jerusalem settlement of Ramat Shlomo, he said the five
punitive house demolitions were equally worrisome. “I reiterate that settlement activity and punitive demolitions are illegal under international law,” he
said, expressing concern that Israeli forces had carried out several raids in hospitals, including in East Jerusalem and Hebron. Turning to Gaza, he said
the security situation there had been relatively calm, despite three fatalities resulting from clashes near the border fence. Seven rockets had been fired
towards Israel, and the Israel Defense Forces had responded with six air strikes and three incursions into Gaza. In a worrying development, Israel had
intercepted 450 litres of TDI (toluene diisocyanate), a substance that could be used for the production of rockets. Noting that the Gaza Reconstruction
Mechanism continued to function effectively, he said that Israel had removed aggregate from the list of dual-use materials, but had added other items
to the list during the year, including timber. Pointing out that such additions hindered Gaza’s reconstruction process, he called upon Israel to reconsider
that decision. He said that although current conditions made a return to negotiations a challenging prospect, the parties and their international partners
must pursue measures that would significantly improve the lives of Palestinians, including by strengthening their institutions, economic prospects and
security. That would require
Israel to make substantial policy changes on the ground. The Middle East
Quartet remained the principal international entity to support negotiations towards a
comprehensive and just resolution of the conflict, he said, requesting that the Council provide any additional guidance on
developing a new peace architecture. More broadly, he said, the Secretary-General was encouraged that the international community had finally re-
It was
engaged in the search for a political settlement to the conflict in Syria, based on the transition elements of the 2012 Geneva communiqué.
important that key international and regional players follow through on commitments to press
their Syrian allies to engage in all areas. “This is vital in order to give political backing, leverage and credibility to
our efforts,” he added. Turning to the occupied Golan, he said the volatile situation there was marked by clashes between Syrian Government forces
and armed groups, as well as continued air strikes in Ufaniyah, Jabbata Al Khashab and Al Baath, in the central part of the separation area. On 13
October, the Israel Defense Forces had notified the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) that it had retaliated to spill-over fire
from the Bravo side by firing three missiles at Syrian armed forces in the limitation area. Noting that UNDOF had not observed the alleged firing from
the Bravo side, he warned that such incidents could potentially jeopardize the ceasefire between the two countries. “I refuse to be convinced that
Israelis and Palestinians want to live by the sword and in a state of perpetual violence,” he said, noting that the Secretary-General remained steadfast
the long road ahead
in his support for any effort to restore the hope that a two-State solution could be achieved through negotiations. “But
requires leadership,” he said, underlining that such leadership had been “ glaringly absent to date”.
 2NC – Israel/Palestine – Solvency
Massive Settler Move to Innocence (some CP text about cultural/religious
settlement between Israel and Palestine)
Halevi 18 (Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
He served as a visiting professor of Israel Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New
York in the fall of 2013. He is a former contributing editor of the New Republic and writes for the
op-ed pages of leading American newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York
Times and the Los Angeles Times, "There is a 2-story solution to Middle East crisis", 5/15/18,
The Monitor, https://www.themonitor.com/2018/05/15/commentary-there-is-a-2-story-solution-to-
middle-east-crisis/) SWu

The seemingly endless war between Palestinians and Israelis isn’t only about substantive issues of borders and land and
sovereignty. It is, in essence, a war of competing narratives. This week, as Israelis celebrate 70 years of victory over repeated
attempts to destroy the miraculous rebirth of Jewish sovereignty, and Palestinians mourn 70 years of defeat, displacement and occupation, each side
clings to its founding story as an affirmation of its very being. On Monday, Israeli forces shot and killed 59 Palestinians and injured more than 3,000
during mass protests along the Gaza border — the deadliest day since a devastating 2014 war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers — which
One reason that peace between
further dimmed the already bleak prospects for President Donald Trump’s hoped-for peace plan.
Israelis and Palestinians has been so elusive is that the real elements of the conflict — faith, memory, identity
— have gone largely unaddressed. Diplomats focus their so-far futile efforts on the tangible issues dividing the two sides. But this

is a fight over intangibles . I recently appeared on a panel with Palestinian reconciliation activist Huda Abuarquob of the Alliance for
Middle East Peace. A member of the audience asked us: Why can’t Israelis and Palestinians forget the past and look to the future? Huda and I nearly
shouted together: “Impossible!” It was a revealing moment in the disconnect between the West and the Middle East. For Middle Easterners, Jews and
Arabs alike, we are our stories. We are formed by the cumulative memories of millenniums; we are contemporaries with our ancestors. Both Arabs and
Jews, for example, cherish our ancient father Abrahim/Ibrahim not as a mythic patriarch but an extant example of faith and perseverance. And no less
than our exalted memories, we are formed by our collective traumas. As we enter the eighth decade of the conflict, the two sides are further apart than
ever. Palestinians see spreading West Bank settlements eroding the chances of a two-state solution. Meanwhile, Israelis witness the denial of their
country’s right to exist, conveyed by Palestinian media, schools and mosques. And with the U.S. Embassy opening in Jerusalem on Monday, violence
in Gaza and the West Bank will likely intensify. And yet for all the fatalism on both sides ,
the Middle East is in greater flux than
ever before . Fear of an imperial Iran is drawing together Israel and the Sunni Arab world. Israel’s
massive retaliation against Iranian military bases in Syria last week was greeted with quiet satisfaction in Arab capitals. Saudi Arabia’s government-
controlled media publishes denunciations of anti-Semitism these days, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has declared there is no Islamic
obstacle to recognizing Israel’s legitimacy. He has also publicly faulted the Palestinian leadership for rejecting Israeli overtures for a two-state solution.
This radically
shifting atmosphere requires a new conceptual language for peace. Each side will need
That means Israelis acknowledging the shattering of the Palestinian people
to honor the other’s narrative.
and the destruction of their homeland. That also means the Arab world acknowledging the
shattering of ancient Jewish diasporas in the Middle East — a million Jews forced out so that today they are scarcely a
memory from Yemen to Morocco to Iraq. Along with respect for the wounds of the past, we need to recognize the maximalist territorial claims of both
peoples. Each can make a compelling case for why the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea belongs by right to its side. For a
Palestinian whose family fled Jaffa near Tel Aviv, what is now the state of Israel will always be part of Palestine. And for me, as a religious Jew, the
solving our conflict will require each
West Bank isn’t occupied territory but Judea and Samaria, the biblical heart of my homeland. But
side to contract its maximalist dreams, a violation of its perception of justice. And each must acknowledge
the sacrifice of the other. A successful Middle Eastern — not a Western — peace process would also
draw on religious language. In the past, diplomats tried to circumvent the religious sensibilities on both sides to reach a “rational”
compromise. But for us, a peace process between secularized elites lacks legitimacy. Moderate rabbis and imams
must be willing to probe their respective traditions to justify painful compromise. This is not far-fetched: Meetings between Israeli and Palestinian
each side needs to acknowledge
religious leaders have quietly occurred even as talks between political leaders collapsed. Finally,
the right of the other to define itself as a people entitled to national sovereignty. On the Palestinian side,
one of the great obstacles to peace is accepting that the Jews aren’t just members of a religion but a people. In conversation with Palestinians at every
level of society, I have repeatedly heard the same refrain: We have no problem with you as a religious minority, but we can’t accept your invention of
yourselves as a nation. On the Israeli side, much of the right denies the existence of a Palestinian people, insisting that it is a contrived identity whose
sole purpose is to undermine Israel. Yet the majority that do acknowledge the legitimacy of Palestinian national identity understandably fear the
Israelis and
creation of a Palestinian state when there is no sign of reciprocity. Without illusions of an imminent breakthrough,
Palestinians can create an infrastructure for reconciliation resonant with our values and cultures.
No outside power, however well-intentioned, can do that hard work for us. We need to hear each other’s
narratives, and acknowledge that two rightful claimants share this tortured land between the river and the sea. Seventy years on, there is still no other
choice.
 1NC – Iran
Text: The United States federal government should rejoin the Iran Nuclear Deal.
The counterplan restores US diplomacy & relations with Iran – that spills over to
human rights & non-proliferation efforts in the Middle East.
Costello and Cullis 18 (Ryan Costello is an American attorney and politician, Tyler Cullis is a
legal fellow and policy associate, “Restoring U.S. Credibility: Returning to the Iran Nuclear
Agreement”, 11/19/18, National Iranian American Council , https://www.niacouncil.org/jcpoa-
report/)
Resuming commitments under the JCPOA would deliver profound benefits for the U.S. national
interest. First, it would signal to the world that the U.S. is a responsible actor in the
international arena ; the U.S. intends to live up to the political agreements that it makes with
other countries; and the Trump administration was nothing more than an unfortunate aberration
in the American political system. Nothing has caused more serious damage to U.S. interests than the growing trust deficit towards
the United States. If states are unable to trust the United States, then not only is U.S. global leadership severely undermined but the international
system that has been predominate since the end of the Second World War risks unraveling. By clearly showing the world that the U.S. intends to fully
Second, the
observe the commitments that it makes, a successor administration can begin to repair the damage wrought by President Trump.
U.S.’s re-entrance into the JCPOA would have important non-proliferation benefits by
effectively disincentivizing Iran from exiting the JCPOA itself and thus undoing the risk of a
burgeoning nuclear crisis in the Middle East . In so doing, the U.S. would ensure the survivability of the tough and far-
reaching constraints on Iran’s nuclear program that will be imposed by the JCPOA through 2030 and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program
does not pose the risks it did in the pre-2015 era, and that is fully thanks to the JCPOA and the restrictions it imposes. Any
policymaker should be eager to return to the JCPOA and, in so doing, re-secure hard-fought concessions that take an Iranian nuclear weapon and war
Third, reentry to the JCPOA would signal to the
with Iran over its nuclear program off the table for the foreseeable future.
kingdom of Saudi Arabia that Donald Trump’s blank check for their increasingly brazen behavior
is at an end, and that the U.S. has alternatives to outsourcing American policy in the region to
an erratic kingdom that – in the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham – has double dealt on terror. Perversely, both the Trump
administration and numerous Washington pressure groups have warned that the administration’s pressure campaign against Iran would be jeopardized
if the U.S. dared to impose consequences on the kingdom over the brutal murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. Such
warnings expose the current administration’s approach to the region as so hopelessly unbalanced that is susceptible to extortion by one morally
The U.S. needs to move to a transactional relationship with both Saudi
bankrupt regime against another.
Arabia and Iran where we can impose consequences on each for such brazen misbehavior. In
Iran, the U.S. has sanctioned itself out of influence, whereas with Saudi Arabia the U.S. is too
afraid to use its substantial leverage to rein in the kingdom’s destructive course – whether on the
disastrous war in Yemen or on the kingdom’s mounting human rights abuses . An alternative
is available, and it should start with re-entry to the JCPOA. Finally, U.S. participation in the JCPOA
Joint Commission would guarantee diplomacy with Iran that does not presently exist amid the
administration’s pressure campaign, and could lead to follow-on negotiations addressing the
full spectrum of America’s concerns with Iran – including regional security and human rights .
The present Trump administration approach of exiting the JCPOA and seeking its destruction prohibits the U.S. from affecting Iran’s calculations on
issues beyond the nuclear file. Any policymaker with justifiable concerns with Iranian behavior or who seeks political solutions to the proxy conflicts that
have gripped the region should be urging a return to the JCPOA.Returning to the JCPOA and restoring U.S.
credibility and influence with Iran is unlikely to be without cost, but will not be nearly as costly
as the alternative. The U.S. reneged on its commitments and, barring Congressional intervention or a change of heart from President
Trump himself, will have materially breached the accord by snapping back nuclear-related
sanctions for a period of at least 32 months if there is a change in administration after the 2020 elections. Judging by recent sanctions
designations, as well, the Trump administration does not appear intent to sit idly in the months ahead,
but will proceed with a dramatic expansion of sanctions designations that may go well beyond
previous sanctions campaigns. These will have a tremendous negative effect on the Iranian economy and the Iranian people’s
aspirations, in addition to the economies of our allies in Europe seeking to comply with the UNSC-endorsed JCPOA.
 2NC – Iran – Solvency
Only the CP encourage peaceful cooperation and limits Iranian nationalism
MOHSENI 18 (Payam Mohseni is the Director of the Iran Project, Belfer Center; lecturer,
Harvard Department of Government, "Harvard analysts assess the Iran deal pullout," 5/8/2018,
Harvard Gazette, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/05/harvard-analysts-assess-the-
iran-deal-pullout/)
President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal is a strategic
mistake with three major consequences. First, it greatly undermines U.S. national interests by eroding its credibility, by
splitting the United States from its European allies and the international community, by upending an
agreement that effectively blocked Iran’s nuclear aspirations at the weapons level, and by wasting billions of dollars of political,
financial, and human capital the United States invested to reach the JCPOA. Second, it erodes the pillars of the rules-
based international system as it questions the independent power and diplomatic credibility of
European states, especially if they are not able to safeguard the deal from American violations. Likewise, Trump’s
decision undermines the value and significance of multilateralism and international institutions,
especially those operating towards the global nuclear non-proliferation regime such as the IAEA (International Atomic Energy
Agency). Third, it marks a turning point in the post-revolutionary history of modern Iran as the first major bitter experience of the
country’s youth with the United States and the first direct public negotiation with America– inflaming
Iranian
nationalism, undermining the value of engaging the West, and shifting the domestic
discourse to a hardline position. This was a gift to Ayatollah Khamenei as it undermines the platform of moderate
President Rouhani, claiming he was right to tell everyone not to trust the Americans. Now Khamenei will turn to undermine the
credibility of the Europeans by turning all eyes on the EU powers, before Iran uses the U.S. violation and withdrawal of the
agreement to move beyond the deal

The CP paves the way for regional peace and stability

Muslimi 15 (Al-Muslimi is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, where his
research focuses on Yemeni and Gulf politics, "What Will the Nuclear Agreement With Iran
Mean for the War in Yemen?," 9/21/2015, Carnegie Middle East Center, https://carnegie-
mec.org/diwan/61348)
On July 14, the nuclear negotiations between Iran and Western powers resulted in an agreement by which Western
countries ended long-standing international sanctions on Tehran in exchange for Iran renouncing all military nuclear ambitions.
indirectly impact various
While the over-100-page agreement mainly addresses technical details, it is likely that it will
issues in the region, such as the traditional Saudi-Iranian struggle for regional influence, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the
ongoing war in Syria, and more recently the war(s) in Yemen . Since the nuclear negotiations entered their final round,
Saudi Arabia has received strong support from the West in its war in Yemen, in what can be described as a consolation prize after
the kingdom failed to dissuade its Western allies from the deal with Iran. Yemen has become a new battleground
where Iran and Saudi Arabia are engaged in a proxy war, taking advantage of local Yemeni conflicts and
complexities. While it is possible that the nuclear agreement will exacerbate tensions in Yemen, it may also yield
positive results. There is still a chance to transform Yemen into a model of consensus instead of a site
of regional conflict. Six months ago, a coalition of forces led by Saudi Arabia began launching airstrikes against militants loyal
to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Zaydi Islamist faction Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis. Despite
the local roots of the war, it has now without a doubt become part of a wider regional struggle—and that’s where
the Iran nuclear deal comes in. In a recent interview with the Saudi-owned newspaper al-Asharq al-Awsat, U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry said that the agreement with Iran had focused exclusively on the nuclear issue. But he added that he
would now consult with his counterparts in the Gulf about ways to engage with other regional issues. This statement coincided with
a visit by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to the Gulf states, aiming to reduce the tension caused by the nuclear
agreement. Days before his visit, Zarif wrote an article entitled “The Neighbor Before the House” (al-jar qabl al-dar) in the Lebanese
newspaper al-Safir, where he argued for better Gulf-Iranian relations and suggested Yemen as a model for working
together toward regional peace between the Gulf and Iran. For parties who want to push peace
in the region forward, these developments are an opportunity to be exploited. The nuclear deal
has reduced tension and improved the West’s ability to communicate with Iran . If this is
extended to the West’s allies in the region, it could change things considerably and perhaps even pave the way for
regional peace in Yemen . It may be possible to harness this opportunity to exert pressure on Tehran to “tame” its Houthi
guarantees that the Houthis will commit to any
allies in Yemen and, perhaps most importantly, to provide
agreements concluded in the future. This point is all the more important in view of the fact that many Houthi violations
of previous agreements stemmed from the lack of a guarantor that could pressure the group to comply, given the declining power of
local parties and the Houthis’ general indifference toward international resolutions. As long as Iran was isolated, it had
little reason to engage constructively with the Gulf Arabs or the West over Yemen. Now, things
may be changing.
 2NC – Iran – AT: Saudi Arabia Key
No solvency and alt causes – even if the aff ends Saudi Arabia’s involvement in
Yemen, Iran will continue to destabilize the region as part of their Shia Crescent
Strategy – only the CP stifles hardline pushes
Ghavami 18 (Raman Ghavami is an analyst based in London and the Middle East. He has
worked for various social and political organizations across the Middle East and Europe and
holds an MA in international relations, "Opinion: We will not achieve peace in Yemen until we
stop blaming Saudi Arabia for the war," 11/21/2018, The Independent,
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/yemen-war-saudi-arabia-iran-houthi-rebels-un-peace-
talks-ceasefire-conflict-a8644681.html)
This week, Yemen’s internationally recognized government agreed to take part in peace talks in Sweden after a leader in the Houthi
rebel group called for a halt to military operations. Since the Houthi uprising in 2015, the war has turned Yemen into
one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The bulk of the criticism has been placed on the Saudi-led
coalition as well as the western countries which arm it. But if we want to achieve peace in the region we need to start to take into
consideration the atrocities the Houthi rebels have also committed. In September 2014, Houthi rebels, who only represent a small
minority of the population in Yemen, attacked the capital city of Sanaa and seized it. Many Yemenis called this a coup against the
elected and internationally recognised Yemeni government. The Houthis were able to take the capital in just a
few days thanks to the backing they received from Iran, which has been providing Houthi rebelswith missiles
which have targeted Saudi Arabia, and seems likely to continue to do so regardless of UN sanctions. The war in Yemen is
a proxy for Iran’s war against Saudi Arabia, as part of its wider Shia Crescent strategy,
which aims to link a network of allies spanning from the border with Iraq to Lebanon in a
crescent shape . In February 2014, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds forces, Qasem
Soleimani, in a meeting with Iranian armed forces, explained the motivation behind Iran’s strategy in the region, dubbed the Shia
Crescent. He said: “ The
Shia Crescent is not political but it is actually an economic crescent,
as Shias hold 80 per cent of the world’s oil in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria
and Iran .” Without understanding this core reason behind the Houthi offensive, achieving peace in Yemen is nigh on impossible
– any plan to end the war without putting more pressure on Iran to dismantle its Quds forces is
highly likely to fail, as we’ve seen since the beginning of this conflict. If Britain wants peace in Yemen it
needs to condemn Saudi Arabia Houthis are merely a proxy of the IRGC’s Quds forces. However, now that Iran is under intense
pressure by the current US administration and its own people, it can no longer continue to arm and sponsor the Houthis like before.
Consequently, Houthi rebels have been pushed to show willingness in negotiations for the time being. Nevertheless, it is important
to remember that Houthi rebels have refused to join any peace talks to end the war in Yemen in the past. According to Kamal
Kharrazi, the head of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, Tehran is negotiating with European countries about the Yemen
crisis and, according to Iranian media, the war was the top priority of the discussion between British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt
and Iranian officials on Monday. Children suffering from acute malnutrition in Yemen But from the Iranian perspective, a
ceasefire in Yemen is only crucial for the time being because it needs to focus on domestic
economic challenges as the country hopes to ease US sanctions. It is hard to imagine they
are truly seeking a peaceful resolution to the conflict, as it remains a key part of their
wider regional strategy of expanding their influence. Indeed, look at other countries
where Iran has sought to impose its influence – namely Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and
Palestine, which are extremely divided and unstable . There is little reason to assume Iran’s intentions are
different in Yemen. This suggests the main reason behind Houthi rebels announcing halting attacks on the Saudi-led coalition is
linked to Iran’s current domestic problems, as opposed to a genuine willingness to find peace in the region. Yemen is not an
isolated war but intrinsically linked to Iran’s wider regional strategy. Unless this aspect begins to be
highlighted more insistently, it is difficult to see any lasting peace in Yemen – a treaty could be signed, but as Iran faces other
problems it could return to destabilizing Yemen because it is a crucial part of Iran’s Shia
Crescent into Saudi Arabia. The death of the face of Yemen’s humanitarian crisis is a wake-up call It is highly unlikely Iran
will stop pursuing its belligerent efforts to establish its Shia Crescent in the long run because that is the very essence and purpose of
the Islamic regime of Iran. This poses a great threat to the stability in the region, and threatens Saudi Arabia and Bahrain which
have significant Shia population in their countries.
The CP prevents further escalation and Saudi Arabia expansion
Quamarmd 18 (Md. Muddassir Quamarmd is an Associate Fellow At The Institute For
Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. He Received PHD In Middle East Studies From
Jawaharlal Nehru University In 2016, "Trump and West Asia: Policy Departures and Geopolitical
Implications," 7/12/2018, SAGE Journals,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0974928418785478)
The US policy departures in West Asia under Trump are significant and far reaching but there is a common
chord that links it with the policies pursued by previous administration and that is to protect American interests and ensure its
regional dominance. Nevertheless, despite adopting the vastly different approaches, Trump faces the similar tests of
growing regional and global challenge to the US predominance in West Asia. Trump’s policy
departures are directed against Iran and concur with the Israeli and Saudi view of Iran as a state
propelling conflicts in the region by supporting proxies leading to growing Iranian regional
footprints. It is based on the assessment that the nuclear deal rather than preventing Iranian quest for nuclear weapons allowed
only a delay in its acquisition and let Iran expand its regional influence at the cost of the USA and its allies. The changes in
the US policy direction under Trump will have long-term impacts on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and are designed
to bring a change in the Palestinian attitude of resisting Israeli occupation and accepting the peace agreement being
promoted by the USA. Trump’s policy departures sharpen the geopolitical tensions in
West Asia and have the potential to further flare up the already fragile region . It will lead
to new alignments in the region and will force regional countries including Iran, Turkey, Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to
step up efforts to safeguard their interests and expand their influence in the region . At the
same time, it works in favour of Israel and Saudi Arabia who have been significantly opposed to the
Iran nuclear deal. On the other hand, it creates complications for countries such as Jordan which will be in a vulnerable
position, if it had to defend a decision such as the US embassy move to Jerusalem. While regional countries will certainly be
affected, the departures in US policy will have long-term implications for the USA and other global powers. As far as the regional
geopolitics is concerned, Trump’s policy departures are going to have two important impacts. First, it ensures that despite the
declining regional dominance, it remains the most powerful external player in West Asia. The USA has been the predominant
military power in the region with a number of military bases and strategic partnerships. It remains the sole security guarantor in the
Persian Gulf as no other country is in a position to commit military in the region. Nevertheless, with countries such as the UK,
France, Russia, China and Turkey finding ways to enhance their military and strategic presence in the region, it can no longer claim
to be the only superpower in the region, which it became after the end of the Cold War. Second, it will increasingly lead to a
geopolitical competition among the USA, Russia and China in West Asia. Moscow has entrenched itself in the Syrian crisis and built
a working cooperation arrangement with Iran on several regional issues. It is expected to continue working with Tehran and expand
cooperation with countries such as Turkey, Egypt as well as Saudi Arabia and Israel to ensure its interests are protected. Moscow
has on several occasions demonstrated the desire for working with other countries in the region to resolve conflicts in Iraq, Yemen,
Israel–Palestine and within GCC countries (Cook, 2018). Russia’s early response to the US withdrawal from the JCPOA strengthens
the position that it will not accept the unilateral withdrawal and work with other signatories to ensure continuation of the deal (TASS,
2018). China too has expressed similar views (Qingyun & Jin, 2018) and this means that both China and Russia will look to work
with the European countries to ensure minimal impact of the US withdrawal and sanctions. China will be moved by its economic and
security interests as it has invested significantly in Iran and with other countries in the region to promote its Belt and Road Initiative
(BRI). It means that the emerging global powers will increasingly challenge the US domination in West Asia. Conclusion President
Trump has made three significant policy departures in West Asia in the first year and half, he (a) has ended the hands-off policy in
Syria; (b) has changed the status quo on Jerusalem and (c) has withdrawn from the JCPOA. In Syria, it has resulted in a significant
increase in regional competition with Israel and Iran engaging militarily to counter growing threats and Russia looking to stabilise the
situation and establish peace in favour of the regime. The Jerusalem decision has flared up Palestinian, Arab and global Muslims
opinion against the USA and has created space for global powers for manoeuvring in the conflict. The withdrawal from
JCPOA has created uncertainty about the future of the Iran nuclear deal and forces Iran and
other regional and global powers to re-think their policies. While Obama looked to pull away from regional
affairs and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump is focused on revival of the US entrenchment in regional conflicts. Despite
the vital differences between the Trump and Obama policy choices, the outcome so far as the geopolitical impacts are concerned is
the decline in American dominance due to growing challenges and competitions from emerging global powers.
 2NC – ME – AT: Aff Sufficient
Solving conflict in ONE region of the Middle East will NOT spillover to broader stability—
conflict must be addressed from multiple angles
Kapusnak 19 (Jan Kapusnak is an Israel-based political scientist. He holds MAs in political
science and security and strategic studies from Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic.
He previously interned at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, NGO Monitor, and the Israel
Democracy Institute, "THERE IS NO KEY TO MIDDLE EAST STABILITY", 3/18/2019, The
Jerusalem Post, https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/There-is-no-key-to-Middle-East-stability-
583849) Swu

For decades, many foreign policy officials, academics and commentators across the West and the Arab world have argued that there is a key to
stability and peace in the Middle East .
For generations, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been portrayed as the key to making regional peace.
Middle East peace, less
Proponents of this concept have claimed that a solution of the protracted conflict would pave the way to
terrorism and less anti-Americanism, and would eliminate Iran’s regional expansionism and
nuclear pursuits. According to this logic, if Palestinians had a state, all the Arab countries would become
secular constitutional democracies run by rulers respecting human rights, Turkey would guarantee
the right of self-determination to Kurds, Iran would cut support for its proxies, and militant Salafists
would call off their jihad.
There is no similar case in diplomatic history that was so misunderstood by so many entities
for such a long time. Roots of this belief can be traced back to British foreign policy by the end of the 1930s. The British believed that their
concerns in the region – such as access to oil, their relations with the individual Arab countries, undercutting French positions and keeping Nazi
Germany from gaining more of a foothold – would play out once the problem of Palestine was solved to the satisfaction of the Arab countries.
After the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent OPEC oil embargo, US presidents started repeating this “ Israeli-Palestinian
conflict key
to peace” mantra, which became conventional wisdom in the White House. Jimmy Carter, influenced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national
security adviser, formulated that “the US has a vital interest in the establishment of a stable peace in the Middle East” via solving the Israeli-Arab
conflict.
Even in 2008, after the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War (one of the deadliest conventional wars ever fought), the Gulf War and the Iraq War, Carter claimed
that “without doubt, the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem,” and Brzezinski added that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the
single most combustible and galvanizing issue in the Arab world. ”
Although this myth was discredited by other violent events connected with the Arab Spring, including the Syrian civil war and the genocide of Yazidis by
ISIS, Donald Trump (the same applies for Barack Obama) repeated it – thus effectively denying his 2017 National Security Strategy – in saying that “if
we can make peace between the Palestinians and Israel, I think it’ll lead to ultimately peace in the Middle East, which has to happen. ”
Unfortunately, this is not going to happen, since there is no key to Middle East peace. This myth is
based on the false assumption that the Middle East is a highly interconnected structure where
the solution of one specific armed conflict will solve a bunch of other armed conflicts.
However, the Middle East, regardless of how one defines it, is an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous
region characterized by many complexities and fault lines which throughout the years have produced multiple
intrastate, interstate and transnational armed conflicts among countries and violent non-state
actors, each of which holds competing, overlapping and sometimes contradictory interests.
Any attempt to simplify affairs in the region and analyze them through the lens of one particular
conflict (currently via the proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran) creates the impression that
all conflicts in the region, their sources and solutions are connected and not independent.
THIS WISHFUL thinking about some kind of domino effect in the volatile Middle East has proved to be a very
dangerous game with disastrous and long-lasting consequences. For example, US president G.W. Bush, influenced
by neoconservatism, launched a war in Iraq, in the belief that regime change in the country would be a catalyst for
stimulating democratic change that would “domino” throughout the Middle East.
Henry Kissinger , former US secretary of state, even linked the Iraq invasion with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
claiming: “It is not true that the road to Baghdad leads through Jerusalem. Much more likely, the road to Jerusalem will lead through Baghdad.”
ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, did not materialize,
However, the hope for a democratic Baghdad, and so
and post-invasion Iraq has become a repellent example of a failed state defined by
widespread political violence, disorder and leadership with authoritarian tendencies.
Moreover, by ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein, Washington inadvertently eliminated Tehran’s overriding challenge, thus allowing it to project its
influence in Iraq.
The Arab Spring demonstrated that the notion of democratic dominoes in the region is a mirage. Early hopes for positive shifts in
Middle Eastern politics, while ignoring the lack of democratic tradition, influence of Islamism, the weakness of secular forces and
widespread poverty, were profoundly misplaced. Although the upheavals in 2011 had similar roots, that does not mean that their
outcomes must be the same. The Tunisian revolution inspired other countries to revolt. Regrettably, its relatively successful transition into
“flawed democracy” did not become an inspiration for other countries, such as Syria and Libya, which, rather, descended into
civil wars.
In February 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that “confronting Iran” is the key to stability and peace
in the Middle East. In truth, increasingly powerful Iran destabilizes the region with its pursuit of regional hegemony, characterized inter alia by
a policy of systematic interference in other countries – such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen – through the sponsorship of local Shia militias. Iran
has mastered the art of proxy wars.
Although it is important to stop Iran’s aggressive expansionism and prevent it from building a
contiguous sphere of influence from its Western border to the Mediterranean, that still will not be enough to bring
stability, let alone peace, to the region. Even if Iran abandons the states, there still will be conflicts ongoing on their soils.
Iran is an opportunistic player that looks for vacuums in failed states, exploits sectarian conflicts to increase its influence, while
using Shi’ism as the main tool to attract foreigners to cooperate. These countries will remain fragmented and deeply
divided, even without Tehran’s presence.
Needless to say, other countries with hegemonic ambitions in the region – namely, Turkey and Saudi Arabia – have not contributed to stability either.
The list of their stability-undermining activities is difficult to fathom. Turkey invaded northern Syria in order to prevent the creation of a Kurdish state.
Saudi Arabia trapped itself in the civil war in Yemen, after invading it in August 2015; and, together with other Gulf countries, it has helped to worsen
conflicts in Syria and Libya.
Russian intentions in the region are far from being a salvation. Russia tries to brand itself as a problem solver;
however, its conflict-mediation strategy tends to be effective in freezing disputes rather than
solving them. This approach is evident in conflicts that Russia tried to handle, specifically in Abkhazia, Chechnya, South Ossetia, Transnistria or
Ukraine.
Pursuing stability in the current Middle East seems to be chimerical. The region is going through a time of perhaps
the region lacks a collective security framework of
unprecedented instability and turmoil – all enabled by the fact that
any kind that would guide local actors to manage inevitable disputes with minimal violence and
disruption.
The current regional order is fundamentally one of disorder, and pointing out one simplistic frame obscures from view
the complex issues plaguing the region.
There is not one key to stability in the Middle East. It is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
democratic Iraq or pacified Iran. Stability requires multiple keys to multiple issues, what seems to
be a Sisyphean task just to imagine, let alone to do.
Aff
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Iran Deal Fails
Iran deal fails – no clear pathway and lack of coop
UANL 15(United Against Nuclear Iran - not-for-profit, bi-partisan, advocacy group that seeks to
prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons. UANI was founded in 2008 by
Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, and Middle East expert Ambassador Dennis Ross and is led by
a diverse Advisory Board of policy "What's Wrong with the Iran Nuclear Deal and What Can We
Do Now?," Published:7-14-15 DOA:7-25-19 https://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/whats-
wrong-with-iran-nuclear-deal
The JCPOA does not confirm the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program and provides a clear
pathway to nuclear weapons. Sunset Clause The sunset provisions in the JCPOA mean restrictions
on Iran's uranium-enrichment and plutonium reprocessing lift after 10 to 15 years. Iran is free to
expand its nuclear program at that time to an industrial scale and introduce advanced
centrifuges that can potentially reduce its "breakout" time - the time needed to produce enough
weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear weapon - to a matter of weeks, if not days—"almost down to zero,"
according to President Obama. The JCPOA therefore merely "rents" Iranian arms control for a limited and
defined period, after which Iran will be permitted to have an industrial-scale nuclear program
with no limitations on number and type of centrifuges, or on its stockpiles of fissile material, buttressed by the economic
benefits obtained through sanctions easing. Inspections, Verification and Potential Clandestine Parallel Program The JCPOA
does not require Iran to submit to "anytime, anywhere" International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) inspections of facilities and military sites where nuclear activities are suspected to have
occurred. Iran, a serial cheater on its nuclear and other international obligations, can delay
inspections of such facilities for up to 24 days, giving it significant time to hide evidence of covert nuclear activities.
Key questions remain concerning Iran's undeclared nuclear activities. The JCPOA prematurely and irresponsibly
closed the IAEA probe into Iran's documented nuclear-weaponization efforts or the so-called
Possible Military Dimensions (PMDs) of its nuclear program. However, the IAEA concluded that
Iran was actively designing a nuclear weapon through at least 2009. Iran's lack of cooperation
with the IAEA probe makes it impossible to verify if Tehran has halted all such efforts.
Consequently, the international community has an incomplete picture of Iran's nuclear program making it impossible to establish a
baseline to guide future inspections and verification.

The iran deal merely set temporary restrictions, the cp emboldens iran
UANL 15(United Against Nuclear Iran - not-for-profit, bi-partisan, advocacy group that seeks to
prevent Iran from fulfilling its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons. UANI was founded in 2008 by
Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, and Middle East expert Ambassador Dennis Ross and is led by
a diverse Advisory Board of policy "What's Wrong with the Iran Nuclear Deal and What Can We
Do Now?," Published:7-14-15 DOA:7-25-19 https://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/whats-
wrong-with-iran-nuclear-deal
Iran accepts temporary nuclear restrictions in exchange for front-loaded, permanent benefits.
Under the JCPOA, United Nations (U.N.) restrictions on Iran's ballistic-missile program expire eight years after Adoption Day
(October 2023), while U.N. restrictions on the transfer of conventional weapons to or from Iran terminate after five years (October
2020). In exchange for temporary restrictions on its nuclear program, Iran is receiving permanent
benefits up-front. U.N. sanctions and some E.U. sanctions have been lifted, enabling Iran to
access previously frozen assets. Remaining EU sanctions will be lifted in less than 8 years. Until
the U.S. withdrawal in May 2018, the U.S. had ceased applying nuclear-related sanctions against foreign companies for doing
business in Iran. Since the JCPOA was implemented and prior to the U.S. withdrawal in May 2018,
Iran had signed over $100 billion in contracts with foreign companies. The deal emboldens and
enriches an extremist anti-American terror state thereby furthering Iran's expansionist and
destabilizing activities. Regional Instability The windfall of sanctions relief freed up tens of billions of
dollars to finance Tehran's many destabilizing activities. Iran increased its military budget 145%
over the course of President Rouhani's first term. Iran continues to be the world's leading state
sponsor of terrorism, backing terrorist organizations Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which have been responsible
for the deaths of American citizens. Iran has escalated its support to Syria's Assad dictatorship, which has killed hundreds of
thousands during the Syrian civil war, enabling Assad to reverse key setbacks and turn the tide of war in his favor. Iran sponsors the
violent extremist groups destabilizing Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Bahrain. Iran continues to take Americans and other Westerners
hostage, detaining at least five Americans and six other Westerners since the nuclear deal was reached. The Iranian regime brutally
represses its own people and violates the human rights of ethnic, national, and religious minorities with impunity. Iran has test-
launched at least 16 ballistic missiles since the JCPOA was reached. U.N. Security Council
Resolution 2231, which implemented the deal, aided Iran's ballistic-missile program by replacing
previous resolution language that said Iran "shall not" engage in ballistic-missile activities with
weaker language that merely "calls upon" Iran not to test any ballistic missiles "designed to be nuclear capable." Arms
Race The deal fails to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons in the long term and
weakens restrictions on Iran's ballistic-missile program and conventional-arms transfers.
Consequently, Iran's regional adversaries, like Saudi Arabia, may race to counter Iran by getting
their own nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles and to enhance their conventional-arms
capabilities. Former Saudi Intelligence Minister Turki al-Faisal warned in 2015: "I've always said whatever comes out of these
talks, we will want the same. So if Iran has the ability to enrich uranium to whatever level, it's not just Saudi Arabia that's going to
ask for that. The whole world will be an open door to go that route without any inhibition." Thus, the chance of destabilizing regional
competition and conflict has increased.

The first pulling out of the iran deal killed it – its too late to recover
Toosi 19(Nahal - foreign affairs correspondent at POLITICO. She joined POLITICO from The
Associated Press, where she reported from and/or served as an editor in New York. "Democrats
want to rejoin the iran nuclear deal. its not that simple" Published: 7-20-19 DOA:7-25-19
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/20/iran-nuclear-deal-democrats-1424113
Most of the Democrats running for president have promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal if they win the Oval Office. It won’t be that
easy. By the time Inauguration Day rolls around in 2021, there might not even be a deal left — it
has been hanging on by a thread since President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out last year.
Even if it still exists, sections of the 2015 agreement are set to expire in the coming years, Trump’s
punishing sanctions on Iran will be hard to fully unwind, Iran has elections that could put more anti-
deal hard-liners in power and Tehran has already threatened to unwind itself from the deal in
the months ahead. Then, there’s the possibility that Iran and the U.S. could be in a full-blown
military conflict. Democratic campaign aides acknowledge these challenges. But they insist that the
smartest move, politically and policywise, is for White House hopefuls to promise a return to the 2015
agreement. It’s a way, they said, for candidates to link themselves to a popular Barack Obama
legacy, distinguish themselves from Trump and send a signal to the world — including Iran —
that the U.S. will once again be a reliable partner. “It’s moving away from this hysterical way that
Washington talks about Iran, as this uniquely problematic actor that exists outside the realm of
normal diplomacy,” said Matt Duss, an adviser to Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator seeking the Democratic
presidential nomination. The Obama administration spent years negotiating the nuclear agreement with Iran's Islamist government
and global partners. The deal removed numerous international sanctions on Iran in exchange for severe restrictions on its nuclear
program. Trump quit the agreement last year, arguing that it was too narrow and time-limited and that it should have covered Iran’s
non-nuclear activities, too, such as its support for terrorist groups. But despite using sanctions and other pressure,
Trump has been unable to lure Iran into negotiating a new deal. If anything, the two countries
have been moving closer to a military confrontation, with each side downing each other’s drones, among other
faceoffs.
 2AC – Iran – Links to Politics
Congress is split over decisions about Iran
Mascaro 18( Lisa Mascaro An economics and political science graduate of UC Santa Barbara,
she also studied in Budapest, Hungary. "Congressional leaders split on Trump withdrawal from
Iran deal," Published:5-8-19 DOA:7-25-19 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/congressional-
leaders-split-on-trump-withdrawal-from-iran-deal
Congressional leaders are split, but not neatly along party lines, over President Donald Trump’s
decision Tuesday to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Some welcomed the pullout, believing the 2015
accord was unsound, but others worried the U.S. was now in the position of reneging on an
international commitment and without a backup plan. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.,
said that the Iran deal “was flawed from the beginning” and that he looks forward to working with the president
on the next steps. “My own view is it’s a flawed deal and we can do better,” he said. “Clearly there’s a next step beyond this and
we’ll look forward to seeing what he recommends.” But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who
opposed the deal negotiated by President Barack Obama’s administration and world powers in
2015, said the Trump White House appears to have a slogan but no plan. “This is a little like replace and repeal — they had these
words, they used them in the campaign, and they don’t have a real plan here,” Schumer said, referring to the failed GOP effort to
undo the Affordable Care Act. The administration — and even Trump himself — briefed leaders ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.
One top Republican, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also spoke with
European leaders and said he looks forward to negotiating better terms of the deal. “It is disappointing that the
administration was unable to reach an agreement with our allies,” Corker said. “However, based on
The
conversations I have had in recent days, it is my sense that the administration will move quickly to work toward a better deal
committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, said Trump “is risking U.S.
national security, recklessly upending foundational partnerships with key U.S. allies in Europe
and gambling with Israel’s security.” Menendez is among a handful of Democrats who opposed the agreement in 2015. But he said
Tuesday that “it is a grave mistake to walk away … without a plan for ensuring that Iran does not restart its nuclear weapon
program, without a strategy for countering Iran’s dangerous non-nuclear activities, and without our allies and partners.” The deal put
the brakes on Iran’s nuclear weapons program for the next decade in exchange for lifting economically devastating sanctions.
Trump’s decision to reimpose sanctions is expected to provoke a response from Iran that some hope will open negotiations to a
better deal. Others, though, say the outcome is uncertain.
 2AC – Iran – Links to Assurances
Rejoining the iran deal causes US allies to question intent more
Mascaro 18( Lisa Mascaro An economics and political science graduate of UC Santa Barbara,
she also studied in Budapest, Hungary. "Congressional leaders split on Trump withdrawal from
Iran deal," Published:5-8-19 DOA:7-25-19 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/congressional-
leaders-split-on-trump-withdrawal-from-iran-deal
The deal put the brakes on Iran’s nuclear weapons program for the next decade in exchange for
lifting economically devastating sanctions. Trump’s decision to reimpose sanctions is expected
to provoke a response from Iran that some hope will open negotiations to a better deal. Others,
though, say the outcome is uncertain. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said he hopes during the sanctions
implementation period — 90 days for some, 180 days for others — the U.S. will “work with our
allies to achieve consensus on addressing a range of destabilizing Iranian behavior_both
nuclear and non-nuclear.” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., called the withdrawal “a mistake of historic proportions.” Trump’s
action “isolates the United States from the world at a time when we need our allies to come
together to address nuclear threats elsewhere, particularly in Korea,” said Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the
Senate. It’s a view shared by some Republicans who opposed the deal. Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake says allowing Iran to skirt the
restrictions imposed on its nuclear program “would be foolhardy.” Pulling out of the accord is a mistake, he said, and sends a poor
message to U.S. allies. “We’re having enough problems around the world in terms of our reliability,” Flake said. “If you’re our
allies, you’ve got to be scratching your head, whether it’s a trade deal or security arrangements.
Is America reliable anymore?”
Asia
Neg
 1NC – Trade CP
Text: The United States Federal Government should
 Initiate trade partnerships between the TPP, the RCEP, and the CJK
 repeal tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on the People Republic of China.
 Establish active cooperation between the AIIB, the Asian Development Bank and the
IMF on Infrastructure Development in East Asia

That solves -- Co-op on infrastructure development, Climate change, and regional

confidence building is key to cohesive international relations
Tanaka 17
(Hitoshi Tanaka, 2/28/17. “How to manage geopolitical instability in East Asia”
Hitoshi Tanaka is a senior fellow at JCIE and chairman of the Institute for
International Strategy at the Japan Research Institute, Ltd. He previously served
as Japan’s deputy minister for foreign affairs.
https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2017/02/28/how-to-manage-geopolitical-
instability-in-east-asia/)
A US–China ‘grand bargain’ may not be impossible. For China, any damage to
the prospects of its high economic growth would be unwelcome. And if a grand
bargain restrains aggressive Chinese behaviour in the South China Sea and East
China Sea, it should be welcomed by the region. We face many great challenges
as we seek to manage geopolitical instability in East Asia. The best approach
may be to pursue multilayered functional cooperation. This means starting with
functions. Find those countries that have a common interest in enhancing
functional cooperation on a particular issue. Different areas may require different
coalitions for effective outcomes — for instance trade arrangements, financial
cooperation for infrastructure investment, regional confidence-building measures,
and cooperation on environmental and energy issues. On trade arrangements,
there are a number of mega-regional trade initiatives currently under discussion,
such as the TPP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership agreement
(RCEP), and the China–Japan–South Korea (CJK) trilateral free trade
negotiations. While the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States
from the TPP, the remaining 11 members might work to see what is possible
among themselves. The RCEP and a CJK FTA could help to fill some of the gaps
left by the TPP. But the bigger aim should be to realise a Free Trade Area of the
Asia Pacific (FTAAP). Other trade initiatives should all be utilised as stepping-
stones toward the establishment of an FTAAP. On financial cooperation and
infrastructure investment, we have seen the emergence of the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) led by China. This is a positive
development for the region given the huge demand for infrastructure investment.
It is disappointing that Japan and the United States have not engaged with the
AIIB. Both countries should do more to proactively engage in the creation of
infrastructure in the region. One way this can be achieved is through the
establishment of a mechanism to coordinate cooperation between the AIIB and
other institutions such as the Asian Development Bank and the IMF. Such
coordination is critical to ensure that investment in infrastructure provides the
best possible development gains for the region as a whole. Greater confidence
building among the five powers in Northeast Asia — the United States, China,
Russia, Japan and South Korea — is sorely needed in order to de-escalate
tensions, defuse nationalism and build relations rooted in win–win cooperation.
Confidence building should initially focus on the low-hanging fruit of non-
traditional security issues. This should include the joint establishment of concrete
mechanisms for reporting on, preventing, and responding to natural disasters,
major industrial accidents, acts of terrorism, and cyber-attacks. It should also
include a commitment to nuclear non-proliferation. While these steps may be
hard to envision based on what we have seen from the Trump administration so
far, operational-level cooperation that is already underway in the region can
gradually be expanded to realise easy wins. There is a pressing need to tackle
environmental and energy issues. Over the coming decades, the demand for
energy will continue to grow exponentially, particularly in Asia’s emerging
economies with expanding middle classes, such as China, India, and ASEAN
nations. Regional cooperation —including joint efforts in areas such as energy
exploration, the development of new extraction technologies, and the
strengthening of nuclear safety measures—is needed to ensure that the energy
demands of all nations are met. At the same time, the unabated use of fossil
fuels will cause environmental damage detrimental to sustainable economic
growth and poverty reduction, not to mention the planet. Intensive cooperation
among nations for jointly funded and developed green energy technologies is
sorely needed. The East Asia Summit and other regional forums should take up
these issues in a more serious manner. The Trump administration includes a
number of climate change deniers while Trump himself has referred to climate
change as a ‘hoax.’ Friends and allies of the United States will need to
emphasise the importance of environmental and energy cooperation in their
dealings with the Trump administration. Managing geopolitical instability in East
Asia will not be an easy task. There are understandably great concerns around
the region regarding the uncertainties that the Trump administration brings.
America’s friends and allies will need to cooperate, coordinate, and strive to
make their views clearly heard on the importance of regional cooperation. The
interconnected nature of global and regional challenges means that win-win
cooperation is necessary more than ever. But given the nature of the globalised
world we live in and the technological possibilities available to us, the potential
for win-win cooperation is also greater than ever. Through multi-layered
functional cooperation, we can manage geo-political instability in East Asia and
safeguard shared regional peace and prosperity into the future.
The trade war is one of the most important determining factors in ensuring co-op
Wyne ’18 (Ali Wyne is a policy analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and a nonresident senior fellow with
the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security." The Greater Danger of U.S.-China Trade Tensions," No
Publication, 05-09-18, https://www.rand.org/blog/2018/05/the-greater-danger-of-us-china-trade-tensions.html)(Shiv)
Over the long term, though, the main risk of indefinitely heightened trade tensions between
the two countries is not commercial, but strategic: Robust economic interdependence has
played a central role in preventing vigorous competition between the United States and
China from devolving into outright hostility. The ties that bind are thankfully thick and wide-
ranging. The United States buys some 18 percent of Chinese goods exports, more than any other single country, and roughly
two-thirds of China's $3.14 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves consist of dollar-denominated assets (PDF). On the flip side, China
is America's top trading partner, the fastest-growing market for its exports and the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities.
But China has been making a concerted, successful push to reduce its dependence on trade: the share of total exports in its gross
domestic product fell from over 30 percent in 2007 to under 20 percent last year; during that same time, the share of exports to the
United States fell from approximately 9 percent of China's economy to just over 4 percent. If Beijing concludes that trade tensions
with Washington are likely to stay, and perhaps even intensify, it may well take steps to accelerate that trend. America's current
trade tensions with a range of other actors—Mexico and Canada (over the terms of a potential revision to the North Atlantic Free
Trade Agreement), Japan (over the extant trade imbalance) and the European Union (over the volume of U.S. steel and aluminum
imports), in particular—afford it a compelling set of opportunities to diversify away from U.S. imports. Meanwhile, the progression of
Beijing's flagship economic-cum-strategic project, the Belt and Road Initiative, will enable it to deepen its footprint and forge new
relationships across a wide swath of Eurasia. China's economic heft vis-à-vis the United States has grown considerably since the
global financial crisis. In 2008 its GDP was 31 percent as large as America's; in 2016, the last year for which the World Bank reports
data, the ratio was 60 percent. Still, explains Ruan Zongze, executive vice president of the China Institute of International Studies,
the Trump administration's mid-April decision to bar U.S. companies from selling components to ZTE highlights China's high level of
dependence on the U.S. economy. One of the express objectives of Made in China 2025 is to unwind that symbiosis—an imperative
that has taken on heightened urgency amid present trade tensions. Following last week's negotiations, economist Eswar Prasad
observed that the U.S. delegation “seems to have had the objective of negotiating a surrender rather than a truce.” Xi Jinping will not
accept the former outcome. Instead, he will maneuver to ensure that China is increasingly capable of generating and sustaining
growth on its own. The less Beijing depends on Washington economically, the more assertive it is
likely to be in challenging U.S. foreign policy. Of course, the two countries had already been
experiencing growing frictions on a number of issues before the recent wave of trade tensions:
the status of Taiwan, territorial claims in the South China Sea, and internet governance,
among others. But the United States and China had also cooperated to shore up macroeconomic
stability, tackle climate change, and bring Iran to the negotiating table. A Beijing less
encumbered by economic interdependence might not only scale back such cooperation but
also be more proactive in undermining U.S. national interests—whether by further
undercutting multilateral sanctions on North Korea, strengthening its alignment with Russia,
or more explicitly framing its approach to governance as a counterpoint to national-level political
dysfunction in Washington. And while China has taken a complex attitude so far toward the postwar order—strengthening
certain elements, weakening others, and developing parallel institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) on
the outside—it may embrace a more overtly revisionist posture if it is not as concerned about the
extent of America's economic leverage. If these shifts occur, they will do so gradually. It would
take far more than the tit-for-tat retaliation observers presently fear to undo the interdependence
the two countries have accrued in the more than 15 years since China acceded to the World
Trade Organization. But leaders in Washington and Beijing should recognize that short-term
trade tensions, left unchecked, could undermine a longstanding ballast of bilateral ties
over the long term, with profound implications for global stability.
 2NC – AIIB – Solvency
Joining the AIIB promotes US-Sino relations
CFR 16 (Council on Foreign Relations, May 17, 2016. “Crisis in Global Governance: A
Conversation With Richard N. Haass and the Council of Councils,” Council on Foreign
Relations. https://www.cfr.org/event/crisis-global-governance-conversation-richard-n-haass-and-
council-councils//KDES).
LEE: And at the same time, you know, there is interesting AIIB, the Asia Investment Infrastructure Bank, initiated by China. So in
Asia, we thought there is a coming of a kind of competition between China-led economic and trade or even investment organization
versus U.S.-led TPP. But I see this is not a good idea if the economic, you know, cooperations should
be work together. So, I think it’s more rational for USA to be a member of AIIB rather than
just to, you know, vetoing AIIB. So, by participating in AIIB, you know, we can make the
governments more democratic and transparent rather than by (conflict ?). HAASS: I’ll talk about trade.
Just on trade very quickly, world trade has not been growing for about the last five years—very little. And, you know, more than
anything it’s because economies aren’t growing. But also, it’s now been, what—I lost count of the years, but since, what, 15 years
ago, the Doha Development Round. Global trade talks are going nowhere. It’s not clear they can revive given, you know, any time
you try to get agreement with 190 countries, good luck. And that’s the old-fashioned legally binding approach, very, very tough. So
what we’re seeing is the proliferation of regional, and bilateral, and various types of multilateral trade agreements, which are at best
second best. There’s people like Jagdish Bhagwati who think they’re actually quite, on balance, bad. But I would simply say I think
they’re second best in what issues they can handle, and I think it comes up against now also the domestic pushback. So I think it—I
think it has been a rough time for trade. And I think more than anything it’s—at the global level you can’t get it negotiated, and at the
domestic level it’s not clear you have the support. FULLILOVE: Can I just add one— MABRY: Sure. FULLILOVE: Can I just pick up
something Professor Lee said about the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank? Because one issue we
haven’t—we haven’t talked too much about China so far, and everybody in this room knows that
one of the features of international relations is that sometimes established and rising powers
collide. And this relationship between China and the United States is going to be very important
to many of the global governance challenges that we talk about in the report, not just the ones in
Asia but globally. And it seems to me that the United States and like-minded countries need to
get the right balance of engaging and hedging with China, and sometimes we get that balance
quite wrong. For example, on the AIIB, I didn’t understand why the United States was so
negative about the—about that particular initiative. Because if we’re not going to allow China the
ability to set up some kind of infrastructure investment bank in Asia, where it’s required, then
what prerogatives are we going to allow China? On the other hand, I would be—so I think, in a way, we were—I
think the United States was hedging too much in relation to China. But then on other issues—and we’ve mentioned the South China
Sea—I would say that President Obama has been too soft. I would say he’s been too down the engagement end. So this is
going to be, this relationship—these are just examples of this, but this relationship between the
United States and China is going to be so important. Can the two countries come up—arrive at
an order, a new—a new modus operandi where each of them can achieve their objectives, but
allow the other side to exercise its prerogatives and allow everybody else in Asia to also
exercise their prerogatives? Can they get that balance right? And the importance of statecraft, and
leadership, and getting the right mix of engaging and hedging, and choosing where to engage and where to hedge is so hard, which
does come back to leadership.

The AIIB is a symbolic starting point for future relations—promotes trust and
cooperation
Jasper 15 (Daniel Jasper, 8-24-2015, "Overcoming Barriers to U.S.-China Cooperation,"
United States Institute of Peace, https://www.usip.org/publications/2015/08/overcoming-barriers-
us-china-cooperation//KDES).
Willingness Although Washington is intent on spreading liberal democracy and continuing as a global leader, Beijing demonstrates
growing commitment to what President Xi terms "strive to achieve"—a more active involvement in global governance and
international affairs.6 This policy looks to reshape China’s traditional approaches to foreign development assistance, trade, and
investment. Washington, on the other hand, is often willing to step within another state’s boundaries to confront conflict and fulfill
what it sees as its responsibility as a global leader. A willingness gap in the relationship is clear as both countries struggle to adhere
to their foreign policy principles in a changing global arena. Beijing and Washington need to continue to show
flexibility in their foreign policy. Extreme applications of principles damage each side and their
ability to cooperate constructively. Perhaps it is time for them to change their political narratives
and take on their shared role in the international community . The AIIB is one arena for such
cooperation . Because its rules and guidelines have yet to be fully defined, the AIIB provides
Western states an opportunity to share experiences with China and China an opportunity to
integrate its approach to development with those that other states have already developed.
Capability The final barriers to cooperation involve capability. China is newer to the field of peace and development, has yet to fully
establish the AIIB, and has only recently become a major contributor to UN peacekeeping missions. Meanwhile, the United States
can no longer provide the support needed in least developed countries, a gap further handicapped by congressional emphasis on
U.S. defense rather than development and humanitarian assistance. China and the United States can be
complementary. China is strong in engineering, construction, and infrastructure, and the United
States is strong in developing risk and security guidance—areas where Chinese and Western
analysts alike have pointed out key gaps in Chinese approaches. For optimal impact, the two
countries need to coordinate their development efforts. Conclusion As security tensions continue to rise in Asia
and as China begins launching global initiatives, it is imperative that Washington and Beijing find ways to
collaborate. As Beijing academic Wang Jisi recently wrote, both countries risk seeing the emergence of competing global
institutions, which may result at best in wasted resources and at worst in deeper conflict and tensions across the developing world.
The AIIB is a possible starting point . Fifty-seven countries signed the bank’s charter in June
2015, and the bank has emerged as a global initiative promising to remake the face of global
finance. Washington might be well advised to engage with the AIIB. Because the AIIB will target
infrastructure and development projects in least developed countries and conflict hotspots, its
emerging portfolio is an opportunity for Chinese-U.S. cooperation. Development lending could
prove a minimally politically sensitive testing ground.

Joining the AIIB spills over to US-Sino cooperation in other areas—infrsatructure

development, Middle East, US companies
Grossman 17 (Marc Grossman, American former diplomat and government official. He served
as United States Ambassador to Turkey, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, and
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. 1-15-2017, "Two Visions, One Collaboration? Part
of a Future for US-China Relations?," Asia Pacific Journal,
https://apjjf.org/2017/02/Grossman.html//KDES).
Indeed, it would be a great advantage to the countries where OBOR projects are being built or
planned if this important DRC assertion – that the goal of OBOR is to “achieve participating
countries’ diversified, independent, balanced and sustainable development” – were to become a
transparent policy objective for everyone involved, including the AIIB and the BRIC New Development Bank.
Beijing would enhance OBOR’s reputation by asking the UN periodically to assess whether or not OBOR projects are in fact promoting the seventeen
2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS). The US should do the same with NSR. And measuring OBOR and NSR efforts against the SDGs would
be an excellent topic for US-China consultations if more collaboration is in fact encouraged. In this case, OBOR/BRI might take a lesson from NSR:
If President-elect
many of America’s energy assistance programs in Pakistan are designed to promote alternative energy production.
Trump were to seek “good deals” for America, here are four advantages which might emerge
from more active US support for the OBOR and NSR initiatives. First, if Washington ignores or
opposes OBOR and has amnesia about NSR, it could end up “denying both developing Asia and
stagnating Europe an important growth engine while excluding American investors from the
benefits of private investment in major infrastructure projects.” Failure by the US to engage will
open the way for China to guide the future of at least Central, Southeast, and South Asia’s
geopolitics and geoeconomics, “impacting almost every aspect of US foreign policy including in
some of the world’s hotspots– the Middle East, South Asia, Eastern Europe and the South
China Sea.”14 Getting back in the game should also mean reversing an Obama policy and
joining the AIIB. Second, Afghanistan. The September 2016 US-China Summit in Hangzhou
highlighted Afghanistan as an “area of cooperation.” The US and China share an interest in an
Afghan state in which al-Qaeda and the Islamic State find no havens, drug exports shrink, and
private sector–based economic activity increases. A coordinated OBOR-NSR effort to create
what Afghan officials once called an “Asian Roundabout” to encourage a sustainable Afghan
economy would promote these shared goals. The recent opening of a rail line from the eastern
coast of China to the northern Afghan city of Hairatan, offers Afghan exporters an alternative
route to Asia with dramatically reduced transit times. Robert Kaplan presciently captured the thought in his 2011 book Monsoon, when he wrote,
“Stabilizing Afghanistan is about much more than just the anti-terrorist war against al-Qaeda or the Taliban; it is about securing the future prosperity of
A third area of potential cooperation is in Pakistan, where China and the
the whole of southern Eurasia.”14
US want Pakistan to support regional stability, grow their economy and undermine extremism.
China’s $51 billion commitment to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is designed to
build highways, railways and energy generation in Pakistan, including a proposed rail and
highway between Pakistan’s port at Gwadar and China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, which
would also connect the OBOR to China’s Maritime Silk Road project. Pakistanis hope the
corridor will create 700,000 jobs by 2030, which should provide alternatives to extremism for
some of Pakistan’s 190 million people, a majority of whom are under the age of 22. Washington and Beijing are already working
together in Pakistan on the clean-energy project Sapphire Wind. The US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) has provided $128 million in
financing for this 50-MW wind project, which uses General Electric turbines. Under the umbrella of the US-Pakistan Clean Energy Partnership, the US
will invest $70 million on transmission lines to connect a 680-MW wind project in Sindh to the national grid. China is also an investor. In a bilateral
contribution to regional connectivity, the US Agency for International Development funded the construction of 111 kilometers of road needed to
Fourth, collaborative
complete the N-25 highway and link Chaman, on the Afghan border, with Karachi through Quetta in Balochistan.
NSR-OBOR efforts between the US and China can bring benefits to US companies. The Wall
Street Journal reported in October that General Electric, Honeywell and Caterpillar are already
focused on the possibilities. According to the Journal, GE’s orders in Pakistan are more than $1 billion today, compared with less than
$100 million five years ago.[15] Connecting US firms to OBOR and keeping them aware of NSR
opportunities requires a concerted effort by many parts of the US government, including the
Departments of State and Commerce, OPIC and the Export Import Bank.

The only hope for cooperation are deeper cultural ties with China
Kazianis 17 – April 6, 2017, Harry Kazianis- Director of Defense Studies at the Center for the
National Interest and Executive Editor of The National Interest. “6 Reasons U.S.-China
Relations Are Headed For Trouble”
https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2017/04/06/6_reasons_us-
china_relations_are_headed_for_trouble_112279.html
What can bring both sides together again
While the above six flashpoints are certainly reason for concern, tensions between the world’s
two biggest economies and militaries need not sputter into an open shooting contest. While
there are many areas of pressure, there are also many areas of potential cooperation. Climate
change and saving the environment should be at the top of talks this week. If the trade
relationship could be made more equitable and as China transitions slowly from being the
world’s factory to a service and ideas economy, there is no telling how deep trade ties could go.
And considering cultural ties that span generations and the millions of Chinese students
here in the United States , there is ample room for hope -- as long as both sides don’t embrace
the mindset that the United States and China are truly destined for war.
 2NC – Tariffs – Solvency
The trade war is holding US-China relations hostage – ending it is key
Hadley 4/11 – Stephen; principal of RiceHadleyGates. He served as the national security
advisor to President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009. From 2001 to 2005, he served as
deputy national security advisor. (“A Win-Win U.S.-China Trade Deal Is Possible” Foreign
Policy. April 11, 2019. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/11/a-win-win-u-s-china-trade-deal-is-
possible/)//GK
There appears to be a struggle within the administration for the mind of U.S. President Donald Trump on this
issue—with many (including U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer) arguing strongly that the trade
agreement must not only involve structural reform but also contain a real enforcement mechanism to
ensure that China complies with its commitments. Indeed, some argue that current U.S. tariffs on
Chinese goods should not be loosened until there is not only a trade agreement but actual evidence of Chinese
compliance with it. Only with real structural reforms will the Chinese economy be able to continue to
contribute to global economic growth and will the two nations be able to resolve the trade
issues that now hold hostage the future of U.S.-China relations. The threat of increased
tariffs and a weakening Chinese economy has presented the Trump administration with a once-
in-a-lifetime opportunity to make progress on these structural issues. It must not let that opportunity slip away.

The trade war destroys US-Sino relations – US action to reduce tariffs is key
Lee 19 – Don; (“For the U.S. and China, it’s not a trade war anymore — it’s something worse”
LA Times. June 1, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-us-china-trade-stalemate-
20190531-story.html)//GK
What started out two years ago as an effort by President Trump to wring better terms from China on
the nuts and bolts of foreign trade now threatens to become a far wider and more ominous
confrontation. The conflict continues to be framed as a “trade war” between the world’s two
biggest economies — as Washington and Beijing pursue an escalating series of tariff hikes and
other retaliatory measures. Even as Trump moved Thursday to open a new, potentially damaging trade war with Mexico,
however, the conflict with China has widened beyond the original trade-based issues. Beneath the surface, a new
tone has begun to emerge since trade talks broke down in early May and Trump ratcheted up tariffs
on imported goods from China, an action met with retaliatory duties from Beijing. Officials on
both sides of the Pacific have begun to portray the U.S.-China relationship in nationalistic
and emotion-charged terms that suggest a much deeper conflict. Recently, for example, a private
group of American economists and trade experts with long-standing experience in China traveled to Beijing, expecting their usual
technical give-and-take with Chinese government officials. Instead, a member of the Chinese Politburo harangued them for almost
an hour, describing the U.S.-China relationship as a “clash of civilizations” and boasting that China’s government-controlled system
was far superior to the “Mediterranean culture” of the West, with its internal divisions and aggressive foreign policy. On the U.S.
side, a senior State Department official, during a forum last month in Washington, warned of a deepening
confrontation with China that she cast in something close to racial terms. In the Cold War with the Soviet Union, said
Kiron Skinner, the State Department’s director of policy planning, Washington at least faced fellow Caucasians, whereas with
Beijing, Washington faces a nonwhite culture. “In China we have an economic competitor, we have an ideological
competitor, one that really does seek a kind of global reach, that many of us didn’t expect a couple of decades ago,” Skinner said.
“And I think it’s also striking that this is the first time that we will have a great-power competitor that is not Caucasian.” On the
trade issues themselves, the two sides may still be able to reach a truce, with the best chance coming
with the economic summit of major nations at the end of June in Osaka, Japan. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are
scheduled to attend the meeting of Group of 20 leaders. Nothing short of a deal struck directly by the two
leaders is likely to avert new rounds of punches and counter-punches over economic and
financial ties, analysts say. But whether either leader is interested in a stand-down is unclear.
 2NC – Trade – Solvency
Increased ASEAN Innovation enables greater regional transparency – that’s a key
prerequisite to solving for tensions and improving relations
Mahmood 18 (8/29/18, “7 key challenges for the future of ASEAN and how to solve them”
Ishtiaq Pasha Mahmood is a Professor at the National University of Singapore Business School
and Co-curator of the  Transformation Map on ASEAN.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/7-challenges-to-business-in-the-asean-region-and-
how-to-solve-them/)
ASEAN was formed in 1967, with an agreement by the five original founding
nations – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – to
organize for the sake of peace, stability and cooperation. ASEAN states are
located at a strategically important junction, bordering two of the world’s most
populous economic powers, China and India, which makes ASEAN a focal
point for both regional and global powers. ASEAN member states are also
enmeshed in territorial disputes with interested powers. China’s claim to
territories in the South China Sea, for example, overlaps with competing
claims by Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Viet Nam. While
there are challenges, closer coordination and common goals among ASEAN
governments can help promote stability and lessen the prospect of conflicts.
ASEAN is home to a wide variety of businesses, including a number of huge family-owned
conglomerates and state-linked enterprises, like the Central Group in Thailand, Salim Group in
Indonesia, state-linked Singtel in Singapore, and Vinamilk in Viet Nam. Yet small- and medium-
sized enterprises (SMEs) together with micro-entrepreneurs make up at least 89% of business
activity in the region. Entrenched interests with the large conglomerates, paired with widespread
corruption, is undermining the region’s business environment and is particularly hurtful for small
enterprises. The ASEAN region needs strong independent civic institutions to prevent corruption
and to help the region compete globally. One hope is that digital innovations will enable greater
transparency and promote economic growth.

A focus on consumer needs and innovation boosts the regional economy

Mahmood 18 (8/29/18, “7 key challenges for the future of ASEAN and how to solve them”
Ishtiaq Pasha Mahmood is a Professor at the National University of Singapore Business School
and Co-curator of the  Transformation Map on ASEAN.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/7-challenges-to-business-in-the-asean-region-and-
how-to-solve-them/)
The ASEAN region offers a growing market of more than 600 million consumers. The
region’s GDP per capita measures about $6,500 (excluding Singapore, the region’s
most advanced economy), which is less than China but more than India. Consumers in
the region are price-sensitive and demanding, resulting in local businesses with low
margins and low labour costs – formidable competitors to foreign rivals. One way for
new entrants to adapt and increase profits is to focus on specific consumer needs and
conditions in the region and work backward to develop solutions. Mobile technologies
can be particular useful, especially given the high mobile adoption rates in the region.
Government support can also ensure companies are encouraged to innovate by
reducing the cost burden of potential failure . This can be done with a so-called “light
touch” regulatory approach, which fosters creativity and entrepreneurship.
A regional internet infrastructure would allow East Asia to capitalize on growth
while spurring co-op in other areas
Mahmood 18 (8/29/18, “7 key challenges for the future of ASEAN and how to solve them”
Ishtiaq Pasha Mahmood is a Professor at the National University of Singapore Business School
and Co-curator of the  Transformation Map on ASEAN.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/7-challenges-to-business-in-the-asean-region-and-
how-to-solve-them/)
ASEAN member states span a wide spectrum of income levels, ranging from
Singapore’s GDP per capita of $57,714 to Cambodia’s $1,384 and Myanmar’s
$1,298 in 2017. In recent years, lower-income states have made important
gains. However, regional economic gains have fallen short of erasing
significant differences among ASEAN member states. The World Bank’s most
recent 2017 edition of the Global Findex showed that while 98% of adults in
Singapore and 85% in Malaysia had a bank account, just 22% of Cambodian
adults and 26% Burmese adults did. These disparities illustrate the need for
broad, robust investment in infrastructure, financial institutions and strategic
planning. South-East Asia is home to the world’s fastest growing population of
internet users, with more than 125,000 new users forecast to come online
every day through the year 2020. Most of that growth will come via mobile
use, and it has the potential to stimulate new industries, leapfrog legacy
business models and fundamentally change the lives of millions of people.
However, technology adoption differs greatly among ASEAN countries, and
there is a need to build regional internet infrastructure.
Security institutions are an important factor in preventing escalation – improving
them solves
Wong 17 (9/11/17, Catherine Wong. Catherine Wong is a reporter with the South China Morning
Post in Beijing, where she focuses on China’s diplomacy and defence policy. “distrust is fueling
instability in Asia, think tank reports – can a stronger Asean help mend ties?”
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2109471/us-planning-more-
regular-south-china-sea-patrols)
“One of the greatest threats in a rapidly militarising region such as the Asia-
Pacific is the risk of inadvertent crisis and/or military escalation,” the report said.
“Regional security institutions can play an important function in avoiding such
outcomes by developing practical mechanisms to prevent crises and disputes
and provide policy ‘off ramps’ when they do occur.” To strengthen and improve
the role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), the report
suggested the bloc engage more with its partners, which include the US, China,
India, South Korea, Japan and Australia. “As Asean engages in internal
deliberations about its future vision and role in the region, external partners
should encourage and help facilitate further strengthening of Asean,” it said.
Trump’s tariffs make broader US-China cooperation impossible
Levite and Jinghua 19 – *Ariel (Eli) Levite is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Nuclear
Policy Program and was the principal deputy director general for policy at the Israeli Atomic
Energy Commission from 2002 to 2007. **Lyu Jinghua is a visiting scholar with Carnegie’s
Cyber Policy Initiative. Her research focuses primarily on cybersecurity and China-U.S. defense
relations. (“Chinese-American Relations in Cyberspace: Toward Collaboration or
Confrontation?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. January 24, 2019.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/01/24/chinese-american-relations-in-cyberspace-toward-
collaboration-or-confrontation-pub-78213)//GK
In parallel, disconcerting developments have recently occurred on the political and economic and
security fronts. The Trump administration’s aggressive trade policies toward China have
been very poorly received in China. Recent tightening of the review of Chinese investments in
the United States by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States is both a
symptom of the growing mutual distrust and a force reinforcing it.11 Meanwhile, the goals, pace, and
direction of Chinese modernization plans in general and in the military realm in particular are heightening U.S. anxiety about
Chinese intention and threat. Similarly, Chinese watch with concern some of the corresponding U.S. defense plans. Taken together,
these are leading many observers in both countries to conclude that “strategic competition between China and the US has loomed
large, prompting their relations to take a dark turn,”12 and that “relations between the U.S. and China are destined to get worse
before they get better.”13 Absent at least some easing of tensions on trade issues and other political issues, it
is unlikely that more cooperation on cyber rules of the road can be fostered. Breaking this vicious
cycle and easing bilateral tensions on the broader political and economic issues is now not only
an urgent issue in and of itself, but also highly conducive to developing stability in cyberspace as
well.

East Asian Economic Stability is a key deterrent to conflict and escalation

Vatikiotis 19 (2/20/29 Michael Vatikiotis is Asia director of the Centre for Humanitarian
Dialogue and author of "Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia."
“Southeast Asia stumbles over politics” https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Southeast-Asia-
stumbles-over-politics)
What looked like stable political outcomes or transitions in Cambodia, Malaysia,
Thailand and Indonesia have more recently generated fear and uncertainty as
squabbling entrenched elites are battered by divisive issues of corruption, identity and
inequality. In Myanmar and the Philippines democratic transitions have morphed into
state-sponsored repressive security crackdowns on hard-won freedoms.Broader
concerns stem from the geopolitical uncertainty created by U.S.-led efforts to
challenge China's rise, which threatens to exert a drag on Asia's economic growth.
The start of the third decade of the 21st century points to a troubled way ahead for the
region.The outlook is disappointing, not least because Southeast Asia is regarded as
an important auxiliary engine of growth and investment for Asia as China's econ omy
begins to cool. But optimism about its economic potential and resilience should be
tempered by the realities of political developments in the region, which is struggling
to escape cultural and historical constraints.Six years after the military intervened in
Thailand to end a violent and disruptive period of political conflict, elections have
finally been scheduled for the end of March. There were hopes of a transition back to
a democratically elected government and an end to the polarized, often violent,
political confrontation, even as members of the military junta prepared to stand for
elected office. But when Princess Ubolratana, the elder sister of King Vajiralongkorn,
made the surprise announcement in early February that she would stand as a candidate
for prime minister under the banner of a party supported by exiled Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawatra, deep divisions in the Thai elite were exposed. This suggests that
the long period under military rule has had no impact on solving underlying conflicts.
 2NC – Trade – Solvency/Alt Cause
Econ decline inflates Asian instability which spills over
Williamson et al 13
(Lucy Williamson, BBC. Anthony Nelson, US-ASEAN Business Council. Hong Kyudok,
Sookmyung Women’s University. Huang Kwei-bo, National Chengchi University. Ren Xiao,
Fudan University. Yamaguchi Noboru, The National Defense Academy of Japan. Bruce
Bennett, RAND Corporation. Cheng Xiaohe, Renmin University. Nicholas Eberstadt, American
Enterprise Institute. Miyake Kuni, The Canon Institute for Global Studies. Shin Beomchul, Korea
Institute for Defense Analysis. “Sources of Instability in East Asia” 5/1/13
http://en.asaninst.org/contents/session-6-refugees-and-neighbors-4/)

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the ripples it has sent throughout the world, it is
incumbent to evaluate the condition of the global capitalism system and to draft expectations for
the future. As moderator, Philip Stephens remarked that there appear to be three distinct groups
in the post-crisis world: rising countries that appear to still be growing, established countries like
the US which seem to be recovering well, and European countries growing at a sluggish rate.
Global economic and political bodies have show signs of adapting to fit the new realities of the
global economy, but it is unclear what changes will be made. But the question emerges, can we
continue to have a global financial system without the tools of global governance?
Regarding governance issues, Bark Taeho explained that the reason we don’t have a
conclusive direction to take is because there is disagreement between the involved parties.
Namely, there are three fundamental issues. First, there needs to be compromise by large and
rapidly developing nations. Second, less developed countries do not feel that the World Trade
Organization is doing enough on their behalf. And third, global trade organizations are a public
good from which countries need to feel that all parties can benefit.
Kwon Goohoon, managing director of Goldman Sachs (Asia), in discussing the sustainability of
the global architecture (like the G20, WTO, World Bank, and others), cited two areas facing the
global market: cyclical and structural issues. Regarding cyclical concerns, the near term
problem is how to get out of the lasting recession, and the longer term issue is how to
coordinate changes to the liquidity markets to encourage growth while implementing safety
mechanisms to avoid another crisis. Structurally, free markets and democracy are the pillars of
the global economy, and the challenge is how to employ and balance them against each other.
Guy Sorman provided a counter perspective that the free market system is not the problem but
is the solution. Free markets are inherently unstable, and that is the benefit. Innovation,
spontaneous order, and entrepreneurship are all elements that produce uncertainty but also
drive economic growth. Governments act on political incentives and therefore often retard
economic growth, so we should desire a simple body that can preserve the rule of law.
However, informal and unbinding associations, such as the G20, should be encouraged
because they align incentives rather than divide them.
Yang Baoyun, professor at Peking University, explained that, due to the integration of the global
economic system, the financial crisis of 2008 had many implications in individual countries. The
economic crisis provided the trigger for many political, social, and even cultural issues around
the world. The challenge we face is the politicization of economics. Thus, reform is needed.
However, there is no guarantee which countries will adjust or what the particular reforms will
actually be.
 2NC – AT: Arms Sales Key
A litany of other issues effect Asian instability --If we kick the CP these are alt
causes
Williamson et al 13
(Lucy Williamson, BBC. Anthony Nelson, US-ASEAN Business Council. Hong Kyudok,
Sookmyung Women’s University. Huang Kwei-bo, National Chengchi University. Ren Xiao,
Fudan University. Yamaguchi Noboru, The National Defense Academy of Japan. Bruce
Bennett, RAND Corporation. Cheng Xiaohe, Renmin University. Nicholas Eberstadt, American
Enterprise Institute. Miyake Kuni, The Canon Institute for Global Studies. Shin Beomchul, Korea
Institute for Defense Analysis. “Sources of Instability in East Asia” 5/1/13
http://en.asaninst.org/contents/session-6-refugees-and-neighbors-4/)

In the past decade, East Asia has been more stable than it was throughout most of the 20th
century, yet there are still potential flashpoints where conflict can occur, panel moderator
Anthony Nelson said to open a wide-ranging debate. Nelson framed the discussion by
highlighting the diverse challenges that currently pervade the region, including competition over
dwindling water resources, the advent of social media that can aggravate nationalistic disputes
among populations, and increases in national defense budgets. Nelson encouraged the
panelists to tackle any potential conflict area and offer creative policy options to deal with it.
Hong Kyudok began by broaching a central issue to security in East Asia that was referenced
frequently in the debate?North Korean nuclear weapons and provocations. After the 2010
sinking of the ROKS Cheonan and the artillery barrage on Yeonpyeong Island, South Korea
created a new doctrine of pro-active deterrence, intending to respond to future provocations by
striking back forcefully and quickly at a level of violence appropriate to the force used in the
provocation. Hong said it is necessary to make clear to North Korea that South Korea will not
tolerate such actions by using force in order to prevent future attacks. De-escalation, however,
is the ultimate goal, which Hong believes can be best achieved through working with its regional
partners in Japan and China.

Malaysian and Indonesian economic and domestic stability is key to East Asian
stability at large
Vatikiotis 19 (2/20/29 Michael Vatikiotis is Asia director of the Centre for Humanitarian
Dialogue and author of "Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia."
“Southeast Asia stumbles over politics” https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Southeast-Asia-
stumbles-over-politics)
What at first looked like a remarkably peaceful transition in Malaysia after the defeat
of the ruling United Malaysia National Organization at the polls last year is now
overshadowed by splits within the new governing coalition and the failure to swiftly
prosecute former Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak on graft charges. Despite credible
allegations that Najib presided over the theft of more than $4 million from a state-
backed investment vehicle, 1MDB, he has seen a revival in popularity among the
majority Malay population. This development, along with legal tactics delaying the
opening of his trial, has unnerved the new multiracial government led by veteran
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and underscored its vulnerability to fickle
conservative Malay sentiment.In Indonesia, campaigning for parliamentary and
presidential elections due in mid-April is underway. As stable and routine as the
electoral process has become, with Indonesia having peacefully elected two presidents
since 2004, the worry is that the country's increasingly rambunctious democracy is
allowing ultra-nationalist and religious extremist elements to push their
agendas.Underlying social and economic problems in Indonesia provide ample tinder
for unrest if rising prices and youth unemployment are not addressed. Much of the
discontent could be channeled through conservative Islamic forces, which the leading
presidential candidates, incumbent Joko Widodo and challenger Prabowo Subianto,
have gone dangerously overboard to cultivate. Whoever wins, "conservative Islamic
groups, backed by radical groups, will win -- have already won -- the election," wrote
prominent Indonesian novelist Eka Kurniawan in The New York Times.
ASEAN political and cultural unity is a key factor to regional stability
Vatikiotis 19 (2/20/29 Michael Vatikiotis is Asia director of the Centre for Humanitarian
Dialogue and author of "Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia."
“Southeast Asia stumbles over politics” https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Southeast-Asia-
stumbles-over-politics)
What these electoral aftermaths tell us is that democracy, though entrenched, is far
from well-established in Southeast Asia, with deep-seated problems at the social and
elite level often accompanying political change that affects stability. More troubling
still are those countries where the hard struggle for freedom has been reversed.Both
Myanmar and the Philippines have endured protracted struggles at different times to
replace dictatorship and martial law with democracy. Yet both countries have seen a
drastic slide back toward repression under elected leaders.In the Philippines, President
Rodrigo Duterte remains remarkably popular despite his controversial "war on drugs"
that has killed thousands of people, including more than a dozen elected officials.
More recently, Duterte, a former city mayor from Davao, has attacked the media and
stood by as Maria Ressa, the head of the popular news service Rappler, was arrested,
and later released, on charges of cybercrime.Freedom of expression was one of the
earliest dividends of a gradual transition away from stern military rule in Myanmar
after 2011, so it has been deeply disappointing to see the freely elected government
led by the former democracy and human rights icon Aung San Suu Kyi reverse the
trend after she was elected in 2015. In its 2018 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters
Without Borders ranked Myanmar 137th out of 180 countries, citing the prosecution
of 20 journalists in the past year.None of these troubling developments appear to
threaten any of these countries with collapse, but they herald trouble ahead.
Transparency, government integrity and reducing social inequality are all important
factors that support continued economic stability. But governments across Southeast
Asia are failing to deliver on these key indicators. Removing entrenched privileges for
the elite and addressing the yawning income gap that afflicts the region would go a
long way toward dealing with these problems since elections alone will not do the job.
More far-reaching reforms are necessary.Set against increasing confrontation between
China and the U.S., the collective role of Southeast Asian countries as a stable
platform for regional economic growth is becoming increasingly important. It is vital
in this context for ASEAN member states to put aside domestic turmoil and
demonstrate a unity of purpose.
Aff
 2AC – Links to NB
Ending the trade war saps political capital
Griffin 18 – Kyle; (“Trump Has No Intention of Making a Trade Deal With China” The Diplomat.
September 7, 2018. https://thediplomat.com/2018/09/trump-has-no-intention-of-making-a-trade-
deal-with-china/)//GK
With China, Trump has found a regular source of praise and support which spans the political spectrum. This
consistent and lucrative stream of political capital begs the question: What are Trump’s incentives
to make a deal to end the trade war? One argument is that he may seek a deal to avoid damaging the U.S. economy.
However, with the U.S. stock market at a record high, unemployment at 3.9 percent, and GDP growing at 4.1 percent — plus the
president’s ignorance toward the risks posed by an overheating economy — this seems unlikely. In addition, the Trump
administration consistently states a willingness to suffer short-term economic pain for long-term gains. Another argument is that by
concluding the trade war, Trump can claim a big victory. But in maintaining the dispute, he can claim regular victories across a
longer period. This would provide a welcome distraction from the scandals that continually dog his presidency. There is a real
chance that Trump’s ostensible desire for a deal with China is a lie. If the trade war ends, the
president sacrifices a cash cow of political capital. On the other hand, drawing out the dispute
and leaving any deal-making until after the 2020 election could prove an effective re-election
strategy. The strategy would involve a gradual escalation of protectionist policy measures,
which is exactly what we have seen so far. The escalation of tariffs has been gradual. A 25 percent tariff on $50
billion of Chinese goods was announced on March 22. The tariffs were later broken into two smaller rounds: tariffs on $34 billion of
Chinese exports were implemented on July 6, and the remaining $16 billion was implemented on August 23. From announcement to
realization, the $50 billion in tariffs took five months. At this rate of escalation, the trade war will indeed be a long one. Currently,
Trump’s administration is drawing up plans to tariff another $200 billion in Chinese goods. The duty will be between 10 percent to 25
percent. How this tariff comes into effect will shed light on whether Trump intends to make a deal. If the tariff is relatively low at 10
percent, then there is room for a drawn-out escalation to 25 percent (or higher). This is also true if the $200 billion, like the first $50
billion, is broken down and gradually doled out as smaller tariffs. However, if the $200 billion is implemented in full at 25 percent,
then Trump may be gunning for a deal. Decision makers must be cognizant towards the unfolding of either scenario. To conclude,
there’s a significant chance that the president has no intention of making a deal. This is a scenario that nations must heed,
particularly those in East Asia. East Asia is a deeply integrated regional production network, with China as its platform for final
assembly and export. Therefore, any tariffs that hurt China’s growth will hurt the entire region’s growth. To address this threat, East
Asian nations can hedge their bets by planning and preparing for a worsening and protracted U.S.-China trade war. There are also
domestic consequences for America, besides the economic ones usually trumpeted in the media. By targeting China,
Trump has broadened the domestic support for his toxic brand of economic nationalism. It now
appeals across the political spectrum. His talent as a populist must not be underestimated.

The counterplan links to politics – there’s bi-partisan support in Congress for

tariffs on China
Lee et al 5/14 – Don Lee, Noah Bierman, and Jennifer Haberkorn. (“Trump tests the patience
of his political allies in his approach to trade and tariffs” LA Times. May 14, 2019.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-tariff-policy-republicans-20190514-story.html
With a growing economy at his back and little resistance from Republicans, President Trump has
been free to impose tariffs on America’s trading partners with few political
repercussions. Yet his protectionist approach — particularly his heavy-handed tactics with China, as well as with
traditional allies Canada and the European Union — presents a high-stakes gamble for him and other
Republicans in the 2020 elections. So far the president has been able to keep skeptical
Republicans from rebelling by stoking his voting base and promising to subsidize soybean farmers and others
hit hard by the trade conflict with China. And Trump has bipartisan support in Congress to try to compel
Beijing to change or halt policies that many in Washington see as endangering U.S.
economic and security interests.
 2AC – Arms Key
Chinese aggression is only a response to US arms sales to Taiwan
Zhang 4/8 – Ketian Vivian; a postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research
Center at Stanford University. She will join the Schar School of Policy and Government at
George Mason University in summer 2019 as an assistant professor of international security.
(“China is pushing back against Taiwan for these three reasons” The Washington Post. April 8,
2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/08/china-is-pushing-back-against-
taiwan-these-reasons/?utm_term=.f9d420fc307b)//GK
On March 31, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that two Chinese Air Force (PLAAF) J-11 jets crossed
the median line of the Taiwan Strait. This violated the long-held tacit agreement between China
and Taiwan that neither side should cross the median line. Taiwan deemed this “an
intentional, reckless & provocative action,” which triggered “a 10-minute standoff” in the air. As
Asia security expert Bonnie S. Glaser notes that, if intentional, this would be the first PLAAF crossing of the median line in about 20
years. In this case, it’s likely that Taiwan, not the South China Sea, prompted Beijing’s actions. An unresolved issue from
the Chinese civil war, Taiwan has always been a “core interest” to party leaders in Beijing. Here
are some key takeaways from my research on China-Taiwan relations. What does the PLAAF move signal? Granted, there is much
we don’t know about this specific PLAAF incident. But my work on cross-Strait relations suggests that it’s quite possible the PLAAF
behavior is intentional — and serves as a coercive signal to Taiwan and the United States. Here’s what you need to know: 1. The
U.S. agreed to sell fighter jets to Taiwan. In March, the United States agreed to sell F-16V fighter jets to Taiwan —
the fourth-generation model. The last U.S. sale of F-16s to Taiwan took place in September 1992. [China-U.S.-Taiwan relations are
in choppy waters. Here’s what’s going on.] Beijing considers selling weapons platforms such as jet fighters
and submarines to Taiwan an implicit red line. In the past, China used coercion to deter
countries from selling these weapons platforms to Taiwan. This suggests that last week’s PLAAF
incident is intended to send a deterrent signal about fighter sales to both Taiwan and the
United States. The Chinese Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Defense lodged protests against
the United States regarding the sale, reiterating that China will “take all necessary measures”
to resolutely defend its sovereignty. The Trump administration decided on April 5 to put on hold the F-16V deal
until the United States strikes a trade deal with China, suggesting that China may have used the bilateral trade talks as a bargaining
chip.

Arms sales are a prerequisite to successful Trade talks – allows for

unprecedented leverage.
Sputnik ‘19 ( Sputnik cities Paul Huang, Huang is an East Asian columnist for The Epoch Times and master’s candidate at
the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts University) along with Benjamin Cavender who is the Director of The China Market
Research Group and MBA (Columbia University), “How Can Prospect of Taiwanese F-16 Procurement Affect US Trade Talks With
China?” 3-26-19, https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201903261073564311-f-16-taiwan/)
The request for F-16 supplies to Taiwan also comes amid crucial
Impact on Trade Talks Between China and the US
trade talks between Beijing and Washington. The two states were embroiled in a trade war in 2018, mutually imposing hefty
tariffs on goods worth billions of dollars. The US and China have recently made certain progress towards striking a new trade deal, according to Donald
Huang was at a loss to predict if
Trump, who recently refused to impose a new round of tariffs in order to avoid hampering the trade talks. Paul
suggested that
Beijing would retaliate against the F-16 supplies to Taiwan via its trade talks with the US, but at the same time
Washington could be using the matter to pressure China in the talks. "If anything , having the
option to sell arms to Taiwan actually gives US decision makers a considerable leverage in
its negotiating position with Beijing", Huang said. Cavender also suggested that the possibility of selling
F-16s to Taiwan could be used by Washington in trade talks with Beijing, but noted that there could be
other reasons to permit the sale of the jets. "This potential deal does come at the same time as the US is
completing arms sales to its other allies in the region who are concerned about China's military build-up", he
said.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – AIIB
AIIB isn’t key to relations—it has no strategic value and other members outweigh
Chen 15 (Dingding Chen is Professor of International Relations at Jinan University,
Guangzhou, China and Non-Resident Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute Berlin,
Germany. March 22, 2015. “AIIB: Not a US Loss, Not a Chinese Win,” The Diplomat.
https://thediplomat.com/2015/03/aiib-not-a-us-loss-not-a-chinese-win//KDES).
Too much ink has been spilled over China’s seeming success in wooing away the United
States’ traditional allies to the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Many
analysts (here, here, and here) see it as a ‘China winning, U.S. losing’ story, thereby implicitly
highlighting the confrontational nature of Sino-U.S. relations. Such a view is not only too
simplistic, but also dangerous for moving Sino-U.S. relations forward . While to some degree
it is true that China has scored a political victory by successfully attracting some of America’s
traditional allies to the AIIB, there are three things we need to consider before we bandwagon
with the cliché that China is rising while the U.S. is declining. The first thing to bear in mind is
that the AIIB is an economic institution that may or may not carry strategic implications. While
many might be tempted to view China’s AIIB move as a direct threat to the U.S.-led global
financial order, in reality the AIIB’s goals are much more limited. It is very important for the U.S.
not to view the AIIB as a new signal of strategic rivalry between China and the U.S.; such a
distorted view would assign unnecessary strategic significance to the AIIB which is in reality is
first and foremost about development. It is about funding more roads, railroads, airports, and
pipelines for many developing countries in Asia. If the U.S. becomes hypersensitive to China’s
every effort in global governance, then it is possible that the U.S. might reach the wrong
conclusion that China indeed is trying to overthrow U.S. hegemony and start taking
countermeasures to curb China’s rising influence. That would be a tragedy. In actuality, China
cannot and will not challenge U.S. hegemony. Another thing that is worth remembering, as
many have already pointed out, is that the AIIB’s future is still uncertain. For one thing, it is the
first time that Beijing has tried running a multilateral economic institution. Some internal
challenges will not be fixed easily, and some external challenges are even harder to overcome.
It is not clear how democratic and transparent the decision-making structure will be within the
AIIB, especially now that many major economies like Germany and the U.K. have decided to
join the bank. What is more likely is that Beijing’s preferences will be constrained by such major
players, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The reason is that these more experienced
players can help Beijing make better decisions when allocating funds and thus ultimately
improve the quality and reputation of the AIIB in the future. More importantly, a more democratic
structure in the AIIB will reduce the suspicions and worries of smaller Asian countries that are
already wary of China’s future intentions. By delegating more power to other players, Beijing
can send a strong and reassuring signal to countries like Vietnam and the Philippines thereby
moderating tensions between these countries, stemming from maritime territorial disputes.
Beijing must make a serious effort to show that the AIIB is not just another weapon to help
China dominate Southeast Asia. Failing to do so would jeopardize not only the AIIB’s goals but
also China’s project of a peaceful rise. Finally, it is misleading to claim that the U.S. is a
loser in the AIIB project. While it was unwise for the U.S. to prevent its allies from joining the
AIIB earlier, it would be equally unwise to underestimate the potential influence of the U.S. on
the AIIB and development in Asia in general. Whether or not the U.S. eventually joins the AIIB
remains to be seen. If the U.S. does join the AIIB, then we could very well see a different
structure for the bank. Even if the U.S. chooses to stay outside of the AIIB in the future,
competition between AIIB and the U.S.-led world bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)
will ensure that American standards and will continue to dominate the global financial order in
the foreseeable future.

Cooperation over AIIB in the squo—World Bank and AIIB partnership proves
Lawder 17 (David Lawder, writer at Reuters magazine, 4-23-2017, "World Bank Group, China-
led AIIB agree to deepen cooperation," Reuters Magazine. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-
imf-g20-aiib/world-bank-group-china-led-aiib-agree-to-deepen-cooperation-
idUSKBN17P0WB//KDES).
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The World Bank Group and the China-led Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank said on Sunday they agreed to deepen their cooperation with a framework for
knowledge sharing, staff exchanges, analytical work, development financing and country-level
coordination. The memorandum of understanding signed at the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund spring meetings in Washington comes a year after the two multilateral lenders
established mechanisms for cost-sharing and co-financing of investment projects. Since then,
the AIIB and the World Bank have co-financed five projects, supporting power generation in
Pakistan, a natural gas pipeline in Azerbaijan, and projects in Indonesia to rebuild slums,
improve dam safety and develop regional infrastructure. They said in a joint statement that they
are discussing more projects to be co-financed in 2017 and 2018. “Signing this memorandum of
understanding fits into our vision of a new kind of internationalism,” AIIB President Jin Liqun
said in a statement. “It deepens our relationship with the World Bank Group and sets up the
mechanisms through which we can more easily collaborate and share information.” A World
Bank spokeswoman said the knowledge-sharing memorandum was similar to one that was in
place during the AIIB’s early development stages, but which ended when the Beijing-based
institution was formally launched in January 2016. She said the new agreement does not
specify financing amounts or targets, adding that those will be determined through meetings and
consultations to discuss the banks’ respective portfolios. The AIIB has been viewed as a rival to
the Western-dominated World Bank and Asian Development Bank. The United States initially
opposed its creation and is not a member, but many U.S. allies, including Canada, Britain,
Germany, Australia and South Korea have joined. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim told
Reuters on Thursday that he wants to push the Washington-based lender’s business model
towards harnessing more private capital for development finance. In a statement on Sunday,
Kim said: “Collaboration between development institutions is essential to make the best use of
scarce resources, crowd-in the private sector, and meet the rising aspirations of the people we
serve.”
 2AC – Econ Turn – Tariffs
Tariffs help US companies – stocks increased significantly
Grant 18 – March 2, 2018, Kinsey Grant – Flash writer for The Street, Washington and Lee
University Business Journalism degree. “What Does Steel Mean to the U.S. Economy?”
https://www.thestreet.com/story/14508109/1/what-does-steel-mean-to-the-us-economy.html
President Donald Trump on Thursday, March 1, announced that his administration planned to
impose a 25% tariff on imported steel and a 10% tariff on imported aluminum. His argument was rooted in
the notion that other countries' trade practices have undermined U.S. production and could potentially compromise national security at home. While
protectionists and free trade advocates erupted into a fierce debate, the stock market tumbled. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 420 points, or
It's important, then, to know how important
1.68%, on Thursday, the S&P 500 lost 1.33% and the Nasdaq declined 1.27%.
steel and aluminum are to the U.S. economy. After all, as much as 55% of a car's total weight
comes from steel, according to the World Steel Association. Roughly 50% of steel use goes toward buildings and
infrastructure. And about 16% of steel goes toward making mechanical equipment. So who wins with
these tarffis, who loses and why does this matter? The Winners U.S. steel and aluminum companies are the clear

winners should the tariffs be enacted. The companies and their managements have lobbied
for quite some time for similar legislation, but this is the first time in recent history that they've
actually made real traction. Even in a market that tanked Thursday, steel and aluminum
stocks boomed. U.S. Steel Corp. (X - Get Report) rallied 5.75% to close at $46.01 on Thursday; AK Steel Holding Corp. (AKS - Get
Report) climbed 9.5% to $5.65; and Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. (CLF - Get Report) surged 10.24% to $7.65 by the closing bell.

Tariffs create jobs, boost the economy and help domestic businesses
Diaz 18 – July 13, 2018, Jaclyn Diaz - Labor reporter for Bloomberg, B.S. Journalism at
Emerson College. “Steel, Aluminum Plants Resurrected, but at What Cost?”
https://www.bna.com/steel-aluminum-plants-n73014477396/
Almost 19,000 steelworkers were laid off in 2015 as steel production idled, according to the
United Steelworkers. From 2000 to 2016, 48,000 domestic steel jobs and 17 million tons of
domestic steel production capacity were lost. Labor has largely supported Trump’s actions, but it has urged the
administration to focus on major violators like China rather than U.S. allies. The administration has also imposed tariffs on Canada,
Mexico, and the EU. “There’s no question” that the steel and aluminum industries were in trouble,
Robert E. Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy
Institute, said. “This intervention happened at a critical moment for both industries.” Three years
ago, Century Aluminum, a U.S.-based producer of aluminum, had to curtail production by 60
percent at its Hawesville, Ky., smelter in response to cheap aluminum imports. Given the
dramatic fall of aluminum prices, the company was eventually forced to lay off 300 workers, Jesse
Gary, the company’s executive vice president and general counsel, told Bloomberg Law. Post-tariffs, Century has plans
for a production restart at the smelter. It’s set to be fully online by 2019 and can bring back
those 300 jobs, Gary said. “What we had been calling for was a fair environment we can operate in,” and the tariffs
achieved that, he said.
Warming
Neg
 1NC – Carbon Tax CP
Plan: The United States federal government should impose a $40 tax per cubic
ton of greenhouse gas emissions on all commercial companies in the United
States.
Carbon taxes solve
Davenport 18 (Coral Davenport covers energy and environmental policy, with a focus on
climate change, from The Times's Washington bureau. Davenport, C. (2018). Major climate report
describes a strong risk of crisis as early as 2040.)
INCHEON, South Korea — A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the
immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy
at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”
The report , issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide
world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within
the lifetime of much of the global population.
The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist
with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be commissioned by world
leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming .
The authors found that if
greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will
warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels
by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average
temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously
considered for the most severe effects of climate change.
The new report, however, shows that many of those
effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.
Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few
years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But
while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid
2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.
[How much hotter is your hometown today than when you were born? Find out here. ]
For instance, the report says that heavy
taxes or prices on carbon dioxide emissions — perhaps as high as
$27,000 per ton by 2100 — would be required. But such a move would be almost politically impossible in the United States,
the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China. Lawmakers around the world, including in China, the European
carbon pricing programs.
Union and California, have enacted
President Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, has vowed to
increase the burning of coal and said he intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement. And on
Sunday in Brazil, the world’s seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gas, voters appeared on track to elect a new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has
said he also plans to withdraw from the accord.
The report was written and edited by 91 scientists from 40 countries who analyzed more than 6,000 scientific studies. The Paris agreement set out to
prevent warming of more than 3.6 degrees above preindustrial levels — long considered a threshold for the most severe social and economic damage
from climatechange. But the heads of small island nations, fearful of rising sea levels, had also asked scientists to examine the effects of 2.7
degrees of warming.
[What on Earth is going on? Sign up to get our latest stories about climate change. ]
Absent aggressive action, many effects once expected only several decades in the future will arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature,
the report shows. “It’s telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,” said Myles Allen, an Oxford
University climate scientist and an author of the report.
To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse pollution must be reduced by
45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. It also found that, by 2050,
use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to between
1 and 7 percent. Renewable energy such as wind and solar, which make up about 20
percent of the electricity mix today, would have to increase to as much as 67 percent.
“This report makes it clear: There is no way to mitigate climate change without getting rid of coal,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke
University and an author of the report.
The World Coal Association disputed the conclusion that stopping global warming calls for an end of coal use. In a statement, Katie Warrick, its interim
chief executive, noted that forecasts from the International Energy Agency , a global analysis organization, “continue to see a role for coal for the
foreseeable future.”
Ms. Warrick said her organization intends to campaign for governments to invest in carbon capture technology. Such technology, which is currently too
expensive for commercial use, could allow coal to continue to be widely used.
Despite the controversial policy implications, the United States delegation joined more than 180 countries on Saturday in accepting
the report’s summary for policymakers, while walking a delicate diplomatic line. A State Department statement said that “acceptance of this report by
the panel does not imply endorsement by the United States of the specific findings or underlying contents of the report.”
The State Department delegation faced a conundrum. Refusing to approve the document would place the United States at odds with many nations and
show it rejecting established academic science on the world stage. However, the delegation also represents a president who has
rejected climate science and climate policy.
“We reiterate that the United States intends to withdraw from the Paris agreement at the earliest opportunity absent the identification of terms that are
better for the American people,” the statement said.
The report attempts to put a price tag on the effects of climate change. The estimated $54 trillion in damage from 2.7 degrees of warming would grow
to $69 trillion if the world continues to warm by 3.6 degrees and beyond, the report found, although it does not specify the length of time represented by
those costs.
The report concludes that the world is already more than halfway to the 2.7-degree mark. Human activities have caused warming of about 1.8 degrees
since about the 1850s, the beginning of large-scale industrial coal burning, the report found.
The United States is not alone in failing to reduce emissions enough to prevent the worst effects of climate change. The report concluded that the
greenhouse gas reduction pledges put forth under the Paris agreement will not be enough to avoid 3.6 degrees of warming.
The report emphasizes the potential role of a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. “A price
on carbon is central to prompt
mitigation,” the report concludes. It estimates that to be effective, such a price would have to
range from $135 to $5,500 per ton of carbon dioxide pollution in 2030, and from $690 to
$27,000 per ton by 2100.
By comparison, under the Obama administration, government economists estimated that an appropriate price on carbon would be in the range of $50
per ton. Under the Trump administration, that figure was lowered to about $7 per ton .
Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group funded by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, has made a point of campaigning
against politicians who support a carbon tax.
“Carbon taxes are political poison because they increase gas prices and electric rates,” said Myron
Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded Washington research organization, and who led the
Trump administration’s transition at the Environmental Protection Agency.
The United States, it
The report details the economic damage expected should governments fail to enact policies to reduce emissions.
said, could lose roughly 1.2 percent of gross domestic product for every 1.8 degrees of warming.
In addition, it said, the United States along with Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam are home to 50 million
people who will be exposed to the effects of increased coastal flooding by 2040, if 2.7 degrees of warming occur.
At 3.6 degrees of warming, the report predicts a “disproportionately rapid evacuation” of people from the tropics. “In some parts of the world, national
borders will become irrelevant,” said Aromar Revi, director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and an author of the report. “You can set
up a wall to try to contain 10,000 and 20,000 and one million people, but not 10 million.”
The report also finds that, in the likelihood that governments fail to avert 2.7 degrees of warming, another scenario is possible: The world could
overshoot that target, heat up by more than 3.6 degrees, and then through a combination of lowering emissions and deploying carbon capture
technology, bring the temperature back down below the 2.7-degree threshold.
In that scenario, some damage would be irreversible, the report found. All coral reefs would die. However, the sea ice that would disappear in the
hotter scenario would return once temperatures had cooled off.
“For governments, the idea of overshooting the target but then coming back to it is attractive because then they don’t have to make such rapid
changes,” Dr. Shindell said. “But it has a lot of disadvantages.”

The cp solves – worked in China

Dong et al 17 (Huijuan Dong, Hancheng Dai, Yong Geng, Tsuyoshi Fujita, Zhe Liu, Yang Xie,
Rui Wu, Minoru Fujii, Toshihiko Masui, Liang Tang, Exploring impact of carbon tax on China’s
CO2 reductions and provincial disparities, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews,
Volume 77, 2017, Pages 596-603, ISSN 1364-0321,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032117305488
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2017.04.044.)
Carbon tax is a useful and prospective policy measure to mitigate China’s carbon emissions. In
order to examine its effect on China’s industrial economy and CO2emissions, as well as identifying regional disparity, a novel CGE
model covering 30 Chinese provinces was developed to evaluate the carbon tax effect on 30 provinces. The main conclusions and
suggestions for China’s carbon tax implementation include:
First, carbon tax can effectively reduce industrial carbon emissions after 2020 with the increasing
carbon price. The industrial CO2 will be reduced from 12.2 billion tons under BaU scenario to
10.4 billion tons, 9.3 billion tons, 8.5 billion tons, 7.9 billion tons, 7.4 billion tons and 7.0 billion
tons in 2030 under scenarios of TAX20, TAX40, TAX60, TAX80, TAX100 and TAX120,
respectively. Moreover, sectors of Electricity, Metal smelting and Chemicals are the three main sectors for CO2 emission and
reduction, and should be the key sectors for implementing carbon tax policy in China.
Second, significant regional disparity of carbon tax effect on carbon reduction exists. GDP is the top factor to affect regional CO2
emission, while coal production/consumption and total energy consumption are the most important
factors that affect CO2 reduction potential when levying carbon tax. Therefore, Inner Mongolia, Shandong,
Shanxi and Hebei are the top four provinces to reduce China’s industrial CO2 emissions, coal production/consumption and total
energy consumption.
Third, all provinces will suffer from GDP losses after levying carbon tax. Developed eastern provinces such as Shandong, Henan,
Guangdong and Jiangsu will suffer from the largest absolute GDP losses, while less developed western provinces such as Ningxia,
Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Gansu will bear the most welfare losses. Moreover, energy structure will change significantly
from coal to crude oil or natural gas, particularly in Gansu, Sichuan, Qinghai, Jilin and Inner Mongolia.
Finally, carbon tax sensitivity and carbon tax efficiency are investigated and discussed in order to provide appropriate carbon tax
policies. Research results indicate that provinces of Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, Hebei and Anhui should be set top priority for
implementing carbon tax policy in China. However, carbon price should be set as less than 50 USD/ton.
Moreover, in order to solve the problem that higher carbon tax efficiency may lead to more GDP loss and welfare loss, it is
suggested that the revenue from carbon tax should be reallocated and transferred more to western
regions to balance their welfare losses.

Carbon taxes work – produce revenue and reduce gases

Calder 15 (Parry, I. (Ed.), Morris, A. (Ed.), Williams III, R. (Ed.). (2015). Implementing a US Carbon
Tax. London: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315747682)
CT on fossil fuel sales seems likely to be an administratively better option than a
On balance an upstream

downstream CT imposed directly on power and industrial plant emissions, providing a better
balance of coverage/accuracy and administrative practicality; and it has no conclusive non-
administrative disadvantages. But countries have in practice managed to administer downstream CT on power and industrial plant emissions, and if
combined with CT on retail sales of fuel for transport and domestic consumption, this could achieve quite high coverage, even though not as high as an upstream CT. If CT is
imposed upstream on fossil fuels there does not have to be a single point of taxation. The experience of collecting excise taxes is likely to be useful for working out the most
practical points of measurement to ensure that they are comprehensively taxed in practice. If petroleum excise tax is applied to refinery output, and coal excise to mine output,
these might be best points of measurement for CT purposes too. This chapter cannot claim to have identified and addressed every practical problem that might arise with an
upstream CT. But in general it seems likely that such problems will be similar in kind and degree to those that arise with excise taxes, and should therefore be capable of being
addressed in practice. British Columbia probably comes closest to an upstream CT, and seems to combine reasonable coverage (estimated at 77 percent of Canada’s total
GHG emissions 8 ) with relatively simple administration. Sequestered CO 2 from fossil fuels Non-energy use of fossil fuels Non-energy use produced 1.8 percent of GHG
emissions in 2010, but if CT applied upstream, it would be necessary to ensure that it applied only to CO 2 emitted and not to CO 2 stored, for example, in asphalt (where 100
percent is stored), chemical feedstock (62), waxes (58), lubricants (9), others (25). If CT applied to refinery output it would be possible to identify and exempt asphalt at that
stage, and similarly to identify and exempt (or partially exempt) other products destined for non-combustion use. If not possible, then purchasers would have to apply for refunds
(as currently happens with excise where petroleum fuels are used for exempt purposes such as agriculture). Carbon capture and storage (CCS) CCS is not an immediate
concern since there has been limited development of CCS technology in practice so far. 9 If it did become viable in future, steps would have to be taken to exempt captured CO
2 from CT. If CT applied upstream, it would not be practical to identify and exempt in advance fuels whose CO 2 would be captured by CSS. Retrospective linking of CCS to the
relevant upstream supply, refund of CT on that supply, and revision of the price charged to the customer for it would be administratively complex, and if CCS ever became
common, with CO 2 piped from numerous sources to CCS plants, it would probably negate some of the administrative advantage of upstream CT. The problem with CT credits
or refunds in an upstream system is that upstream CT payers might not be involved in CCS projects, and downstream businesses who were involved would be unable to use
them. One option would be to make CT credits tradable, but this would add complexity and might be open to fraud. A simpler option would be for the government just to pay an
amount equal to CT per ton to a company that implemented CSS. 10 The government would monitor CCS facilities, and charge CT on any CO 2 that escaped. Monitoring CCS
would be a specialist technical function, and monitoring and payment could be allocated to a specialist technical agency either in the IRS or outside it. International issues might
have to be considered in due course – for example, import or export of liquefied CO 2 for CCS. Credit for export would need international cooperation (to ensure CO 2 was
genuinely stored). The US would give no credit for imported CO 2, but would impose CT on any that escaped. Land use (forestry, etc.) carbon sinks Forestry provides the main
potential carbon “sink” (though of course deforestation can increase GHG emissions). In 2010, forestry and other land use were estimated by 52 Jack Calder the EPA to have
reduced US CO 2 emissions by a substantial 1,075 MMT, primarily through increases in forest density or acreage. In principle there is a case for the government to provide
some form of CT set-off for additional CO 2 sunk in forestry. As with CCS, it would probably be better for the government not to try and embed forestry within the CT regime
through CT refunds, tradable CT credits, and the like, but instead simply to make payments equivalent to the rate of CT per ton direct to forestry businesses that could provide
an acceptable measure of additional tons of CO 2 sunk, since this would be easier to administer and less open to fraud. The basic problem, however, would be how to establish
additionality. It has been suggested that if potential qualifying companies were limited to large paper and forest product companies, who were required to measure sunk CO 2 by
reference to their entire land stock, it might make additionality easier to establish. But there would be a host of other complex technical issues in measuring CO 2 sunk in
forestry, even if additionality could be established. These issues are far too complex to do justice to in this short chapter. Measurement, if it did become feasible, would be a
highly technical operation, and, as for CCS, administration would probably have to be carried out by a specialist technical agency either within the IRS or entirely separate from
it (since the required expertise might already exist in other government departments). 11 Extending CT to non-fossil fuel emissions With non-fossil fuel emissions it is again
normally possible to identify different stages at which a CT could theoretically be imposed, but it is generally harder to identify anything equivalent to an upstream taxing point;
and a large proportion of these emissions are fugitive, not measured for normal business purposes, and in some cases very difficult to measure at all in relation to individual
relative
taxpayers. This means that administration is likely to be more complex, and coverage in some cases may be impractical. A factor to take into account is the

cost or difficulty of reducing the emissions. If the prime purpose of a CT is seen as reducing
emissions, it may be felt that if CT would result in a relatively large reduction in GHG
(particularly those with high GWPs), it may be worth the administrative effort even if the
emission is relatively small; and conversely that there is little point in applying CT to a
substantial but hard-to-administer emission if no one can reduce it anyway. (An alternative point
of view is that governments should apply CT to significant emissions even if they are difficult to
reduce, primarily as a means of raising revenue.)

They work - China

Dong, Wei, Ma, and Li 17 (Baomin Dong, Weixian Wei, Xili Ma & Peng Li (2018) On the
impacts of carbon tax and technological progress on China,Applied Economics, 50:4, 389-
406, DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2017.1316826)
Climate change has become one of the primary threats to mankind. Mitigating climate change will require substantial
abatement of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from all core economic sectors (Pacala and Socolow
2004). Control for local air pollutants and elevation of overall air pollution control standard will also result in considerable
reductions of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, especially in developing countries, such as China. In 2015, global CO2
emissions reached 32.1 billion metric tons, roughly equivalent to the 2014 level.1 The emission of CO2 has gone beyond the earth’s absorption
capacity. As Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii reports that by February 2016, the atmospheric CO2 concentration was 403 PPM, exceeding 400 PPM
for the first time in history.2 In the same time, Chinese CO2 emission is 8.98 billion metric tons, contributing about 30% to the world, according to the
 Too
International Energy Agency (IEA). The proportion of Chinese CO2 emission in the world has increased from 5.94% in 1971 to 27.89% in 2013.
much CO2 emissions will eventually result in unwanted climate change – higher global
temperatures, greater climate variability and possibly increases in sea levels. This external cost,
referred to as the social cost of carbon (SCC), ranges from $10 to $200 per ton CO2 according
to various estimations (Pindyck 2013). In other words, CO2 abatement will generate enormous benefits,
which is equivalent to the SCC of CO2 emissions. As for China, carbon reduction could bring some
benefits, including (a) reducing extreme cold or warm weather events; (b) decelerating or even
preventing land degradation and desertification; (c) ameliorating glacial melt on the Qinghai–
Tibetan Plateau; and (d) alleviating sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion according to Asian
Development Bank (ADB 2010). Unquestionably, a large amount of direct or indirect costs is required for varied carbon-cutting
measures. Substantial investment is an essential prerequisite of technological innovation, such as shifting carbon energy to clean energy, enhancing
carbon tax and/or carbon emission right
energy efficiency in both consumption and production sides. In other ways, economic measures (e.g.
The abatement cost is estimated as 10 ~ 30 dollars in the
trading) may cripple macroeconomic development.
United States (Burtraw et al. 2014) and 300 ~ 1500 RMB in China (Du and Mao 2015) for
cutting each ton of CO2. As the largest contributor of CO2 emissions in the world, China has made a great effort to mitigate its rising
trend of GHG emissions. In 2007, the Chinese central government launched an energy-conservation and pollution-abatement programme which aimed
to shift China towards a low-carbon society (Council 2007). The Chinese government has announced its national voluntary target of carbon abatement,
that is, to reduce the CO2 emission per unit of GDP by 60–65% from 2005 level by 2030 (Council 2015).
China’s carbon abatement will be especially challenging, since her economy is more dependent on energy-intensive manufacturing industries and the
primary energy source is coal. Most of the CO2 emissions are related to fossil energy consumption, such as coal, oil and gas (Saidi and Hammami
2015). Based on the energy performance standards (EPS) database from IEA, energy-related CO2 emission explains more than 93% of the total
emission.3 Tradable emission permits and carbon tax (or emission tax in general) are the two main market approaches in curbing carbon dioxide
emissions. The theoretical literature has shown the merits of the tax scheme over the quantity scheme, notably from Weitzman (1974) onward. In
particular, the incentive provided by the grandfathered permits for firms to invest in abatement technologies is smaller than a constant emission tax,
since the marginal abatement costs (MACs) decrease as firms invest, thus reducing the market price of the permits and consequently the benefits of
the investment (Milliman and Prince, 1989; Jung et al., 1996). Moreover, the permit price is more volatile (due to economy-wide uncertainties) relative
to tax rate, which further reducing the irreversible abatement investment (Chao and Wilson, 1993). Furthermore, the overwhelmingly high monitoring
cost for the enforcement of emission trading scheme makes it more costly to implement. Currently, the Shenzhen emission exchange, established on
30 September 2010, as the first and only CO2 emission exchange in China, has an accumulated trading volume which has just reached two million
In the past, China
tons by 2014.4 The amount is so less compared to the total emissions of the country, some seven billion tons per year.
levied a resource tax on coal among other mineral and fossil resources. The effect of resource
tax differs from that of carbon tax in that the latter applies to all domestic production with carbon
emission where the former is concerned with all fossil energy production excluding importation,
thus the downstream firms’ abatement investment incentives differ.5 For research on resource tax in China, the
existing studies mainly focused on the impacts of such tax policy on China’s economy rather than worldwide impacts (Shi, Tang, and Yu 2015; Xu et al.
if China adopts a 5% ad valorem resources tax on coal, her
2015; Zhang et al. 2013). Xu et al. (2015) find that
CO2 emission will decrease by 8–9%, and GDP will decrease by 1–2%. Due to the preference of
emission/carbon tax over tradable emission permits, the literature has been explosive on carbon tax.6The computable general equilibrium (CGE)
models have gained popularity in this line of research for simulations and policy analyses (Zhou et al. 2011). The research questions in these studies
differ. One strand of the CGE models simulates the implied carbon tax rate with different mitigation targets (Garbaccio, Ho, and Jorgenson 1999; Liang,
Fan, and Wei 2007; Stram 2014; Zhang 1998). Another strand investigates the mitigation outcome and nationwide economic impacts of different
carbon taxes (Barker, Baylis, and Madsen 1993; Goto 1995; Grimaud and Rouge 2014; Rausch 2013), as well as the impacts on individual sectors (Liu
abatement technology improvement assuming it
et al., 2017; Li et al., 2015). The current article also considers the impact of
is exogenous. The improvement of abatement technologies is the source of the gross welfare
gains of a particular emission scheme such as carbon tax or tradable permits. Although attempts have
been made to endogenize the technology improvement (Webster et al., 2008; Buonanno et al., 2003; Mulder et al., 2003), the literature has not found a
convincing method to incorporate it in CGE models due to data constraint even with the most comprehensive data set such as GTAP-E model
(McDougall and Golub 2007) and the inherent complexity of all CGE models. Thus, the received literature has confined itself to econometric studies or
scenario analyses to investigate the potentials of energy saving for a given sector (Zhang, Worrell, and CrijnsGraus 2015; Jiang et al., 2015; Ke et al.,
2012; Xu et al., 2014; Ates, 2015; Kusumadewi and Limmeechokchai, 2015; Sritong et al., 2014; Moutinho et al., 2015).
 2NC – Carbon Tax – Solvency
Solves for GHG emissions – Polluters Pay Principle
Baranzini et al 17 (Baranzini, A., van den Bergh, J. C., Carattini, S., Howarth, R. B., Padilla,
E. and Roca, J. (2017), Carbon pricing in climate policy: seven reasons, complementary
instruments, and political economy considerations. WIREs Clim Change, 8: e462.
doi:10.1002/wcc.462)
Carbon pricing affects emissions by penalizing energy sources in proportion to their carbon
content. It is easily applicable to emissions coming from energy use, but can be extended to emissions arising from land use
changes and other sources. In what follows we present the most important arguments in favor of carbon pricing.
Argument 1: As Carbon Pricing Alters Relative Prices, Firms and Consumers Automatically
Internalize Global Warming Effects
Carbon pricing changes relative prices of all goods and services in accordance with the Polluter
Pays Principle. As a consequence, when making decisions that cause GHG emissions, firms,
consumers, and investors consider not just their private costs and benefits, but also the social
costs associated with (direct and indirect) emissions generated in every phase of the product life
cycle, from resource to waste. The entire economy then becomes less carbon intensive ,
since all consumers and producers will adjust their decisions to prices corrected for the climate
externality. To obtain the same result with nonprice instruments would require that the regulator possesses all relevant
information about emissions and abatement options to control in detail all polluting processes and behaviors. This would evidently
be extremely difficult and imply a huge cost of governance.
Carbon pricing means that the prices of fossil energy fuels will adequately reflect the carbon
content of these fuels. As a result, industries that use more carbon‐intense fuels will face higher
input costs and thus ask higher output prices from their customers. In turn, sectors using these
outputs as inputs will also see their output prices go up. Finally, consumers buying products or
services from the latter sectors will confront higher prices as well. As all these agents are motivated to
purchase the cheaper input, product or service, a shift will occur to options with relatively low direct and indirect emissions. In other
words, witha fairly simple carbon‐pricing policy on fossil fuels each price in the economy will be
corrected so as to reflect in some way the overall CO2 emissions effect of the associated good
or service. This means that no economic decision escapes the regulatory effect of carbon pricing
— it is a systemic solution . This does not mean carbon pricing is the complete and only solution: as discussed in the
More Than Carbon Pricing section, complementary instruments are needed, because of informational failures and bounded
rationality, among others.

Only carbon pricing solves – heterogeneity of emitters is an obstacle the aff can’t
overcome
Baranzini et al 17 (Baranzini, A., van den Bergh, J. C., Carattini, S., Howarth, R. B., Padilla,
E. and Roca, J. (2017), Carbon pricing in climate policy: seven reasons, complementary
instruments, and political economy considerations. WIREs Clim Change, 8: e462.
doi:10.1002/wcc.462)
Argument 2: Carbon Pricing Accounts for Heterogeneity of Emitters, Which Reduces the Overall
Abatement Cost
Compared to other types of instruments, carbon pricing can address the vast heterogeneity of GHG
emitters, thus helping to minimize the cost of pollution control. Heterogeneity might result from firms producing
diverse goods or having distinct technologies, and thus different emissions per unit of output, which translates into unequal marginal
costs of pollution abatement. Under perfect information and substantive rationality, all polluters should
choose that level of emissions abatement for which the associated marginal cost equals the
carbon price. Hence, with a carbon price signal, the marginal abatement costs would become
equal among all polluters, implying that a given level of abatement is met at least global cost.
No other instrument than pricing is able to realize the same outcome. Since polluters show inertia or are
not always perfectly aware of available abatement technologies and associated costs, one should expect the global cost to not
reach the exact lowest level. Nevertheless, empirical research suggests that reliance on nonprice policy
instruments often leads to considerably higher abatement costs.5, 6 The reason is that such instruments are
less effective in covering diverse sources of emissions. For example, it is impossible to implement technical
standards for the millions of technologies and products worldwide, and moreover update these
frequently to account for nonstop technical innovation. To illustrate, two studies show, using different models,
that a fuel economy standard for cars results in considerably higher costs of reducing CO2 emissions than fuel taxes.7, 8 Note that
older empirical studies found the abatement costs of uniform standards to be up to a factor 22 higher than those of pricing
instruments.9

Carbon taxes are key – they spur innovation to clean tech which is something the
aff can’t do
Baranzini et al 17 (Baranzini, A., van den Bergh, J. C., Carattini, S., Howarth, R. B., Padilla,
E. and Roca, J. (2017), Carbon pricing in climate policy: seven reasons, complementary
instruments, and political economy considerations. WIREs Clim Change, 8: e462.
doi:10.1002/wcc.462)
Argument 3: Carbon Pricing Provides a Continuous Incentive for Adoption and Innovation of
Carbon‐Efficient Technologies
Carbon pricing contributes to so‐called dynamic efficiency as it stimulates innovation and
adoption of technologies emitting less carbon. By increasing the cost of carbon‐emitting technologies and activities,
carbon pricing provides a financial incentive for consumers and producers to invest in
technologies reducing emissions. This not only encourages more adoption of existing low‐carbon
technologies, but also indirectly promotes the development of new ones. Empirical evidence
suggests a positive relationship between higher energy prices and the development of more
energy‐efficient technologies.10 Compared with emission or technology‐based standards, carbon pricing provides a
continuous and stronger economic incentive for adoption of, and R&D on, improved abatement technologies. Econometric studies
find that under stable energy prices, innovations generally reduce consumer prices, while after oil price hikes, they tend
to make equipment more energy efficient.11 This suggests that carbon pricing is an essential element
of a policy package aimed at redirecting technical change towards the cleaner goods and ways
of production. Further support for this comes from a comprehensive theoretical analysis.12
Examining the effect of the European carbon market (EU‐ETS) on innovation, one study finds that carbon pricing is
responsible for a 10% increase in clean innovation (measured by patents), in spite of the relatively low
prices experienced so far.13 Another study provides additional evidence on the innovation effects of EU‐ETS.14 Both
confirm the results of an earlier patent‐based study that energy prices have the largest inducement effect on
energy‐related innovations.15 A third study analyses 3412 firm‐level patent data from 80 countries for the car industry
between 1965 and 2005, concluding that firms tend to innovate more in clean technologies when they face
higher tax‐inclusive fuel prices.16
Corrected prices are essential to rapid innovation in the right direction, as relative prices steer innovation
opportunities and associated investments. This aspect is underappreciated in many discussions about technological change and
climate change, where pricing is downplayed as if innovation/diffusion subsidies and other innovation policies, such as information
provision or stimulating cooperation between innovators, were sufficient. To fully appreciate the subtlety of this point, it should be
recognized that rather than current carbon or energy prices, expectations about future prices are relevant.17 Of course, a high
carbon price today acts as a signal for the near and more distant future, so that it will contribute
to stimulating investments and R&D with the aim to reduce dependence on high carbon energy
in all sectors of the economy.

Carbon taxes avoid Jevon’s paradox – means aff can’t solve otherwise due to
carbon rebound
Baranzini et al 17 (Baranzini, A., van den Bergh, J. C., Carattini, S., Howarth, R. B., Padilla,
E. and Roca, J. (2017), Carbon pricing in climate policy: seven reasons, complementary
instruments, and political economy considerations. WIREs Clim Change, 8: e462.
doi:10.1002/wcc.462)
Argument 4: Carbon Pricing Represents the Most Effective Way to Limit Energy/Carbon
Rebound
The issue of energy rebound and how carbon pricing could mitigate it has received little
attention in the public debate on carbon pricing. One reason may be that this argument was neglected by previous
comprehensive reviews of environmental policy analysis.18, 19 In line with this, rebound has so far not been
considered a standard criterion in environmental policy analysis.
Rebound denotes that energy conservation, including through adoption of more energy‐efficient
technologies, can indirectly create additional energy uses and associated emissions. Hence, the net
conservation effect will be lower than the initial energy savings—or even negative in some
cases, known as Jevons paradox. Rebound involves diffusion of technologies as well as various economic
mechanisms. Technological advances and improvements in energy efficiency tend to lead to a direct reduction in energy
consumption. However, given the improved efficiency, the energy services—for instance, traveling
by car—become cheaper, which stimulates more intensive use of these services. Moreover, money
saved due to more energy efficiency will increase spending on other goods and services, and hence associated energy use and
emissions.20
Compared to other policy instruments, opportunities for such rebound effect are limited if carbon pricing is
in place, because it is a systems approach that reduces rebound consistently across all carbon‐
intensive goods and technologies.21 Such pricing would discourage money savings due to energy conservation to be
spent on energy‐intensive goods and services, as the latter will have a higher price due to carbon pricing. Empirical evidence
suggests that such ‘re‐spending rebound’ is non‐negligible and deserves serious attention in policy design. 22 Furthermore, in many
cases, carbon pricing can reduce absolute rebound due to the direct rebound or intensity effect,
because it may partially compensate the fall in the user (fuel) cost due to implementing more
energy‐efficient technologies (as in transport23). In these circumstances, the direct rebound effect on demand, in
absolute terms, will be lower than in a situation without carbon prices as then initial demand is higher.
Carbon pricing will further ensure that consumers automatically, without even realizing, make a trade‐off
between the individual benefits of new or higher energy consumption due to rebound and
related climate change damages.24 Indeed, carbon pricing will mainly discourage rebound
associated with a price correction for environmental damage costs exceeding direct individual
benefits of the respective consumption decision.

Avoids politicization – companies get to do their own thing AND faster timeframe
– firms don’t have the bureaucracy the government does
Baranzini et al 17 (Baranzini, A., van den Bergh, J. C., Carattini, S., Howarth, R. B., Padilla,
E. and Roca, J. (2017), Carbon pricing in climate policy: seven reasons, complementary
instruments, and political economy considerations. WIREs Clim Change, 8: e462.
doi:10.1002/wcc.462)
Argument 6: Carbon Pricing Decentralizes Policy, Reducing Regulators’ Need for Information
Carbon pricing is consistent with flexibility and autonomy of choice, allowing emitters to freely
change their behavior to reduce their costs. They can opt for emitting and paying any charges or taxes associated
with emissions, or for undertaking a variety of activities, immediately or after relevant investments, to abate emissions. Carbon
pricing thus means decentralization of policy, with associated low information needs and administrative costs. In
addition, carbon pricing implies low transactions costs for firms, as, unlike eco‐labeling, it requires no
separate life cycle analysis to account for all carbon dioxide emissions of products and services.
Instead, firms will integrate carbon prices in existing cost‐accounting systems of their products and
services.

Carbon pricing reaches out to consumers and ensures micropolitical change

Baranzini et al 17 (Baranzini, A., van den Bergh, J. C., Carattini, S., Howarth, R. B., Padilla,
E. and Roca, J. (2017), Carbon pricing in climate policy: seven reasons, complementary
instruments, and political economy considerations. WIREs Clim Change, 8: e462.
doi:10.1002/wcc.462)
Argument 7: Carbon Pricing Takes into Account that in Making Purchasing Decisions, most
Consumers are more Influenced by Prices than by Environmental Concerns
Even if one is environmentally conscious, it is impossible to perfectly know which goods to buy and in what amounts to achieve
environmental goals. It is, moreover, unthinkable that one can voluntarily contribute to all public goods in the world.39 Even
though many people would like to contribute at a personal cost to a more responsible use of the
natural environment, such cooperative behavior frequently depends on the perception of what
others will do.40 The fact that an individual action alone has a negligible impact tends to discourage most people to undertake
these voluntary actions. Moreover, many consumers are not particularly environmentally conscious in their purchase behavior, being
sensitive to personally salient concerns, notably financial considerations, when making purchasing decisions. An effective
climate policy has to reach out to this group. Carbon pricing is capable of doing this as it
naturally intervenes in a core element of markets, namely prices of goods and services. It does
so without the need for people to act altruistically, show voluntary environmentally benign
behavior, or have the ability to handle much information about products as in the form of eco‐
labels. This does not deny proenvironmental behavior.41, 42There is no clear evidence, though, that voluntary action can
overcome very large differences in prices between green and dirty products/services, nor that it applies to a large group of
consumers. Of course, policymakers are encouraged to leverage cooperative behavior when they have the opportunity to do so, but
this approach cannot represent the main solution to climate change. Probably the most relevant voluntary behavior
is that voters choose politicians who will strike a climate agreement that supports effective
climate policies in all countries (see PE Issue 4 in the section on Political Economy Issues). Once
implemented, carbon pricing does not require proenvironmental behavior. Nevertheless, the evidence
available so far suggests that, if anything, proenvironmental behavior makes carbon pricing more
effective, which is all good for climate policy (PE Issue 5 in section on Political Economy Issues).
 2NC AT: Links to Politics
The cp is bipartisan and avoids politics
Colman and Wolff 18 (Zack Colman is an energy reporter for POLITICO Pro. Eric Wolff
covers energy policy and politics. Prior to joining POLITICO in 2015, he covered the EPA for
SNL Energy, an electric power trade publication. 12-9-2018, "Why greens are turning away from
a carbon tax," POLITICO, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/09/carbon-tax-climate-change-
environmentalists-1052210)
Taxing carbon to tackle climate change is one of those big ideas that have long held a kind of
bipartisan sway in Washington — endorsed by Al Gore and former members of Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, economists from both parties and even Exxon Mobil.
But environmentalists are increasingly ready to look elsewhere.
This month's fuel-tax riots in Paris and the defeat of a carbon-fee ballot measure in Washington state show the difficulty of getting people to support a levy on the energy sources that heat their homes and power
their cars. Meanwhile, even the most liberal Democratic candidates this year gave carbon taxes scant if any mention in their climate platforms, focusing instead on proposals like a phaseout of fossil fuels and
massive investments in wind and solar power.
The story of the carbon tax’s fading appeal, even among groups that like it in principle, shows the difficulties of crafting a politically palatable solution to one of the world’s most urgent problems — including
greenhouse gas levels that are on track to reach a record high this year.

This aversion to taxes in the U.S. is high and should not be underestimated
“ ,” said Kalee Kreider, a former Gore adviser
and longtime climate activist. “I have a lot of scars to show for that.”
“I fear that the idea of a carbon tax is turning out to be a heavier lift than people envision," said RL Miller, founder of the advocacy group Climate Hawks Vote. "As it is right now, starting from scratch, there is no
constituency for it. ... And I think the climate movement needs to go through some rethinking."
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) pointed to the fate of Washington state's proposed carbon fee, which "failed miserably" at the polls last month despite the support of Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee.
"If it can't pass in Washington state right now, I'm not sure that says that there's much of a pathway at this moment nationally," Merkley said.
Even some progressives who support a carbon tax, such as Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), are promoting it as just one possible element of a sweeping " Green New Deal" that includes pouring
huge amounts of money into renewable energy.

predominant conversation in Washington, D.C., that’s been led by economists and politicos that have tried to frame a carbon tax as the
“There’s been a

only way,” said Evan Weber, national political director with the Sunrise Movement, which has backed Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. “It’s proved time and time again to be not politically popular, and
we haven’t even priced the policy at where economists say it needs to be. The idea that [a carbon tax is] the way out of this mess is something we need to be pushing back on.”

A carbon tax, imposed on each ton of greenhouse gases produced by fuels like oil and coal, is
meant to make businesses and consumers pay a price for their role in worsening climate
change — and offer an economic incentive for switching to cleaner energy sources. That
simplicity has won the endorsement of even some conservative economists, as well as major
corporations such as Exxon Mobil.
“We need to put a price on carbon in markets, and we need to put a price on denial in politics,”
Gore said in 2015, adding that “we are already paying an enormous cost in the form of floods, droughts, famines.”
Still, new taxes are toxic enough in Washington that former President Barack Obama never endorsed the idea. Instead, he backed unsuccessful legislation that would have created a more complicated cap-and-
trade system to put a price on carbon.
The notion has proved an equally tough sell elsewhere around the world: Only 11 countries have carbon taxes in place, and most of those were instituted more than a decade ago. Australia canceled its carbon
tax in 2014 after three years, and Canada is in the process of imposing a carbon fee on some reluctant provinces.
Carbon tax supporters, such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have typically sought to make their proposals more politically palatable by returning much of the money to citizens to offset the higher
energy prices. Gore has proposed repaying the money to Americans “dollar to dollar” by eliminating payroll taxes.

Some plans would direct the money to investments in clean energy investments, or — in the case of Washington
state's proposal — toward helping communities suffering from the effects of climate change or the closure

of fossil fuel industries. Others, such as a plan backed by former Republican Secretaries of State George Shultz and James Baker, would also phase out existing carbon regulations.
But the Washington state proposal won the support of just 43 percent of voters last month, after a barrage of oil and gas industry lobbying opposing the carbon fee. The reaction was violent in Paris, where days of
riots forced French President Emmanuel Macron to scrap a 6.5-cent fuel tax that had been aimed partly at weaning motorists off diesel and gasoline.

the United
The Washington state fee, whose supporters included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, would have charged a relatively modest $15 per ton of greenhouses gases. In contrast,

Nations' climate panel has called for charging $135 per ton, and increasing the fee to $5,500 a
ton by 2030, to keep the rise in global temperatures from reaching catastrophic levels.
"You do have this irony, and that is the policy that is overwhelmingly endorsed by economists of the right, the

center and the left as the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is inverse with what is
politically feasible," said Barry Rabe, a University of Michigan professor who has studied carbon taxes.
The failure to pass a carbon tax in Washington state stands in contrast to California voters' backing last month of an increase in the gasoline tax, revenues from which are directed to improving the state's clogged
transportation infrastructure. California is one of more than two dozen states that have increased their gasoline taxes in the past five years to pay for road and bridge projects.
"People are sensitive to taxes, but they will approve them if they're perceived to be getting value, whether that be a road, a hospital, a school," said Kreider, the former Gore adviser. "Where I think environmental
groups struggle is they approach carbon pricing in terms of environmental performance, instead of what service are they providing to the taxpayer?"
Green groups say there's still a place for a carbon tax in a broader climate change policy. But Ocasio-Cortez, one of the top progressives in next year's House freshman class, has said the climate crisis is far too
urgent for a tax to be the main strategy.
"It's certainly possible to argue that, if we had put in place targeted regulations and progressively increasing carbon and similar taxes several decades ago, the economy could have transformed itself by now," she
said on her campaign website. "But whether or not that is true, we did not do that, and now time has run out."
"Probably a price is not going to be enough," said Ana Unruh Cohen, managing director for government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We need a larger, comprehensive approach."

The wave of Democratic governors and lawmakers elected in November seems to have picked up
on this current. Aside from Washington state's ballot item, carbon taxes were mostly absent from campaign platforms despite candidates' emphasis on fighting climate change.
Others aren't ready to give up just yet, saying a revenue-neutral carbon tax is the most sweeping greenhouse gas-reduction policy that both parties could support. Reps. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) and Brian

Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) unveiled a bill on Nov. 27 to create such a tax. That was just months after Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) launched a plan that would have taxed
emissions and used the revenue for highway projects and other programs, before he lost in the November elections.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who has sponsored his own carbon tax legislation, said two main strategies have emerged to limit climate change:
regulating stricter greenhouse gases or putting a price on carbon . He doesn't see another path.
"There's the third category, which is 'something else,'" Whitehouse told POLITICO. "And until somebody shows me what something else is, I don't want to hear about something else."
Carbon tax backers say the approach has proved successful in places such as British Columbia, Ireland and Norway. And other strategies to price carbon have gotten footholds, such as the cap-and-trade
program found in nine Eastern states.
Others say a carbon tax could easily become part of the Green New Deal or other broad-based plans as they are fleshed out.
"When you talk about the Green New Deal and 100 percent clean economy, I see those as values frameworks, and they don't have policy prescriptions on how to get there," said Alison Cassady, managing
director for energy and environment at the liberal Center for American Progress. "In order to achieve a 100 percent clean economy, you're going to need a lot of tools. A carbon tax could get you there part of the
way."
Some supporters say the biggest problem for carbon tax proposals has been how they were designed — and defeats in places like Washington state are not a rejection of the overall concept.
"I don't think we lost on the merits," Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, which campaigned for the Washington ballot initiative. "I think we lost on the inability to transmit the message. I do think
that, yes at some point, perhaps it might make sense to take the revenue generated from a carbon fee broadly defined and use it for other purposes."
Aff
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Carbon Tax
Carbon Taxes fail – no behavioral change
Motor News Reporter 19 (Motor News, 07-25-2019, "Carbon tax must bring real change in
behaviour related to climate change," BusinessLIVE,
https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/life/motoring/2019-07-25-carbon-tax-must-bring-real-change-
in-behaviour-related-to-climate-change/)
The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) has urged the government to ensure that environmental

taxes be clearly linked to real changes in behaviour.

The Carbon Tax Act, which has recently come into effect in SA, aims to penalise large emitters of greenhouse gases to

minimise the climate risks. According to a recent report by the IMF, carbon tax is the best way to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as it allows for a reduction in energy consumption,
favours cleaner energies and provides much-needed revenues, which could be used to finance sustainable and more inclusive growth.
Outa’s executive director, Dr Heinrich Volmink, made the call to the government at a recent seminar on carbon tax organised by the Mail & Guardian and Webber Wentzel.

It would be disastrous if an issue as critical as climate change was used to simply raise more
“

revenue without a clear link to behavioural change or acceleration in climate change mitigation.”
The transport sector is a huge culprit when it comes to polluting the atmosphere and subsequently our cities, and according to citycarbonfootprints.com, Johannesburg ranks as the 13th worst polluted city in the
world.

there should be tangible and visible alterations to SA’s reactions to the carbon tax.
Outa says

five other environmental taxes already exist. The plastic bag levy, the incandescent light
He said that

bulb levy, the electricity levy, the CO₂ tax on vehicle emissions (2010/2011), and the tyre levy
have raised R90.795bn but had had far less of an effect than expected.
One example he mentions is the plastic bag levy, which started at 3c per bag and is now 12c.

“The number of plastic bags produced per annum has actually gone up — from 2-billion in the
first full year of the levy (2005/2006) to just under 2.6-billion bags in 2018/2019. So, what
changes in behaviour have occurred?” Volmink said.
“Arguably, if the money collected from this tax had been used to drive the recycling industry, we may have seen some progress here.”
Volmink called for a discussion on ring-fencing at least part of such taxes.

the government should clearly show all of the revenue collected from environmental
“At the very least,

levies, including the carbon tax, on the one hand, and the total expenditure related to climate
change mitigation on the other. Even if the revenue collected is recycled into the general fiscus, there should at least be some approximation between these two amounts,”
said Volmink.

A carbon tax, however, has a knock-on effect on consumers in the form of raised fuel prices
“

and potentially increased living costs. Despite this, citizens should have the fiscal right to see the
correlation between revenue collection and climate change mitigation in way that’s clearly
understandable.”
He said the government should look at using the revenue collected from the carbon tax to support the introduction of new smarter mobility, such as electric vehicles or increased public transport.
In order to become a zero-emissions society, the electrification of transport is vital, said Generation.e co-founder and CEO Ben Pullen, who is putting together the Electric Vehicle Road Trip Africa (EVRT Africa)
event in SA for the first time on October 2-10.

Look to B.C. for evidence carbon taxes fail

Dudley 18 (Brier Dudley is a member of The Seattle Times editorial board. His columns
appear regularly on editorial pages of The Times. 1-25-2018, "Look to B.C. for evidence carbon
tax doesn’t work," Seattle Times, https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/look-to-b-c-for-evidence-
carbon-tax-doesnt-work/)
If Washington wants to reduce pollution and fare better on its climate-change goals, it should
reject Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposed carbon tax .
Instead, the state should put its efforts into environmental regulations that directly and measurably

reduce harmful emissions.

As proposed, the carbon tax is a grab bag of handouts for the powerful and politically connected, funded by a
steep new tax largely on the middle class. Many of the handouts have dubious benefits in reducing emissions.

Carbon taxes also don’t work as promised. North America’s first such tax, in neighboring British Columbia, is failing to reduce emissions.
Emissions from driving are rising faster than population growth in B.C., despite a carbon tax
higher than Inslee’s proposal.
Recent data says emissions increased 2.3 percent from 2013 to 2015. That includes a 7.2 percent increase in transportation
emissions, the main focus of the B.C. and Washington plans.

B.C. won’t meet its 2020 carbon-reduction goals. Tax advocates there insist it works, but they’re seeking an overhaul and rate increase in hopes of
meeting future climate goals.
Environmental group Food and Water Watch examined effects on the 70 percent of fuels subject to the tax. It concluded B.C.’s tax is a “failed experiment”
and proponents “have significantly overstated the purported beneficial effects.”

“Greenhouse gas emissions have been rising rapidly in recent years even as the tax rate and
total tax revenues have increased,” it said. “Moreover, the short-term declines in taxed greenhouse gas emissions were more modest and were reversed more quickly
than the changes to the untaxed greenhouse gas emissions — exactly the opposite of what would happen if carbon taxes had a causal impact on changing emissions.”

A cynical take is that Washington’s carbon tax is like Trump’s border wall. When first proposed,
both were going to be free. Now they’ll cost taxpayers billions. Most don’t want either (voters said no to a “revenue neutral” carbon tax in
2016) and the benefits are debatable, but they’re being rammed through anyway.
State senators who introduced Inslee’s carbon tax in the Legislature (SB 6203) are taking a new tack away from the original message that it would reduce emissions by changing behavior.
Democratic Sens. Reuven Carlyle of Seattle and Guy Palumbo of Maltby say the tax is still good policy because it would raise money for projects they see as beneficial.
Their candor and dedication to reducing pollution are admirable, as is Inslee’s persistence. I’m looking forward to a revised proposal they’ll introduce soon.
But I’m not sold on the tax for several reasons.

First, many of the projects it would fund have questionable effects on emissions. Inslee’s
proposal reads like a Christmas list, with goodies for developers, labor, transit advocates and
even Microsoft (the high-speed train it wants is a potential beneficiary).
The plan exempts farms, airlines, shippers and certain factories from the tax.
Investor-owned power companies would get carbon taxes back to cover system upgrades. Inslee’s plan would also repay loans they’ve taken for capital projects. If I pollute, will he clear my remodeling debt?
Labor would help dole out billions to those affected by the evolving mix of energy sources, which could be anyone and everyone, since the mix is evolving no matter what. Recipients wouldn’t have to show
emission reductions.
This all builds political support but also feeds skepticism about the sincerity of climate-change remedies.

Second, clearly beneficial projects on the list, such as power-system upgrades, will or should
happen already because of existing regulations and market demand for cleaner power. Polluters should do
this work without subsidies from working-class families. Instead of buying them off, regulate them.

Third, the plan would fund clean-energy ventures, but these ventures don’t need money from
carpenters in Tacoma driving pickups or farmworkers heating homes in Mattawa. More than $1 trillion for such
ventures was raised the last three years, including nearly $200 billion in the U.S., according to Bloomberg. Bill Gates started a $1 billion clean-energy fund.
Fortunes will be made in clean energy, and investors are lining up. Don’t tap households for more.
Besides, public investments in such ventures have a terrible record, including Washington’s 2006 foray into biofuels.

Even if the carbon tax worked, it’s terribly regressive.

Past federal research has found that increasing fuel costs doesn’t necessarily lead to a corresponding drop in

consumption. Households just pay more and have less money for food, clothing and other needs.
Token rebates for the poor won’t make it progressive. The burden still falls harder on the lower middle class.

This exacerbates the proposal’s elitism. It’s pushed by Seattle residents with options to avoid the tax, since the area has density, extensive transit and
hydroelectricity.
Lacking such options, the other 90 percent of Washington will be forced to pay more and more, because the tax increases at least 3.5 percent per year.

Over four years, the tax would generate $3.3 billion. Averaged across the state’s 2.7 million households, that’s about $1,200. Good thing the minimum
wage increased.
If politicians want to collect billions to fund green and quasi-green projects, let’s discuss that and whether it should happen with regressive taxes.

Climate change is real and needs a strong response, not pricey, feel-good measures that don’t
work as promised.

Carbon taxes can’t overcome economics

Marchand and Ebell 18 (Ross Marchand is director of policy at the Taxpayers Protection
Alliance. Myron Ebell is director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute. 7-25-2019, "A carbon tax would be a costly failure," Washington Examiner,
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/a-carbon-tax-would-be-a-costly-failure)
Recently, some Republicans have developed the rather unfortunate habit of floating tax increases shortly after cutting taxes. The
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed into law in December 2017, reduced taxes on more than 90 percent of households and gave the
average family of four a $2,000 boost just in time for Christmas. But then, mumblings over tax increases began. As the Competitive
Enterprise Institute and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance have pointed out, the administration’s recently enacted tariffs, which is
nothing more than an import tax, will likely cost millions of jobs and raise prices on everything from foodstuffs to new homes.
As if that were not enough, Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., recently introduced a bill that would establish a $23
per-ton carbon tax on oil refineries, gas processing plants, and coal mine mouths beginning in 2020.
E&E News reports that, “Industrial sectors such as cement, aluminum, steel and glass would also pay the fee for emissions
stemming from physical or chemical reactions outside of energy production.” While the legislation eliminates the
federal gasoline tax, the net impact of such a steep carbon tax would be disastrous for working
families. Despite dubious claims that carbon taxes can avert climate change and promote “renewables,” this misguided
policy will only succeed in fleecing Americans struggling to keep the lights on.
Trying to figure out how much more working families will have to pay under the proposed carbon tax is a tricky exercise, since
previous estimates covered different proposals. But virtually all studies analyzing carbon tax proposals have come to the same
conclusions: Fiscal impacts are significant and disproportionately harm low-income households. In 2010, researchers from
the University of Wisconsin and Stanford University found that a $15-per-ton tax on carbon
results in the poorest one-fifth of households paying $325 extra a year for gas and electricity. In
paying the tax, “the
burden as a percent of annual income is much higher among lower income
groups than higher income groups.”
In a 2013 review of the evidence, Brookings Institution scholars William G. Gale, Samuel Brown, and Fernando Saltie concurred that
carbon taxes will almost certainly fall upon low-income folks rather than their wealthier
counterparts, with virtually all estimates ranging in hundreds of dollars annually.
It makes no sense to craft a policy that will increase energy bills on millions of vulnerable
Americans. But, to “green” advocates, the answer is seemingly simple: Getting America off of carbon will clear the air and avert
a catastrophic change in climate. While it’s impossible to sum up decades of climatology research in a few paragraphs, the case
for a carbon tax is flimsy even if we assume that carbon impacts climate. As it turns out, the
economy is complex and impossible to steer toward a narrow, preordained outcome dreamed
up by bureaucrats.
As left-leaning economist Hans-Werner Sinn points out, energy producers would likely respond to an impending
carbon tax by increasing supplies in the here-and-now, crashing the price and encouraging
more carbon emissions in the present. Whoops!
This idea, known as the “Green Paradox,” is true if oil and gas companies are flexible enough to
change their output quickly in response to changing policies. Wrongly assuming the opposite(that energy
suppliers aren’t as adaptable as Sinn predicts) implies that gas prices will likely rise in coming decades due to exploding demand
across the globe. If energy suppliers prove inflexible in meeting this increased demand, they’ll go out of business with or without a
carbon tax.
All of these hypotheticals lead to a sobering conclusion: Economic realities will likely doom a carbon tax to fail.
Economies are complex instruments that always defy central planners, derailing even the best-
laid plans. Policymakers must steer clear of this poorly thought out proposal that will achieve
little at a gargantuan cost.
Lawmakers can preserve the legacy of tax reform by avoiding expensive schemes to engineer
ecology. Republicans who passed historic tax reform would be wise to avoid passing a tax increase that could wipe out any
savings from the tax reform.

Carbon taxes are regressive and inadequately account for low-income

households
Baranzini et al 17 (Baranzini, A., van den Bergh, J. C., Carattini, S., Howarth, R. B., Padilla,
E. and Roca, J. (2017), Carbon pricing in climate policy: seven reasons, complementary
instruments, and political economy considerations. WIREs Clim Change, 8: e462.
doi:10.1002/wcc.462)
PE Issue 1: Distributional Consequences of Carbon Pricing
Much resistance against carbon pricing is motivated by concerns that it will be inequitable, that is,
have regressive distributional effects in terms of income or consumers’ purchasing power. Of
course, any serious climate policy could have similar, undesirable distributional impacts. In the case of
carbon pricing, however, regressive impacts are not inevitable. They can be avoided through appropriate policy design or
complementary measures. Moreover, when considering the distributive consequences of carbon pricing, it is important to compare
these to alternative scenarios, notably business‐as‐usual (no climate policies) and climate mitigation policies with alternative, and
less effective, instruments. For instance, many studies show that unmitigated climate change impacts would be unequal among
countries and that poorest countries will be more affected than richer.62
Paradoxically, carbon pricing provides an excellent instrument to address undesirable distributional
consequences—notably if taking the form of carbon taxation, but also of emissions trading, if initial permits are auctioned or
sold. The reason is that it will generate public revenues that can be used to compensate low‐income
households, for example, through tax reductions for low incomes or energy poor households, or lower
value‐added tax (VAT) rates for products serving basic needs.63-65 Progressive effects can also be obtained by
lump sum redistribution, which represents the simplest and administratively less burdensome way of recycling revenues
from carbon pricing.66-68
Any remaining distributional impacts of carbon pricing have to be compared with those resulting from climate change or other
climate policy instruments. For example, technical standards will not necessarily guarantee an equitable distribution of emissions
reductions and associated monetary and welfare costs. In particular, they will also raise costs and thus prices, but not generate
extra public revenues that could be used to lessen perceived unfair distributive impacts. In a review of arguments and empirical
studies, one study warns that assessing distributional effects of environmental policy (any instrument, not only pricing) is a difficult
task, as it involves six elements: (1) higher prices of carbon‐intensive products, (2) changes in relative returns to factors such as
labor, capital, and resources, (3) allocation of scarcity rents from a restricted number of tradable permits in the case these are
initially freely distributed, (4) distribution of the benefits from improvements in environmental quality, (5) temporary effects during the
transition, and (6) capitalization of all those effects into prices of property values (land, buildings, and houses).69 A full assessment
should account for all of them, which clarifies the huge challenge to comprehensively address distributive impacts of policy . It
means one should be careful in quickly judging a particular instrument, like carbon pricing,
negatively from the angle of equity. It should further be noted that in the case of climate change,
the beneficiaries of reducing emissions are future generations, notably people living in poor
countries. Hence, carbon pricing can contribute to both intra‐ and intergenerational equity.
A general finding of the literature on acceptability of climate policy, and in particular of carbon taxes, is that people tend to
have a strong preference for designs that protect low‐income households.70-73 Concern about income
inequality is among the main reasons why 92% of voters (more than two million people) in a public ballot held
in Switzerland in 2015 rejected a proposal for an energy tax to replace the national VAT.74 The authors of this study
show, using a choice experiment administered at the same time of the ballot, that acceptability is much higher when a progressive
energy tax is proposed, provided that information on its distributional properties are made salient.
When considering redistribution effects of climate policies, one should realize that a subsidy scheme for adopting
renewable energy—not to be confused with innovation subsidies as discussed in the More Than Carbon Pricing section—
may be regressive as well, namely when it involves a considerable transfer of money to
homeowners, notably for installing solar PV panels on roofs. This type of scheme was introduced in a number of countries
(e.g., Germany and Switzerland) as carbon pricing turned out to be unpopular. But, as argued, subsidies do not necessarily perform
better, neither on (cost‐)effectiveness nor on equity. The distributional effect should be carefully analyzed in each specific case as it
will depend on the precise design of the subsidy scheme.
 2AC – Links to 2020
Swings voters – people don’t like high taxes – even if they’re carbon
Carattini, Carvalho, and Fankhauser 18 (Stefano Carattini is a Postdoctoral Fellow and
Associate Research Scientist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. Maria
Carvalho worked as a policy analyst for the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change &
Environment (GRI), focusing on energy and climate policies for the EU, along with North
American policy engagement. Sam Fankhauser is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Climate
Change Economics and Policy. Overcoming public resistance to carbon taxes. WIREs Clim
Change. 2018; 9:e531. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.531)
It is a standard tenet of public choice theory that people do not like high taxes. It is not immediately obvious, however, that the
same sentiment should extend to environmental taxes such as those on carbon. Environmental taxes are
Pigovian taxes (after Pigou, 1920), put in place to correct a market failure. Voters may accept them on the grounds that they address a problem people
care about. Yet
empirical studies consistently find that the standard objection to high taxes also
holds for carbon taxes (Brännlund & Persson, 2012; Carattini et al., 2017; Gevrek & Uyduranoglu, 2015; Sælen & Kallbekken, 2011;
Thalmann, 2004). People's attitudes to carbon taxes appear to be influenced more by the direct personal cost of the measure than by an appreciation
of the environmental objective (Kallbekken, Kroll, & Cherry, 2011).
Consequently, the
public acceptability of an environmental tax depends heavily on its policy
stringency, since the proposed tax rate determines the direct costs to consumers. Aversion to higher
tax rates is even found when revenues are redistributed to the population. That is, voters tend to
dislike sudden changes to taxation even if, on paper, these may not make them worse off.
The effect of tax levels on acceptability can be measured relatively precisely with choice experiments. For instance, Sælen and Kallbekken (2011)
Brännlund and Persson
assessed the acceptability of fuel taxes in Norway, analyzing the responses of 1,147 survey participants.
(2012) studied the acceptability of carbon taxes with a survey of 2,400 Swedish citizens. Gevrek
and Uyduranoglu (2015) surveyed 1,252 individuals from 16 Turkish cities about their attitude to
a carbon tax. All three studies found that the acceptability of a tax proposal decreases with the
personal cost it would impose on survey respondents.
Two Swiss studies have used voter surveys to analyze the drivers of public opposition in public ballots. Thalmann (2004) analyzed the responses of a
representative sampling of 990 Swiss residents after a referendum in the year 2000 on three different energy tax proposals, all of which were rejected.
While the magnitude of the tax rate was not a decisive factor for most voters, Thalmann showed
that it was important to a fraction of voters with a particular concern about the cost of the tax.
Carattini et al. (2017) analyze another tax proposal, put forward in 2015, which was rejected by 92% of voters. The proposal entailed a tax swap in
which a new energy tax on nonrenewable energy would have generated the same revenues as value ‐added tax, which would have disappeared
completely. The complete replacement of the value ‐added tax, and the constraint to keep revenues constant over time, would have implied a high, and
growing, tax rate. This concern, and its implications for distributional and competitiveness effects, led, among other factors examined in the paper, to
the massive rejection in the ballot. To analyze how alternative tax designs could have performed in a ballot, Carattini et al. (2017) administered a
The researchers found that the
second survey, a choice experiment with a representative sample of 1,200 Swiss voters.
acceptability of the tax almost linearly decreased as the tax rates increased (see Figure 1). They
also found that people with low levels of climate change concern showed a higher sensitivity to
tax rates, while people with stronger climate change concern paid less attention to price levels.
US Democracy
Neg
 1NC – Election Fix CP
Text: The United States federal government should
 Abolish the electoral college
 Prohibit gerrymandering

That solves
Hasan 18 [Mehdi Hasan, writer, 11-1-2018, "Eight simple steps to fix American democracy,"
No Publication, accessed 7-24-2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-
america/2018/11/eight-simple-steps-fix-american-democracy ]
1) Abolish the electoral college
“The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” So said Donald Trump on election night in 2012, when it
looked for a brief moment as if Mitt Romney might win the popular vote against Barack Obama. Today, of course, Trump sits in the
Oval Office as a result of that very same electoral college – which, unbeknownst to many Americans, was created
to boost the political power of slave-owning southern states .
Since the start of this century, the United States has elected two Republican presidents – Trump and George W Bush – who lost the
national popular vote but won the majority of electoral college votes. How so? The electoral college elevates smaller, rural
Republican states at the expense of bigger, more urban Democratic states. Compare California to Wyoming: the former has one
electoral vote per 712,000 people, while the latter has one per 195,000 people. That means a vote in Wyoming has 3.6 times the
impact in the electoral college as a vote in California.
The core of democracy is supposed to be the principle of one person, one vote, but the electoral
college makes a mockery of that principle. And guess what? Most Americans agree . In June, a PRRI poll
found that two-thirds (68 per cent) of Americans would prefer electing their presidents on the basis of the national popular vote, as
opposed to the electoral college.
Abolishing the electoral college won’t be easy. It would need a constitutional amendment, which itself requires a two-thirds vote in
both the House and the Senate and the ratification of three-quarters (38) of the 50 states.
There is, however, an alternative to outright abolition. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement
between a growing number of US states to pool their electoral college votes for the presidential candidate who wins the popular
vote. The agreement is supposed to take effect once the participating states represent at least 270 electoral votes, the minimum
number required to elect a president. As of October 2018, the NPVIC had been adopted by 11 states which, between them, have
172 electoral votes or 32 per cent of the total Electoral College.
2) Pass a new Voting Rights Act
Turnout in the United States is abysmally low by international standards – according to a Pew study in May 2018, the US came 26th
out of 32 OECD countries. But Republicans are bent on reducing it even further. Voter suppression has become an integral part of
the GOP’s election strategy at the federal and state levels. Take Georgia, where Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp –
who, as secretary of state, also doubles as Georgia’s top election official – is trying to block 53,000 people from registering to vote,
nearly 70 per cent of whom are black. His Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, is black.
In 2013, conservatives on the Supreme Court gutted a key section of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act which had required state
and local governments in areas with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal “preclearance” before making any changes to
their voting laws. The Democrats, if they retake the House and the Senate, should immediately pass a new, beefed-up Voting Rights
Act, which would:
– Prohibit racist voter ID laws at the state level. Over the past decade, more than a dozen Republican-led states have introduced
restrictive voter ID laws. Their justification? To combat (mythical) voter fraud. The reality? A 2017 academic study found “a
significant drop in minority participation when and where these laws are implemented”.
– Mandate that every state automatically register every voter. Thirteen states plus the District of Columbia have already approved
automatic voter registration (AVR). In 2016, after Oregon introduced AVR, the state’s turnout increased by 4 per cent compared to
the 2012 elections.
- Restore the right to vote to ex-felons. In the swing state of Florida, more than one in ten people of voting age – and a whopping
one in five black adults! – are barred from voting due to a felony conviction. In total, and nationwide, around six million Americans
with a felony conviction are currently disenfranchised – some of them for life. As the Sentencing Project points out: “We know of no
other democracy besides the United States in which convicted offenders who have served their sentences are nonetheless
disenfranchised for life.”
– Make election day a federal holiday. Countries such as Germany, France, Spain, Brazil and India either vote at the weekend or
recognize election day as a public holiday. One recent study found that “creating a national holiday for election day would increase
voter turnout by about 16 percentage points” and cause “voter turnout in the US to be consistent with other developed
democracies.”
3) Ban gerrymandering
Is there anything more brazenly anti-democratic than redrawing the boundaries of electoral
districts to secure a partisan advantage? That’s gerrymandering .
Take Pennsylvania. In November 2012, according to the Washington Post, “Democratic candidates for the
state’s 18 US House seats won 51 percent of their state’s popular House vote. But that
translated to just 5 out of 18, or a little more than one-quarter, of the state’s House seats.” How
come? Because Republicans had drawn ridiculously-skewed district maps the year before.
Republicans in control of statehouses and governors’ mansions across the United States have gerrymandered their way to the “the
most audacious political heist of modern times,” in the words of investigative journalist David Daley. Remember, as political scientist
Lee Drutman, of the New America think tank, observed in January, “Gerrymandering is largely a US phenomenon
… We’re the only country that uses single-member districts but doesn’t use independent districting commissions to draw them.”
Americans from across the political spectrum have expressed their dislike of gerrymandering. A bipartisan poll conducted by the
Campaign Legal Center in September 2017 found that 71 per cent of respondents, including 65 per cent of Republicans, want the
Supreme Court to define “clear, new rules” that end blatant partisan gerrymandering.
There is, however, a glimmer of light on the horizon: in Michigan, an anti-gerrymandering ballot measure, calling for an amendment
to the state’s constitution that would put redistricting in the hands of an independent commission, will go to a statewide vote in
November. If voters in Michigan vote Yes, expect other states to follow their lead.
 2NC – Electoral College
Perception changes such as the aff don’t work
Cohen 15 [Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s, 1-19-2015, "Restoring Faith In U.S.
Democracy," HuffPost, accessed 7-24-2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/restoring-faith-in-
us-dem_b_6503734 ]
The Supreme Court’s misguided 5-4 Citizens United v. FEC ruling authorized corporations to spend limitless amounts of money
influencing elections. In the majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court claimed “The appearance
of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.”
They were wrong . With Congress ending last year with a public approval rating of 14%, the
electorate isn’t just losing faith in this democracy — it’s totally gone . Every year since the Citizens
United ruling, special interest groups and corporations have been one-upping their own electoral
spending from the previous year with TV ads and media buys. All this spending recently slammed us with a nearly $4 billion
midterm last November.
But the Citizens United ruling also detonated a massive movement built on people power to get big money out of politics. 89% of
Americans agree that there is too much corporate money in politics and we’re doing something about it.
Over 140 organizations and millions of activists have banded together to counteract the Supreme
Court’s nefarious slash-and-burn of campaign finance restrictions, implemented to safeguard our
democratic process from becoming a plutocracy where the wealthy few call all the shots.
In the last five years, 16 states and over 600 cities and towns passed measures calling on Congress to support an amendment to
overturn Citizens United. And in September 2014, the U.S. Senate voted for an amendment proposal to reverse Citizens United -
only 12 votes shy of the requisite three-fourths majority.
The anti-corruption group, Represent.us - allying with both liberal and conservative groups - worked hard to successfully pass the
Anti-Corruption Act in Tallahassee, Florida. This year they are taking the model bill to more cities and states.
Over 30,000 people are legally rubber-stamping messages like “Not to be used for bribing
politicians” and “Stamp money out of politics” onto their currency with the grassroots campaign, Stamp
Stampede. They are turning money into media by creating millions of mini-billboards and creating a mass visual demonstration of
support. I call it a petition on steroids. It’s a simple action that anybody, anywhere can do anytime.
As this month marks the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United ruling, hundreds of folks are walking for days in the freezing New
Hampshire winter to protest corruption in politics with the New Hampshire Rebellion group. Over 50 events all around the country
are being held to educate the public on the toxic outcomes of the Citizens United case.
We the People have made sweeping gains in the last 5 years to take back a government of, for and by the people. And we’re just
getting started. As our politicians increasingly rely on big money, we are relying on the growing force
of people-power to keep democracy alive.

The electoral college is bad – people want it gone

Bouie 2/28 [Jamelle Bouie, political analyst for CBS News, has been a staff writer at The Daily
Beast and has held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine, 2-28-
2019, "Opinion: The Electoral College Is the Greatest Threat to Our Democracy," The New York
Times, accessed 7-24-2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/opinion/the-electoral-
college.html ]
It’s still well under the radar, but the movement to circumvent the Electoral College gained ground this
week. On Sunday, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, said he would sign a bill to join the
National Popular Vote interstate compact, whose members have pledged to give their electoral
votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The Maine Legislature, likewise, is mulling
membership and will hold hearings to discuss the issue.
Attacking those lawmakers, Paul LePage, the former governor of Maine — who still calls into conservative radio shows from his
retirement home in Florida — dismissed the proposal as an attack on the political rights of white people. “Actually what would
happen if they do what they say they’re going to do is white people will not have anything to say,” he said. “It’s only going to be the
minorities that would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida.”
That is racist nonsense. But it’s useful to think about, in a way, because beneath LePage’s objection is an unintentionally keen
observation about the electoral status quo. If direct election of the president would give equal weight to all
votes, then the Electoral College works to give outsize weight to a narrow group of voters in a
handful of states. That bias is why Donald Trump is president. A healthy plurality chose his opponent, but his supporters
dominated key “swing” states.
It could happen again. A 2018 report on America’s future political demography found four realistic scenarios in which Democrats win
the national popular vote but lose the Electoral College because of the geography of the electorate. The 2020 election could be the
third time in six elections that the White House went to the loser of the popular vote.
That is why Electoral College reform deserves a prominent place in the national conversation, especially as the Democratic Party
champions a host of pro-democracy reforms, such as public financing of elections and an end to gerrymandering.
As it stands, the most visible Democrat speaking against it is the former Attorney General Eric Holder, who on Tuesday called for its
abolition. “Time to make Electoral College a vestige of the past,” he said on Twitter. “It’s undemocratic, forces candidates to ignore
majority of the voters and campaign in a small number of states. The presidency is our one national office and should be decided —
directly — by the voters.”
Of course, there are not enough votes in Congress or the states to pass and ratify an amendment abolishing the Electoral College.
Beyond partisan politics — Republicans currently benefit from its distortions — there’s sentimental attachment to the institution, tied
to popular mythology about the Constitution. In this view, the Electoral College is one of the great compromises of the Constitutional
Convention, part of the wisdom and genius of the “founding fathers” who sought a middle path between pure democracy on the one
hand and anti-majoritarianism on the other.
The truth is less noble. The Electoral College was actually a workaround meant to satisfy a divided
Constitutional Convention at the cost of actual functionality. The framers considered three ways to elect a
president.
Roger Sherman of Connecticut proposed election by Congress, to make the executive “absolutely dependent on that body, as it was
the will of that which was to be executed.”
Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania proposed popular election. “If the people should elect,” Morris said, “they will never fail to prefer
some man of distinguished character, or services; some man, if he might so speak, of continental reputation.”
Objections came from George Mason of Virginia, who thought “the extent of the Country renders it impossible that the people can
have the requisite capacity to judge of the respective pretensions of the Candidates”— and other Southern delegates who feared
domination by the largest states. “The most populous States by combining in favor of the same individual will be able to carry their
points,” said Charles Pinckney of South Carolina.
Southern opposition came with obvious subtext. By population, South Carolina was the seventh largest of 13 states. Maryland was
the sixth. North Carolina was the third. And Virginia was a colossus — the largest state in the incipient union. But large minorities of
their residents were enslaved. In Virginia, it was roughly 40 percent, giving the state a smaller voting population than its more
populous neighbors to the north.
Hugh Williamson of North Carolina made this point explicit in his objection: Because there won’t always be “distinguished
characters” with national recognition who could win a majority of votes, “the people will be sure to vote for some man in their own
State, and the largest State will be sure to succeed.” But this will not be Virginia, “since her slaves will have no suffrage.”
James Madison, another Virginian, actually favored popular election of the president but saw the writing on the wall. “The right of
suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern states,” he said a few days later as discussion continued, “and
the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”
Debate over executive election began in mid-July. It resumed in late August, and the framers settled on a solution in early
September, less than two weeks before the convention would adjourn. Their compromise centered on an idea introduced at the start
of the discussion: Instead of direct election or election by legislature, states would choose electors who would then elect the
president and vice president from a group of candidates. To preserve an element of popular election, each state would receive
electors equal to its congressional delegation, which would also account for states with large enslaved populations, since the
convention had already reached agreement on how to count slaves for legislative apportionment. If no candidate received a
majority, the election would go to Congress.
The historian Jack Rakove notes how few of the framers “expected the electors to do anything more than nominate candidates.”
They would winnow the field, and then elected representatives would actually choose the president.
The system worked as intended in two elections: 1789, when George Washington won his first time, and 1792, when he won again.
Its flaws were apparent by 1796, when John Adams became president with the runner-up Thomas Jefferson as his vice president,
despite being opponents who had running mates aligned with their political factions. The following year, in response to this fiasco, a
South Carolina congressman introduced an amendment requiring each elector to cast separate votes for president and vice
president.
It would take deadlock to force action. In 1800, Jefferson ran again against Adams with Aaron Burr as his running mate. Their party,
the Democratic-Republicans, won a majority of voters (a scant 67,282 ballots out of a free white male population of roughly one
million and a total adult population of more than two million) and electors. But those electors cast an equal number of votes for
Jefferson and Burr, forcing the election into the House of Representatives, where a lame-duck Federalist majority saw its chance to
stymie Jefferson.
Burr was poised to become president despite not actually standing for the office. It took months of heated political conflict — with
Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist, lobbying the House to choose Jefferson — to resolve the standoff. After dozens of ballots,
Jefferson was elected president. To keep another such crisis from blowing up the political system, Congress passed the 12th
Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1804, which distinguished clearly between votes for president and vice president and
streamlined other elements of the process.
The history of the Electoral College from this point is of Americans working around the
institution, grafting majoritarian norms and procedures onto the political process and hoping,
every four years, for a sensible outcome. And on an almost regular schedule, it has done just
the opposite . The presidency went to the popular-vote loser in 1824 (John Quincy Adams; his opponent, Andrew Jackson,
also won the most electoral votes), 1876 and 1888. In the 20th century, Americans had close calls in the elections of 1948, 1960,
1968 and 1976, with near splits in the popular and electoral vote. Despite winning the popular vote in six of the past seven
presidential elections, Democrats have held the presidency for only four of those terms, under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
This obvious dysfunction is why the Electoral College has been a source of persistent dissatisfaction,
with generations of lawmakers introducing new proposals for modifying or abolishing the system outright. Indeed, after the 1968
election, a commission of the American Bar Association recommended “direct popular election of the president,” calling the
“Electoral College method of electing a president of the United States archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and
dangerous.”
None of this has changed. The Electoral College routinely threatens or produces perverse outcomes, where the will of the voters is
thwarted by an ill-considered 18th-century electoral device. It has no place in a democracy that strives for a standard of “one person,
one vote.” And most Americans still don’t like it. In a 2018 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, 65 percent said
presidents should be elected by popular vote.
The simplest solution for circumventing the Electoral College is the National Popular Vote interstate compact I mentioned earlier,
which would take effect once the member states made up a majority of electoral votes.
Americans worried about disadvantaging small states and rural areas in presidential elections
should consider how our current system gives presidential candidates few reasons to campaign
in states where the outcome is a foregone conclusion. For example, more people live in rural counties in
California, New York and Illinois that are solidly red than live in Wyoming, Montana, Alaska and the Dakotas, which haven’t voted for
a Democratic presidential candidate in decades. In a national contest for votes, Republicans have every reason to mobilize and
build turnout in these areas. But in a fight for states, these rural minorities are irrelevant. The same is true of blue cities in red states,
where Democratic votes are essentially wasted.
Candidates would campaign everywhere they might win votes, the way politicians already do in statewide
races. Political parties would seek out supporters regardless of region. A Republican might seek votes in
New England (more than a million Massachusetts voters backed Donald Trump in 2016) while a Democrat might do the same in the
Deep South (twice as many people voted for Hillary Clinton in Louisiana as in New Mexico). This, in turn, might give
nonvoters a reason to care about the process since in a truly national election, votes count .
If nothing else, our quadrennial game of political hot potato can finally come to an end. We can close off this glaring flaw in our
political system and stop worrying about another president who lost the popular vote by millions and the anger, rancor and mistrust
that comes with that.
But the inertia behind the Electoral College is strong, which is why it needs vocal opponents making their case as loudly and often
as possible. That includes Democratic politicians, including the group running for president. A primary campaign is the perfect forum
for raising the issue, giving it high-profile support and wide attention. That, in turn, might move Americans from passive
dissatisfaction with the status quo to action against it. Eventually — and really it can’t come too soon —
Americans could at least vote as though they live in a modern democracy .

The electoral college is undemocratic – ending it solves

Bouie 3/21 [Jamelle Bouie, political analyst for CBS News, has been a staff writer at The Daily
Beast and has held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine, 3-21-
2019, "Getting Rid of the Electoral College Isn’t Just About Trump," The New York Times,
accessed 7-25-2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/opinion/electoral-college-warren-
trump.html?module=inline ]
In February, I wrote about the Electoral College, its origins and its problems. Whatever its potential merits, it is a
plainly undemocratic institution. It undermines the principle of “ one person, one vote ,” affirmed in
1964 by the Supreme Court in Reynolds v. Sims — a key part of the civil and voting rights revolution of that decade. It produces
recurring political crises. And it threatens to delegitimize the entire political system by creating
larger and larger splits between who wins the public and who wins the states.
Many readers disagreed, making arguments similar to those used by the president and his allies. But those claims — that
the Electoral College ensures rural representation, that its counter-majoritarian outcomes reflect
the intentions of the framers and that it keeps large states from dominating small ones — don’t
follow from the facts and are rooted more in folk civics than in how the system plays out in reality.
Take rural representation. If you conceive of rural America as a set of states, the Electoral College
does give voters in Iowa or Montana or Wyoming a sizable say in the selection of the president.
If you conceive of it as a population of voters, on the other hand, the picture is different. Roughly 60
million Americans live in rural counties, and they aren’t all concentrated in “rural” states. Millions live
in large and midsize states like California, New York, Illinois, Alabama and South Carolina.
With a national popular vote for president, you could imagine a Republican campaign that links rural voters in California — where
five million people live in rural counties — to those in New York, where roughly 1.4 million people live in rural counties. In other
words, rural interests would be represented from coast to coast, as opposed to a system that only weights those who live in swing
states.
Totaling the 2016 numbers, Sam Wang, a molecular biologist at Princeton who also runs a widely read election website,
found that out of almost 400 campaign stops made after the conventions, neither Hillary Clinton nor
Donald Trump made appearances in Arkansas, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, the
Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee,
Kentucky, West Virginia or Vermont. It doesn’t matter that Trump won millions of votes in New
Jersey or that Hillary Clinton won millions in Texas. If your state is reliably red or blue , you are
ignored.
By contrast, under a national popular vote, the margin of your loss within a state matters as much
as the size of your win. Democrats would have reason to maximize their share of the vote in the
Deep South, and Republicans would see the same incentive in the Northeast (and the West for that
matter).
Still, you
might argue, the Electoral College keeps large states from dominating small ones. If there
that is
were no such system, campaigns could win by focusing all their attention on the largest states. As a matter of math,
unlikely. In 2016, New York, California, Texas and Florida cast about 35 million ballots, roughly a
quarter of the total 137 million. Even if you somehow won every single one of those ballots, you’d still have to campaign
elsewhere for tens of millions more votes, assuming a 50 percent threshold. Take the total of 2016 presidential votes in the 10
largest states, and you’d get only 71 million ballots, or about 52 percent of the vote.
In the incredible event that a candidate won every ballot cast in those states, then yes, under a national popular vote, he or she
could ignore the rest of the country and become president. But that isn’t politically possible. Even an attempt to “run up the score”
and retreat to the largest cities isn’t viable — there just aren’t enough votes.
Compare that with what we have under the Electoral College, where hypothetically a bare majority in
the 11 largest states is all it takes to win 270 electors and become president — an actual instance of big-state
domination.
Beyond the numbers, it is a conceptual error to focus on states in a race for votes. Who wins Virginia has
implications for down-ballot races for Congress, but it’s just a curiosity in the fight for the White House. What would count are voters
and communities, and candidates would have multiple avenues for building majority coalitions across state lines.
This gets to a larger point. As James Madison observed during the Constitutional Convention, the political interests of the
states aren’t actually tied to size. Instead, whether states share interests will depend on shared
conditions and connections. Massachusetts and Tennessee have populations of similar size but little in common
otherwise; Massachusetts and Connecticut, on the other hand, are linked by history and geography.
In modern politics, intrastate political differences are as important as interstate ones. Voters in Milwaukee may have more in
common with voters in Richmond, Va., than they do with those in Superior in the northwest of the state. A national campaign would
probably follow suit, with candidates looking for connections between regions, cities and metropolitan areas versus a singular focus
on a few states.
It is true the
founders feared “mob rule” and “pure democracy.” But electing a president isn’t the
same as either . When Madison referred to “pure democracy” in Federalist No. 10, he meant direct governance by the
people. “A society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” He contrasted
this with representative democracy, or “republican” government. And while Madison agreed to an Electoral College, he also saw the
merit of choosing a chief executive by popular election.
“The people at large,” he argued during the Constitutional Convention, “would be as likely as any that could be devised to produce
an Executive Magistrate of distinguished Character. The people generally could only know & vote for some Citizen whose merits
had rendered him an object of general attention & esteem.” His main reservation was slavery and how it made “the right of suffrage”
more “diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States.”
Beyond issues of representation, there are other practical problems with the status quo. When margins between candidates are
large, the Electoral College aligns with the national popular vote. But narrow margins throw it into chaos. The 1968 presidential
election nearly went to the House of Representatives; in 1976, if you move roughly 6,000 ballots from Jimmy Carter in Ohio and
roughly 18,000 in Wisconsin and Gerald Ford becomes president despite losing by nearly 1.7 million votes.
Indeed, the recurring prospect of a president elected with a minority of the vote inspired a major push to end the Electoral College
beginning in the 1960s. In 1966, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana — who died last week at 91 — introduced a constitutional
amendment to elect the president by national popular vote. In 1968, Bayh spoke before a committee of Congress in support of his
amendment. His words still resonate. In 1968, addressing a committee of Democrats in Indiana, Bayh urged fellow Democrats to
support his proposal.
“We are living in a dangerous world where the stability of the United States of America is one of the most important things facing
us,” he said. “When we have an Electoral College system which threatens to elect a man who has
fewer votes than his opponent, we tend to erode the confidence in the people of this
country and their president and in their form of government. ”
James Michener, an author who served as a presidential elector in 1968, was even blunter. The Electoral College, he wrote, was a
“time bomb lodged near the heart of the nation.”
It still is.

The electoral college is bad – it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do

Linker 18 [Damon Linker, senior correspondent, consulting editor at the University of
Pennsylvania Press, and a former contributing editor at The New Republic, 9-19-2018, "The
Electoral College is a civic abomination," The Week, accessed 7-25-2019,
https://theweek.com/articles/796519/electoral-college-civic-abomination ]
The Electoral College was a dumb idea when it was first proposed. Today, it's the Constitution's
most egregious affront to elementary fairness. In a just and properly functioning political system,
it would be eliminated without delay or regret.
Why do we have the Electoral College in the first place? If we begin at the beginning and look for
guidance to Alexander Hamilton — the presumed author of Federalist Paper No. 68, which discusses and defends the
Electoral College — we discover what sounds like the musings of a dorm room full of mildly drunken
undergraduates seeking to apply to the world the overly pious lessons of an "Intro to Political
Theory" course.
Wouldn't it be nice if voters didn't cast ballots in favor of the president directly but instead voted
for a group of people of "information and discernment" who would themselves make the final
choice of who will stand at the head of the executive branch of government and serve as the commander in chief of the armed
forces? The idea, apparently, was that there should be an extra layer of distance between the
people and the choice of president — and that this layer should consist of a group of citizens (electors) who freely
deliberate about the choice, like a temporary Congress filled with people who don't serve in other elective offices, with the outcome
of those deliberations treated as legitimate by the people even when it countermands the result of the popular vote.
How Hamilton or anyone else with a knowledge of political history could have
considered this a workable idea is beyond me .
But don't take my word for it. We know the idea is ridiculous because the institution has never
functioned in any way like this. Yes, there have been a handful of elections, including two within the
last two decades, in which the winner of the electoral vote has won the presidency despite losing the
popular vote. But that isn't because the electors pondered the results of the popular vote,
deliberated about it, and then overruled it.
In fact, during the Trump transition of 2016-2017 a small number of anti-Trump scholars and citizens
tried and failed to persuade electors to act this way, switching their votes away from the electoral
vote winner (Trump) to some other person, either the winner of the popular vote (Hillary Clinton — who just argued in The Atlantic
that it's time to kill the Electoral College) or a different Republican — really to anyone other than the singularly unfit man at the head
of the GOP ticket.
That didn't happen, or come remotely close to happening, because it's a recipe for an outcome that
would understandably be viewed as democratically illegitimate , with ordinary citizens wondering just who the
hell these electors think they are to meddle with and overturn the outcome of an election.
In practical terms, then, the actual people who serve as electors are irrelevant, as is their capacity for
deliberation. The electors nearly always vote the way their state voted in the popular election. The process is automatic,
rendering the formality of an actual meeting to cast ballots beside the point. Which means that what matters is not who
votes but how many electoral votes a state is allocated . That is determined by adding together a state's
congressional and senatorial delegations.
And that's where the problem lies — because there is a significant representational
imbalance between heavily and sparsely populated states.
At this point, we run into a classic debate in American politics — about federalism, population density, large states versus small
states, and the cultural character of rural versus urban and suburban areas of the country.
Is the U.S. a single nation with a single population of citizens? Or is it a conglomeration of 50 mini-
nations with 50 distinct bodies of citizens bound together into a unit that is and should remain
less than the sum of its roughly equal parts? The Articles of Confederation that preceded the
federal Constitution
sided strongly with the latter. The U.S. Constitution written in 1787 attempted to strike
a balance between the two extremes, with the Federalist faction (led by Hamilton and James Madison) leaning in the
direction a single nation and the anti-Federalists favoring a more state-centered arrangement. (Progressives have tended to lean
much less unambivalently in the direction of viewing the country as a single nation in which the power and distinctiveness of
individual states is minimized.)
The need to get anti-Federalist (and Southern slaveholding) buy-in for ratification of the Constitution led to a number of the founding
document's most distinctive features. One was the Bill of Rights. Another was the upper chamber of Congress, which gives two
senators to every state, regardless of population. This meant that the least heavily populated state at the time of ratification
(Delaware, with 59,000 people) had the same representation in the Senate as the most heavily populated state (Virginia, with
747,000 people), despite the latter having nearly 13 times the population as the former.
That's a lot of extra power for small states. But it's nowhere near the boost they enjoy today, when the most populated state (very
Democratic California) is 68 times as heavily populated as the least populated state (very Republican Wyoming). It's this dynamic
that is producing a situation in which, just over two decades from now, one-third of Americans could be represented by 70 percent of
the Senate.
Let's assume this makes sense — because states should be considered roughly equal political entities regardless of population, and
because the more rural, low-density populations of small states possess certain qualities (like civic virtue?) that deserve to receive
outsized influence on our political system. I don't buy either claim and rather doubt that most people who live in larger states would
either. But let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that it's persuasive — that for the good of the country small
states should be vastly overrepresented in the upper chamber of Congress.
But then how do we explain the Electoral College, which builds off of this imbalance and applies it
to how we choose the head of the executive branch — and through the president's appointment powers the
judicial branch as well?
Consider the difference between voting for president in California and Wyoming.
In 2016, roughly 14 million people voted for president in California compared to 255,000 people in Wyoming. Clinton's California win
gave her 55 electoral votes, while Trump walked away from Wyoming with three. That might sound like a big advantage for the
Democrat, but when the electoral result is compared to the relative size of each state's population it's the opposite. In fact, an
individual voting for president in Wyoming in 2016 had three times the influence on the Electoral College as an individual voting in
California.
So let's summarize: The Senate hugely amplifies the power of small states. (This comes on top of
Republican gerrymandering of House districts, which does the same for rural areas within Republican-controlled states.)
The
Electoral College then does the same thing when it comes to choosing the presidency, and with
incredibly significant consequences — giving us George W. Bush instead of Al Gore and Donald Trump
instead of Hillary Clinton, not to mention Neil Gorsuch instead of Merrick Garland.
That's all three branches of the federal government operating to systematically hand more
political power to fewer people . If this happened in one branch of the federal government, perhaps it could be
justified. But across them all? That's grossly unfair, as growing numbers of Americans are coming to recognize.
 2NC – Gerrymandering
The epistemology that justifies the redrawing of borders to serve one’s own
desires also justifies actions which lead to further erosion of democracy
Beauchamp 6/27 [Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers global
politics and ideology, 6-27-2019, "The Supreme Court’s gerrymandering decision reveals a
profound threat to democracy," Vox, accessed 7-24-2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
politics/2019/6/27/18761166/supreme-court-gerrymandering-republicans-democracy ]
The Supreme Court’s Thursday morning ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause amounts to a blank check for partisan gerrymandering.
Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion holds that federal courts should not have the power to
declare particular maps unconstitutional, as doing so would be “unprecedented expansion of
judicial power ... into one of the most intensely partisan aspects of American political life.”
What this means, in practice, is that local authorities get to decide on the shape of House and state
legislative districts. Parties that control statehouses will be freer to not only cement their own hold on power but ensure that
their party sends more representatives to Washington as well.
While Republicans and Democrats both gerrymander, there is no doubt that Republicans do it more and more shamelessly. North
Carolina Rep. David Lewis, who helped draw one of the maps at issue in Rucho, was admirably honest about his
motives in a 2016 statehouse speech.
“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” he explained. “So I
drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
This principle — that Republicans believe their rule is better and are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure they take and hold
power — does not merely lead to gerrymandering. It has produced a whole host of undemocratic
actions, at both state and federal levels, that amount to a systematic threat to American democracy .
Indeed, some of the best scholarship we have on American democracy suggests that this is even more alarming than it sounds; that
it fits historical patterns of democratic backsliding both in the United States and abroad.
In her dissent to Roberts’s ruling, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “gerrymanders
like the ones here may
irreparably damage our system of government.” I’d take it a step further .
The Court’s ruling in Rucho reveals that there’s a threat to American democracy more subtle and yet greater than the Trump
presidency: the Republican Party’s drift toward being institutionally hostile to democracy.
The Court’s ruling permits a systematic attack on democracy
Partisan gerrymandering is, on its face, an obviously anti-democratic practice. State legislators pack large
numbers of voters from the opposing party into a handful of legislative districts, thus ensuring their voters dominate the bulk of
districts and hand them a majority. It gives their supporters’ votes more weight, a direct violation of the core democratic principles
relating to equal citizenship and representation.
Historically, both parties have engaged in partisan gerrymandering: Rucho itself concerned both the Republican map in North
Carolina and a Democratic map in Maryland. But the GOP has embraced the fashion in a far more
systematic and troubling fashion.
In 2010, Republican strategist Karl Rove wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating a significant
Republican push to gerrymander legislative districts after that year’s midterm elections . Rove’s idea
manifested as Project REDMAP, a dark-money campaign to support Republican candidates for state legislature and then help them
redraw House districts after the 2010 census.
We first saw the results of this process in 2012, when Republicans held the House despite more
Americans voting for Democratic House candidates than Republican ones. The consequences
persist , making it significantly harder for Democrats to win office in places around the country.
In the 2018 election, Republicans won about 50 percent of the US House vote in North Carolina. That
translated into 70 percent of House seats due to heavily gerrymandered districts. Wisconsin Democrats
won every statewide election in 2018 but did not win majorities in either chamber of the state legislature.
Once again, gerrymanders are to blame .
The Rucho ruling allows Republicans to continue this campaign and even escalate it, as they don’t have to worry about outrageous
maps getting rolled back by federal courts. “John Roberts ... gave the Republicans a green light to gerrymander to their hearts
content,” UC Irvine election law expert Rick Hasen writes at Slate.
The national Republican campaign to cement their control over state legislatures and congressional delegations is not only harder to
fight back but could very well get worse.
Gerrymandering allows for hardline laws not supported by voters to be pushed
through
Daley 6/2 [David Daley, author of the national bestseller “Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t
Count” and a senior fellow at FairVote, 6-2-2019, "Why are extreme abortion laws taking over
America? Blame gerrymandering," Guardian, accessed 7-24-2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/02/how-gerrymandering-undermines-
democracy-us-elections ]
Fifty-four thousand votes out of nearly 4 million. That’s what separated Stacey Abrams from Brian Kemp in Georgia’s 2018
gubernatorial election, a sign of how closely contested this once reliably red, southern state has become.
Earlier this month, however, Georgia’s legislature responded to the state’s closely divided political
climate not with thoughtful compromise but by passing one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the
United States.
An April poll by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that 70% of Georgians support the landmark Roe v Wade decision that
legalized abortion. The new state ban is opposed by 48% of Georgians and supported by only 43%. So why would the
legislature enact such an extreme measure?
For that matter, why would Ohio, Alabama, Missouri and other states establish similar “fetal heartbeat” laws that are far more
restrictive than their constituents support?
One important answer is gerrymandering: redistricting voting districts to give the party in power
an edge – making it almost impossible for the other side to win a majority of seats, even with a majority
of votes. Sophisticated geo-mapping software and voluminous voter data turned this ancient art into a hi-tech science when the US
redistricted after the 2010 census.
Republicans recognized the opportunity. Democrats snoozed. Nine years later, they’re still
paying the price , particularly in swing state legislatures. A little-known group called the Republican State
Leadership Committee (RSLC) launched a devastatingly effective strategy called Redmap – short for the Redistricting Majority
Project. It dropped $30m of dark money into sleepy local races, flipped legislative chambers blue to red, and gave the Republicans
control over drawing the vast majority of local legislative and US House seats – and with it, the power to remake the political playing
field for the next decade.
Republicans took such advantage that they have controlled state legislative supermajorities in
otherwise competitive states even when voters prefer Democratic candidates by hundreds of
thousands of votes. This nullifies elections and insulates lawmakers from a majority that seeks to vote them out of office.
Despite lacking any mandate for an extreme agenda in a closely divided nation, Republican
lawmakers have pushed through new voting restrictions, anti-labor laws, the emergency
manager bill that led to poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, and now, these strict abortion
bans . Electorally, there’s little that Democrats can do to stop it.
Just take a look at Georgia, where the ultra-competitive contest between Kemp and Abrams made
national headlines and propelled the highest midterm voter turnout in the state’s modern history.
But while that race was decided by just a handful of votes, it was a completely different story in the
down-ballot elections for the state’s house and senate. Those districts were drawn to be so non-
competitive that 112 of the state’s 180 house districts – and 33 of the 56 state senate elections –
featured no major-party challenger. Voters literally had no choice at all.
Or travel to Ohio, the long-time midwestern bellwether. There’s also zero evidence that voters here have
extreme opinions on abortion. Polls show that more voters are against the new “heartbeat” bill than for it,
and Ohioans are clearly comfortable splitting their ballots in statewide races. In 2018, the state re-elected a pro-choice
Democratic senator and an anti-abortion Republican governor. They divided their vote for the state’s house
and senate about as equally as possible: Republicans won 50.3% statewide .
But thanks to what a University of Chicago study called an “uncommonly severe gerrymander”, barely half the votes
provided Republicans more than 63% of the seats. Once again, there’s little that Democrats can do,
simply because the maps were surgically designed to create so few competitive seats. In 2018, only six of 99 house elections
finished within five percentage points. Democrats could have won them all and still finished far short of control.
In Alabama, meanwhile, a determined racial gerrymander packed black Democrats into as few seats as possible and diluted the
African American vote. That legislature, seated after a sleazy money-laundering effort uncovered by the RSLC’s own attorneys, has
passed the strictest abortion ban in the nation, one that polls show is too conservative even for Alabama. A recent survey found that
only 31% of Alabama voters backed abortion limits like this one, which provides no exception for rape or incest.
Voters are silenced at the ballot box, and then can be safely ignored by their legislatures
This is what happens when so many races are non-competitive. It means that the only action takes place in party primaries. They
tend to be low-turnout elections that favor the most passionate partisans. That has three key effects: it sends more extreme
members of both parties to state capitals, incentivizes them to fear compromise or anything that might earn a primary challenge, and
it insulates them from voters almost no matter what they do. Voters are silenced at the ballot box, and then can be safely ignored by
their legislatures.
What, if anything, can voters do? It won’t be easy. Last November, citizens in four states – including Missouri, home to yet another
radical new abortion ban – passed ballot initiatives or constitutional amendments that shifted mapmaking powers away from self-
interested partisans and toward independent commissions. In Missouri and Michigan, however, despite more than 60% of voters
demanding an end to politicians choosing their own voters, these gerrymandered legislatures have taken steps to undermine the
new initiatives. Several other states this year have made it significantly harder to put initiatives on the ballot.
Four federal courts, meanwhile, have overturned entire statewide maps as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. The US supreme
court, long reluctant to get involved in this political thicket, is expected to issue rulings in cases from Maryland and North Carolina in
June. Whether or not the court takes action, it could take a generation to wash away the anti-majoritarian toxins that this decade’s
partisan gerrymanders intentionally injected into our hijacked politics. Just as frightening: the 2021 redistricting cycle is just two
years away.

Gerrymandering is bad – plethora of reasons

Prokop 16 [Andrew Prokop, Senior Politics Correspondent, 11-7-2016, "Why the Electoral
College is the absolute worst, explained," Vox, accessed 7-24-2019,
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/12315574/electoral-college-explained-
presidential-elections-2016 ]
3) That seems unfair.
Well, there’s a lot that’s unfair — or at the very least undemocratic — about the Electoral
College.
For one, the winner of the nationwide popular vote can lose the presidency . In 2000, Al Gore won half a
million more votes than George W. Bush nationwide, but Bush won the presidency after he was declared the winner in Florida by a
mere 537 votes. And that wasn’t the first time — electoral college/popular vote splits happened in 1876 and 1888 too, and occurred
in 2016 too.
Second, there’s swing state privilege . Millions of votes in safe states end up being “wasted,” at
least in terms of the presidential race, because it makes no difference whether Clinton wins California by 4
million votes, 400,000 votes, or 40 votes — in any scenario, she gets its 55 electors. Meanwhile, states like
Florida and Ohio get the power to tip the outcome just because they happen to be closely divided politically.
Third, a small state bias is also built in , since every state is guaranteed at least three electors
the 4 percent of the
(the combination of their representation in the House and Senate). The way this shakes out in the math,
country’s population in the smallest states end up being allotted 8 percent of Electoral College
votes.
And fourth, there’s the possibility for those electors themselves to hijack the outcome .
4) Wait, the electors can hijack the outcome of the presidential election? What?
For decades, it’s been assumed that the 538 electors will essentially rubber-stamp the outcome in their respective states, and they
mostly have. But there’s scarily little assurance that they’ll actually do so.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, about 30 of the 50 states have passed laws "binding"
their electors to vote in accordance with the presidential popular vote in their state. But in most, the
penalty for not doing so is only a fine, and it’s unclear whether stiffer penalties would hold up in court — it’s never been tested, and
the Constitution does appear to give the electors the right to make the final call. Furthermore, there are still 20 or so states that
haven’t even tried to bind their electors.
This hasn’t mattered much in the past because, almost always, the parties do a good enough job of vetting their respective electoral
slates to ensure that they will indeed loyally back their party’s presidential nominee.
But therehave been a few rogue, faithless, or just plain incompetent electors over the years —
and their votes have all been counted as cast.
In 1837, rogue electors from Virginia briefly blocked the seating of the vice president-elect because they were offended that he had
a mixed-race common-law wife. (The Senate overrode them.)
A Democratic elector from Tennessee cast his ballot for segregationist third-party candidate Strom Thurmond in 1948, and a
Republican elector from North Carolina voted for segregationist third-party candidate George Wallace in 1968.
In 2000, an elector from Washington, DC, withheld an electoral vote from Al Gore, because she wanted to protest the fact that DC
didn’t have representation in Congress.
Perhaps most bizarrely of all, in 2004, an elector from Minnesota who was supposed to vote for John Kerry for president instead
voted for John Edwards. (It’s believed that this was an accident, but since the votes were cast anonymously, we don’t really know
for sure. Great system!)
And this year, one Democratic elector candidate from Washington state has repeatedly said that he will “absolutely not” cast his
ballot for Hillary Clinton if she wins his state. We’ll see whether he follows through.
Rogue electors have never been numerous enough to actually affect the outcome of a presidential
race. But it really doesn’t look like there’s much stopping them should they choose to do so.
Now, some defenders of the system, like Georgetown professor Jason Brennan, take the comforting view that the power of electors
to go rogue is a good thing, since they could conceivably save America from a popularly elected majoritarian candidate who could
oppress the minority.
But it seems just as likely, if not more likely, that electors could install that candidate with dictatorial
tendencies against that popular will. Perhaps some electors are wise sages with better judgment than the American
people, but others are likely malign, corrupt, or driven by their own idiosyncratic beliefs. (You’ll notice above that several of those
historical rogue electors in history had racist motivations.)
In any case, if we had a process in which the electors were notable citizens who were chosen because they’re supposed to exercise
good judgment, maybe Brennan’s defense would make sense. But in the system we have today, the electors are chosen to be
rubber stamps. As a result, there’s incredibly little attention paid to who those electors even are outside internal party machinations
in each state. Any defection by an elector would, essentially, be a random act that could that could hold our system hostage.
Aff
 2AC – AT: Electoral College
The electoral college is good – it incentivizes parties to strategize
Douthat 3/23 [Ross Douthat, Opinion columnist for The Times, 3-23-2019, "A Case for the
Electoral College," The New York Times, accessed 7-25-2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/electoral-college.html?module=inline ]
Debates about the Electoral College, like the one that Democrats have lately instigated, often get bogged
down in disputes about the intentions of the founding generation — whether they were trying to check mob
rule, prop up Southern power, preserve the power of small states, or simply come to a necessarily arbitrary constitutional
compromise.
These disputes are historically interesting but somewhat practically irrelevant, because everyone agrees
that the college doesn’t work the way the founders expected. It doesn’t allow wise electors to veto demagogic
candidates, it doesn’t throw most presidential elections to the House of Representatives — and as my colleague Nate Cohn pointed
out last week, it doesn’t always give extra influence to the smallest states. (Donald Trump won because he overperformed in big
swing states, not because he cobbled together a coalition of small ones.)
Instead the Electoral College really just does one big thing that a popular-vote system wouldn’t do: It
makes it possible for close elections to yield a president supported by a minority of voters,
especially in circumstances where that minority is regionally concentrated rather than
diffuse .
Is there a case for a system that sometimes produces undemocratic outcomes? I think so, on two grounds.
First, it creates incentives for political parties and candidates to seek supermajorities rather
than just playing for 50.1 percent , because the latter play is a losing one more often than in a popular-vote
presidential system.
Second, it
creates incentives for political parties to try to break regional blocs controlled by the
opposition, rather than just maximizing turnout in their own areas , because you win the presidency
consistently only as a party of multiple regions and you can crack a rival party’s narrow majority by flipping a few states.
According to this — admittedly contrarian — theory, the fact that the Electoral College produces chaotic or undemocratic outcomes
in moments of ideological or regional polarization is actually a helpful thing, insofar as it drives politicians and political hacks (by
nature not the most creative types) to think bigger than regional blocs and 51 percent majorities.
Thus the electoral/popular split of 1888 pointed the way to William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt’s national Republican majorities,
and the near-splits of 1968 and 1976 pushed us toward Reagan’s nationwide landslides and Bill Clinton’s successful center-left
campaigns. Time and again a close election leads to hand-wringing about the need for Electoral College reform; time and again,
politicians and parties respond to the college’s incentives, and more capacious and unifying majorities are born.
Does this theory fit our current situation? In a sense, yes. Donald Trump could win the presidency without a
popular-vote majority only because both parties have been locked into base-turnout strategies
that are partially responsible for our government’s ineffectiveness and gridlock. And to the extent
that Hillary Clinton’s campaign leaned into this polarization (writing off many constituencies that her husband competed
for), she deserved her electoral-college loss.
Trump could also only win the presidency without a popular-vote majority because a large
region of the country, the greater Rust Belt and Appalachia, had been neglected by both parties’
policies over the preceding decades, leading to a slow-building social crisis that the national press only really noticed
because of Trump’s political success. In this sense, Clinton’s weird post-election boast that her half of the country was way more
economically dynamic indicated the advantages of a system where a declining region can punch above its popular-vote weight —
because it makes it harder for a party associated with economic winners to simply write the losers off.

Disregard all neg electoral college evidence – Dems only want it gone to win
Davies and Harrigan 3/28 [Antony Davies, associate professor of economics at Duquesne
University, and James R. Harrigan, teaches in the department of Political Economy and Moral
Science at the University of Arizona, 3-28-2019, "Calls to end the electoral college are not about
protecting democracy," https://www.inquirer, accessed 7-24-2019,
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/electoral-college-democrats--20190328.html ]
Nearly every element of the U.S. Constitution is a compromise resulting from long and often contentious
arguments. There was one thing, though, upon which nearly all parties agreed: the Electoral
College. Alexander Hamilton spoke to this in Federalist 68, writing that the appointment of the President “is almost the only part
of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of
approbation from its opponents.”
The major point of contention at the time was the construction of Congress. Citizens from more populous states favored
representation based on population. Citizens from less populous states wanted representation based on statehood. What emerged,
the Great Compromise, combined both methods. Legislative power would be shared by a House of Representatives, based on the
former, and a Senate, based on the latter.
The Electoral College raised no eyebrows because it was simply grafted to the Great
Compromise. Each state would receive a number of electoral votes equal to the number of the state’s representatives and
senators. Today, these range from a high of 55 for California to a low of three for each of the seven least populous states.
So how did we get to the point where Democratic politicians, most recently Elizabeth Warren, are calling for dismantling the only
Democrats believe they would have a
thing on which virtually all the Founders agreed? The answer is simple:
better chance of winning without it. Expediency explains why politicians do just about
everything they do. But for the nation, the important question is not about who might win with or without the Electoral
College. The important question is whether, in principle, the Electoral College is still a good idea.
It is . The Electoral College is a good idea because there is more to representation than raw
population. Population is important, but so , too, is geography .
As was the case when the Constitution was framed, rural and urban voters today have decidedly different interests. The Electoral
College considers both. More than 80 percent of the Electoral College’s votes are based on state populations, with the remainder
based on geography. Because Democrats do well in urban areas, if geography no longer mattered, they would never again need to
campaign in nor care about the country’s sparsely populated areas.
This is no guarantee of electoral victory, though. If geography didn’t matter, Republican campaign strategies would change also.
Whereas Republicans have long written off states like California under a popular vote model, Republicans would gain an incentive
to campaign there. How all of this would affect the popular vote is anyone’s guess. What would happen to the attention paid to vast
swaths of the country, however, is not. That attention would disappear.
But the move to scuttle the Electoral College is not about principle. It’s about winning. How do we
know? Because Democrats could achieve almost the same outcome as a popular vote without
touching the Electoral College. Under the Constitution, each state has the power to decide for itself how to assign its
electoral votes. Democrats control the legislatures in 18 states. They could propose tomorrow that those states’ electoral votes be
allocated proportionally according to the states’ popular votes. Two states, Nebraska and Maine, already do something like this.
But Democrats won’t propose this. If they did, solidly Democratic states like California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey, would
end up allocating some of their electoral votes to Republican candidates. This reveals the real motivation behind the push to
eliminate the Electoral College: Democrats want to dictate to Republican states how those states assign
their electoral votes.
While the current push to disband the Electoral College comes from a host of Democrats, the
Republicans would do precisely the same thing were the situation reversed. How do we
know? They care about winning exactly as much as their Democratic counterparts.
This lack of principle is reason enough not to take either party all that seriously. An even better reason is that the nature of
representation itself is on the line. The Framers gave us a Constitution in which both population and geography mattered. Until there
is a principled reason to shift away from this, we shouldn’t. And wanting your preferred party to win is not a principled reason.

Even if abolishing solves, it’s deeply unpopular as long as Trump is in office –

still links to politics
Vasilogambros 4/19 [Matt Vasilogambros, writer, 4-19-2019, "How Trump Changed the
Electoral College Debate Among States," No Publication, accessed 7-24-2019,
https://www.governing.com/topics/politics/sl-trump-alters-electoral-college-debate.html ]
For years, polls show, Republicans across the country championed a national popular vote to elect
presidents, instead of the state-by-state tally of the Electoral College.
But something changed: Donald Trump got elected president.
Trump won the Electoral College handily in 2016 but lost the popular vote to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million
ballots. As of last year, only 32% of GOP voters supported a national popular vote, down from 54% in 2011, according to the Pew
Research Center. Three-quarters of Democrats, meanwhile, supported a national popular vote. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds
both the Pew Research Center and Stateline.)
The Republican shift has altered the trajectory of state legislative efforts to change the federal
system. State legislatures have the constitutional right to choose the method by which electoral votes are distributed, and more
than a dozen support a way to work around the Electoral College in presidential contests.
Those behind the push for change want states to sign on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement in which
states would assign their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who gets the most voters across the entire country.
So far, with strong support from Democratic lawmakers and governors, 14 states and the District of Columbia have joined the
compact, accounting for 181 electoral votes. The compact would go into effect once member states account for the 270 electoral
votes needed to elect a president. To reach that goal, the compact is going to need Republican support.
Republican opinion surrounding the Electoral College, however, followed a similar path to
Trump’s own opinion. In 2012, he tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”
Shortly after his victory in 2016, he changed his tune, tweeting, “The Electoral College is actually genius
in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play.”
Today, there is bitter debate over the founding fathers’ intent when they created the Electoral College. Some
think the Electoral College, by propping up smaller states, is working as it was originally
intended.
Some supporters also note that the system empowers presidents who win a plurality, but not a majority, of the popular vote. In 1912
and 1992, third-party candidates held Democrats Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton to 41.8 and 43% of the popular vote,
respectively.
But Wilson won 81.9% of the electoral vote and Clinton won 68.7%, allowing both to govern from a position of strength.
But some constitutional scholars say the Electoral College of today is far from what was imagined more than 200 years ago.
Andrew Shankman, a professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, said the Electoral College was designed to give a small
group of men — the electors from each state — the power to choose the president, instead of giving the power to the public. Before
the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, the presidential runner-up became the vice president.
The Electoral College changed over time, Shankman said, becoming more chaotic and dysfunctional with the rise of political parties
and the growth of the nation.
“There’s nothing sacrosanct about the Electoral College,” he said. “The very idea of it is increasingly not compatible in American
politics.”
Debate within the Republican Party, meanwhile, has not stopped. Many state lawmakers and former party
officials, determined to change the way presidents are elected, are struggling to convince their colleagues
not to abandon the movement.
“Republicans … think it’s a communist plot to make Al Gore and Hillary Clinton president,” said Saul Anuzis, who served as the
chairman of the Michigan Republican Party from 2005 to 2009. “This is a federalist, states’ rights approach.”
Anuzis is now a senior adviser for National Popular Vote, a nonprofit based in California that advocates for the interstate compact.
He’s been lobbying Republican state lawmakers on a new system, touting the support of eight former chairs of the American
Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative nonprofit that focuses on state legislative efforts. He also has the backing of former
Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich.
National Popular Vote spent $182,000 in the 2018 midterms on federal elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
But getting more than a handful of Republican state legislators to sign on to the agreement in the
past two years has been a challenge. This year, measures that passed in New Mexico and Colorado in
March had not a single Republican backer.
In Delaware, which also signed on to the compact last month, just two Republican state senators supported the measure. One of
them, Anthony Delcollo, recognizes the Trump effect.
“Sometimes folks get really passionate about things and, in this case, there was definitely a knee-jerk reaction that some had
against this idea,” Delcollo said in an interview. “It’s much harder to convince someone who’s had that reaction to be open-minded.”
The current system “is bad for our nation,” Delcollo said, since swing states are the only ones deciding presidential elections. He
said he hopes other Republicans will join in trying to fix it.
In Oregon, when a measure passed the state Senate in April, just two Republicans supported it. The measure now heads to the
state House, where it’s expected to pass. The state House has passed the measure several times in the past decade, but
Democratic Senate President Peter Courtney blocked the bills in his chamber.
In Nevada, where Democrats control both houses in the legislature and the governorship, a bill to adopt the national popular vote
has a chance of passing this session. In April, it passed the Assembly without Republican support, and is now heading to the state
Senate.
Since state legislatures control how electoral votes are distributed in states, a state could in theory leave the national compact if its
lawmakers passed a new law.

Overhauling the electoral college is unpopular – means it still links to politics

Parks 3/22 [Miles Parks, 3-22-2019, "Abolishing The Electoral College Would Be More
Complicated Than It May Seem," NPR.org, accessed 7-24-2019,
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/22/705627996/abolishing-the-electoral-college-would-be-more-
complicated-than-it-may-seem ]
Fully overhauling the way the president is selected would take a Constitutional amendment, which
would require the votes of two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the states.
Support of that magnitude has become rare for anything in a sharply divided United States. An
amendment hasn't been adopted since the 27th, in 1992, and one hasn't been adopted relatively quickly since the 26th, which took
100 days from proposal to adoption in 1971.
President Trump once supported abolishing the Electoral College — he previously felt it was a "total disaster for
democracy" — butsince his 2016 presidential victory over Hillary Clinton, in which Clinton won the popular vote by almost
3 million votes, but Trump received 304 electoral votes, he
has changed his mind.
Now, Trump feels the Electoral College is "far better for the U.S.A." as he wrote Tuesday on Twitter.
That position, shared by many Republicans, makes it highly unlikely that there would be
sufficient support for changing the system.
"There's no realistic chance of a Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College," said Jacob Levy, a professor of political
theory at McGill University.
 2AC – AT: Gerrymandering
Gerrymandering isn’t destroying democracy – the voters do it themselves
Bump 13 [Philip Bump, former politics writer for The Atlantic Wire, 7-29-2013, "No,
Gerrymandering Is Not Destroying Democracy," Atlantic, accessed 7-24-2019,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/no-gerrymandering-not-destroying-
democracy/312772/ ]
The point being: Even before five decades of gerrymandered congressional districts, congressional
races weren't as close as Cook might suggest.
In addition to gerrymandered districts, the Journal cites a rationale for the declining number of close
races .
Another factor in the declining number of competitive districts is that voters are dividing themselves geographically
more than they did 10 or 20 years ago, political observers say. Americans are now more likely to
live in communities where their neighbors share their political views . That steady, decades-long shift
produces more-partisan congressional seats.
That is mirrored by a study completed after last year's election, by Eric McGhee of The Monkey Cage. After the election, a common
complaint among Democrats, echoing Nolan's, was that Democrats won a majority of votes but a minority of seats. Which is true:
48.7 percent of the national House vote was Democratic, versus 47.6 for Republicans.
So McGhee modeled the 2012 race using the previous Congress' districts. (Redistricting generally occurs after each
Census, so 2012 used new boundaries nationally.)
Democrats do gain more seats under this simulation—seven more total— but fall far short of matching
their predicted vote share . The point should be clear: even under the most generous assumptions,
redistricting explains less than half the gap between vote share and seat share this election
cycle.
McGhee suggested that Democrats fare worse in part because of geography. "Democrats also do worse
because they are more concentrated in urban areas," he wrote. "They 'waste' votes on huge margins
there, when the party could put many of those votes to better use in marginal seats." In other words, Democrats move to cities and
overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. If Democrats want to re-take the House, they should move to
Wyoming.

Gerrymandering can be used for good – makes sure minorities are represented
Druke 17 [Galen Druke, FiveThirtyEight’s podcast producer and reporter, 12-14-2017, "Is
Gerrymandering The Best Way To Make Sure Black Voters Are Represented?," FiveThirtyEight,
accessed 7-24-2019, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-gerrymandering-the-best-way-to-
make-sure-black-voters-are-represented/ ]
At first glance, few things scream “gerrymander” like splitting the country’s largest historically black
university in two. That’s what happened at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University in 2016; a school that was
once in the state’s 12th Congressional District is now in the 6th and 13th. The school is in Greensboro, where 40 percent of the
population is black, and the city has also been divided in two. Both new districts are represented by white Republican men, and
students have rallied against the division.
But the new lines were actually instituted as part of a remedy for a previous racial
gerrymandering case . In 2016, a federal court struck down the old lines down, ruling that Republican lawmakers had
packed black voters, meaning minorities were too isolated in one district to be represented fairly statewide. (To make matters more
confusing, the entire state map is now being challenged in a partisan gerrymandering case.)
The back-and-forth over electoral boundaries has repeated itself for decades in Greensboro. Since
1990, the lines around the city have been redrawn six times even though there have been only
three rounds of normal post-census redistricting during that period. The lines have been argued before the
Supreme Court five times. In many ways, the changing lines in Greensboro illustrate a long-running debate over how to ensure
minority voters are represented in government.
This is the third installment of FiveThirtyEight’s podcast series “The Gerrymandering Project,” in which we travel around the country
to explore the effects of gerrymandering and what reformers are doing to change the redistricting process. In this episode, we focus
on racial gerrymandering in North Carolina.
As things stand today, partisan gerrymandering is not illegal, but racial gerrymandering is. But that doesn’t mean that everyone
agrees on what constitutes a racial gerrymander. The legal fight to define racial gerrymandering has raged for decades, in no small
part because the answer has major implications for each party.
At the heart of that debate are majority-minority districts. A 1986 Supreme Court ruling, Thornburg v. Gingles, established that
where racially polarized voting1 is present, it is illegal to dilute minority residents’ voting power, either intentionally or unintentionally.
States across the South then drew new majority-minority districts to ensure that black voters could elect their candidates of choice.
In many places, the newly drawn majority-minority districts elected those states’ first African-
American congressional representatives since Reconstruction.
It was a win for African-American representation, and also a win for Republicans. By grouping together black
voters, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic, the maps increased Republican electoral prospects in the surrounding districts. That
dynamic has encouraged Republicans to advocate for majority-minority districts, while Democrats have been more skeptical of
them.
In North Carolina, the debate over majority-minority districts often comes down to this complicated question: In a state where
African-Americans vote overwhelmingly for one party, is what’s best for African-Americans the same as what’s best for Democrats?

Even if gerrymandering is bad, it’s getting better – the CP isn’t necessary

Wehrman and Siegel 3/21 [Jessica Wehrman, Dispatch Washington Bureau, and Jim
Siegel, The Columbus Dispatch, 3-21-2019, “The bad? Ohio gerrymandering is among nation’s
worst. The good? It should get better,” Ashland Times-Gazette, accessed 7-24-2019,
https://www.times-gazette.com/news/20190321/bad-ohio-gerrymandering-is-among-nations-
worst-good-it-should-get-better ]
WASHINGTON — Ohio has some of the nation’s most-gerrymandered statehouse and congressional maps,
according to a new Associated Press analysis — a fact that comes as no surprise to those who have successfully pushed to reform
the district-drawing process after the next census.
With a firm grip on Ohio state government, including sizable majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans were able to draw
legislative and congressional maps with pinpoint precision, helping ensure they would maintain those majorities even if the political
tide turned against them for a cycle or two.
In Ohio House races last year, Republicans got 52 percent of the vote but won 61 percent of the districts, allowing them to continue
to hold a super-majority despite losing five seats. Based on data compiled by the Associated Press, Ohio’s gerrymandered House
districts allowed Republicans to win seven more seats than they otherwise should have judging by vote totals.
That means the House, according to the analysis, would be 54–46 Republican, instead of the current 61-
38, if the map were drawn fairly.
The GOP-drawn districts also protected Republicans in Ohio’s U.S. House delegation. Republicans got 52 percent of the vote but
won 75 percent of the seats — the same 12-4 margin that has existed since the current district maps were drawn in 2011. According
to the AP analysis, Ohio’s maps allowed Republicans to hold three more seats than they otherwise should have.
Michael Li, senior redistricting counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said Ohio has
one of the most “problematic” congressional maps in the nation, with an impenetrable 12–4 GOP advantage.
While Republicans hold all but one statewide nonjudicial office, he dismisses the notion that the
state is overwhelmingly Republican.
“Ohio may be trending Republican, but it’s not a 75 percent Republican state,” he said. The map drawn in 2011 was “a
very deliberate prioritization of politics over everything else.”
Richard Gunther, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University, said Ohio has been one of the worst actors in
gerrymandering by multiple standards.
Even a shift in voter preference from 2016 to 2018 couldn’t overcome gerrymandering. For example, he said, in Ohio, there was a
10.4 percent shift of votes for Republicans running for Congress in 2016 to votes for Democratic candidates in 2018. “Not one single
seat was flipped,” he noted.
In Ohio’s 12th District, where Republican Rep. Pat Tiberi’s retirement spurred a special election, there was a 15 percent shift of
Republican votes cast to Democratic votes cast, he said. It was not enough to change the party holding the seat.
Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, said the 2011 maps were drawn with “surgical precision,” as GOP
mapmakers used “a lot more information than just typical partisan data” to create maps so solid that they have remained unchanged
over the decade.
“When you have a robust, strong gerrymander, it makes it harder for the people who are marginalized to keep coming up with good
people to run,” she said.
Turcer and leaders of groups such as the League of Women Voters of Ohio hope that, while Republicans continue to hold all of
state government, new voter–approved processes for drawing legislative and congressional maps will significantly reduce partisan
gerrymandering and produce districts that better reflect the will of the electorate.
The goal of a congressional redistricting process approved by voters last May is for a map drawn with significant bipartisan support
— either by the legislature or, if that fails, a seven–member commission of three statewide officeholders and four legislators.
And in 2015, voters approved a new process for legislative districts, creating a seven-member commission with at least two
minority–party members. For a 10-year map to pass, it would take at least two minority-party votes, and the process says the
commission “shall attempt to draw” a map that does not primarily favor a political party and corresponds closely to the statewide
preferences of voters.
But before the congressional maps are redrawn again in 2021, federal judges in the 6th U.S. Circuit
will decide, based on a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters, ACLU and others, whether Ohio
Court of Appeals
has to redraw that map before the 2020 election. Arguments on that case were completed this month.
US Econ
 1NC – Tax Cuts CP
The United States Federal Government should
 Initiate tax cuts and rebates
 Deregulate financial institutions
 Increase infrastructure development

Those are key to spurring economic growth -

Depersio 19( Greg depersio, Greg began a career as an account executive for FleetOne, LLC,
a fuel card supplier, in 2005. His more than 13-year background also includes expertise in
search engine optimized (SEO) website content and marketing materials, "What Are Way
Economic growth can Be Achieved" Published: 7-8-19 DOA: 7-22-19 Wall-e
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/032415/what-are-some-ways-economic-growth-can-
be-achieved.asp
Tax Cuts and Tax Rebates Tax cuts and tax rebates are designed to put more money back into
the pockets of consumers. Ideally, these consumers spend a portion of that money at various businesses, which
increases the businesses' revenues, cash flows, and profits. Having more cash means
companies have the resources to procure capital, improve technology, grow, and expand. All of
these actions increase productivity, which grows the economy. Tax cuts and rebates,
proponents argue, allow consumers to stimulate the economy themselves by imbuing it with
more money. In 2017, the Trump administration proposed, and Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The legislation
lowered corporate taxes to 20%— the highest corporate income tax rate was 35% before the bill. Various personal income tax
brackets were lowered as well. The bill cost $1.5 trillion and is designed to increase economic growth for
the next ten years. As with any stimulus used to spur economic growth, it's often difficult to pinpoint how
much growth was created by the stimulus and how much was generated by other factors and market forces. Stimulating the
Economy With Deregulation Deregulation is the relaxing of rules and regulations imposed on an
industry or business. It became a centerpiece of economics in the United States under the
Reagan administration in the 1980s, when the federal government deregulated several industries, most notably
financial institutions. Many economists credit Reagan's deregulation with the robust economic growth that characterized the U.S.
during most of the 1980s and 1990s. Proponents of deregulation argue tight regulations constrain businesses and
prevent them from growing and operating to their full capabilities. This, in turn, slows production
and hiring, which inhibits GDP growth. However, economists who favor regulations blame deregulation and a lack of
government oversight for the numerous economic bubbles that expanded and subsequently burst during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Many economists cite that there was a lack of regulatory oversight leading up to the financial crisis of 2008. Subprime mortgages,
which are high-risk mortgages to borrowers with less-than-perfect credit, began to default in 2007. The mortgage industry collapsed,
leading to a recession and subsequent bailouts of several banks by the U.S. government. New regulations were implemented in the
years to follow that imposed increased capital requirements for banks, meaning they need more cash on hand to cover potential
losses from bad loans. Using Infrastructure to Spur Economic Growth Infrastructure spending occurs
when a local, state, or federal government spends money to build or repair the physical
structures and facilities needed for commerce and society as a whole to thrive. Infrastructure includes
roads, bridges, ports, and sewer systems. Economists who favor infrastructure spending as an economic catalyst argue that
having top-notch infrastructure increases productivity by enabling businesses to operate as
efficiently as possible. For example, when roads and bridges are abundant and in working
order, trucks spend less time sitting in traffic, and they don't have to take circuitous routes to traverse waterways.
Additionally, infrastructure spending creates jobs as workers must be hired to complete the green-
lighted projects. It is also capable of spawning new economic growth. For example, the construction of a
new highway might lead to other investments such as gas stations and retail stores opening to cater to motorists. During the Great
Recession, the Obama administration, along with Congress proposed and passed The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of
2009. The stimulus package was designed to spur economic growth in the economy since business and private investment was
waning. The Obama stimulus as it's commonly referred to included federal government spending exceeding $80 billion for
highways, bridges, and roads. The stimulus was designed to help create construction jobs that were hit hard due to the impact from
mortgage crisis on residential and commercial construction.
 2NC – Tax Cuts – Solvency
Tax cuts spur growth
Cloutier 19(Richard Cloutier, Richard has over 20 years of experience in the investing,
banking, and finance industry. For more than seven years, Richard has held the position of the
Vice President and Chief Investment Strategist at Washington Trust Bank. "How tax cuts
stimulate the Economy" Published:6-25-19 DOA:7-22-19 wall-e
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/tax_cuts.asp
Advocates of tax cuts argue that reducing taxes improves the economy by boosting spending; those who oppose them say that tax
cuts only help the rich because it can lead to a reduction in government services upon which lower income people rely. In other
words, there are two distinct sides to this economic balancing scale. The federal tax system relies on a number of
different types of taxes to generate revenues. The largest sources of funds is the individual
income tax and payroll tax. Approximately 80% of tax revenues are generated through these
taxes. Personal income taxes are levied against income, interest, dividends and capital gains,
with higher earners generally paying higher tax rates, while the the payroll tax is a tax levied at a
fixed percentage on salaries and wages, up to a certain limit and is paid equally by both employer and employee.
Payroll taxes have become an important source of revenue for the federal government and have
grown more quickly than income taxes as the government has raised rates and income limits. Commonly known as
the FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act) tax, the payroll tax is used to pay Social Security benefits,
Medicare and unemployment benefits. (For related reading, see Introduction To Social Security) In third comes
corporate taxes, comprising 10.6% of total taxes, and followed by excise taxes. Excise taxes are a form of federal sales tax, levied
on miscellaneous items such as gasoline and tobacco. They account for 3.1% of the total tax revenue. The federal
government uses tax policy to generate revenue and places the burden where it believes it will
have the least effect. However, the "flypaper theory" of taxation (the belief that the burden of the tax sticks to
where the government places the tax), often proves to be incorrect. Instead, tax shifting occurs. Shifting tax
burden describes the situation where the economic reaction to a tax causes prices and output in
the economy to change, thereby shifting part of the burden to others. An example of this shifting
took place when the government placed a sales tax on luxury goods in 1991, assuming the rich
could afford to pay the tax and would not change their spending habits. Unfortunately, demand
for some luxury items (highly elastic goods/services) dropped and industries such as personal
aircraft manufacturing and boat building suffered, causing layoffs in some sectors. If a tax is
levied on a non-price sensitive good or service — like cigarettes — it wouldn't lead to big
changes such as factory shutdowns and unemployment. Studies have shown that a 10%
increase in the price of cigarettes, only reduces demand by 4%. The tax imposed on luxury goods in 1991
was also 10%, but the tax revenue fell $97 million short of projection, and yacht retailers saw a 77% drop in sales. Regardless, tax
shifting should always be considered when setting tax policy.

Solve future growth even if effects aren’t immediate

Conard 19( Ed Conard American enterprise institute scholar, former ain capital partner. "Taxes
Pruned, the Economy Grows," Published: 3-7-19 DOA: 7-23-19 wall-e
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/03/25/republican-tax-cut-was-good-and-the-
deficits-dont-matter/
The CBO now expects the nominal gross domestic product to increase nearly $750 billion more
per year by 2020 than in its forecast prior to the tax cut. It originally attributed about one third of that growth to the tax-cut
legislation — even by that estimate, the cut more than pays for itself. The CBO expects that, through a combination
of real GDP growth and a burst of inflation, the cut will produce more tax revenue when the
middle-class tax cuts expire than would have been the case without the cut. The expected
increase in tax revenue, together with the elimination of the health-care mandate, which saves
more money than it costs, and other pushes and pulls, more than pays for the interest expense
from deficits that accumulate in the interim. That expense includes additional interest paid on all federal debt from
an expected rise in interest rates stemming from the tax cut. The eventual increase in tax revenue enables the
cut to pay off its debt gradually. With its financing costs covered and the debt accumulated from
the cut now declining, the legislation leaves future generations to enjoy more real after-tax GDP
than would have been the case without the tax cut. Distributional analysis indicates that households across all
income levels share these gains. Contrary to popular belief, a tax cut doesn’t need to recover its lost tax
revenues to make future generations more prosperous. That’s an illogically high standard used
as spin by opponents of tax cuts. If you borrow money to buy an asset that permanently
produces more income than the cost of the interest on the money you borrowed to buy the
asset, you and your children are made richer by the additional income the asset produces, not poorer by the
amount of the money you borrowed. That’s why investors make investments. The 2018 tax-cut legislation is no different.
Borrowing makes future generations poorer only if borrowers consume rather than invest the
proceeds, leaving future generations with no increased earning capacity to pay for the interest
on the debt. By increasing real GDP and collecting more in additional taxes than the incremental cost of its financing, the tax cut
makes future generations better off.
 2NC – Tax Cuts – Infrastructure Solvency

Tax cuts spur growth

Cloutier 19(Richard Cloutier, Richard has over 20 years of experience in the investing,
banking, and finance industry. For more than seven years, Richard has held the position of the
Vice President and Chief Investment Strategist at Washington Trust Bank. "How tax cuts
stimulate the Economy" Published:6-25-19 DOA:7-22-19 wall-e
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/tax_cuts.asp
Advocates of tax cuts argue that reducing taxes improves the economy by boosting spending; those who oppose them say that tax
cuts only help the rich because it can lead to a reduction in government services upon which lower income people rely. In other
words, there are two distinct sides to this economic balancing scale. The federal tax system relies on a number of
different types of taxes to generate revenues. The largest sources of funds is the individual
income tax and payroll tax. Approximately 80% of tax revenues are generated through these
taxes. Personal income taxes are levied against income, interest, dividends and capital gains,
with higher earners generally paying higher tax rates, while the the payroll tax is a tax levied at a
fixed percentage on salaries and wages, up to a certain limit and is paid equally by both employer and employee.
Payroll taxes have become an important source of revenue for the federal government and have
grown more quickly than income taxes as the government has raised rates and income limits. Commonly known as
the FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act) tax, the payroll tax is used to pay Social Security benefits,
Medicare and unemployment benefits. (For related reading, see Introduction To Social Security) In third comes
corporate taxes, comprising 10.6% of total taxes, and followed by excise taxes. Excise taxes are a form of federal sales tax, levied
on miscellaneous items such as gasoline and tobacco. They account for 3.1% of the total tax revenue. The federal
government uses tax policy to generate revenue and places the burden where it believes it will
have the least effect. However, the "flypaper theory" of taxation (the belief that the burden of the tax sticks to
where the government places the tax), often proves to be incorrect. Instead, tax shifting occurs. Shifting tax
burden describes the situation where the economic reaction to a tax causes prices and output in
the economy to change, thereby shifting part of the burden to others. An example of this shifting
took place when the government placed a sales tax on luxury goods in 1991, assuming the rich
could afford to pay the tax and would not change their spending habits. Unfortunately, demand
for some luxury items (highly elastic goods/services) dropped and industries such as personal
aircraft manufacturing and boat building suffered, causing layoffs in some sectors. If a tax is
levied on a non-price sensitive good or service — like cigarettes — it wouldn't lead to big
changes such as factory shutdowns and unemployment. Studies have shown that a 10%
increase in the price of cigarettes, only reduces demand by 4%. The tax imposed on luxury goods in 1991
was also 10%, but the tax revenue fell $97 million short of projection, and yacht retailers saw a 77% drop in sales. Regardless, tax
shifting should always be considered when setting tax policy.
 2NC – Tax Cuts – Author Indict
Framing of tax cuts is flawed – tax cuts spur long term growth not immediate
Conard 19( Ed Conard American enterprise institute scholar, former ain capital partner. "Taxes
Pruned, the Economy Grows," Published: 3-7-19 DOA: 7-23-19 wall-e
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/03/25/republican-tax-cut-was-good-and-the-
deficits-dont-matter/
Unfortunately, some zealous proponents of tax cuts foolishly promised that cuts would immediately
produce more tax revenues. Opponents of tax cuts seized on that standard — that a tax cut
hasn’t paid for itself until it has paid down all of its resulting debt — for propaganda purposes. It
is simply not the case that an investment that leads to a permanent increase in income large
enough to cover its financing cost need ever pay back its debt. A permanent increase in GDP
and tax revenues — what this legislation produces — produces a permanent increase in debt
capacity. Without this basic understanding of finance, all deficits look the same, with no apparent
difference between deficit-financed consumption and its opposite, legislation that increases GDP and fully
covers its financing cost, as this legislation does. Deficit-financed consumption increases debt without increasing America’s capacity
to finance the increased interest expense. That hurts future generations, unlike this tax-cut legislation. Misinformed deficit hawks
and opponents of tax cuts fail to differentiate between the two kinds of deficits. A more relevant comparison asks
whether this investment is better than alternative investment opportunities. It is surely the case
that the business-tax cuts on their own would have grown GDP without producing the large
deficits created by the middle-class tax cuts. The latter create little, if any, long-term growth. But it’s hardly obvious
that the legislation would have passed without the cuts for the middle class. Cuts that lower taxes for most voters, as this legislation
does, run the risk that lawmakers will extend the cuts beyond their stipulated expiration. For that reason and others, I opposed the
middle-class cuts. But analysis that avoids debating the legislation

Their authors are hacks – trump tax cuts are great

Conard 19( Ed Conard American enterprise institute scholar, former bain capital partner.
"Taxes Pruned, the Economy Grows," Published: 3-7-19 DOA: 7-23-19 wall-e
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/03/25/republican-tax-cut-was-good-and-the-
deficits-dont-matter/
its entirety — legislation that includes not only cuts but also a partial expiration of those cuts and a rollback of
the health-care mandate, both measures contributing substantially to deficit reduction — deceives
the public. Saying that the tax-cut legislation is risky is different from saying that the enacted
legislation doesn’t pay for itself. Every investor knows that gains come with risk. There is no free lunch. Another
deceptive strategy used by opponents of the cut is to conflate GDP levels and growth rates. The
cut produces a one-time increase in GDP that unfolds gradually over many years. Once
increased, GDP returns to its prior long-term growth rate, but it now grows from a permanently higher level.
This permanent long-term gain is somewhat obfuscated by the CBO’s forecast. Reductions in
the business-tax rate increase the rate of investment, which gradually increases GDP. At the same
time, reductions in the personal-tax rate lead taxpayers to work harder until those cuts expire. This causes short-term
growth to overshoot expected long-term growth. Growth declines at the end of the forecast
period, when the personal-tax cuts expire and work rates return to pre-cut levels. The business-tax
cuts lead to a permanent increase in GDP. Eventually, growth, together with the expiration of the personal-tax cuts and the rollback
of the health-care mandate, produce enough additional revenue and cost reduction to more than pay for the additional financing cost
that occurs as a result of the cut. This surplus eventually produces more deficit reduction than would
have been the case without the legislation. From the broader perspective, the relevant question is
whether the Republican-controlled Congress passed legislation that made future generations
more prosperous. It did that and more. The tax cut not only pays for itself, but the CBO now
expects nominal GDP to be much higher than the increase needed to pay for the tax cut.
 2NC – Solvency – Infrastructre
Infrastructure is key to all aspects of the economy and competitiveness ---
creating national infrastructure bank avoids funding issues
Masters 11(Jonathan Masters writes on foreign policy and national security and his work has
appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, and Bloomberg. Masters has a BA in political science
from Emory "Infrastructure Investment and U.S. Competitiveness," Published: april-5-11 DOA:
7-23-19 https://www.cfr.org/expert-roundup/infrastructure-investment-and-us-competitiveness
Most experts agree the United States must address the nation’s aging network of roads,
bridges, airports, railways, power grids, water systems, and other public works to maintain its
global economic competitiveness. In 2010, President Barack Obama proposed a national infrastructure
bank (PDF) that would leverage public and private capital to fund improvements, and in April 2011 a
bipartisan coalition of senators put forward a similar concept (NYT). Four experts discuss how the United States can best move
forward on infrastructure development. Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution suggests focusing on increasing exports, low-
carbon technology, innovation, and opportunity. Renowned financier Felix Rohatyn endorses the concept of a federally owned but
independently operated national infrastructure bank that would provide a "guidance-system" for federal dollars. Infrastructure policy
authority Richard Little argues that adequate revenue streams are the "first step in addressing this problem," stressing "revenue-
based models" as essential. Deputy Mayor of New York City Stephen Goldsmith says that the "most promising ideas" in this policy
area involve public-private partnerships. Robert Puentes Infrastructure is central to U.S. prosperity and
global competitiveness. It matters because state-of-the-art transportation, telecommunications,
and energy networks-- the connective tissue of the nation --are critical to moving goods ,
ideas, and workers quickly and efficiently and providing a safe , secure, and competitive
climate for business operation s. But for too long, the nation’s infrastructure policies have been
kept separate and apart from the larger conversation about the U.S. economy. The benefits of
infrastructure are frequently framed around short-term goals about job creation. While the focus
on employment growth is certainly understandable, it is not the best way to target and deploy infrastructure dollars. And it means so-
called "shovel ready projects" are all we can do while long-term investments in the smart grid, high-speed rail, and modern ports are
stuck at the starting gate. We often fail to make infrastructure investments in an economy-enhancing way. This is why the proposal
for a national infrastructure bank is so important. So in addition to the focus on job growth in the short term, we need to
rebalance the American economy for the long term on several key elements: higher exports ,
to take advantage of rising global demand ; low-carbon technology , to lead the clean-energy
revolution; innovation, to spur growth through ideas and their deployment; and greater
opportunity, to reverse the troubling, decades-long rise in inequality. Infrastructure is
fundamental to each of those elements. Yet while we know America’s infrastructure needs are substantial, we
have not been able to pull together the resources to make the requisite investments. And when we do, we often fail to make
infrastructure investments in an economy-enhancing way. This is why the proposal for a national infrastructure
bank is so important. If designed and implemented appropriately, it would be a targeted
mechanism to deal with critical new investments on a merit basis, while adhering to market forces and
leveraging the private capital we know is ready to invest here in the United States. Building the next economy will require deliberate
and purposeful action, across all levels of government, in collaboration with the private and nonprofit sectors. Infrastructure is a big
piece of that. Felix G. Rohatyn While America’s economic competitors and partners around the world
make massive investments in public infrastructure, our nation’s roads and bridges, schools and
hospitals, airports and railways, ports and dams, waterlines, and air-control systems are rapidly
and dangerously deteriorating. China, India, and European nations are spending--or have spent--the
equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars on efficient public transportation, energy, and water
systems. Meanwhile, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated in 2005 that it would take $1.6 trillion
simply to make U.S. infrastructure dependable and safe. The obvious, negative impact of this situation on our
global competitiveness, quality of life, and ability to create American jobs is a problem we no longer can ignore.
 2NC – AT: Infrastructure Links to Politics
Both parties like infrastructure bills - republicans think they give them power and
it gives dems leverage for bills like the plan
Leinberger 17(Chris Leinberger - Chris Leinberger is a land use strategist, developer, teacher,
consultant and author. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at The Brookings Institution "The Politics
of Infrastructure," Published: 3-13-17 DOA:7-24-19
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-politics-of-infrastructure/
About the only issue on which Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agreed during the 2016 presidential race was the need to rebuild America’s
Trump proposed spending twice as much on
infrastructure—roads, bridges, mass-transit systems, and the like. In fact,
infrastructure as Clinton did. That endeared him to his base voters, who saw it as a concrete
(literally) manifestation of his promise to “make America great again.” The country’s infrastructure is certainly in
sorry shape. The American Society of Civil Engineers rates the overall condition of our bridges as C+ and our roads and mass transit systems as D.
Many of these structures, built decades ago, are reaching the end of their useful lives. Under pressure from traditional conservatives in Congress, who
a big push on
are no fans of big domestic spending projects, Trump agreed to defer infrastructure until after his first 100 days in office. But
the issue by the administration clearly is coming. Indeed, Trump has profound political and
personal reasons to fulfill the promise he made during the campaign. His whole professional identity, after all,
revolves around the creation of steel and concrete structures (usually built by others) with his name on them. And an infrastructure
build-out of the size he has talked about— upwards of $1 trillion—would surely juice an already
growing economy and provide well-paying jobs for many of the non-college-educated white male voters who supported him.
Advertisement Moreover, some close Trump advisers see infrastructure as a way to pull Democratic
voters, including some minorities, into a new political coalition that will remake the Republican
Party and keep it in power for decades. “With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest
opportunity to rebuild everything,” Trump campaign CEO and now chief White House strategist Steve Bannon told the Hollywood
Reporter soon after the elections. “Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up . We’re just going to throw it up against the
wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—
conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.” Such grandiose political hopes aside,
many Democratic lawmakers are clearly open to working with Trump. In fact, Senate Democrats have proposed spending the same amount on
infrastructure as Trump has: $1 trillion. That is far more than most GOP lawmakers are comfortable spending. But precisely because of that Republican
resistance, Trumpwill almost certainly need large numbers of Democratic votes to pass any
substantive infrastructure bill. That means Democrats likely will have significant leverage in
determining the shape of such legislation. What should Democrats demand in return for their
support? For one thing, that Trump drop the idea his advisers floated in November for $85 billion in new tax credits for infrastructure investors.
The private sector must be involved in America’s infrastructure build-out, but tax credits are a very expensive way of making that happen. Tax credits
attract private investors and corporations needing high rates of return to offset their tax liabilities, returns in the range of 18 to 35 percent annually. But
infrastructure investments don’t typically produce those kinds of high returns unless the risks are somehow shifted onto others, typically taxpayers. With
interest rates at 3 percent, it’s much cheaper and less risky to the public for the federal government to simply borrow the money and have it paid back
by local sources, both public and private. Even more importantly, liberals should recognize that it is no longer 2009. Back then, to stabilize an economy
in free-fall, Democrats passed a massive stimulus bill with tens of billions of dollars devoted to whatever “shovel ready” projects state transportation
departments happened to have on the shelf—widening interstates, paving rural roads, etc.
 2NC – Solvency – Infrastructure – Inequality

The CP also solves inequality – infrastructure helps wages in low income

communities
Pressman 19(Steve Pressman - an American economist. He is a former Professor of
Economics and Finance at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, NJ "Three ways
$2trillion for Infrastructure can fight inequality too" Published: may-8-19 DOA:7-24-19
https://www.salon.com/2019/05/08/3-ways-2-trillion-for-infrastructure-can-fight-inequality-
too_partner/
A sudden infusion of infrastructure spending could benefit all Americans, creating good jobs and
higher incomes for many. Decrepit infrastructure costs each U.S. household an average of
$3,400 every year due to productivity losses, higher transportation costs and other problems, according to the
ASCE. That amounts to about $4 trillion in total over a decade, plus 2.5 million in lost jobs. It can also
result in lost lives or severe health risks, such as when a bridge collapses or lead from an old pipe enters the water supply. That’s
likely why the public overwhelmingly supports more spending on infrastructure – and why the deal between Trump and the
Democrats finally came together. But it’s unclear whether Congress will ultimately agree to spend the promised $2 trillion – or even
whether that’ll be enough. So it’s important to establish spending priorities. Spending in areas that will help
struggling working and middle-class families hurt by ever-rising economic inequality would be a good
place to start. As research by myself and others has shown, inequality makes almost every aspect of human life
worse, from infant mortality and crime to politics. 1. The water crisis That’s why a top priority should be
addressing the lack of potable water in many parts of the country. Water is necessary for basic human survival. And unsafe
water puts people’s health and even their lives at risk. This has long-term consequences,
especially for children. Furthermore, it reduces earnings and increases health care costs, which
are ultimately paid for by everyone through lower tax collections and higher insurance premiums. The ASCE
report gave America’s drinking water a D grade due to all the waste and risks from the nation’s ancient, leaky and corroding piping
system. And it’s a problem that primarily afflicts poor communities, like Flint, Michigan. Affluent
communities usually have the political power to ensure safe drinking water and the money to
pay slightly higher taxes for clean water if necessary. Low-income neighborhoods are usually
neighborhoods with little political clout and will suffer most from water problems. Low-income areas
are also less able to cope with undrinkable water and afford the costs of replacing tap water with bottled water. And people living in
poor neighborhoods lack the ability to move, especially if they own homes that declined sharply in value because of water problem,
as happened in Flint.
 1NC – H1B CP
Text: The United States federal government should increase the cap on H1B and
EB visas to meet the needs of businesses

The counterplan solves – increasing the cap on H1B visas improves the economy and solves
better than the affirmative
Salmon 8 (Diem salmon - Health policy fellow, The Heritage Foundation, “Increasing the
Cap for H-1B Visas Would Help the Economy,” “published: 3-31-2008 DOA:7-23-19 wall-
e https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/increasing-the-cap-h-1b-visas-would-
help-the-economy

Starting on April 1, any foreigner in the world who has a specialized skill with a college degree or higher will have only one day to apply for a
U.S. work visa for fiscal year (FY) 2009. After that, many
experts predict that the cap for H-1B visas will be met,
requiring foreigners to wait another 12 months before applying again and leaving American companies
without needed workers. H-1B visas are given to highly educated foreigners who are sponsored by American employers. As the
law currently stands, a maximum of 65,000 visas is given each fiscal year . Admitting such a low
number of qualified workers hurts the high-tech industry in the United States and pushes the smartest people to work in competing countries
like China. Some U.S companies that are desperate for workers, like Microsoft, have moved certain branches to Canada and Mexico.
Representatives Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and Lamar Smith (R-TX) have recognized the gravity of the problem and have introduced similar bills
raising the cap for H-1B visas. Raising
the cap is a necessary first step, but more should be done to make H-1B
visas flexible. Their number should reflect the economy's need for high-tech workers- not arbitrary
limits set by Congress. As with other work visas, employers must navigate highly complicated
procedures to hire workers on an H-1B visa. The application process involves several U.S. departments and is often a
bureaucratic nightmare. Despite these obstacles, the visas are popular with employers. Congress
has tried to fix the H-1B cap
before, but these fixes were temporary and largely ineffective. The cap was raised to 115,000 visas in 1999 and to
195,000 visas in 2001. Because of the pitfalls of navigating the application process, combined with the economic slowdown of 2002, not all
of the visas authorized were issued in FY 2003. As a result, an excess of 117,000 visas was discarded at the end of
the year. Congress lowered the cap back to 65,000 for FY 2003. Since that year, employers have used every authorized visa. Employers have
also exhausted the annual H-1B visa supply at a faster rate. In 2007, employers used up the entire quota less than a day after U.S. Citizen and
Immigration Services (USCIS) started accepting applications, and USCIS conducted a lottery to determine which workers would receive visas.
Not all H-1B visas are counted against the cap . The first 20,000 H-1B visas issued to workers with a master's degree or higher
are not deducted from the 65,000 cap.Employees of universities are similarly exempt. On the other hand, Singapore and Chile have a
guaranteed 6,800 visas, which are counted against the 65,000 cap. Increasing the cap on H-1B visas creates new jobs for
American workers, not just H-1B immigrants. Employees do not compete for a fixed number of
jobs so that when more H-1B workers come to the United States, an equal number of
Americans lose their jobs. Instead, businesses create jobs when they grow and shed jobs when they
shrink . Currently, the economy has a severe shortage of workers for many high-skilled positions. The unemployment rate in computer and
mathematical occupations, like computer programming, was 2.1 percent in 2007-essentially full employment after accounting for workers
between jobs.[2] There
are not enough high-tech workers in America to fill the jobs that employers want
them to do. By increasing the H-1B cap, Congress would allow companies to fill vital positions and
enable them to expand within the United States, which avoids the problem of companies outsourcing
work or moving overseas.
H1B visas are net better for the economy – immigrants allow for a positive impact on the
economy
AIC 16 (American Immigration Council, “The H-1B Visa Program: A Primer on the
Program and Its Impact on Jobs, Wages, and the Economy” Published: 2016 DOA:7-23-
19 https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa-program-fact-
sheet

foreign workers fill a critical need —particularly in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math
In today’s labor market,
(STEM) fields. Many opponents of the H-1B visa seek to pit native-born workers against their foreign-born colleagues. In reality, workers
do not necessarily compete against each other for a fixed number of jobs . The United States has created a
dynamic and powerful economy, and immigrants of all types and skills, from every corner of the globe, have worked with native-born workers
to build it. Skilled
immigrants’ contributions to the U.S. economy help create new jobs and new
opportunities for economic expansion. Indeed, H-1B workers positively impact our economy and the
employment opportunities of native-born workers . Despite suggestions to the contrary, the overwhelming
evidence shows that H-1B workers do not drive down wages of native-born workers, with some studies
showing a positive impact on wages overall .  From the creation of the H-1B program in 1990 to 2010, H-1B-driven
increases in STEM workers were associated with a significant increase in wages for
college-educated, U.S.-born workers in 219 U.S. cities . A one percentage point increase in foreign STEM
workers’ share of a city’s total employment was associated with increases in wages of 7 to 8 percentage points paid to both STEM and non-
STEM college-educated natives, while non-college educated workers saw an increase of 3 to 4 percentage points. From 2009 to 2011, wage
growth for U.S.-born workers with at least a bachelor’s degree was nominal , but wage growth
for workers in occupations with large numbers of H-1B petitions was substantially higher. For example, in the Computer Systems Design and
Related Services category, there has been a 5.5 percent wage growth since 1990 and a 7 percent wage growth since 2009. In comparison, wage
growth across all industries has been 0.8 percent since 1990 and 1.6 percent since 2009. On average, H-1B workers earn higher
wages than employed U.S.-born workers with bachelor’s degrees : $76,356 compared to $67,301, including in areas
like computer and information technology, engineering, healthcare, and post-secondary education. When comparing workers of the same age
cohort and occupation, H-1B workers earn higher wages than their native-born counterparts.
Specifically, in 17 out of 20 age cohort and occupation groups, wages for H-1B workers are higher than non-H-1B workers. Factors such as
gender, marital status, and ethnicity play a larger role than citizenship or immigration status for wages in the tech and finance industries—
industries that use a large number of H-1B visas. A worker’s geographic region also accounts for significant differences in wages.
 2NC – H1B – Solvency
The counterplan solves – increasing the cap on H1B visas improves the economy
and solves better than the affirmative
Salmon 8 (Diem salmon - Health policy fellow, The Heritage Foundation,
“Increasing the Cap for H-1B Visas Would Help the Economy,” “published: 3-31-
2008 DOA:7-24-19 https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/increasing-the-
cap-h-1b-visas-would-help-the-economy
Starting on April 1, any foreigner in the world who has a specialized skill with a college degree or higher will have only one day to
many experts predict that the cap for H-1B visas
apply for a U.S. work visa for fiscal year (FY) 2009. After that,
will be met, requiring foreigners to wait another 12 months before applying again and leaving
American companies without needed workers . H-1B visas are given to highly educated foreigners who are
As the law currently stands, a maximum of 65,000 visas is
sponsored by American employers.
given each fiscal year. Admitting such a low number of qualified workers hurts the high-tech industry in the United
States and pushes the smartest people to work in competing countries like China. Some U.S companies that are desperate for
workers, like Microsoft, have moved certain branches to Canada and Mexico. Representatives Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and Lamar
Raising
Smith (R-TX) have recognized the gravity of the problem and have introduced similar bills raising the cap for H-1B visas.
the cap is a necessary first step, but more should be done to make H-1B visas flexible. Their
number should reflect the economy's need for high-tech workers-not arbitrary limits set
by Congress. As with other work visas, employers must navigate highly complicated
procedures to hire workers on an H-1B visa. The application process involves several U.S. departments
Congress has tried to
and is often a bureaucratic nightmare. Despite these obstacles, the visas are popular with employers.
fix the H-1B cap before, but these fixes were temporary and largely ineffective . The cap was raised to
115,000 visas in 1999 and to 195,000 visas in 2001. Because of the pitfalls of navigating the application process, combined with the
economic slowdown of 2002, not all of the visas authorized were issued in FY 2003. As a result,
an excess of 117,000 visas was discarded at the end of the year. Congress lowered the cap back to 65,000 for FY 2003. Since that
year, employers have used every authorized visa. Employers have also exhausted the annual H-1B visa supply at a faster rate. In
2007, employers used up the entire quota less than a day after U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) started accepting
applications, and USCIS conducted a lottery to determine which workers would receive visas. Not all H-1B visas are
counted against the cap . The first 20,000 H-1B visas issued to workers with a master's degree or higher are not
deducted from the 65,000 cap.Employees of universities are similarly exempt. On the other hand, Singapore and Chile have a
Increasing the cap on H-1B visas creates new
guaranteed 6,800 visas, which are counted against the 65,000 cap.
jobs for American workers, not just H-1B immigrants . Employees do not compete for a
fixed number of jobs so that when more H-1B workers come to the United States,
an equal number of Americans lose their jobs. Instead, businesses create jobs when
they grow and shed jobs when they shrink . Currently, the economy has a severe shortage of workers for many
high-skilled positions. The unemployment rate in computer and mathematical occupations, like computer programming, was 2.1
percent in 2007-essentially full employment after accounting for workers between jobs.[2]  There
are not enough high-
tech workers in America to fill the jobs that employers want them to do. By increasing the H-1B
cap, Congress would allow companies to fill vital positions and enable them to expand within
the United States, which avoids the problem of companies outsourcing work or moving
overseas.

Helps the economy – its critical to investment and innovation

Hernandez 18( Professor Exequiel (Zeke) Hernandez is the Max and Bernice Garchik Family
Presidential Assistant Professor. "Where Immigrants Go, Economic Growth Follows," Published:
8-21-19 DOA: 7-24-19 https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/economic-debate-
immigration-reform/
In America’s heated debate over immigration, there’s plenty of divisive rhetoric punctuated by
strong emotions and precious few facts. Immigrants have been characterized as criminals who take well-paying jobs
from Americans and damage the economy. President Donald Trump was elected, in part, on his promises to
build a border wall with Mexico, to ban Muslims from entering the country, and to narrow the path to citizenship. Since
taking office, his administration has implemented policy changes that increase scrutiny of
immigrants, including not extending work permits or protections for certain nationalities and
tightening visas for high-skilled workers. While the measures have led to numerous lawsuits and more shouting
matches among TV pundits, effective reform remains elusive. That’s because the debate often fails to focus more broadly on the
whole economic picture, according to Wharton management professor Exequiel Hernandez. In a new brief for the Penn Wharton
Public Policy Initiative, Hernandez explained that jobs and wages are only part of the story. His research shows that immigrants
have a powerful effect on both capital investment and innovation, and their presence in a
community can positively influence a firm’s operations. All these factors can lead to greater
economic growth, suggesting that policymakers should consult with firms before making decisions regarding immigration.
“The bigger picture here is that the economy isn’t just powered by jobs and wages, it’s also
powered by capital investment and innovation that makes both workers and capital more
productive — and all three of those are affected by immigration,” Hernandez said. “You can’t pull one lever back and not hurt the
other two. “ Hernandez spoke about the topic on the Knowledge@Wharton radio show, which airs on Wharton Business Radio on
SiriusXM. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)
 2NC – H1B – AT: Links to Politics
Both conservatives and liberals like the plan
Fox news 17( Fox News is an American pay television news channel. It is owned by the Fox
News Group "H1-B critics urge Trump to reform visa they say takes jobs from US workers," 3-
16-17 DOA: 7-24-19 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/h1-b-critics-urge-trump-to-reform-visa-
they-say-takes-jobs-from-us-workers
Almost 1 million jobs in the United States are held by foreigners on an H-1B visa , a temporary permit
for highly skilled workers, according to an eye-popping study by Goldman Sachs. President Trump has been highly
critical of the program and has suggested he would scale it back. Critics , like Trump, say companies
abuse it to hire cheap labor. Those critical of the program say the time is now for Trump to reform it . “We
estimate that 900,000 to 1 million individuals are working under H-1B visas in the U.S. today,”
said the Goldman Sachs study, which was published in February, “based on the assumption that most existing
visas are renewed for a second term, and that about two-thirds of qualified H-1B visa holders
eventually apply for a green card.” Last week, when asked about progress on H-1B visa reform, Press Secretary Sean
Spicer said Trump was reviewing the issue. He did not offer a timetable on when Trump would make
changes to the visa program but an executive order revamping it is reportedly under review. “ The president's
actions that he's taken in terms of his executive order and other revamping of immigration policy have focused on
our border security , keeping our country safe, our people safe. And then, obviously, whether it's H-1B visas
or the other one – spousal visas – other areas of student visas,” Spicer said. “I think there is a natural desire
to have a full look at – a comprehensive look at that.” The H-1B visa is an employment-based, non-immigrant visa category for
temporary workers. To obtain one, an employer must offer a foreigner a job and then apply for his or her H-1B visa petition with the
U.S. Immigration Department. Under the visa, the foreigner is allowed to work but is required to return home after five years – but
the work permit could be extended. The visa was created so companies could find workers in hard-to-fill, highly specialized
positions.

The trump administration likes high skilled visas

Lanard 19(Noah Lanard reporter at Mother Jones "Trump wanted to cut immigration. Now he
just wants to shift it to other parts of the world.," 5-16-19 DOA:7-24-19
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/05/trump-wanted-to-cut-immigration-now-he-just-
wants-to-shift-it-to-other-parts-of-the-world/
Here’s what is known about Kushner’s plan, which is not an actual bill and may never become
one. It would boost skills-based immigration from 12 percent to 57 percent of total immigration,
while keeping overall legal immigration at about 1.1 million green cards per year . Prospective immigrants would be
awarded points based on criteria such as offers for high-paying jobs, English language skills,
and advanced degrees. To offset the nearly fivefold increase in skills-based immigration, Trump wants to eliminate the
diversity visa lottery, which provides 50,000 green cards per year to citizens of countries with low rates of immigration to the United
States. The plan would also limit family immigration, which allows relatives of legal US residents to immigrate, to children and
spouses. That would stop immigrants from sponsoring siblings, and potentially adult children and parents, for green cards. If the
new high-skilled immigrants are anything like today’s, the main effect of the proposal would be a
large increase in the number of immigrants from Asia. China, India, and the Philippines, are
home to more than 80 percent of the people outside the United States whose employment-
based visas have been approved by the State Department but are being held up by annual caps
on how many visas can go to each country. Among people who are already in the United States and waiting to
obtain permanent legal status—often immigrants working on temporary visas—78 percent were from India last year and 17 percent
were from China. Just 5 percent were from the rest of the world

A majority of voters like high skilled immigration – the average is higher than
other countries
Connor 19(Phillip Connor senior researcher at Pew Research Center. He is an expert on
international migration, immigrant integration and immigrant religion in the United States,
"Majority Of Americans Support High Skilled Immigration" Published: 1-22-19 DOA:7-24-19
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/01/22/majority-of-u-s-public-supports-high-skilled-
immigration/
Like publics in other economically advanced countries with a high number and share of immigrants, a majority of
Americans support encouraging the immigration of high-skilled people into the United States,
according to a new survey of 12 countries by Pew Research Center in spring 2018.1 Roughly eight-in-ten
U.S. adults (78%) support encouraging highly skilled people to immigrate and work in the U.S., a
percentage that roughly matches or is exceeded by Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada,
Germany and Australia. Smaller majorities share this positive view of high-skilled immigration in France, Spain and the
Netherlands. Among the countries analyzed, only in Israel (42%) and Italy (35%) do fewer than half back high-skilled immigration.
Chart showing that many who want fewer immigrants support high-skilled immigration. Across the 12 countries, younger
adults, more highly educated adults and adults with higher incomes tend to be more supportive
of encouraging highly skilled people to immigrate to their countries – findings that are generally in line with
other surveys on attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. (See Appendix B for demographic breakdowns.)
 2NC – H1B – AT: Job Loss
Its low wages that hurt the economy – there’s actually a labor shortage now
Frank 18(Thomas Frank - American political analyst, historian, and journalist "It’s not wage
rises that are a problem for the economy – it’s the lack of them," Published: 7-12-18 DOA:7-24-
19 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/12/wage-rises-problem-economy--
vacant-jobs-unfilled-threatens-economy
In recent weeks media outlets in the US have been fretting over what would ordinarily be considered good news – the roaring American
economy, which has brought low unemployment and, in some places, a labour shortage. Owners
and managers have complained about their problems in finding people to fill low-wage positions. “Nobody wants to do manual labour any more,” as
one trade association grandee told the Baltimore Sun, and so the manual labour simply goes undone. Company bosses talk about
the things they have done to fix the situation: the ads they’ve published; the guest-worker visas
for which they’ve applied; how they are going into schools to encourage kids to learn
construction skills or to drive trucks. The Wall Street Journal reports on the amazing perks that plumbing companies are now
offering new hires: quiet rooms, jetski trips, pottery classes, free breakfast, free beer. But nothing seems to work. Blame for the labour
shortage is sprayed all over the US map: opioids are said to be the problem. And welfare,
and inadequate parking spaces, and a falling birthrate, and mass incarceration, and – above all
– the Trump administration’s immigration policies. But no one really knows for sure. So the labour
shortage runs on, frightening and out of control, with journalists trying to build it into some kind of nightmare scenario. There is a “crab crisis” in the
Chesapeake Bay region. There’s no one to harvest the strawberries in Ohio. A beloved bakery outside Denver has closed. Plans for a retirement
community near Tucson, Arizona, have been cancelled. Managers and officials alike demand that the government furnish them with the cheap
workforce to which they are accustomed. The textbook solution to the labour shortage problem – paying workers more – rarely merits more than a line
or two, if it’s mentioned at all. So unwilling are business leaders to talk about or consider this obvious answer that Neel Kashkari, the president of the
Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, scolded them last year: “If you’re not raising wages, then it just sounds like whining.” When the necessity of higher
wages is acknowledged, however, it only seems to crank the whining to a higher pitch. Take for instance the Washington Post’s front-page panic
attack: “Trucker shortage poses economic threat”. Here the problem of trucks sitting idle for lack of drivers is compounded by the even more infernal
possibility that those drivers, when they finally do show up, might be in a position to bargain for better pay, a prospect described as “perilous” because
it could drive up prices “so quickly that the country faces uncontrolled inflation, which can easily lead to a recession”.
 2NC – H1B – AT: Brain Drain
Brain drain is wrong – immigration flows and migration incentives check
Clemens 9(Michael A. Clemens Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development and
an Affiliated Associate Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University. David McKenzie is
a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank "Think Again: Brain
Drain," Publihsed: 10-22-9 DOA:7-24-19 https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/22/think-again-
brain-drain/
Allowing skilled emigration is stealing human capital from poor countries." No. Many of the same countries courted by the United
States through aid and trade deals complain bitterly of the "brain drain" of their doctors, scientists, and engineers to the United
States and other rich countries. If correct, these complaints would mean that current immigration policy amounts to
counterproductive foreign policy. Thankfully, however, the flow of skilled emigrants from poor to rich parties can
actually benefit both parties. This common idea that skilled emigration amounts to "stealing"
requires a cartoonish set of assumptions about developing countries. First, it requires us to
assume that developing countries possess a finite stock of skilled workers, a stock depleted by
one for every departure. In fact, people respond to the incentives created by migration:
Enormous numbers of skilled workers from developing countries have been induced to acquire
their skills by the opportunity of high earnings abroad. This is why the Philippines, which sends
more nurses abroad than any other developing country, still has more nurses per capita at
home than Britain does. Recent research has also shown that a sudden, large increase in skilled emigration
from a developing country to a skill-selective destination can cause a corresponding sudden
increase in skill acquisition in the source country. Second, believing that skilled emigration
amounts to theft from the poor requires us to assume that skilled workers themselves are not
poor. In Zambia, a nurse has to get by on less than $1,500 per year — measured at U.S. prices, not Zambian ones — and a
doctor must make ends meet with less than $5,500 per year, again at U.S. prices. If these were your annual wages, facing U.S.
price levels, you would likely consider yourself destitute. Third, believing that a person’s choice to emigrate
constitutes "stealing" requires problematic assumptions about that person’s rights. The United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that all people have an unqualified right to leave any country. Skilled migrants
are not "owned" by their home countries, and should have the same rights to freedom of movement as professionals in rich
countries.
Aff
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Infrastructure
Infrastructure doesn’t provide short term stimulus - planning constraints check
immediate growth
De Rugy 11( Veronique DE Rugy senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George
Mason University. "Why Infrastructure Spending Is a Bad Bet," Published:9-8-11 DOA:7-24-19
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-infrastructure-spending-bad-bet-veronique-de-rugy/
No one disputes that American public works need improving, and economists have long recognized the value of
infrastructure. Roads, bridges, airports, and canals are the conduits through which goods are
exchanged. However, whatever its merits, infrastructure spending is unlikely to provide much of
a stimulus — and it certainly won’t provide the boost that the president will promise the American people tonight. For one thing,
even though Mark Zandi claims that the bang for the buck is significant when the government spends $1 on infrastructure ($1.44 in
growth), that’s just his opinion. The reality is that economists are far from having reached a consensus on what the actual return on
infrastructure spending is. As economists Eric Leeper, Todd Walker, and Shu-Chum Yang put it in a recent paper for the IMF:
“Economists have offered an embarrassingly wide range of estimated multipliers.” Among respected economists, some find larger
multipliers and some find negative ones. (Thanks Matt Mitchell for this great paper). Second, according to Keynesian
economists, for spending to be stimulative, it has to be timely, targeted, and temporary.
Infrastructure spending isn’t any of that. That’s because infrastructure projects involve planning,
bidding, contracting, construction, and evaluation. Only $28 billion of the $45 billion in DOT money included in the
stimulus has been spent so far. We know that the stimulus money wasn’t targeted toward the areas that were
hit the most by the recession, but even if the funding were targeted, it still might not be
stimulative. First, the same level of job poaching from existing jobs would have happened; construction
workers tend to be highly specialized, and skilled workers rarely suffer from high unemployment.
Many of the areas that were hardest hit by the recession are in decline because they have been producing goods and services that
are not, and will never be, in great demand. The overall value added by improving their roads is probably a lot less than that of new
infrastructure in growing areas that might have relatively little unemployment but do have great demand for more roads, schools,
and other types of long-term infrastructure. As for being temporary — which stimulus spending needs to be to work — what the
president will propose tonight is likely to cost the American people money for a very long time. Infrastructure spending
tends to suffer from massive cost overruns, waste, fraud, and abuse. A comprehensive study examining
20 nations on five continents (“Underestimating Costs in Public Works Projects: Error or Lie?” by Bent Flyvbjerg, Mette K. Skamris
Holm, and Søren L. Buhl) found that nine out of ten public-works projects come in over budget. Cost overruns
routinely range from 50 to 100 percent of the original estimate. For rail, the average cost is 44.7 percent greater than the estimated
cost at the time the decision was made. For bridges and tunnels, the equivalent figure is 33.8 percent, for roads 20.4 percent. I
should also add that I think it’s a mistake to assume that it is the role of the federal government to pay for roads and highway
expansions. With very few exceptions, most roads, bridges, and even highways are local projects (state projects at most) by nature.
The federal government shouldn’t have anything to do with them.
 2AC – AT: Infrastructure – Links to 2020
Infrastructure deals cause political fights that hurt the economy
Tomer and Fishbane 19(Lara Fishbane is a senior research assistant with the Metropolitan
Policy Program at Brookings. Fellow - Metropolitan Policy Program "Political gridlock blocks
infrastructure progress and costs our economy" Published 4-25-19 DOA: 7-22-19
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/04/25/political-gridlock-blocks-infrastructure-
progress-and-costs-our-economy/
Infrastructure talks are heating up again. In just the last week, 2020 presidential candidate Amy
Klobuchar pitched a trillion-dollar infrastructure proposal while the Trump administration and
Congress continue to flirt with major infrastructure packages. This kind of thinking reflects clear public support
for greater investment. While these concepts and conversations suggest bipartisanship could deliver
infrastructure reform, the current state of national politics delivers anything but an infrastructure
boost. Put bluntly, when political discord leads to infrastructure failure, it doesn’t just deepen our
distrust of government—it also takes our economy down with it. After all, it was only months ago when fights
between House Democrats and the Republican White House spilled over into our airports. With public employees and contractors
forced to work without pay during the budget shutdown, it was little surprise that TSA security officers and air traffic controllers
started calling in sick. Then, 35 days after the shutdown began, LaGuardia Airport closed due to staffing shortages. The budget fight
ended just hours later. While the budget fight may be over (for now), our political system is regularly causing less
perceptible but more sustained disruptions to our road, water, and other physical networks. We
can no longer afford this kind of unnecessary economic harm due to short-sighted politics. This
administration’s trade and tariff policies serve as a potent example of self-inflicted economic
harm. Since the Trump administration applied tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, the cost
index for steel mill products alone rose by almost 14 percent from March 2018 to January 2019. This directly
impacts our state departments of transportation, their local peers, and water authorities who all rely on steel and aluminum to
construct major capital projects. As Mark Niquette at Bloomberg reported, states from California to Michigan to Virginia have already
seen certain project costs jump by millions of dollars. Meanwhile, steel and aluminum manufacturers in the U.S. have been hit hard
by the costs, needing to lay off workers to close budget gaps. Price increases can act as a fiscal virus, infecting an agency’s entire
project pipeline. Since infrastructure agencies work on tight budgets and are naturally capital-
constrained, there’s only so much construction to go around. So, when current projects start
costing significantly more, agencies have no choice but to delay other projects. If the tariffs
remain in future years—and the politically-motivated rhetoric suggests the president will keep
them—the effects will only compound as more projects are either delayed or outright scrapped.
The net result: lower quality infrastructure than if the country never instituted the new tariffs. Oddly enough, while the president
pushes a trade war to boost global competitiveness, our domestic infrastructure will be less prepared to power our economy once
the war is over. Politics disrupting our infrastructure stretches far beyond tariff fights. For example,
the U.S. Department of Transportation has now twice delayed promised capital grants to local
transit agencies. Similarly, Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration cannot agree on
how to manage and comprehensively fund a new satellite-based air traffic control system. They’re
all guaranteed ways to raise infrastructure costs in the long-term and reduce public trust today. That’s why these next two- and four-
year periods are so important at the federal level. For the nearly two years remaining on President’s Trump term, there is a major
negotiation coming with congressional Democrats around our next surface transportation bill, if not a larger infrastructure package. If
the two parties can craft a bill that boosts investment around long-run needs—from resilience to electrification to digitalization—and
reduce tariff impacts in the process, we’ll all be in a better place. Washington has the chance to give long-run
certainty to our state and local partners, who build all the projects and pay the majority of costs,
anyway. But if political compromise doesn’t happen—and we have our doubts—the pressure will
only be higher on the next Congress and president to deliver a more collaborative, bipartisan
vision for the country’s future. It’s why we’re not just watching what happens on the Hill these next couple years, but why
we all should carefully watch the infrastructure and trade platforms put together by the Democratic candidates for president. Of
course, everyday Americans use infrastructure systems that remind us what political compromise can deliver. The national highway
network is still one of the world’s great capital projects. The commercial air network is the busiest and safest in the world. We’ve
grown accustomed to clean water access and are shocked when it fails. But we have to remember how easily our politics can upend
high-functioning infrastructure. As the budget fight grounded planes at one of the busiest airports in our
nation’s biggest city, stacking up on the runway, the image said it all. Unnecessary gridlock
eventually drags us all down.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Tax Cuts
Tax cuts don’t actually help econ – trump cuts weren’t effective
Cox 19(Jeff Cox - the finance editor for CNBC.com where he manages coverage of the
financial markets and Wall Street. "Trump Tax Cuts Did Little To Boost Economic Growth In
2018, Study Says" Published: may 29 19 DOA: 7-22-19 wall-e
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/trump-tax-cuts-did-little-to-boost-economic-growth-in-2018-
study-says.html
The U.S. economy’s strong 2018 performance happened without much health from the massive tax
cut President Donald Trump ushered through the previous year, according to a study released this week. An
in-depth look by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service indicated that not only did the
rollbacks in business and personal rates have little macro impact, but they also delivered the
most benefits to corporations and the rich, with little boost to wages. In all, GDP rose 2.9% for the full
calendar year, the best performance since the financial crisis. But that came in an economy already poised to move higher,
economists Jane Gravelle and Donald Marples wrote. “On the whole, the growth effects [from the cuts] tend to
show a relatively small (if any) first-year effect on the economy,” the report said. “Although
examining the growth rates cannot indicate the effects of the tax cut on GDP, it does tend to rule
out very large effects in the near term.” Trump had touted the cuts as a key step toward generating GDP growth of at
least 3%. The legislation, passed in late 2017, slashed corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%, reduced the number of brackets,
lowered rates for many individual payers, and doubled the standard deduction in an effort to make most income tax-exempt for the
lowest earners. Employment continued to boom in 2018 and average hourly earnings have in recent months passed 3% on a year-
over-year basis for the first time since the recovery began in 2009. However, the economists said wage gains could
not be tracked to the tax cuts. “This growth is smaller than overall growth in labor compensation
and indicates that ordinary workers had very little growth in wage rates,” the economists wrote. The
study indicated that the tax changes contributed only marginally to the overall economic
economic gains — maybe 0.3% of a “feedback effect.” The economists say that for the tax cuts to pay for
themselves, as Trump has promised, GDP would have to rise by 6.7%. “The initial effect of a demand side is likely to be reflected in
increased consumption and the data indicate little growth in consumption in 2018,” the report said. “Much of the tax cut was directed
at businesses and higher-income individuals who are less likely to spend. Fiscal stimulus is limited in an economy that is at or near
full employment.” At the same time, tax receipts from 2018 indicate that corporations got an even bigger break than expected.
While the Congressional Budget Office had forecast a $94 billion break that still would have
generated $243 billion in corporate revenues, the actual total was $205 billion, or 16% lower
than projected.

Trump cuts hurt most Americans – they only help the elite
Pardo 19( Oliver Pardo - Assistant professor and graduate fell at the london school of
conomics "The Trump Tax Cuts Will Help Stockholders, But Hurt Most Americans" Published: 1-
9-19 DOA: 7-22-19 https://www.barrons.com/articles/stock-market-gauges-barely-budge-as-
fed-decision-looms-51563592175
The 2017 U.S. tax reform became law just over a year ago, but its effects on economic performance, public finances, and individual
households are still being debated. We won’t be able to resolve this debate with hard data for years. But there are tools economists
can use to make estimates. That’s what I did in a recent paper. To estimate the macroeconomic and welfare
effects of the tax bill, I used what’s called a dynamic general equilibrium model, which simulates
how the whole economy will change over time. The model I used was calibrated to replicate the
household income distribution in the U.S., giving us a more granular picture of how the tax cuts will likely affect
different segments of society. The results suggest that the 2017 tax cuts will lead to increases in investment, wages, and output,
although the welfare gains are quite unevenly distributed across households. Despite efficiency gains overall, the
poorest households can expect to be worse off because of the tax reform. The richest
households will fare better, in large part because they own corporate stocks. You can think of the model
as something like a virtual world. In this virtual world, the economy consists of a continuum of households that differ in their labor
productivity, income, and wealth. Households also engage in some precautionary saving. There’s a
representative firm hires which hires people (labor) and decides how much to invest to
maximize shareholder value. The government taxes payrolls, personal income, and corporate
profits. The tax revenue is distributed back to the households via lump-sum transfers. Running a
simulation sparks a series of changes in this virtual world. Here’s what we see when we
introduce an unexpected and permanent tax cut on the effective tax rate on business profits. (In
the model, the effective corporate tax rate falls from 27.5% to 21.3%, an estimate derived from work by Harvard
professors Robert Barro and Jason Furman.) First, because of higher after-tax profits, long-run investment increases by one
percentage point of the baseline GDP. Higher investment increases labor demand, which then pushes up wages by 1.3% two years
in. This wage increase takes two years because of an increase in labor supply and the lagged
response of the capital stock. The increase in investment and employment leads to a GDP
growth of 0.4% the year the tax rate is cut. After about a decade, GDP is 1.6% higher than it
would have been without the cut. So far, so good. But the economic gains here are not evenly
distributed. Overall, aggregate welfare gains for the whole economy add up to the equivalent of
a one-off payment of 3.3% of annual GDP. But households in the richest quintile can expect a gain equivalent to a one-off
payment of 4.2% of annual GDP. Households in the poorest income quintile may face a welfare loss
equivalent to a one-off debit of 1.8% of annual GDP. Why are the gains so uneven? In the world of the model, I
assume that government revenue losses (which is what tax cuts are) will result in spending cuts, and
that these cuts are evenly spread across households. This means that the transfers that
households receive are all cut by the same amount, no matter the household’s income level. As
a result, despite the long-run increase in wages, the poorest households are worse off. In fact, many
middle-class households would also fail to benefit. Under the assumption of evenly-spread spending cuts, only the two richest
quintiles benefit from the 2017 tax bill. This is mainly explained by the ownership of corporate stocks: the higher the income, the
higher the ownership of corporate stocks. When you cut corporate taxes, stocks tend to go up. But only
stock-owners can benefit from a higher stock value. Of course, it’s possible that in the real world, government
spending cuts won’t be evenly distributed; politicians could decide to aim cuts more at the poor or at the wealthy. It’s even possible
that the government won’t cut spending at all—historically, only out-of-power politicians seem to seriously bemoan government debt.
So in reality, the welfare distribution could be different than the one estimated here depending on the policy decisions made
regarding the deficit. (Alternatively, politicians could decide to raise taxes and avoid spending cuts; this would wipe out at least some
of the efficiency gains of the 2017 reform.) Still, based on my research, the most likely outcome is that the poorest
households will face a future in which they are going to be worse off than they would have been
without the 2017 tax law. That is, unless policy-makers decide to get redistributive, and start transferring income gains
from the richest to the poorest. And that’s probably not the outcome the architects of tax reform had in mind.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Infrastructure
Turn – infrastructure hurts the economy more than it helps – cost ratios
overhyped.
Hanke 17( Steve hanke - professor of applied economics at john hopkins. "Forget the Hype:
Public Infrastructure Generates Waste, Fraud and Abuse," Published: 8-31-17 DOA: 7-22-19
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/forget-hype-public-infrastructure-generates-
waste-fraud-abuse
President Trump has jumped on this infrastructure bandwagon. He is proposing a $1 trillion public works
program. Following the script of the public works advocates (read: big spenders), Trump has lifted a page from President Obama’s
Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The CEA’s 2016 Annual Report contains a long chapter titled “The Economic Benefits of
Investing in U.S. Infrastructure.” That title alone tells us a great deal. Infrastructure spending advocates focus on
the alleged benefits, which are often wildly inflated, while ignoring, downplaying, or distorting,
the cost estimates. This was clearly on display in an op-ed, “These are the Policies to Restore Growth to America,” which
appeared in the Financial Times (12-13 November 2016). It was penned by none other than Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived
adviser of President Trump. In it, “The Mooch” asserted that infrastructure spending “has an estimated economic multiplier effect of
1.6 times, meaning Mr Trump’s plan would have a net reductive effect on long-term deficits.” This multiplier analysis is exactly the
same one used by President Obama’s CEA to justify public works spending. The idea that a dollar of government spending creates
more than a dollar’s worth of output is nothing new. Indeed, the multiplier originated in an article that appeared in a 1931 issue of the
Economic Journal. The article was written by R. F. Kahn, who was one of John Maynard Keynes’ favorite students and closest
collaborators. Since Kahn’s 1931 article, the multiplier has become an inherent part of Keynesian theory. The numerical
values of the multiplier are not only sensitive to the assumptions employed, but also subject to
misuse in the artificial inflation of benefits. Once public works are installed, the hot air comes out of their alleged
benefits. These projects are poorly maintained, and users are often not charged for what they use,
or they are charged prices set well below the relevant costs incurred. Water is a classic case. For
example, the accompanying chart shows that, on average, 34% of the water delivered to water
systems is either stolen or leaks out of the distribution systems. In Nigeria, 70% is leaked or stolen. So, it’s
hard to take seriously the claims that billions of dollars are required to develop more water-resource capacity when much of the
water produced in existing systems leaks away. Adjusted for leaks and thefts, the alleged benefits for many new projects, which
have been inflated by multipliers, wither away to almost nothing. Non-Revenue Water (Leaks and Thefts) When we turn to the cost
side of the ledger, something infrastructure advocates prefer to keep from the public’s view, we find that infrastructure
projects are always subject to cost overruns. While the projects might look “good” on paper,
reality is a different story. Detailed studies show that the average ratios of actual costs to
estimated costs for public works projects in the U.S. typically range from 1.25 to over 2.0. In
addition to cost overruns, the financing of infrastructure requires the imposition of taxes, and taxes
impose costs beyond the amount of revenue raised. The excess burdens of taxation include
“deadweight” distortions and enforcement and compliance costs. In short, it costs more than a
dollar to finance a dollar in government spending. The best estimates indicate that, on average,
it costs between $1.50 to $1.60 to raise a dollar in tax revenue. Taking proper account of cost overruns and
the costs of collecting taxes, one wonders if there are any public works projects that could justify federal financing, let alone
financing to the tune of $1 trillion. Welcome to the wonderful world of infrastructure waste, fraud and abuse.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Dereg
Deregulation hurts the economy
Shefrin 17( Hersh Shefrin behavioral economist for over 40 years, lucky to be studying how
psychology impacts the way the financial world works. Currently serving as the Mario L. Belotti
Professor of Finance at Santa Clara University, "Danger: financial Deregulation Is a Very Bad
Idea" Published: 2-3-17 wall-e DOA: 7-22-
19https://www.forbes.com/sites/hershshefrin/2017/02/05/danger-financial-deregulation-is-a-
very-bad-idea/#510b453b4457
President Trump’s wants to weaken, if not eliminate, the Dodd-Frank Act; and he wants to
remove the requirement that financial brokers act as fiduciaries when advising clients making
retirement investment decisions. These are bad ideas. To be fair, the plan will not harm everybody, just almost
everybody; and they will help some, at least in the short run. If you want to understand who the losers and winners
will be, ask yourself who were the winners and losers during the lead up to the global financial crisis, the crisis itself, and the fallout
thereafter. During the housing bubble, financial services firms benefitted by allowing homeowners
with unsound financial situations to buy homes by taking out subprime mortgages they would
not be able to service. Many of these home owners benefitted before the crisis, but once the
crisis hit lost their homes, and in many cases their jobs too. In the lead up to the crisis, financial
services firms collected large fees related to those mortgages, and greatly magnified those fees by trading
associated financial derivatives. I suggest that President Trump’s plan will set a future crisis in motion. A good
way to understand the negative dynamic that his plan will generate is to take a look at the Rethinking
the Financial Crisis, a collection of readings edited by luminaries Alan Blinder, Andrew Lo, and Robert Solow, which was jointly
published by the Sage Foundation and the Century Foundation.

Reforms are bad for the economy

Dolan 18( Ed Dolan senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, and holds a PhD in economics from
Yale University. "Is Overregulation Really Holding Back the U.S. Economy" Published 1-8-18
wall-e DOA: 7-22-19 https://hbr.org/2018/01/is-overregulation-really-holding-back-the-u-s-
economy
With tax cuts now a done deal, Republicans are turning to regulatory reform to give economic growth a
further boost. There, they may find more bipartisan support. Past reforms of airlines, rail, and trucking
regulation were, after all, set in motion by Democrats. Today there is significant Democratic support for reform of financial
regulation, especially for smaller community banks. Overregulated small businesses can be found in every congressional district,
red or blue. But while regulatory reform could provide a big boost if it is done right, indiscriminate
deregulation could do more harm than good. Blanket Deregulation Won’t Help Many conservatives and libertarians
seem to think the only good regulation is a dead regulation. If that were true, it should be possible to quantify regulation and
measure the harm it does. However, attempts to do so have not been particularly successful. Consider the regulatory
freedom indexes published by the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, which rank
countries on a scale where a high score indicates greater freedom from regulation and a low
score indicates a greater regulatory burden. Those scores correlate positively with GDP per
capita and with broader measures of prosperity, such as the Social Progress Index and the
Legatum Index of Prosperity. That tells us that countries with less regulation are, on average,
richer and better off, but does it really support the notion that too much regulation is holding
back the U.S. economy? A closer look at the data shows that the United States already ranks high on the world scale of
regulatory freedom. Its score is even better than would be expected, given its GDP. On the Heritage index, the United States ranks
fourth out of 131 countries, behind only New Zealand, Denmark, and Australia. According to Cato, it ranks sixth out of 143 countries,
with only one OECD country, New Zealand, doing better. Given how lightly regulated the U.S. already is by these measures, it is
hard to think that one or two more steps up the regulatory freedom rankings would be transformational. Furthermore, although
prosperous countries do tend to have higher regulatory freedom scores, correlation is not
causation. Other factors are at work that jointly influence both prosperity and regulatory
freedom. In previous research, I have used some of those factors to compile a quality-of-government index, based on data
regarding the rule of law, protection of property rights, judicial independence, procedural justice, and freedom from corruption. I
found that quality of government is a statistically significant predictor of GDP and of broader prosperity indexes. At the same time,
when I controlled for quality of government, regulatory freedom lost its predictive power. I
interpret this to mean that quality of government is the real cause of economic and social
prosperity. Regulatory freedom, at least as it is measured by the Heritage and Cato indexes, is
not an end in itself. Rather, it is an outcome of good government in the more general sense.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – H1B
Demand for h1b visas is dropping under trump rhetoric and visas are already
over the cap – CP cant solve
Donnolley 17(Grace, writer for fortune magazine “New Data Shows Foreign Interest in
American Jobs May Be Declining Under Trump” Published: 8-2-2017 DOA: 7-23-19
http://fortune.com/2017/08/02/new-data-shows-foreign-interest-in-american-jobs-may-be-
declining-under-trump/)
The number of H-1B visas given out by the United States government hit the congressionally mandated cap after just four days, but
there's evidence that interest from foreign job seekers may be waning. Data from job site Indeed show that
searches by job seekers for H-1B visas declined year-over-year for the first time in three years, according to Valerie Rodden, an
economic research analyst at the employment website. “There is a seasonal trend of searches peaking in February and bottoming
out in April,” she said “but this year searches have continued to decline [since April] showing us that job
seekers are less inclined to search for H-1B opportunities than they have [been] in the past.” For
the first half of 2017, Canada was the most searched destination for H-1B visa jobseekers on the site,
with 44% of traffic directed there, 10% to Australia, 5% to the United Kingdom and 5% to China. This could be a problem for the tech
sector. While the Trump Administration is pushing companies to "hire American", there simply aren’t
enough qualified workers from the United States to fill open positions. In 2015, there were nearly 10 times
more computer science jobs than students graduating with computer science degrees. Job seekers requiring
sponsorship showed fives times the concentration of interest in tech positions compared to the
average U.S. job seeker. On Indeed, software engineering positions specifically saw nearly 16 times greater concentration
from H-1B job seekers. Java developer and data scientist jobs saw 14 times and 13 times greater concentration, respectively. As is
the case with much of U.S. immigration policy, the H-1B visa program is complex. It involves the Department of Labor, the
Department of Homeland Security and the State Department. And each of those agencies track a different part of the H-1B process,
which has an annual cap of 85,000 for new approvals. Annual totals almost always surpass that cap because
H-1B holders are allowed to renew their visa for three years after being approved. That means what
looks like growth in the number of employees working on H-1B visas accounts for foreign workers already in the U.S. who are
renewing their visas as well as employees at organizations exempt from the mandated cap, such as religious groups. The largest
number of H-1B visas go to workers in the tech sector and these jobs primarily get filled by Indian applicants. More than 70% of all
H-1B visas over the last 10 years went to Indian applicants working mostly these computer science or IT positions, according to data
from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Demand for H1B visas are dropping – trump is cracking down

O'Brien 18(Sara Ashley O'Brien tech writer for CNN Business, covering tech's highly-valued
startups and their societal impact "H-1B visa applications are down again," Published: 4-12-18
DOA:7-24-19 wall-e https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/12/technology/h-1b-visa-applications-
2018/index.html
On Thursday, US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced the number of H-1B applications dropped
for the second consecutive year. Applications for the visa, which is frequently used in the tech
industry by highly-skilled foreign workers, opened on April 2 for a five day period. This year,
190,098 applications were received, down from 199,000 applications in 2017. Last year marked the first
time the number fell below 200,000 applications since 2014. Only 85,000 H-1B visas are granted annually -- 20,000 of which are
reserved for master's degree holders. This is the sixth year the application cap was met within the five day period When demand for
the visa exceeds the supply -- like this year -- a lottery system is activated. The cause of the decline is unclear, but a
number of factors could have contributed to the application drop, including uncertainty about the
visa's future. While H-1B visas are used to help fill a skills gap in the US, some critics --
including the administration of President Trump -- have voiced concerns about abuse of the
program. In some cases, outsourcing firms flood the system with applicants, obtaining visas for
foreign workers and then contracting them out to tech companies. American jobs are sometimes replaced in
the process, critics argue. The Trump administration has taken some steps to crack down on companies
that get visas for foreign workers and farm them out to employers. USCIS issued a policy memo
in February noting it will require more information about H-1B workers' employment to ensure
the workers are doing what they were hired for.
Too much uncertainty in visa screening
Surana 9-11. (Kavitha Surana – senior reporting fellow at ProPublica covering immigration. she
covered immigration, counterterrorism and border security policy at Foreign Policy magazine.
holds a master’s degree in journalism and European studies from New York University
"Authorities Can Now Deny Visa and Green Card Applications DOA: 7-24-19 wall-e
https://www.propublica.org/article/authorities-can-now-deny-visa-and-green-card-applications-
without-giving-applicants-a-chance-to-fix-errors)
Apart from technicalities, lawyers have noted an increase in detailed requests for evidence . Some of the
new questions fit with Trump’s 2017 Executive Order called “Buy American and Hire American,” which directed the Department of
Homeland Security to find ways to make sure specialty work visas are awarded only to the most highly skilled and highest-paid
foreign workers, to fill jobs that couldn’t be filled by an American. To some, the increased scrutiny of work visas is welcome. In
particular, the H-1B visa category has often been the subject of controversy. Intended for high-level workers with specialized skills, it
has been used to outsource ordinary jobs. In 2014, for example, Disney laid off about 250 long-time workers in computer jobs so
that they could replace them with workers flown in from India. The Americans were required to train their replacements before they
left. A federal court found that Disney did not violate any laws and the case was eventually dropped, but Republicans have often
pointed to similar cases to call for tougher oversight of foreign worker programs. “It’s almost like it’s a subclass of employee that
they can take advantage of and can work them extra hard for smaller pay,” said Rennie Sawade, the communications chair of the
Washington Alliance of Technology Workers. He has experienced increased competition in his own search for jobs in the tech
industry and in that of his son, who is 24 and has an associate degree in robotics and computer networking but is still struggling to
find work. “These visas should be used for what they are intended for, so you definitely need more scrutiny in how they are being
used.” But lawyers argue the stepped-up examinations go beyond what’s required to assess an immigrant’s eligibility and
seem intended to simply make the process more burdensome for all immigrants. Under Trump, the extra
layer of questions has not been limited to H-1B cases, but applied to all types of work visas, family-based
green cards and humanitarian cases . The extra questions are also directed toward people who have lived and worked in the
U.S. for more than a decade and are applying to extend their visas. Foreign workers once considered to have slam-
dunk immigration cases — an internationally recognized physicist, an Alzheimer’s disease
researcher, a biologist doing “cutting edge” work on vaccine development — are now finding
themselves tied up in extra requests for evidence to prove their skills are truly specialized . One
Iranian professor, in the process of launching a graduate degree program at an American university,
included 10 letters of recommendation from experts in his field and evidence of his awards and publications.
Feist, his lawyer, said she felt certain his petition for a green card under the “outstanding professor” category would
sail through. Read More Behind the Criminal Immigration Law: Eugenics and White Supremacy The history of the statute that
can make it a felony to illegally enter the country involves some dark corners of U.S. history. Instead, she received a notice
of intent to deny, reviewed by ProPublica, pointing out a slew of quibbles: The professor had published
frequently in his field, but was he cited often enough ? He had won awards, but the reviewing officer didn’t
think they were truly prestigious. The professor had served on panels and presented at conferences, but those were not really
sufficient to prove influence, the officer wrote. “This
is just one example of pretty typical aggressive requests
for additional evidence that I’m seeing that are far outside of the norm that I’ve seen in the past 17 years,”
Feist said. Michael Cataliotti, an immigration lawyer in New York, recalled a case in which he printed and attached emails between a
physicist and the editors of peer-reviewed journals, to demonstrate the physicist had served as a reviewer for each of them.
Because the email was printed from his work computer, Cataliotti’s name appeared at the top of the paper. This seemed to confuse
the USCIS official handling the case. “The document has been altered, and as such, is inadmissible,” the official wrote. Other
examples show an overly strict reading of the rules, sometimes applied incorrectly. Courtney Morgan-Greene, an immigration
attorney in California, said the USCIS tried to deny a religious worker’s request for a visa extension because she had taken some
time off from her job — in order to give birth, and then to mourn the death of her child after 11 months. The response from the
agency began, “While USCIS sympathizes with the death of the beneficiary’s baby,” and went on to deny the case based on the
time she took off. Morgan-Greene emailed the quote to ProPublica. USCIS policy allows breaks in employment “such as sick leave,
pregnancy leave, spousal care and vacation as long as they do not exceed two years.” Morgan-Greene said her client’s two periods
of leave combined did not add up to two years. “Not only is the decision incorrect as a matter of law, it shocks the conscience,” she
said. Employers are just as frustrated as immigrants trying to obtain green cards and visas. On Aug.
22, a group of CEOs representing major U.S. companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Cisco Systems, American Airlines,
Apple, Coca-Cola and Texas Instruments, sent a letter to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen with their concerns
with recent USCIS policy changes. “ Inconsistent government action and uncertainty undermines
economic growth and American competitiveness and creates anxiety for employees who
follow the law,” they wrote. They added: “USCIS actions significantly increase the likelihood that a
long-term employee — who has followed the rules and who has been authorized by the U.S. government multiple times to
work in the United States — will lose his or her status. All of this despite the Department of Labor having, in many
cases, certified that no qualified U.S. workers are available to do that person’s job.” Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst
at the Migration Policy Institute, said examples of H-1B misuse are “highly concerning,” but she said that there’s no clear data to
prove how widespread it is. “We know there are a lot of legitimate employers that use this program as well,” she said. Pierce said
targeted approaches — such as limiting contractors from hiring H-1B workers or going after companies that mainly depend on H-1B
workers — would be better solutions than a blanket approach making it difficult for all companies to hire foreign workers. But Trump
has made it clear that he would like to see a reduction in all immigration. “One thing really unique about President Trump is he views
not just illegal immigration, but legal immigration through the context of it being a security threat and an economic threat to the
Even when cases are ultimately approved , Feist says employers have told her
United States,” Pierce said.
they will reconsider going through the process again. Workers stuck in limbo have told her they’re considering
other options , too. Cataliotti agreed the strategy seems designed to frustrate, “so either one or both parties say s:
Forget it, I can’t do this anymore , the position is gone , or I might as well go to Canada .”
 2AC – AT: Solvency – H1B – Trump
Trump will just deny visas using executive power
Lapowsky 19(Issie Lapowsky Issie Lapowsky is a senior writer for WIRED covering the intersection of
tech, politics, and national affairs. Lapowsky covered startups and small business as a staff writer for Inc.
magazine before joining WIRED, and before that she worked for the New York Daily News. Lapowsky
received a bachelor’s degree from New York University. "VISA REJECTIONS FOR TECH WORKERS SPIKE
UNDER TRUMP" Published: 4-25-19 DOA: 7-23-19 wall-e https://www.wired.com/story/h-1b-visa-
rejections-spike-under-trump/
IN NOVEMBER OF 2018, Usha and her husband Sudhir received the news they never expected: the United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services declined to extend Usha’s work visa, meaning the couple and their daughter would have 180 days to leave the country before the US
government would consider their presence to be unlawful. The notice hit the whole family like a punch to the gut. Eight years before, Usha and
her daughter had moved from India to New Jersey to join Sudhir, who was already living in the United States, pursuing a master’s degree in
computer science. Both Usha and Sudhir landed jobs as quality assurance analysts for IT outsourcing firms, relying on so-called H-1B visas,
which are reserved for specialty occupations. Before coming to the US, Usha had earned a bachelor's in math and physics, and a master's in
political science. They’d bought a home, paid their taxes, and enrolled their daughter, who’s now 16, in school. Usha had been approved in the
early stages of the green card process, and had successfully extended her H-1B visa twice before. Nothing had changed about her job, her
skillset, or her educational background since the family started their lives in the United States. And yet, when she tried to renew her visa a third
time last year, the government denied her, arguing that her job was not considered a specialty after all. “I’m not doing anything different now,”
says Usha, who agreed to speak on the condition that WIRED wouldn’t publish her last name. “What makes them say today that I do not have a
Usha is one of thousands of current US tech workers who have had their visas
specialty?”
suddenly rejected thanks to new policies implemented by President Trump’s
administration. Since 1990, the H-1B program has enabled US companies to employ foreign
workers on a temporary basis for jobs that “require the theoretical and practical
application of a body of highly specialized knowledge.” These visas are reservedfor people with at least a
bachelor’s degree in their specialty, or some form of equivalent training, and they’re intended as a backstop for employers who can’t find
Americans to fill the position. The government issues just 65,000 of these visas per year, with another 20,000 set aside for people who have
gotten a master’s degree or higher in the US. Due to the high demand for tech skills, H-1B visas have always been both coveted and
competitive. In 2018 alone, companies filed419,000 petitions for both new and continuing visas. But over the last two years,
new research finds, denial rates across both categories have spiked dramatically. According to
a recent analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit that studies immigration, the denial rate for
applicants like Usha who are trying to extend their visas grew from 4 percent in 2016 to
12 percent in 2018; the rate climbed even higher, to 18 percent, through the first quarter of 2019.
When it comes to new employment, meanwhile, USCIS has more than doubled the share of petitions it turns down, from 10 percent in 2016 to
. This is despite a steady decrease in the
24 percent in 2018. In the first quarter of 2019, the denial rate was 32 percent
total number of new applications under President Trump. "I think the most striking thing
is the change in denial rates has happened without any new law or regulation that many
people feel would be necessary to have allowed an agency to deny so many applications
in a legal manner," says Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy and a former staffer on
the Senate Immigration Subcommittee. Instead, the Trump administration has enacted these changes
solely through executive power. While campaigning to become president, Donald Trump promised to overhaul the H-1B
visa program, which he argued made it too easy for businesses (including his own) to hire foreign workers and pay them less money than
American ones. During his first months in office, President Trump signed the so-called “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, which
sought to prioritize visas for the “most-skilled or highest-paid” workers. That order has led USCIS to look more critically at third-party
outsourcing firms and reassess whether certain work and educational experience really does constitute a specialty. Later on in 2017, the agency
also instructed officials not to defer to prior decisions when assessing whether to extend someone's visa, reversing policies that existed under
, these changes have led to an uptick in denials across all of the
previous administrations. Taken together
top H-1B employers, including tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and
Facebook, as well as top outsourcing firms like Infosys and Cognizant.
 2AC – H1B Links to politics
Increases in h1b visas under trump manifests as harder visa requirements and
cause political fights
Shear 19(Michael D. Shear White House correspondent in the Washington bureau, where he
covers President Trump, with a focus on domestic policy " Trump Immigration Proposal
Emphasizes Immigrants' Skills Over Family Ties" Published: May 15-19 DOA:7-24-19
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/us/politics/trump-immigration-kushner.html
President Trump on Thursday will unveil a plan to overhaul parts of the nation’s immigration system that would impose new security
measures at the border and significantly increase the educational and skills requirements for people allowed to migrate to the United
States. The proposal, senior administration officials said on Wednesday, would vastly scale back
the system of family-based immigration that for decades has allowed immigrants to bring their
spouses and children to live with them, the officials said. In its place, the new plan would provide
opportunities for immigrants who have specific skills or job offers to work in the United States,
provided they can demonstrate English proficiency and educational attainment, and pass a
civics exam. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a White House adviser, spent months working on the plan, which
will serve as a central part of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign message. Working with him was Stephen Miller, the president’s top
immigration adviser, but the plan falls short of the more extreme measures that Mr. Miller has long
pressed the president to adopt and that have long been opposed by Democrats in Congress.
Attempts by Mr. Trump’s two predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to overcome
those kinds of differences and achieve a bipartisan consensus on immigration policy ended in
failure. Since then, the divisions between the parties have only worsened, and there is little chance
the new proposal will change that. For different reasons, the broad outlines of the plan described on
Wednesday are certain to be unpopular with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. It calls for
construction of some of the border wall that is a preoccupation of Mr. Trump’s and vehemently opposed by Democrats, and upends
family-based migration in ways that Democrats and immigrant advocates have long opposed. And it contains no provision for
providing legal status to people brought to the United States as children, known as Dreamers, or other undocumented immigrants.
 2AC – H1B – Brain Drain Turn
H-1B restrictions are solving Indian brain drain now
Saikia 18(Gogona, senior editor at NewsBytes, “US' curb on H-1B visas a golden opportunity
for India?” Published: 1-4-18 DOA: 7-24-19
whttps://www.newsbytesapp.com/timeline/World/14574/74261/can-india-turn-around-the-h-1b-
curbs
The US' curb on H-1B visas might be bad news for Indians wishing to settle there, but it might turn out to be a
golden opportunity for the Indian government. For officials, the decline in international placements
means more of the top talent staying back in the country and prevent brain drain. During 1999-2015,
there was a 225% increase in migration to the US. The H-1B program and its significance for India The H-1B visa program allows
foreign skilled workers to work in the US. In 2016, 72% of H-1B visas approved went to Indians. The H-1B visa has a three-year
validity and can be renewed for another three years. If approved for Green Card, workers can stay on using extensions, but Indians
often have to wait years considering the massive backlog and per-country cap. The Trump administration's anti-immigrant policies
Trump has continuously tightened conditions for the program: modifications being considered (or approved) include upping eligibility
requirements, boosting minimum salary from $60,000 to $90,000, and disallowing spouses from working on the H-4 dependent
visas. They are also considering a proposal to end extensions for H-1B visa holders whose
applications for Green Cards have been accepted, which could force 7,50,000 Indians to return
home. Not just Indians, but American firms to be affected too Reactions have mostly been of worry. Though some like Anjani
Kovvur of Hyderabad are certain their sons/relatives will get good opportunities in India, most appear anxious. Many are looking at
options other than the US; Canada is emerging as an appealing proposition, said 35-year-old Darshan Srinivasan. But considering
American companies would also be affected, many think big firms will resist the move. Despite increase in migration, a fall in
remittances This brings to the fore the issue of brain drain, a significant matter for India. "If graduates from IITs, NITs and other top
institutions work here, it's good for India," an official said. Two main factors that lure Indians are better education and higher wages.
However, despite the increase in migration, remittances have fallen from 4.2% in 2008 to 3.2% in
2015. India needs to change its conditions to prevent brain drain For Indian officials, this is a way to prevent
brain drain, but some measures are necessary. Quality of education has to be improved, and more importantly, the additional
workforce has to be absorbed in the country. The effects are already being seen though: according to Deloitte Touche
Tohmatsu, the number of Indians in the US looking for jobs back here has increased over tenfold.
US Hegemony
Neg
 1NC – R&D CP
Plan: The United States federal government should substantially increase its
funding for science R&D

That solves leadership

Khan 19 (Dr. Mehmood Khan is PepsiCo’s Vice Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer, Head of
Global R&D. 04-18-2019, “Maintaining US Leadership in Science and Technology,”
https://insight.ieeeusa.org/articles/maintaining-u-s-leadership-in-science-and-technology/)
Given the profound impact of science and technology on U.S. prosperity, standards of living,
national security, modern society and geopolitical standing, every American should be
concerned with the nation’s ability to lead in science, technology and innovation.
More than any country in history, the United States has been the greatest driver and beneficiary of
technology, innovation and a vibrant entrepreneurial spirit. In the 19th century, entrepreneurship
and innovations surrounding agriculture, rail, oil, steel and electricity turned the United States
into an industrial and economic powerhouse, laying the foundation for a manufacturing sector
that provided middle class jobs and a higher standard of living for millions of Americans.
In the 20th century, American inventions and advancements in vehicle and aircraft technology revolutionized transportation and changed society and
the geographic face of the country. American-born digital technologies unleashed a revolutionary new age of computing, communications and
information mobility, disrupting industries and business models, changing society and culture around the world, and creating enormous new wealth.
This continuum of innovation has delivered prosperity and rising standards of living to Americans, and propelled the United States to global leadership.
a new imperative faces the nation.
As we enter the third decade of the 21st Century, a new urgency, a new innovation reality,
Notwithstanding a currently robust economy – rising and strong economic, productivity and job
growth; historically low unemployment; wage increases; an improved tax environment; etc. – the
Council on Competitiveness believes U.S. leadership in technology and long-term
competitiveness is under threat. This potential demands the urgent attention of our nation’s
leaders, and a focused examination of our capabilities, investments and policies related to
science, technology development and innovation.
The Case for Ongoing Investment
While the United States is enjoying an economic upswing on many fronts, U.S. leadership in technology is under renewed threat. In 1960, the United
The United
States dominated global research and development (R&D), accounting for 69 percent share of the world’s R&D investment.
States could drive developments in technology globally by virtue of the size of its investment.
Today, we have evolved into a multipolar science and technology world. As other nations have increased their R&D investments and capacity for
innovation, theU.S. share of global R&D expenditures has dropped to 28 percent in 2016, diminishing the
At the same time, China has risen to the
U.S. dominance and leverage over the direction of technology advancement.
account for a quarter of global R&D spending.
In addition, America’s lead in venture capital is shrinking, further diminishing its role as a driver of
technology and innovation globally. In 1992, U.S. investors represented 97 percent of the $2 billion in venture finance, and
accounted for about three-quarters just a decade ago. However, in 2017, U.S. investors led 44 percent of a record $154 billion in venture finance, with
Asian investors (with China leading) accounting for 40 percent. Moreover, while the absolute level of venture capital coming to the United States has
increased substantially, the U.S. share of the growing global pool of venture capital – which has increased more than 200 percent since 2010 – has
dropped sharply from 95 percent in the early 1990s to about half in 2017.
While traditional U.S. competitors – such as Germany, Japan, France and the U.K. – continue to
be strong R&D performers working at the leading edge of technology, many emerging
economies seek to follow the path of the world’s innovators, transform to knowledge-based
economies, and drive their economic growth with technology and innovation. A growing number of
emerging economies are establishing government organizations and ministries focused on technology and innovation, adopting innovation-based
growth strategies, boosting government R&D investments, and developing research parks and regional centers of innovation. Some of these
economies are also working to increase their production of scientists and engineers. These actions are raising technology and development capabilities
and innovation capacity around the world.
A nation’s R&D intensity expressed as R&D expenditures as a percentage of GDP provides another gauge of national R&D performance. In this
measure, the U.S. position globally has lagged in recent years, as other countries have expanded the range and scope of their R&D activities. Notably,
South Korea, one of the world’s largest R&D performers and another formidable U.S. competitor, ranks at the top in this metric.
At the same time, key U.S. science and technology infrastructure is eroding. Much like roads, rails and
power plants were essential for the Industrial Age, infrastructure that supports knowledge creation and technology development is vital for the 21st
century knowledge economy and U.S. success in innovation-based global competition. This includes laboratories, research and technology
demonstration centers, supercomputers, test-beds, wind tunnels, propulsion and combustion facilities, simulators, accelerators and other user facilities.
America’s national laboratory system is considered a distinctive and globally unique competitive asset. But, across the system, core scientific and
technological capabilities are potentially at risk due to deficient and degrading infrastructure and repair hamstrung by chronic underfunding, and
maintenance backlogs in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
New Disrupters
U.S. technology leadership is under
At the same time that competition in technology and innovation is rising around the world, and
threat, we are witnessing accelerated advancement of the greatest revolutions in science and technology; a new phase of the digital revolution
characterized by vast deployment of sensors, the internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI), and the big data tsunami; biotechnology and gene editing;
nanotechnology; and autonomous systems. Each of these technologies has numerous applications that cut-across industry sectors, society and human
activities. Each
is revolutionary; each is game-changing in its own right. But they are now colliding
and converging on the global economy and society simultaneously, with profound implications
for U.S. economic and national security.
These technologies are crucial drivers of productivity and economic growth, altering the patterns of society and many dimensions of everyday life. For
countries and companies, the ability to leverage these technologies for economic impact is fundamental to their competitiveness and economic
success.
In addition to their economic potential, these
technologies could solve many of the world’s critical challenges
surrounding areas such as health, energy and sustainability, clean water and the global food
supply.

Trump recently passed an Executive Order – but it didn’t have enough funding.
Passing the plan is key to AI dominance and curtailing China
Luo 19 (Luo, Winston. 03-06-2019, "President Trump Issues Executive Order to Maintain
American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence," Harvard Law School,
https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/president-trump-issues-executive-order-to-maintain-american-
leadership-in-artificial-intelligence)
Exec. Order No. 13,859, 84 Fed. Reg. 3967 (February 14, 2019).
On February 11, 2019, President Trump issued an executive order aimed at establishing
America’s place as the global leader in artificial intelligence technology. Largely following up on
the recommendations of the 2018 White House Summit on Artificial Intelligence for American
Industry, it marks the launch of the American AI Initiative.
Entitled “Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” the executive order outlines
five main directives:
Federal investment: Federal agencies should establish AI research and development as an
agency priority and develop budgets accordingly. The agencies should also explore
opportunities to collaborate with academia and the private sector.
Federal resources: Agencies should identify ways to enable the greater AI research community
to use federal resources in the form of data, models, and computing resources, while preserving
security and confidentiality.
Guidelines for regulation: The Office of Management and Budget and the National Institute of
Standards and Technology should establish guidelines and standards to enable the regulation
of AI technologies, with the aim of enabling innovation while protecting privacy and national
security interests.
Preparing the workforce: Agencies that provide educational grants and fellowships to students
and researchers should consider AI as a priority area, giving preference to American citizens
when possible.
Protecting American AI: The National Security Advisor should develop an action plan to protect
AI technology critical to American economic and national security against strategic competitors
and adversarial nations.
Implementation of these tasks will be largely coordinated by the National Science and
Technology Committee Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, a term that has no agreed-upon definition, can be described broadly as
software that makes decisions that typically require human judgment. A recent Brookings
Institution report predicted that broad adoption of AI will “transform the world.” A PwC study
predicts that AI could add over $15 trillion to global GDP by 2030.
American companies like Alphabet are generally considered the current world leaders in AI
technology, but China is aggressively seeking to overtake those American companies. After the
Chinese government announced an ambitious plan in July 2017 to be the world leader in AI by
2030, some American experts called for the Trump administration to chart its own path forward.
The executive order appears to be a step in that direction, but many worry that it will not be
enough. One concern is that the order did not provide new research funds. The order directs
federal agencies to allocate money towards AI but does not indicate where that money is to
come from.
Another concern is that the order lacks details on implementation. Much of the order is
dependent on future agency reports to identify opportunities for action, and there are no
milestones set up for long-term progress evaluation. An assessment by the Brookings Institution
worries that without dedicated funding and concrete mechanisms for implementation or inter-
agency coordination, the initiative will fail.
On the other hand, the day after Trump’s executive order was issued, the Department of
Defense released its Artificial Intelligence Strategy, establishing its own objectives and
strategies regarding AI. Additionally, the executive order references a yet-unreleased National
Security Presidential Memorandum, “Protecting the United States Advantage in Artificial
Intelligence and Related Technologies,” which will guide the development of the action plan to
protect American AI technology.
Many critics have also noted that the executive order makes no mention of immigration. They
argue that harsh visa policies drive away global talent that is vital to innovation in American
technology companies, and that other countries (like Canada), will reap the benefits. Given the
order’s explicit focus on prioritizing American citizens in preparing the workforce, this omission
may have been deliberate.
The race for AI dominance has barely begun, and its outcome may shape the decades to come.
It remains to be seen whether the American AI Initiative will succeed.

Physicists urge for more R&D – budget cuts

Thomas 17 (Will Thomas is a Senior Science Policy Analyst. 03-22-2017.
https://www.aip.org/fyi/2017/experts-advanced-materials-warn-waning-us-leadership)
Last week, experts in advanced materials testified before a House subcommittee on the
potential of their work and the challenges they face. Warning of declining U.S. leadership in their
field, they urged increased federal support for R&D as well as policy changes to speed
technology commercialization. On March 15, the Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection
Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on advanced
materials, covering both R&D and commercial applications. It was the latest in the
subcommittee’s “Disrupter Series” of hearings on issues relating to the development and
deployment of transformative technologies.
The members of the witness panel promoted their work and explained its possible applications.
But, warning that they face fierce international competition, they also appealed for additional
funding and identified changes in policy they felt would speed the commercialization of new
applications.

Space solves US leadership

Morin 18 (Jamie Morin is vice president and executive director of the Center for Space Policy
and Strategy at The Aerospace Corporation. 9-21-2018, "Sustaining American Space
Leadership In An Age Of Disruption," Forbes,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thelabbench/2018/09/21/sustaining-american-space-leadership-in-
an-age-of-disruption/#55dd08716e64)
Since the dawn of the Space Age – and even earlier – visionaries have dreamed of routine spaceflight for science, exploration, and commerce.
Achieving their dream would be a major milestone in culmination of humankind’s long history of gazing at the stars and contemplating the unknown.
Today, we are in a period of transition: the dream of a vibrant space economy is on its way to
becoming reality. The United States government and private industry both played a key role in making it happen, and the U.S. has
the opportunity to continue its leadership during an ongoing period of disruption.
The first source of disruption is the increasing democratization of space. New players are becoming active in
space, and some may intentionally or unintentionally cause difficulties. Many countries now
have access to technologies in which the U.S. formerly had a comfortable lead. Launch is a key example.
Thanks to development of new indigenous launch systems and contracts with international public and private launch providers, where space once was
the purview of government-funded space agencies, today elementary school students can build satellites and find a ride into orbit. Where once
only the superpowers and close allies could afford launch, now diverse countries have
ambitious space programs; for example, India has sent a science probe to orbit Mars, Sri Lanka
is preparing to launch its second satellite, and the United Arab Emirates is recruiting astronauts.
A second source of disruption is the sheer scale of emerging space activity, yielding an increasingly crowded environment. Around the
world, government and industry researchers are pursuing capabilities to support space-enabled businesses and national
security. Increasingly, such capabilities are achieved with large numbers of small, short-lived
satellites rather than small numbers of large, long-lived satellites . The downside is the need to address growing
space traffic that includes thousands of active satellites and an even greater number of debris objects – many of them the legacy of past space projects
that were conceived before protecting the orbital environment was a priority, and others the product of rising powers destructively demonstrating their
leadership from the United
space warfighting capability. Efforts to address this challenge require international cooperation, and

States will be essential in framing what a global space traffic management regime should look
like.
Space weapons tests underscore the third disruptive trend, in which space is becoming a militarily contested domain after being viewed as a
“sanctuary” since the end of the Cold War. That is, space-based military capabilities will be threatened (and maybe civilian satellites as well), making
The precise directions of this trend depend on future choices, but
the space environment riskier for all operators.
increasing commercial activity in space depends on a safe operating environment, just as the
global flow of trade could be greatly disrupted by a great power conflict at sea.
Some fear this disrupted future. But the opportunity for American leadership is enormous, and should be
cause for excitement, not fear. The fact that others are catching up to the United States was
inevitable as observers around the world saw the advantages of space applications and began
pursuing them in an age of rapid technology democratization. The United States is still dominant
overall, and in an excellent position to shape the future of space.
Neither commercial nor government efforts alone will be sufficient. Space remains an area where government and private interests are intertwined. In
the United States, private industry has long been involved in space through government contracts, and as in other areas, has applied this experience to
the development of products and services for commercial customers. Satellite communications was the first example, followed by launch services and
the sale of Earth imagery from orbit. As a result, the global commercial space economy is now estimated to exceed a quarter-trillion dollars annually,
most of it attributable to communications sector activities like satellite television subscriptions.
The United States now has multiple private companies that can launch payloads into space, and more domestic launch providers are on the horizon.
The U.S. is the first country to be in this enviable position, and it is the only country that is
transferring responsibilities for launching human crews to the private sector. With more ways to
get to space, launching satellites will become more affordable, creating a ripple effect of
declining costs and increasing participation in space operations.
But this has been merely the opening act. While growth in the space launch and satellite business has been significant, it is dwarfed by the rise of
space applications like communications, navigation, and remote sensing. With the rise of the data economy, the growing investment in space from so
many players is no surprise. Looking into the future, we are in the early stages of a transition that will vastly expand our concept of a space economy.
Emerging areas include on-orbit servicing, microgravity research and manufacturing, exploitation of extraterrestrial resources, and even space tourism.
Human and financial resources are both essential for success in space. The United States has long been a magnet for people with dreams of exploring
and developing space. For example, a young man named Elon Musk came from South Africa to study, made his fortune, developed a new rocket,
became a formidable player in the global launch market, and launched his sports car into space as a demonstration of his ambition to go to Mars. The
space economy will be built by such people and today many countries are competing for this talent.
The United States achieved space leadership through decades of investment in civil and
national security programs. The commercial sector is now investing significantly on space
projects that used to be government responsibilities, but that does not mean U.S. government
investment should slacken. To remain a dominant actor in space, the United States must be the
pace-setter for a global assortment of collaborators and competitors across government,
industry, and academia.
US leadership is falling in industries like agriculture
Atwood 18 (J. Brian Atwood is a former administrator for the US Agency of International
Development and is a Senior Fellow for International and Public Affairs – Thomas Watson
Institute for International Studies, Brown University. 7-31-2018, "American leadership in
development cooperation," Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/research/american-
leadership-in-development-cooperation/)
Was this enough to stem the inexorable surge of population and poverty? A world population
that had increased by 5 billion since the founding of the U.N. and the Bretton Woods institutions
was beginning to overwhelm the international system. It would take additional resources and
new innovations to stabilize this new and increasingly volatile situation. For the most part,
western democracies were not uniformly generous in responding. Instead, the immigration flows
encouraged by conflict, criminal gangs, and poverty sparked a nativist, and at times populist,
response.
It may be too early to tell whether the “America First” policies of the Trump administration will
stymy efforts to fully implement a 3D national security strategy. The new administration’s
recommended 30 percent cut in diplomacy and development foreign affairs accounts was
rejected by Congress. Momentum for more effective development assistance—built over two
administrations through initiatives such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the
President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), legislation to make food aid more
efficient, reforms to AID Forward, the Development Innovation Laboratory—continue to garner
strong bipartisan congressional support, including through the Trump administration’s USAID
transformation program.
External support for U.S. aid is strong. Non-governmental policy and advocacy organizations
like the Brookings Institution, the Modernization of Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), the
U.S. Global Leadership Coalition (USGLC), the Center for Global Development (CDG), and the
Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley, have
contributed creative ideas for invigorating U.S. development.

Efforts at reinvigorating U.S. architecture include: A proposal to merge and strengthen

development finance programs under a new International Development Finance Corporation
(see paper for Session III); the Aid Accountability and Transparency Act requiring public

disclosure of official development assistance (ODA) in real time; Support for USAID
Administrator Mark Green’s plan to merge the Office of U.S. Disaster Assistance and Office of

Food for Peace; Creating a new Bureau for Development, Democracy, and Innovation,

and combining (once again) USAID’s policy and budget functions; Promoting technology

innovations, and; Introducing legislation to reform food aid.

The community of nations is under threat as populist political leaders challenge the international
system. It is difficult to be optimistic, but so long as there is a vibrant development community
seeking solutions, hope endures that logic will prevail. Development professionals are by nature
patient. They know that political leaders will turn to them when all else fails.

Solves for econ pressures, US leadership and influence, and taking responsibilities
Chiang 15 (Min-Hua Chiang is research fellow at the East Asian Institute. Bandung: Journal of
the Global South (2015) 2: 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40728-015-0023-9)
In parallel to Perroux’s thought about global economic instability brought by IDE, Reich and Lebow specified that American effort to maintain order were a primary source of disorder in the international system.
However, different from Perroux, Reich and Lebow reject conventional view that emphasizes America’s structural position in the global economy or its capacity to leverage its market access by using crude
instruments of power.
Reich and Lebow’s main points of view regarding the US hegemonic role are listed below:
1.

Deterioration of the US power since the post-war period: Different from conventional belief that the US hegemony has continuously existed since the end of WWII, Reich and
Lebow considered the American hegemony has quickly eroded during the post-war period following other countries’

growing economic strength and political stability.

2.

Focus on the US “influence” rather than “power”: Reich and Lebow argued that “America is
unequivocally powerful but only occasionally influential”. Over the past decades, the US translation of its power into influence has proved a
failure as shown in the ineffective results of US aid to Egypt and Israel as well as in the case of military invasion in Iraq. The ineffectiveness of US intervention in other countries’ affairs showed that a hegemon did
not always contribute to international stability.
3.

disagreed with the typical realists and liberals’ description about

Rejection of hegemon’s multi-functional capacity: Reich and Lebow

hegemon’s multiple functions in providing leadership, economic management and security

goods. Instead, they believe that the world is shifting towards a division of functions. Other
actors will emerge in taking more responsibilities and exert more influence. New transnational
forces, coupled with US loss of legitimacy and abandonment of its traditional economic
management responsibilities have accelerated the fragmentation of those functions that usually
associated with hegemony.
However, the above statements are arguable. First, other countries’ development of economic strength during the post war decade, especially Asian countries, has been based on the US market opening up.
Although the US progressively ceased the financial aid to these capitalist countries during the cold war era, the aid actually continued but was transformed into another form. That means the US investment in
developing countries as well as consumption of goods from these countries. The so-called state-led economic development in Asia would not have a success if there was no US tolerance of huge imports from
these developing countries. In term of political stability in certain countries, it has been based on the military alliance or defense treaty between the US and individual countries to deter potential aggression from
another country. For example, the US supplied Taiwan military equipment to prevent from China’s invasion. The US aided South Korea in defense the country from being attacked by the North.

The cp reasserts US leadership and prevents China rise – it’s zero sum
Gabriel 18 (Elliott Gabriel is a former staff writer for teleSUR English and a MintPress News
contributor based in Quito, Ecuador. He has taken extensive part in advocacy and organizing in
the pro-labor, migrant justice and police accountability movements of Southern California and
the state’s Central Coast. 8-3-2018, "US Hegemony Declines As Southeast Asian Nations
Integrate With China," MintPress News, https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-hegemony-
declines-as-southeast-asian-nations-integrate-with-china/247008/)
SINGAPORE – A decade of often bruising negotiations has led to a new agreement for
cooperation, as China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
regional bloc issued a draft document committing to working together, conduct that will govern
future talks over the South China Sea.
A 26-page joint communiqué followed a series of meetings in Singapore involving the ASEAN
member states plus China and Japan, where the goal of regional economic integration was laid
out along with the need for cooperation to weather the potential disruptions posed by high
technology.
“We reiterated the priority placed by ASEAN on the RCEP [Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership] as a centerpiece of its external economic relations, particularly at a time of growing
uncertainty in global trade,” the joint statement read. The RCEP is a proposed free-trade
agreement between ASEAN and Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.
The statement also conveyed the 11 nations’ firm resolve to “fully tap the opportunities afforded
by new technologies and innovation arising from the digital revolution”, as well as to remain
observant and responsive to emerging threats like ecological degradation, and unconventional
security issues such as radicalization, violent extremism, illicit drugs, transnational crime and
cybersecurity threats.
Beijing stresses harmful role of “external disturbances”
China and ASEAN will also hold joint military exercises in October as a means to build mutual
trust among the states and enhance the cooperation of navies, according to the statement.
In a draft text, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi noted China’s desire that the ASEAN-China
Maritime Exercise become a regularly-held event, but that the war games should not involve
extra-regional countries “unless the parties concerned are notified beforehand and express no
objection.”
The top diplomat for the East Asian powerhouse hailed the agreement as a breakthrough while
warning of the danger posed by outside meddlers. “Ruling out external disturbances, the
deliberation of the code of conduct will speed up and move forward,” Wang noted.
The foreign minister added that the regional bloc and China have proven their ability to maintain
regional stability and peace in the South China Sea while forging an ultimate framework of rules
that all countries would observe. Wang said:
It is like China and ASEAN countries building a house together. In the past, there were 11
designs from the 11 countries on what this house would look like. Now we have laid good
groundwork for a single design of this house.”
China and the Southeast Asian bloc could also collaborate in joint oil and gas exploration in the
waters but foreign firms would be excluded in this respect as well, Beijing suggested in the text.
While China’s allies in ASEAN like Cambodia and Laos have sided with Beijing over the
territorial disputes, the Philippines and especially Vietnam have lodged protests against China’s
moves to change the reality on the ground.
Hanoi was infuriated by Beijing’s moves to place an oil rig in waters it claimed in 2014, as well
as its recent transformation of disputed reefs into fortified man-made islands complete with
runways, tunnels, advanced weapons systems and other high-tech infrastructure. The draft
document contained Vietnam’s criticisms of China’s construction of artificial islands.
Such differences are unlikely to be resolved overnight, regardless of China’s expressed
optimism.
China comes into its own as U.S. goes on the attack
Beijing’s approach appears committed to eroding the regional dominance of the United States.
Since the end of the Second World War, the U.S. has been the foremost military power in the
Asia-Pacific region. Washington has frequently weighed in against China amid the contention
surrounding the South China Sea.
China has long pointed to the U.S. as the main source of regional tensions, accusing the U.S. of
meddling in Asian matters through its repeated deployments of warships and jets in the regional
waters while attempting to consolidate a new “Indo-Pacific” alliance meant to contain a rising
China.
The two are embroiled in a heated trade dispute amid mutual accusations of protectionism and
the imposition of tariffs. On Thursday, the U.S. placed new restrictions on 44 Chinese
companies it sees as posing a “significant risk” to its national security and foreign policy
interests.
In an editorial published Thursday evening in the English-language edition of Global Times, an
outlet closely affiliated with the ruling Communist Party of China, the paper urged the Chinese
people to maintain a realistic view of the country’s “ability to withstand a comprehensive U.S.
trade war.”
Warning against both overconfidence and excessive doubt by public intellectuals, the paper
noted:
Under the current circumstances, Beijing has no will to initiate a trade war with Washington, but
is forced to fight back strategically. Chinese society has various opinions on the reason why the
trade war started, and all these opinions are worth summarizing. However, it needs the
solidarity and confidence of all of society to confront U.S. pressure, and fear of the U.S. won’t
help.
… Opening up is a must for China, and the struggle against U.S. hegemony during the process
is also unavoidable.”
Regional odds increasingly favor Beijing
Southeast Asian elites have expressed doubts over the United States’ ability to retain its
regional dominance, especially given the erratic leadership of President Donald Trump and his
administration’s stubborn “America First” agenda of reducing trade deficits with other countries
by demanding they drop their protectionism. Traditional allies like Indonesia and Japan have
balked at the White House’s domineering approach to these talks.
On the other hand, China’s strength is increasingly seen as a new reality that’s here to stay.
Businesses across the region have hoped to attract Chinese investments, tempering their
unease and opposition to Beijing’s policies.
Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a $113 million infrastructure
fund for Asia-Pacific development as a part of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy to counter
what it sees as an emerging Chinese leadership role or “dominance” over the region. Pompeo is
currently on a tour of Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia where he is expected to lay out the
White House’s Southeast Asian regional policy.
Given the apparent consensus on the need for regional differences to remain a regional affair
that should be sorted out by locals, Pompeo may not receive the acquiescence to U.S.
demands or commitment to its flagging hegemony for which he seems to be hoping.
 1NC – Undo Trump CP
Plan: The United States federal government should:
 Reverse all Trump executive actions
 Develop a sanctions doctrine
 Create a White House Council of Foreign Affairs Advisors
 Create a bipartisan National Commission on Reforming America’s Foreign Policy
Architecture
 Substantially increase defense spending, including promoting naval deployment,
deterrence posture, and new military technology.

That solves US leadership and overwhelms the alt causes

Drezner 19 (Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of
Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution. Prior to Fletcher, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of
Colorado at Boulder. He has previously held positions with Civic Education Project, the RAND
Corporation and the U.S. Department of the Treasury and received fellowships from the
German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Harvard
University. "Preserving American Leadership." ProQuest, Jun 13, 2019,
http://ezproxy.kcls.org/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/2239470822?
accountid=46.)
Late last week Heather Hurlburt did a mitzvah and wrote an excellent Lawfare review essay on the current state of debate over U.S. grand strategy. She noted, "though the authors include Republicans,
Democrats and people unaffiliated with either party, all share an eagerness for a day when Donald Trump and his acolytes are not running U.S. foreign policy, and each seeks to push forward the national security
community's preparations for that day."

the U.S. leadership role can

Hurlburt was kind enough to include my recent Foreign Affairs essay in her discussion. While she suggested that I was part of the camp "insisting that

be recouped, and that the investment needed to do so would be worthwhile," I fear she might have overestimated the
optimism contained in that essay. I literally wrote, "In most Foreign Affairs articles, this is the moment when the writer calls for a leader to exercise the necessary political will to do the right thing. That exhortation
always sounded implausible, but now it sounds laughable."
Still, nihilism is not my natural métier. After that essay's publication, I've received queries from surprising places that (a) agree with my diagnosis of the problem but (b) want to know if there's a remedy. If one

believes that it is in the U.S. national interest to continue to exercise leadership, how can that
leadership be sustained? To put it more plainly: can I prove my nihilist sentiments wrong?
That is exactly the kind of challenge any self-respecting academic would accept. Recall my primary concern in that essay: a combination of Ideas Industry effects,

political polarization, and the erosion of checks and balances on the presidency have created a
system where presidents had amassed unfettered foreign policy authorities but may also find all
their actions reversed by their successor from the opposing party: "The question is not what
U.S. foreign policy can do after Trump. The question is whether there is any viable grand
strategy that can endure past an election cycle."
So, can this be fixed? Maybe. If I were advising an incoming administration on what to do to preserve and restore U.S. leadership in the world, here's my proposed set of policies, in sequence:

1. Reverse all Trump executive actions as soon as possible. As previously noted, an awful lot of
Trump's foreign policy legacy consists solely of executive actions; most of the controversial bits
can be reversed as quickly as possible. And I mean everything: lift the tariffs on steel and
aluminum, lift the tariffs on China, rejoin JCPOA (or, if that is not possible, restart nuclear
negotiations with Iran), the Paris climate accords and the U.N. Human Rights Council, end the
declared state of emergency on the Southern border, the whole smash.
The idea here would be to signal to the rest of the world that the Age of Trump was a blip and not a trend . Obviously

this would not extend to anything ratified by Congress, such as USMCA (if that happens). However, in many ways these very revocations would further

confirm my claim that foreign policy is now being conducted by presidential whim. So this would
be a weak signal, but still an initial gesture of good faith. Then ...
2. Develop a sanctions doctrine. One area where the United States continues to exercise unparalleled power is in the financial realm. The Trump

administration's sanctions addiction, however, has gotten so bad that it is roiling allies and rivals
alike into finding ways to route around the dollar. As Jack Lew and Richard Nephew have warned, this is a brilliant way to
erode U.S. structural power.
 way to forestall this decline is to articulate a set of principles under which the United States
One

would choose to resort to financial statecraft. What are the conditions under which the United States would act unilaterally? When would secondary sanctions
be considered? This should come in the form of a presidential speech at the Treasury Department. And these criteria better be pretty damn stringent; otherwise this will not reassure anyone.

A key part of this would be a willingness to work with Congress to reform the tools the Trump
administration has abused, including Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Act and the International
Emergency Economic Powers Act. The goal would be to forestall more concerted action by U.S.
allies to widen the workarounds for U.S. financial sanctions.
3. Create a White House Council of Foreign Affairs Advisers . Foreign policy is just as important to the White House as economic policy, so I

see no reason why political scientists should not get their own council . This would have the added benefit of bolstering

presidential reliance on expertise, which I hear has been a problem as of late. This council would differ from the
National Security Council in providing a bigger picture on how U.S. foreign policy connects to U.S. national interests. It could also take over the lead on drafting the U.S. National Security Strategy.
Is empowering international relations academics self-serving? You betcha! It would nonetheless be another way to bridge the gap between policymakers and scholars.

4.Create a bipartisan National Commission on Reforming America's Foreign Policy Architecture.

National commissions are often ways to turf out problems that cannot be immediately resolved. Still, they can matter on occasion, and this might be one of those times. In her essay, Hurlburt wrote,

"writers from hard-bitten realists to antiwar liberals to internationalist conservatives nearly all see
a continuing role for at least some parts of the alliances and multilateral organizations against
which Trump and his enablers have successfully rallied their supporters." This suggests that it might be possible to
assemble a group of progressives, liberal internationalists, conservatives and even populists to
discuss whether there are common foundations for how to make the foreign policy machinery
run better, the proper allocation of resources, how to get Congress more involved and how to
ensure that commitments last beyond a presidential terms. Finally ....
5. Educate the public. None of this will work unless there is some buy-in from the American people. This requires a president willing to forego Executive Time to actually connect the vagaries of foreign policy to
bread-and-butter issues for U.S. citizens. Ironically enough, this might be Trump's greatest long-term service to U.S. foreign policy. By constantly disrupting the machine, he has highlighted the costs of those
disruptions. The polling data suggest that a message of the importance of credible commitments would register with the American people. The next president has to sell it, however.

Will any of this work? I don't know. But that's what I have. I think it would be worth trying.

That solves – the perception that we’re withdrawing from Paris decks the
economy and US credibility
Romm 17 (Joe Romm covers climate science and climate policy. He is the founding editor of
ClimateProgress. 5-31-2017, "Trump’s reported exit from Paris climate deal signals end of the
American Century," No Publication, https://thinkprogress.org/trump-paris-end-of-the-american-
century-ec5ee0742f8a/)
President Donald Trump’s stunning words and actions to our European allies this week — 
culminating in reports that he will exit the historic Paris climate agreement — signal the end of
the American Century.
Rather than strive to maintain the United States’ position as the leader of the free world, a role
we have assigned to ourselves for decades, Trump is content with America the villain — the
greedy and myopic country that killed humanity’s last, best hope of avoiding catastrophic
climate change. Also, by abandoning clean energy, which is the one new sector capable of
actually creating millions of high wage American jobs, Trump is officially handing the economic
reins over to Europe and China.
Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in the Obama administration,
echoed that sentiment on Twitter Wednesday morning.
“America is responsible, to herself as well as to history, for the world environment in which she
lives,” wrote publisher Henry Luce in a famous February 17, 1941 Life magazine editorial, “The
American Century.”
Luce was writing about America’s obligation to end its isolationism and enter World War II. But
he had a broader purpose, to discuss a “fundamental issue which faces America as it faces no
other nation,” an issue “deeper even than the immediate issue of war.”
That issue was whether America would assume the mantle of global leader. Luce explained that
throughout our history, “this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes.
Above them all… was the triumphal purpose of freedom. It is in this spirit that all of us are
called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to
create the first great American Century.”
In words that still ring true today, Luce described what would happen if America met the
challenge and took a global leadership role — and what would happen if we retreated into
isolationism:
If America meets it correctly, then, despite hosts of dangers and difficulties, we can look forward
and move forward to a future worthy of men, with peace in our hearts. If we dodge the issue, we
shall flounder for ten or 20 or 30 bitter years in a chartless and meaningless series of disasters.
And so the U.S. finds itself at the same crossroads today. After a disastrous European trip in
which Trump offended many world leaders, refused to endorse our commitment to defend our
NATO allies, and persuaded Germany that we aren’t a reliable partner, a decision to exit the
Paris climate deal would be the last straw, a blunder of historical import.
By torpedoing the unanimous agreement among more than 190 nations aimed at sparing
humanity decades, if not centuries, of misery, Trump will destroy America’s “soft power,” our
ability to achieve outcomes we desire in other global negotiations.
Trump will be destroying the global influence that was at the core of Luce’s definition of the
American Century: “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful
and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our
influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”
Ironically, by gutting domestic climate action and clean energy investment, Trump will also
weaken the U.S. economically; other countries, particularly China, have indicated they intend to
seize on the vast wealth and high paying jobs that come with leadership in clean energy and
climate solutions, which will be a $50 trillion-plus market in the coming decades.
China has already announced its intention to be the economic leader and global hero on climate
change. Indeed, one leading Australian financial columnist called Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January “the moment China’s president
claimed global leadership on trade and climate in the vacuum of America’s advertised
withdrawal.”
The official China Daily wrote in a commentary at the time, “ready or not, China has become the
de facto world leader seeking to maintain an open global economy and battle climate change.” It
called China “the one major power with a global outlook.”
Unless Trump is replaced in 2020 by a president committed to domestic and global climate
action, he will have free reign to fully thwart the world’s last plausible realistic chance to avoid
disaster. America, the richest country and biggest cumulative carbon polluter, will inevitably be
blamed for the ever worsening weather extremes, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and climate
conflicts here and abroad.
Luce truly described the future Trump is creating for us with remarkable prescience: “We shall
flounder for 10 or 20 or 30 bitter years in a chartless and meaningless series of disasters.”

US Climate Leadership is key – solves global cooperation and ensure allied

strength
Zhu and Ye 16 (Mengye Zhu is a Doctoral Candidate at Tsingua University. Qi Ye is a Director
at The Climate Policy Initiative. 12-9-2016, "A shift toward climate leadership," Brookings,
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2016/12/13/a-shift-toward-climate-leadership/)
Implementation was the keyword for the 22nd Conference of Parties meeting (COP22), recently held in Marrakech, Morocco. In
October, 113 out of 197 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ratified the Paris Agreement,
representing 80 percent of global CO2 emissions.
Following this achievement, two urgent matters lie ahead: the development of elaborate and concrete road maps to achieve the
goals set in the agreement and fulfilling what is left in the Kyoto Protocol. Marrakech was, without doubt, the beginning of the post-
Paris era.
Climate finance was under the spotlight during the conference, discussed widely across national
pavilions and at side events. Deep concerns were shared by developing countries, especially
the least developed and most vulnerable. Although developed countries promised at
Copenhagen in 2009 to give annual aid of $100 billion (94 billion euros; 79 billion) from 2010 to
2020 to help developing countries cope with climate change, so far there is still an annual $40 to
$70 billion gap to fill. Additionally, this is only the financing shortage within the Kyoto time frame. The world is facing an even
bigger challenge when it comes to the Paris Agreement.
Last year, before the Paris Conference, developed countries, led by the European Union and the United States, secretly formed a
“high ambition coalition” with 79 African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries, but excluding China and India. The group emerged at the
end of the conference to push for a legally binding plan to hold the global temperature increase to within 1.5 C by 2100, instead of
the former agreed target of 2 C. The final version of the Paris Agreement, therefore, states “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature
increase to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels”. This plan serves the best interests of vulnerable countries. But
the climate finance conundrum dragged the ambition down to earth at COP22, with the name
“Donald Trump” contributing to the process.
Noticeably, the landscape of climate leadership is shifting toward the east. China was widely expected to play a leading role at
COP22, an expectation reinforced by the pessimistic atmosphere created by Trump’s election.
Noticeably, the landscape of climate leadership is shifting toward the east. China was widely
expected to play a leading role at COP22, an expectation reinforced by the pessimistic
atmosphere created by Trump’s election. Over the years, China has indeed proactively helped other
developing countries on climate change. From 2011, China has invested more than $1 billion to help African and
vulnerable countries. In last year’s US-China Joint Presidential Statement on Climate Change, China
committed to establishing the South-South Cooperation on Climate Change Fund and to provide
$3.1 billion in three years. This will finance programs including infrastructure construction,
personnel training and capacity building in developing countries. At COP22, this commitment was
strengthened again by Xie Zhenhua, China’s special representative on climate change affairs, during the High-Level Forum on
South-South Cooperation on Climate Change, which was the most important event in the China pavilion. During the forum, the
COP22 president, UN officials and dozens of ministers from developing countries shared their views and visions on south-south
cooperation and China’s positive role in it.
By incorporating climate change in south-south cooperation, China expanded the scope for
foreign aid, which is widely recognized as an important strategy in every country’s foreign policy
portfolio. The poor and vulnerable countries cry for money, technology and expertise to adapt to climate change and develop a
green economy. In this sense, conventional foreign aid targets such as poverty, health and education can be considered more
broadly as climate change issues.
Geopolitically, large powers compete for greater influence in global governance through foreign aid programs. The gap in
climate financing therefore offers considerable opportunities for competitive donors to influence
the climate agenda and international affairs more generally. In this potential competition, China
has many advantages, including empathy for the need for economic development and the
necessity of cooperation. This has resulted in China’s “assistance-plus investment” foreign aid
model.
International opinion on China’s foreign aid, however, is extremely polarized. Some argue that China’s no “strings attached”
approach is efficient and generates win-win outcomes. Others criticize this direct, economically-driven assistance as a form of
neocolonialism.
Unarguably, China’s influence on less-developed countries has been growing rapidly, along with
growing concern from the West. The reasons behind this come not only from concerns that China may
undermine the democratic process of these countries but also, and more important, from the
fear of losing advantages they earn from their own foreign aid programs.
The elephant in the room at COP22 was the question, Does Trump fear losing these advantages? He claimed
on the campaign trail that he would halt US funding for UN climate change programs, seemingly
undermining US President Barack Obama’s original commitment of $3 billion. What he will
actually do once in office remains to be seen.
Regardless, China is taking on a growing leadership role in global climate governance. It is inevitable
that the shifting landscape toward China’s leadership will put pressure on the US in terms of its global image and influence. The
world can only hope that, as a self-proclaimed successful investor, Trump will come to agree with Obama that climate finance is “a
smart investment for us to make”.
 2NC – Undo Trump – Solvency
It solves and avoids the net benefit
NIAC 18 (The National Iranian American Council is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization
dedicated to strengthening the voice of Iranian Americans and promoting greater understanding
between the American and Iranian people. We accomplish our mission through expert research
and analysis, civic and policy education, and community building. 11-19-2018, "Restoring U.S.
Credibility: Returning to the Iran Nuclear Agreement," NIAC, https://www.niacouncil.org/jcpoa-
report/)
Lawrence Wilkerson, Col, USA (Ret), former chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell:
“NIAC’s report, “Restoring U.S. Credibility – Returning to the Iran Nuclear Agreement”, is not
only a powerful indictment of the Trump Administration’s security policy, it is a clear and clarion
call for redress. The report makes quite clear that without a resumption of our agreed
responsibilities under the JCPOA, alliances will fracture, de-dollarization movements will
proceed apace, enemies will gain ground, and Iran will not be substantially prevented from
acquiring a nuclear weapon. War could even result. The wonder is that the U.S. withdrew from
the agreement in the first place; even more of a marvel–but entirely wise and proper–would be a
successful return. Every concerned party should be working toward that end.”
Hooman Majd, Iranian-American writer: “It almost goes without saying that the best option for
de-escalating tensions in the Middle East, and preventing nuclear proliferation, is for the U.S. to
return to the JCPOA nuclear accord. It is unimaginable that Iran would agree to a new deal—or
indeed any other deal on other issues of contention—without the U.S. first abiding by the
commitments that it made when it signed on, along with five other powers, to the nuclear deal
with Iran.”
Ned Price, Director of Policy and Communication at National Security Action: “There is much
that we still don’t know about the Trump administration’s plans and intentions regarding Iran, but
here’s what we do know: the withdrawal from the Iran deal was a political maneuver designed
solely to satisfy the President’s base. It was manifestly not in our national security interest, as it
has the potential to free Iran from the most stringent verification and monitoring regime ever
negotiated, while also simultaneously setting us on a possible path toward another disastrous
Middle Eastern conflict. What we also know, however, is that the new Democratic House now
has the oversight tools to spotlight and constrain the administration’s recklessness, just as we
begin to clear the path for the next administration’s reentry into the deal. There may be tactical
disagreements regarding how to most effectively confront Iran’s destabilizing regional activities,
but there must be a strategic recognition that only the JCPOA provides a baseline that allows us
to achieve our most important objective: a nuclear weapons-free Iran.”
Barbara Slavin, Director of the Future of Iran Initiative at The Atlantic Council: “I concur that the
next US administration should return to the JCPOA– assuming Iran has remained compliant —
and also lift the travel ban. The US should also request new talks with Iran both on repairing the
damage from the unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA and on other issues of mutual concern.
Narges Bajoghli, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies: “It is crucial for America’s standing in the world that we work to re-enter the JCPOA
in the near future. This report provides concrete steps that Congress can take now to ensure
that we return to the promises we made to the international community. Without doing so,
America will continue to act as a force of instability in the Middle East.”
Farideh Farhi, Independent Scholar and Affiliate Graduate Faculty at the University of Hawai’i at
Manoa: “The Trump Administration’s ill-conceived rejection of the JCPOA and policy of
‘maximum pressure’ can no doubt inflict pain on the Iranian people. It can also court disaster in
risking Iran’s resumption of its nuclear activities, further destabilization of the Middle East, and
possibly even another costly US war in the region. Remaining quiet in the face of these
predictable harms is not an option. This report offers timely and reasonable recommendations
for keeping the JCPOA alive as a pathway for the re-emergence of a saner approach to Iran.”
Bijan Khajehpour, economist and a managing partner at Eurasian Nexus Partners: “The US
rejoining the JCPOA and helping to sustain a multilateral agreement will not only reduce the
likelihood of an unnecessary nuclear arms race in the Middle East, but also prevent a
radicalisation of Iranian politics. A moderate Iran is important for regional stability, the
containment of jihadist movements and the future energy security for US allies globally.”
Nicholas Miller, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College “The JCPOA has
successfully curtailed Iran’s nuclear program and remains the surest tool for preventing an
Iranian bomb. The new Congress should do what it can to limit the serious damage done by the
Trump administration’s withdrawal from the deal. If the administration’s ‘maximum pressure’
campaign continues to escalate, the odds increase that Iran will exit the agreement and move
closer to a nuclear weapon, which could in turn spark a costly war.”
Paul Pillar, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown
University: “Candidates and legislators of all political persuasions would do well to read and
heed this report. The Trump administration’s abandonment of arms control and diplomacy in
favor of conflict and confrontation has brought the United States only isolation and infamy as
well as heightened risk of war. It is not too late to return to compliance with the JCPOA and to a
course that demonstrably serves U.S. interests better than the current policy does.”
Ellie Geranmayeh, Deputy Head MENA program at The European Council on Foreign Relations
“President Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the JCPOA, after months of negotiations
with European allies earlier this year on pathways to sustain the agreement, was significantly
damaging for transatlantic ties. This wound has been deepened by the manner in which the
White House has sidelined European security interests and tried to impede their efforts to
preserve the JCPOA, as enshrined by a UN Security Council. This report highlights the urgent
need for the US executive and legislative branch to reassure European allies that in matters of
foreign policy, the United States is a credible and consistent partner. Moreover, the US should
reassure European capitals and companies that US sanctions policy will not seek to
illegitimately target allies in pursuit of a maximalist policy that is unlikely to trigger fundamental
changes in Iranian behaviour.”

That restores US power projection and deterrence

Ochmanek 18 (Ochmanek, David, Restoring U.S. Power Projection Capabilities: Responding
to the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE260.html. Doi: https://doi.org/10.7249/PE260)
Toward a New Approach to Power Projection As noted above, war-gaming conducted by RAND
and DoD has been evaluating the performance of future U.S. forces in scenarios involving
adversaries with advanced A2/AD capabilities. Insights derived from those efforts point to three
key elements of a new approach to projecting power against these most capable adversaries.19
First, forward-based U.S. forces and infrastructure must be sufficiently robust to withstand initial
attacks by enemy anti-access systems and provide essential enabling capabilities for early
strike operations. In NATO/Europe, this means rebuilding a posture of land and air forces on the
alliance’s eastern flank that is capable of confronting a combined arms Russian invasion. In
both Europe and the Western Pacific, it means building a more-resilient network of bases
through selective hardening, redundancy and dispersal, deception measures, and active
defenses against cruise missiles; enhancing the resiliency of space-based capabilities for
reconnaissance, communications, and positioning, navigation, and timing; and ensuring that
operations can be effectively orchestrated in wartime even when command and control assets
are under intensive attack. Second, U.S. forces must find ways to detect, identify, track, and
engage and damage key elements of the enemy’s operational center of gravity—its invading
forces—from the outset of hostilities in circumstances in which the air, sea, land, space, and
cyber domains are heavily contested. Even with improvements to forward posture and
capabilities, U.S. forces likely will not have time to defeat the enemy’s principal threats to their
operations in these domains prior to attacking its invading forces. Therefore, U.S. and allied
forces must find ways to “reach into” contested areas of the battlespace in order to delay,
disrupt, and ultimately defeat an attacking force. For this, U.S. forces today have two important
trump cards to play: heavy bombers and undersea platforms. The U.S. fleet of 96 combat-coded
bombers—B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s— supplemented by aerial refueling aircraft, can operate from
bases that lie beyond the range of Chinese and Russian conventionally armed ballistic missiles.
If equipped with sufficient numbers of capable standoff weapons, these aircraft can bring
sustained, accurate firepower to bear against naval vessels, C2 nodes, logistics and support
facilities, and mechanized ground forces. U.S. submarines can evade detection and launch
standoff weapons as well, although their weapons-carrying capacity is rather limited. Future
generations of large, unmanned underwater vehicles have the potential to expand the attack
capacity of the Navy’s submersible fleet.

Deterrence solves
Engdahl 17 (F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in
politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively
for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” 10-29-2019, "USA Military Force Projection:
Semper Paratus?”, https://www.journal-neo.org/2017/10/29/usa-military-force-projection-
semper-paratus/)
Behind all the bluster is a US military with morale at an all-time low, with preparedness in many cases abysmally
inadequate, and using technologies that are costly to taxpayers and far behind the state of the art of other potential

adversaries. All are symptoms of a failing former sole superpower whose military is being gravely abused and misused, far from the intent for defense of the nation.
US Navy Collisions
This August the USS John Sidney McCain, a guided-missile destroyer of the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet collided with an oil tanker off Singapore, killing ten sailors. Two months
earlier the Japan-based USS Fitzgerald collided with a merchant ship killing seven sailors and causing an estimated half-a billion dollars in damage. A Naval intelligence
investigation found zero evidence of cyber-attack. For once Washington did not try to blame Russia or China. The fault lies at home.
Incredible as it may seem, for the world’s largest and most formidable Navy, a decision was
made during the Bush-Cheney Administration when Don Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense to
“save money” by scrapping the traditional training of Navy officers. As naval electronics such as advanced radar, sonar,
gun, missile, and data linkage systems became more complex during the 1960s, the Navy created what was called the Surface Warfare Division Officer School which gave
future officers a rigorous 12-14 months of training before they boarded their first ship. In 2003, it was shut down “to create efficiencies,” and replaced by computer-based training
(CBT). Instead of attending the earlier training, new naval officers were given a packet of computer training discs and the ship commander was told to be responsible for the
competence of officers under their command.
the elimination of serious training
Vice Admiral Timothy LaFleur, the one responsible for the decision, sharply criticized by many officers, insisted

would, “result in higher professional satisfaction, increase the return on investment during the
first division officer tour, and free up more career time downstream.” The training cuts saved a
ludicrous $15 million a year. Moreover, over-reliance on “fail-proof” electronics such as automated radar systems and the automatic identification system
(AIS) led to abandonment of human watch-standers actually looking out the bridge window of the ship for dangers. No one was watching on the USS Fitzgerald or the USS
McCain.
The commanders of the USS Fitzgerald and the USS McCain were relieved of their commands, hardly a serious response to the deeper problem. The rot goes much deeper.
Lower standards
As any honest experienced military veteran of the 1960s Vietnam War can attest, there is a crucial difference if you come as a foreign soldier to a land and its people who are
fighting for their independence from foreign military occupation or defending from foreign attack. Ho Chi Minh, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of
Vietnam, who spent years in the United States and France, led a vastly under-equipped army of peasants against the best-equipped armed force in the world and ultimately
won.
The fact that the armed forces of the United States, since the end of the Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has not had a convincing “evil” adversary, has
had a huge effect on morale. Going to Afghanistan in 2001 to destroy Osama bin Laden, then to Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein, then to Libya to destroy Muhammar Qaddafi,
now to Syria to destroy Bashar al Assad—none of these “adversaries” are morally convincing to most Americans.
Not surprisingly, in this context the US Armed Forces are having difficulty recruiting sufficient qualified, intelligent service personnel for the wars that Washington and its patrons
in Wall Street seem to want to wage around the world.
This year to meet its quota of new recruits to fill its global missions, the US Army has had to accept recruits with lower qualifications, to take recruits who scored in the lower
third of the tests, so called Category Four recruits, including those with records for drug use.
And it is not only the lack of sufficient preparation of its Army personnel or of its naval officers.
Alarming pilot shortage
On October 23, the US Air Force revealed that it is preparing its fleet of B-52 nuclear-capable bombers for 24-hour alert status, something not done since the end of the Cold
War, according to Defense One. Airmen at the Barksdale Air Force base are readying the planes “in case the alert order is issued.” The B-52s would be armed with nuclear
bombs available to take off at a moment’s notice something that was discontinued with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The mad new plan of Trump’s generals however, has an added problem. The Air Force has a dramatic shortage of qualified pilots.
On October 21, President Trump signed an executive order allowing the Air Force to call back to service up to 1,000 retired pilots, by expanding a state of national emergency declared by George W. Bush after Sept. 11, 2001. The order is part of an attempt “to
mitigate the Air Force’s acute shortage of pilots,” according to a Pentagon spokesman.
For decades the US military–whose annual budget exceeds that of China, UK, France, Germany, and Russia combined–has waged wars against military opponents such as Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya where there was no contest.
This past June the US Army War College issued a study titled, At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World. In the study the authors conclude that the world order created after World War II, dominated by the US “is under enormous stress.”
They add, “The order and its constituent parts… were transformed to a unipolar system with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and have by-and-large been dominated by the United States and its major Western and Asian allies since. Status quo forces collectively
are comfortable with their dominant role in dictating the terms of international security outcomes and resist the emergence of rival centers of power and authority.”

the US “can no longer count on the unassailable position of dominance, supremacy, or

The study adds that

pre-eminence it enjoyed for the 20-plus years after the fall of the Soviet Union .”
 the Trump Administration is
Now, with the emergence of China as a genuine great power, with the rapid emergence of Russia as a great power in cohesion with China’s vision of an emerging Eurasia,

warring around with everybody everywhere in what is clearly not either a healthy conduct of US
foreign policy nor a serious manner for a mature nation to behave. Building up and restoring America’s rotting domestic infrastructure, not building
up the US military against concocted threats or nations who ask the right to own sovereignty, building the real American economy to rejoin the ranks as a leading industrial nation makes far more sense in my view.

Rejoining the JCPOA solves for deterrence in the Middle East

Bolan 6/5 (Dr. Christopher Bolan is Professor of Middle East Security Studies at the Strategic
Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  6-15-2019,
"Deterrence Is Failing — Partly Because Iran Has No Idea What the US Really Wants," Defense
One, https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/06/restoring-deterrence-iran/157756/)
Successful deterrence requires clear delineation of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. That
needs to start, pronto.
Iran is accelerating its enrichment of uranium, the IAEA says. Iran attacked four tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, the Trump administration says. If all this is true — Tehran has hinted at the first, though it
strenuously denies the second, and there are doubters in world capitals and at home — then U.S. policymakers need to conduct an honest assessment of where and why U.S. policies have failed to deter Iranian
actions.

Trump’s maximum pressure campaign has collided head

As Washington Post columnist David Ignatius summarizes the mounting tensions, “

on with [Iranian Supreme Leader] Khamenei’s maximum resistance.”

Leaders in Washington and Tehran alike have miscalculated. The Trump administration applied devastating economic pressure on Iran without providing leaders in Tehran with a clear roadmap for how to escape

As Europe, Russia, and China failed to deliver any

punishment. This put Iran in the penalty box without evident prospect for rehabilitation.

meaningful economic relief to Iran, and as the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear
deal, or JCPOA, solidified the position of hardliners in Tehran, it was virtually inevitable that Iran
would strike back in order to demonstrate its ability to inflict pain on opponents.
Yet Iranian leaders have badly miscalculated as well, by threatening to stop complying with at least some provisions of the JCPOA. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have recently verified
that Iran is increasing its production of nuclear fuel and Iranian President Rouhani has pledged that the next step will be to increase the level of enrichment above allowable levels. These steps are only likely to
increase Iran’s diplomatic isolation and will push even reluctant U.S. allies to back whatever retaliatory action might be taken by the United States. Meanwhile repeated threats by Iranian leaders to close the Strait
of Hormuz to international traffic only bolster the public case for Iran’s culpability in the recent attacks on tankers.
In the immediate term, the central question that should occupy U.S. policymakers in Washington is how to restore deterrence in the wake of these Iranian attacks. As options are considered, U.S. decision-makers
would be well advised to review some of the enduring insights from the vast academic literature on the topic.

At base,deterrence policy is developed to change the decision-making calculus of an opponent. As such it

is a game of perception management and clear communication. Successful deterrence requires clear delineation of acceptable and

unacceptable behaviors. It requires that the opponent understand that unacceptable behavior
will be met with a credible punishment whose costs will outweigh any potential benefit to be
gained. Finally, prospects for successful deterrence are improved when threats of punishment
are combined with positive incentives to alter the opponent’s unacceptable behavior.
Recent events offer clear evidence that U.S. deterrence has failed to sufficiently alter Tehran’s calculus as it weighs its options in responding to the devastating economic impact of U.S. sanctions. Restoring
deterrence will require changes to U.S. policies.

impose punishment on those responsible for the tanker attacks.

The first, most obvious, and most emotionally satisfying step will be to

U.S. military spokesmen say a video released on Thursday identifies the IRGC as responsible.
President Trump’s designation of the IRGC as a terrorist entity in May provides a ready-made mechanism for imposing additional financial and economic penalties on this force.

An effective
However, Iran’s unprovoked attack on international shipping in the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz will require a more robust response if deterrence is to be restored.

response is almost certain to include U.S. military strikes of one extent or another. The challenge for U.S.
policymakers will be to design military strikes that are sufficiently strong to deter future Iranian attacks without provoking escalatory Iranian retaliation that spins out of control and triggers a broader regional war.
Such a balancing act will require detailed intelligence, precise military planning, and sophisticated public and private diplomacy.

U.S. intelligence will need to identify those particular IRGC units, individuals, and leaders
directly responsible for the attacks on the tankers. U.S. military strikes should explicitly target
those facilities with the aim of both signaling resolve and diminishing the IRGC’s ability to
conduct future attacks. U.S. diplomats should both privately and publicly signal that the U.S. will not tolerate future actions of this sort. American officials will simultaneously need to
convince leaders in Tehran that the U.S. is not seeking a broader confrontation with Iran. A forceful, targeted, and proportional U.S.military response could reassure U.S. regional allies of American defense
commitments while giving leaders in Tehran every incentive to avoid further escalation.
Quietly through private diplomatic channels such as Swiss intermediaries, U.S. leaders will also need to provide decision-makers in Tehran an off-ramp to avoid further escalation and present a concrete step-by-
step plan for getting back to the negotiating table as President Trump and other senior officials have said is their ultimate goal.

clarify U.S. redlines for objectionable Iranian behavior. Unfortunately, the unilateral U.S.
The first step in doing so will be to

withdrawal from the meticulously negotiated and internationally sanctioned JCPOA has primarily
served to muddy the waters around Iranian nuclear enrichment. U.S. policymakers should clearly explain what specific Iranian actions
could hasten the development of a nuclear weapon and so draw U.S.military strikes.
The next step should be prioritizing and clarifying the 12 demands that U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo laid on Iran in his May 2018 “New Iran Strategy” speech. These demands amount to a requirement that Iran
cease enrichment of uranium, provide anytime-anywhere access to Iranian civilian and military facilities, halt development of ballistic missiles, end support to its vast array of Shi’a militia groups deployed in Iraq,
Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and stop all further unspecified “threatening behavior.” Such a broad and all-encompassing list of requirements cannot possibly help leaders in Tehran accurately weigh the costs and
benefits of compliance. In fact, the expansive nature of these demands virtually guarantees that Iran will remain in violation regardless of any self-imposed restraints on its behavior short of capitulation. It seems
highly unlikely that Pompeo or his deputies might walk back these overreaching U.S. demands in public, a private exchange that establishes clear priorities for changes in Iran’s behavior is critical to adjusting
calculations in Tehran.
Finally, U.S. policymakers will have to provide a more concrete roadmap for getting back to negotiations. President Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA despite Iranian compliance has severely damaged the
credibility of any public expressions of a desire for a return to negotiations. In the immediate wake of Iran’s attacks and a likely forthcoming U.S. military response, the immediate challenge will be to avoid
uncontrolled escalation toward intensified and expanded conflict. However, identifying small steps that could be taken by Iran that would be quickly rewarded with a comparably small “reward” by the United States
holds the potential to create positive momentum toward reduced tensions. If successful, a series of these small confidence-building steps could provide a sufficient foundation and incentives for both sides to
return to the negotiating table and avoid a broader conflict that both sides say they want to avoid.
The cp solves for deterrence and reasserts American posture
Hanson 19 (NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. 5-28-2019, "Trump’s High-Wire
Act of Reestablishing Deterrence without War," National Review,
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/trump-foreign-policy-challenge-deterrence-without-
war/)
Note that Trump shattered the blue wall in part because of his sober Jacksonianism: restoring
U.S. tough deterrence without inserting a large military presence in any of the hellholes that
U.S. troops have been deployed to in the past 50 years, much less falling into a conventional
war that America could win, but only at considerable cost. Bombing the “sh*t” out of ISIS was a
successful example of a non non-intervention. Early on, the canny Trump, alone of his
Republican rivals, fathomed that voters neither wanted any more Obama apologetics nor would
put up with another Afghanistan, Libya, or Iraq.
Squaring that circle of toughness without risking a major war is now Trump’s political challenge,
given that the shelf life of rhetorical deterrence is brief.
The United States cannot abide renegade lunatic regimes with nuclear missiles aimed at its
heartland, or aggressive nuclearized regimes with which the U.S. had either already fought a
major war or narrowly avoided one. China’s destruction of global trading norms only whets
China’s appetite to translate its huge profits into military power and neocolonial adventurism, on
the theory that countries that have appeased its mercantilism will probably do the same in
matters of its aggressive foreign and military policy.
The Palestinians felt that during the Obama years they were insidiously persuading the United
States to ostracize the moderate Arab regimes, embrace an Iranian foil, and decouple from
Israel.
Putin asserted that his weak Russia was a match for a strong U.S. because he assumed that he
was strong and Obama weak — and therefore his own godhead could do what his country
otherwise could not.
Yet Trump all at once is attempting to straighten out all the foolishness of the last decade with
China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Middle East, and, again, he is doing so
simultaneously, not sequentially. He might remember that China is the chief threat, and it has
some leverage with both Iran and North Korea. In other words, it would certainly be in China’s
interest to see the U.S. in a mess with its surrogates in Tehran and Pyongyang while America
seeks to face down Chinese mercantilism — with the Middle East descending into another hot
war.
So, Trump could achieve either high-profile success — or became mired in endless
engagements and a pre-election, public-relations disaster.
Halving the Chinese trade deficit and forcing it to follow global rules would be an astounding
achievement. So would denuclearizing North Korea and preventing Iran from getting the bomb.
As would finally telling the Palestinians to give up terrorism and get on with building a state, or
corralling Putin so that he abandons dreams of a new Soviet Empire and accepts that Eastern
Europe, the Baltic States, and the breakaway republicans are never going to be Russian again.
Prodding a change in government in Venezuela would create momentum elsewhere in
authoritarian Latin America. Again, to do all that at once, rather than in sequence, would be
singular achievements — and yet likely improbable.
George W. Bush tried to address just three existential challenges all at once following 9/11, and
it all but destroyed his presidency. Bush not only fashioned a successful multifaceted anti-
terrorism strategy that foiled subsequent attempts to repeat the World Trade Center and
Pentagon bombings, but he took the war to the enemy. Yet soon the U.S. was fighting wars in
both Iraq and Afghanistan, while trying to stop North Korea’s sudden emergence as a nuclear
power, and while battling Iranian terrorists inside Iraq and Tehran’s own nuclear agenda — as
China stepped up its global profile and began translating its enormous profits into a growing
military, and as OPEC and Middle East suppliers helped drive up the cost of oil.
What was problematic about Bush’s “Axis of Evil” of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea was not that the
term was necessarily inaccurate about the threats all three posed, or the need to address all of
them eventually. The rub was that a country with a sizable force fighting in Afghanistan might
abruptly find itself fighting three new dirty conflicts all at once.
In short, Trump might learn from the past and avoid what his opponents hope for — a series of
conflicts dovetailing with the 2020 election, as the financial and psychological strain tax the
electorate, as they did from 2006 to 2008.
Note in this regard how deeply Trump’s opposition is invested in seeing him fail or, specifically,
how private citizen John Kerry, last spring and summer, and, most recently, Senator Dianne
Feinstein have met with the oleaginous Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, ostensibly as
“adults in the room” who agree on waiting Trump out — which in fact was the explicit advice
recently given to the Chinese by former State Department official Susan Thornton.
Trump’s “principled realism,” “Jacksonianism,” or “the Trump doctrine” ostensibly is tit-for-tat
deterrence, not nation-building or optional interventions. If Iran hits an American ship, the U.S.
will take out a port facility — but not set foot in Iran. If North Korea sends more missiles over
Japan with Chinese approval, maybe Japan might have to do the same thing to North Korea
with U.S. sanction.
But Trump also must remember that he ambitiously is trying to solve the major festering
challenges of U.S. foreign policy — all at once and right before an election, when his political
opposition at home, most of the European Union, and our enemies would like to see him fail at
last. So in the next 17 months we should expect all sorts of provocations from abroad, and so-
called Logan Acting at home, to make Trump stumble and get into a messy intervention before
the election.
He should not take the bait.

Deterrence solves for great power war

Mueller 18 (Karl P. Mueller is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and a
professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He specializes in research related to military
and national security strategy, particularly coercion and deterrence. Mueller, Karl P.
“Conventional Deterrence Redux: Avoiding Great Power Conflict in the 21st Century.” Strategic
Studies Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 4, 2018, pp. 76–93. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26533616.)
Distilled to 140 characters, deterrence is causing someone not to do something because they
expect or fear that they will be worse off if they do it than if they do not.7 This can be achieved
by making it appear unlikely that the action will succeed (deterrence by denial), by making the
expected costs of taking the action appear prohibitively high (deterrence by punishment), or by
a combination of both.8 It is possible to deter—or to try to deter—all sorts of misbehavior (as
any police officer, vice principal, platoon sergeant, or long-suffering parent can attest), but for
the present discussion we will limit our scope to deterring countries from starting wars or
committing other acts of military aggression.9 Rather than delve at length into deterrence
theory, here we will merely note four key points that will be particularly germane to the
discussion that follows. First, the goal of deterrence is to make the target choose not to attack
even though it has the ability to do so. Disarming or destroying the opponent to prevent it from
attacking, or doing something else that physically eliminates the threat, is not deterrence;
instead it is what Thomas Schelling dubbed “pure” or “brute” force.10 Brute force can be a
useful way to solve national security problems, especially when the enemy is weak, but
deterrence is usually cheaper if it can be achieved. Second, since the target is choosing
between attacking and not attacking, deterrence does not simply depend on making war look
bad—it depends on making war look worse than the alternative. If the status quo is reasonably
attractive, as it is for most states most of the time, deterrence is likely to be easy. However, a
desperate actor may decide to attack even though it is not optimistic about the likely results of
going to war, if it thinks that not doing so would be unacceptably costly or dangerous.11 In other
words, the stakes are critical, as is the baseline against which policy options are being
compared. Moreover, measures that are intended to deter by posing threats against aggressors
can also undermine deterrence by making their targets feel less secure, reducing the expected
value of not going to war.12 Third, there are many ways to make aggression appear less
attractive than the alternative. Threats of punishment—increasing the expected costs of
aggression—are the approach most strongly associated with deterrence and can involve
nonmilitary as well as military action. Conversely, it is possible to deter by altering the
adversary’s expectations about how likely it will be to win (or achieve other desired objectives) if
it attacks, usually called “deterrence by denial”; the line between punishment and denial can be
ambiguous because taking steps to prevent an enemy from winning almost always includes
imposing costs as well. War can also be made less attractive by increasing the appeal of not
attacking though reassurance measures or promises of rewards that make not going to war
more attractive; whether or not one calls this a form of deterrence per se, it is nevertheless part
of the deterrence process.13 Finally, and most important of all, deterrence happens in the mind
of the potential aggressor. What the enemy believes about the future is what matters, and what
the costs and benefits of war will actually be are only relevant insofar as this affects the enemy’s
thinking. Objective reality will of course suddenly become very important if deterrence fails and
war begins. Since decision makers can misperceive reality for many reasons, and because
future events are often difficult to predict, many wars are started by states that probably would
have been better off if they had not attacked.
Aff
 2AC – AT: Undo Trump CP
Rejoining the JCPOA is not an option
Kenyon 19 (Peter Kenyon is NPR's international correspondent based in Istanbul, Turkey. 7-
11-2019, "What's The Deal With The Iran Deal Now?," NPR.org,
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/11/739943760/whats-the-deal-with-the-iran-deal-now)
A special meeting of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors wrapped up Wednesday with no formal action on Iran's two recent violations of
the 2015 nuclear agreement, known as the JCPOA. The meeting let both the U.S. and Iran spell out their starkly different views, and came amid continuing tensions: Iran has
given Europe — which is attempting to get trade going with Iran — a 60-day time frame to save the nuclear deal, and President Trump threatened more sanctions even as the
IAEA meeting was taking place. On the same day, Iranian boats attempted to seize a British tanker in the Persian Gulf. After waiting some 14 months following President
Trump's decision last year to pull out of the JCPOA and re-impose sanctions, Iran began suspending one of its commitments under the deal every 60 days. So far, Iran has
begun keeping more low-enriched uranium than the deal permits, and it's enriching it at levels slightly higher than called for in the agreement.
Iran's IAEA Ambassador Kazim Gharib Abadi offered reporters a direct response to Trump's demand that Iran return to the table and negotiate a new, longer-lasting and more
restrictive deal.
"The JCPOA is not re-negotiable," he said Wednesday. "No country is ready to negotiate with a country
that is putting a gun on its chest."
Abadi said the U.S. call for this week's IAEA special meeting was not well received among other delegations, adding that Washington had tried to encourage other countries to
call for the meeting, but was rebuffed.
The Russian response was sharp, delivered by Ambassador Mikhail Ulyanov.
"The initiative to convene this extraordinary session came from the United States — the country
that has declared the JCPOA to be a 'terrible deal' and took the path of its destruction," he said. "In
practice, it turns out that Washington is aware of the importance of the plan and is seeking its full implementation. Although for some reason, they only refer to Tehran." A U.S.
administration official, speaking with reporters on background, acknowledged approaching other countries about calling the meeting. In the end, he said, the U.S. decided to call
the meeting itself.
The official added that there was strong support among IAEA board members for the continued
role of the IAEA, which has inspectors in Iran monitoring the country's nuclear program. Officials
call this a "state-of-the-art verification system," but in pulling out of the JCPOA, the Trump
administration slammed it as not tough enough.
The U.S. official said the board did agree to make public two reports by Director-General Yukiya Amano, outlining some of Iran's activities that had concerned Washington.
Those concerns are not likely to end soon, with Iran preparing to announce more violations in another 60 days.
Iran focuses on Europe
Iran will cease some parts of
"As stated before by our high-ranking officials, including the president and minister of foreign affairs," Abadi said, "

implementation of its obligations under the deal every 60 days, unless there's going to be
substantial progress made toward implementation of the obligations of other remaining parties
to the JCPOA, especially the European Union and the E3."
The E3 refers to the three European signatories to the JCPOA — Great Britain, France and Germany. They have come up with an alternate payment mechanism, the
Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges or INSTEX, intended to allow trade with Iran without exposing European companies to American sanctions.
To date, it's been used experimentally for food, medicine and other basic transactions, but Abadi complains it has not been used enough.
U.S.: Don't allow Iranian "extortion tactics"
U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA Jackie Wolcott urged other members to join
During the board of governors meeting,

Washington in cutting off Iran's sources of revenue. Wolcott called on countries to resist what
she called Iran's "brinkmanship and extortion tactics," calling the recent Iranian nuclear violations a deliberate and concerning
expansion of its nuclear program.
Iran has long been secretly 'enriching'" in violation of the
While the meeting was going on, President Trump tweeted that "

"terrible" nuclear deal his administration reneged on. "Sanctions will soon be increased, substantially!" he warned.
The U.S. official briefing reporters in Vienna refused to comment on the president's tweet, but said it remained imperative for Iran to continue to cooperate with the IAEA and its
verification regime and reporting requirements. Other officials have said additional sanctions against Iran are likely.
Iran is voicing a rather generic
Argentina's IAEA Ambassador Rafael Grossi says the U.S. and Iran have worked themselves into a difficult position.

demand of seeing economic benefits from staying in the deal, "which is very unlikely in the
present circumstances," he says.
"So I don't see any way out of this," he says. "The current mitigation scheme [INSTEX] is really very insufficient in the eyes of Iran."
Worst-case scenarios
Grossi sees the reactive nature of the dispute as "very serious," saying, "You don't right a wrong with another wrong."
Longtime nonproliferation expert Laura Rockwood also sees gloomy scenarios when she considers how this dispute might unfold.
"I think if the Iranians go above 20% enriched uranium, it's going to start making countries very, very nervous," she says.
Rockwood's worst-case scenario involves Iran walking out of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which includes Tehran's pledge not to acquire nuclear
weapons.
"That would be a very bad signal," she says. "I fear what the consequences of that might be."
Another worst-case event would see Iran kicking out the IAEA inspectors, a possibility the Iranian ambassador mentioned in his comments to reporters.
Tehran is making a clear distinction between cooperating with the IAEA and sticking
Abadi says so far,

to its obligations under the JCPOA.

Iran has stopped complying with some of its commitments under the nuclear deal, he says, "but we
haven't touched our cooperation with the agency. ... I hope that we will not reach that point."
The counterplan removes the Executive Order on AI – China fills in and gains
hegemony & military superiority – turns the cp
Baker 19 (Jim Baker is a contributing editor at Lawfare and the Director of the National
Security and Cybersecurity Program at the R Street Institute. He is also the former general
counsel of the FBI.  7-23-2019, "President Trump’s Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence,"
Lawfare, https://www.lawfareblog.com/president-trumps-executive-order-artificial-intelligence)

On Feb. 11, President Trump issued a new executive order regarding artificial intelligence (AI).
Darrell West from Brookings wrote a brief analysis of the order, Caleb Watney from R Street
critiqued it on Lawfare, and major media outlets have provided some reporting and commentary
on the rollout. Rather than repeat what the order says or what others have said about it, below
are three compliments and three concerns based on my initial review of the order.
First, here are three things I like:
1. The president actually issued the order. No one is really sure exactly how transformative AI
will be—there is a lot of potential in AI, but there is also a lot of hype. But because AI might have
major impacts on the economy, national security and other facets of society, society needs to
stay focused on it. Other countries—especially China—are investing heavily in AI and related
fields, such as high-speed computing, sensors and robotics (including autonomous vehicles and
weapons systems). The U.S. Department of Defense and elements of the U.S. intelligence
community seem to be fully seized of the AI issue and are actively pursuing an array of
initiatives in the field.
The executive order clearly recognizes the potentially significant implications of AI for the U.S.
economy and national security, and posits that the United States must be an AI leader. The
order declares: “It is the policy of the United States Government to sustain and enhance the
scientific, technological, and economic leadership position of the United States in AI R&D and
deployment through a coordinated Federal Government strategy.” If this vision is implemented
fully (a big “if”), maintaining and enhancing U.S. leadership on AI would be a major policy
achievement. The executive order thus prioritizes AI for federal departments and agencies and
establishes a multifaceted framework for the executive branch to implement the administration’s
AI policy. This is good.
Executive orders have the potential to focus bureaucracies in ways that other executive
pronouncements (such as tweets) do not. But realizing that potential will require sustained
leadership and commitment from the White House. I expect that over the coming months there
will be numerous follow-up meetings and working groups established across the executive
branch to implement the executive order. All of that is good and, if done right, will maintain
needed federal focus on the AI issue.
2. The link between AI and big data. Numerous provisions in the executive order address the
link between AI and big data. For example, one of the strategic objectives set forth in the order
is the following: “Enhance access to high-quality and fully traceable Federal data, models, and
computing resources to increase the value of such resources for AI R&D, while maintaining
safety, security, privacy, and confidentiality protections consistent with applicable laws and
policies.” This is important. AI algorithms learn from having access to relevant data. The more
data made accessible, the more learning can occur. Exactly how all of this learning happens is
complex and messy, and real success is hard to achieve. But the point is that in order to
improve our AI systems, we need to provide developers with lawful access to large datasets.
Many directives in the order, like the one above, encourage government agencies to make data
that they possess accessible to AI scientists and developers in ways that protect privacy (more
on privacy below). China has a disproportionate advantage over other countries in terms of the
volume of data about human behavior to which its AI developers have access because of its
intensive (and repressive) collection of data about the activities of its very large population and
its likely theft of data from countries around the world. If we expect to keep up with China, it
makes sense for the administration to encourage U.S. government departments and agencies
to make more of their data available to U.S.-based AI developers.
3. Protecting the AI assets of the U.S. and its allies. For some time, I have been particularly
concerned that the U.S. government is inadequately protecting its AI assets—people,
technology, data—and those of its allies from serious threats. (I wrote about that concern last
year in a four-part series on Lawfare: Part I, Part II, Part IIIand Part IV.) The executive order
rightly discusses the need for federal departments and agencies to protect those assets. One of
the five principles that guide the policy set forth in the executive order includes the goal of
“protecting our critical AI technologies from acquisition by strategic competitors and adversarial
nations.” Indeed, doing so is essential for the long-term national security and economic well-
being of the United States. A related objective the order describes is to “[e]nsure that technical
standards [developed by the federal government pursuant to the order] minimize vulnerability to
attacks from malicious actors.” Protecting the integrity of AI technology from a physical and
cybersecurity perspective is also essential in order to make sure that our AI systems work as
intended.
In addition, the order requires that federal agencies implementing it:
Develop and implement an action plan, in accordance with the National Security Presidential
Memorandum of February 11, 2019 (Protecting the United States Advantage in Artificial
Intelligence and Related Critical Technologies) (the NSPM) to protect the advantage of the
United States in AI and technology critical to United States economic and national security
interests against strategic competitors and foreign adversaries.
The administration has not publicized the NSPM, but its name and the language of this objective
further suggest that the White House is taking seriously its obligation to protect the country’s AI
assets. The order also includes the following section specifically focused on securing the
country’s AI assets:
Sec. 8. Action Plan for Protection of the United States Advantage in AI Technologies.
(a) As directed by the NSPM, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, in
coordination with the OSTP Director and the recipients of the NSPM, shall organize the
development of an action plan to protect the United States advantage in AI and AI technology
critical to United States economic and national security interests against strategic competitors
and adversarial nations.
(b) The action plan shall be provided to the President within 120 days of the date of this order,
and may be classified in full or in part, as appropriate.
(c) Upon approval by the President, the action plan shall be implemented by all agencies who
are recipients of the NSPM, for all AI-related activities, including those conducted pursuant to
this order.
Relevant agencies of course need to devote the appropriate time, effort and resources to
safeguard the United States’ AI assets. And in addition to protecting technology, they must
focus on protecting the people who have relevant AI expertise and making sure that our
immigration policies allow us to attract, educate and retain the best AI minds in the world. The
government must also consider carefully the second- and third-order consequences of any
actions it takes to protect U.S. AI assets, such as avoiding economic protectionism under the
banner of protecting U.S.-based AI capability. But the overall policy highlights the importance of
the AI security issue, and that makes a lot of sense.

Executive Orders are not the problem

Bierman 19 (Noah Bierman covers the White House in Washington, D.C., for the Los Angeles
Times. He previously wrote for the paper’s national desk. Before joining the newspaper in 2015,
he worked for the Boston Globe in both Boston and Washington, covering Congress, politics
and transportation. He has also reported on higher education, crime, politics and local
government for the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post and the Duluth (Minn.) News-Tribune.
Bierman is a native of Miami who attended Duke University. 3-27-2019, "Must Reads: What’s
behind all those executive orders Trump loves to sign? Not much," Los Angeles Times,
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-executive-orders-ineffective-20190327-
story.html)
A seated President Trump handed commemorative pens to his wife, daughter and eight others who hovered around his desk, then theatrically held up for the cameras the latest executive order bearing his oversize signature.

We will now ensure that you

He had done “something that people have wanted presidents to do for a long time,” a triumphant Trump told the applauding military families who packed the White House East Room. “

have better access to federal jobs.”

the four-page document he signed in May did no such thing.
Yet 11 months later,

The order provided no money, created no policies and added no hiring authority. It merely
required federal officials to post notices on their websites and draft reports about an order
signed a decade earlier by President George W. Bush, which allowed agencies to waive
competitive hiring requirements for military spouses in some circumstances .

For a president who relishes pomp and shows of executive action, unchecked by
The substance mattered little, however.

Congress, signing ceremonies have become a hallmark, a way to convey accomplishment for a
man who asserts he has done more than any president in history.
The Times reviewed 101 executive orders Trump has signed since inauguration day, and interviewed experts, advocates and administration officials about their effects. Many were geared toward favored political constituencies, including veterans, blue-collar
workers and evangelical Christians. Few moved policy significantly; generally the orders created committees or task forces, demanded reports or pressed for enforcement of existing laws.

Trump’s boldest unilateral actions, the ones that have provoked the most vigorous objections to
his use of presidential power, were not carried out through executive orders.
He did initially sign two executive orders to fulfill his campaign pledge to ban all Muslims from
entering the country, but courts struck both down . A third version, revised again to pass court muster, was written as a proclamation; it was upheld by the Supreme Court. Trump’s
recent effort to circumvent Congress to pay for a southern border wall, now the subject of another court challenge, is based on his Feb. 15 declaration of a national emergency.
The president’s executive orders are usually more modest, though Americans wouldn’t know it from the ceremonies the White House stages.
Many orders seek action from Cabinet secretaries, something Trump could easily accomplish with a phone call.
“You don’t really need an executive order for a lot of this stuff, but it makes for a good show,” said Elaine Kamarck, a Clinton administration veteran who is the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution.
“He even gives out pens, which is really sort of ridiculous,” she added, noting that past presidents reserved that tradition for signing momentous laws like the Civil Rights Act.
White House officials argue that Trump’s orders focus agency leaders on his priorities and that ultimately some have had broad impact, including the reduction of regulations across the federal government and the expanded availability of less expensive health plans
that don’t offer a full set of benefits.
The formality of a written order, they say, can command attention across government.

The question is not whether Trump’s rhetoric “aligns with the legal language” in the orders, the
White House said in a written response. Rather, the statement added, it’s what they have
accomplished — “And they’ve done a lot!”
The Times review shows a different picture. A few of Trump’s orders have led to changes in policy. Many, however, have proved more ceremonial than substantive.
At least 18 of the 101 orders created new task forces, councils or committees. Among them was an infrastructure council that disbanded within a month; members resigned in 2017 after Trump’s qualified criticism of white supremacists who marched in
Charlottesville, Va. He issued two orders related to his unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud: One established a commission, the other disbanded it after bipartisan criticism.
At least 12 included language such as “encourage” or “to the extent permitted by law,” underscoring the president’s lack of authority to make sweeping change without help from Congress.
At least 15 reversed or curtailed Obama’s initiatives, notably the orders overturning environmental regulations. Those made for some of Trump’s most consequential actions even as they demonstrated a major drawback of executive orders — they can fairly easily
be undone by a successor. Also, courts have blocked some environmental rollbacks.
At least 43 called for agency reports or reviews, including one on historically black colleges and another on retirement savings rules. A few in this category led to significant changes, such as Trump’s order sharply shrinking the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears
Ears national monuments in Utah that Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively, had established.
At least five related to members of the military, veterans and their families. Two called for plans and task forces on mental health and suicide among veterans. One established an accountability office at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
A fourth purported to create a job training program for veterans to enter the U.S. Merchant Marine, but it duplicated an existing “Military to Mariner” program. It “complements what we’re doing,” Coast Guard Lt. Amy Midgett said.

Trump has made broad claims about the impact of his executive orders that have proved
In several cases,

false. He has repeatedly claimed that two of his orders require American-made steel in federal
pipelines. In reality, they simply encouraged federal agencies to choose American companies
for the product.
The order Trump signed on Inauguration Day, “to ease the economic burden” of President Obama’s healthcare law, was similarly toothless. Yet another told federal education officials to follow existing laws respecting local and state boards’ independence.

Trump’s 100th executive order, signed Thursday in an East Room event complete with a string
quartet, followed up on a promise he made earlier in the month to a conservative conference,
promising to force colleges to support free speech.
Experts who read the text afterward said the ultimate impact was uncertain,
Trump called it “historic” and “groundbreaking.”

given that public universities already must follow the 1st Amendment and it simply instructed
private colleges to comply with their existing policies.
An official who briefed reporters beforehand struggled to explain the order and how the administration would enforce it.
Some of the orders seemed to have little purpose. One replaced the “White House Rural Council” with the “Interagency Task Force on Agriculture and Rural Prosperity” and two renamed a financial fraud task force and a council on physical fitness.

. It demonstrated that, for beneficiaries,

Another — one of the five related to the military — was the order for employing military spouses that simply promoted an existing program

executive orders can be a mixed blessing — bringing attention to issues but inviting
complacency that the issues have been addressed.
“There was definitely quite a bit of excitement out there” about the military spouses order, “but what I was personally concerned about was that excitement leading to a ‘check the box’ mentality,” said Jennifer Akin, an applied research analyst for Blue Star Families,
a military family advocacy organization.
Akin said the order brought needed attention to the issue but failed to address bigger obstacles, such as poor child-care options for military spouses.
Another favorite of Trump’s are his “buy American” orders.

he claimed at political rallies that it would require the Keystone XL and Dakota
After signing his first one in April 2017,

Access pipelines to be built with American steel. It did not. The order stated a broad goal and
required the Commerce secretary to write a report.
Signing a second such order earlier this year, he insisted at a White House ceremony that the first was “having an incredible effect” on jobs for steel workers. The second order, to “encourage” agencies to use U.S. products “to the extent consistent with law,” has
had no more impact than the first.
“I could encourage my kids to go to bed; doesn’t mean they will,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, which represents steel workers and manufacturers. “It’s highly unlikely that an aspirational statement is going to produce actual
jobs.”
Paul noted that Trump has senior advisors and Cabinet officials who have a record of opposing such requirements, including his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.
Experts say Trump’s inability to stock his administration with experienced officials can diminish the impact of his orders; it takes committed, loyal advisors to oversee the laborious rule-making processes at government agencies.
“If you want it to actually happen, you’ve got to have people in the department who know what they’re doing,” said Kamarck.
Trump is hardly the first president to use executive orders to attempt to bypass Congress. Obama, frustrated by a Republican-controlled Congress’ obstruction in his final years, famously spoke of his desire to use a “pen and phone” to bypass Capitol Hill. Yet he
seldom held signing ceremonies or made the kind of grand claims Trump has made.
Trump and his advisors speak often of his impatience with the legislative process, though he spent his first two years with a Congress run by his own party. After his first 100 days, he boasted that his signed orders were central to his “historic accomplishments.”
At the American Farm Bureau convention in Nashville last year, Trump hailed the “millions of hardworking Americans, completely forgotten,” and told the excited crowd that he had heard that broadband internet access was “a vital concern.” Then he pulled out a pen
to sign “the first step to expand access to broadband internet in rural America — so you can compete on a level playing field.”
The crowd roared. Yet again, the order was modest, directing agencies to review procedures for placing private cell towers on public lands.
Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative, said it has had practically no impact for the tens of millions of Americans who lack broadband.
“It’s not unlike trying to bail out a cruise liner with a pint glass,” he said. “These executive orders seem to be more about appearing to do something than really do something.”

Trump’s policies are helping thousands in the squo

Benen 19 (Benen got his Master's degree at the George Washington University while interning
in President Clinton's White House. He has experience writing for several congressional
campaigns and having been part of the communications department at Americans United for
Separation of Church and State. 7-10-2019, "Trump's executive order on kidneys piggybacks on
the ACA," MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trumps-executive-order-
kidneys-piggybacks-the-aca)
As a rule, when Donald Trump signs an executive order, there’s reason for concern about
abuses and regressive steps backward. Today, however, the president appears to have done
something worthwhile– though he neglected to mention an important detail.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the government to revamp the
nation’s care for kidney disease so that more people whose kidneys fail have a chance at early
transplants and home dialysis.
Trump said his order was intended to increase the supply of donated kidneys, make it easier for
patients to undergo dialysis in the comfort of their own homes and prioritize the development of
an artificial kidney.
This is the first of several steps, though as Vox’s piece noted, the administration’s new policy
“would make it easier for living donors to give kidneys and other organs, promote the donation
of organs from deceased people, and restructure payment for health care providers to reduce
the rate of kidney failure in the first place.”
On balance, it looks like this executive order is a genuinely good idea. I guess Trump is helping
prove the broken-clock theory.
In fact, the president’s policy has so much merit, I’m not even going to mention his odd remarks
about the executive order, including his assertion, “The kidney has a very special place in the
heart.” It’d be easy to have a little fun with that, but I won’t.
I am, however, inclined to shine a light on a relevant detail Trump neglected to mention: he’s
piggybacking on the Affordable Care Act.
As Dan Diamond explained, the president’s new strategy “wouldn’t be possible without
Obamacare.”
That’s undeniably true. As the Associated Press reported, “These changes are being
implemented through Medicare’s innovation center, created under the Obama-era Affordable
Care Act and empowered to seek savings and improved quality. The Trump administration is
relying on the innovation center even as it argues in federal court that the law that created it is
unconstitutional and should be struck down entirely.”
 2AC – AT: R&D CP
R&D alone fails – needs globalization which US funds prevent
Hannigan and Mudambi 15 (T.J. Hannigan is a doctoral candidate at the Fox School of
Business of Temple University. Ram Mudambi is the Frank M. Speakman Professor of Strategy
and Perelman Senior Research Fellow at the Fox School of Business of Temple University. 6-
25-2015, "Local R&D Won’t Help You Go Global," Harvard Business Review,
https://hbr.org/2015/06/local-rt-help-you-go-global) 
In order to expand, digital businesses need to pivot to new and promising growth areas. Often
that means making forays into new fields and taking on seemingly intractable business
problems. Consider Google’s venture into maps or SAP’s Future Factory initiative, far-reaching
projects that required new ideas from different places. The development of new technologies is
complex and challenging, and to come up with the next big innovation, businesses must think —
and operate — in new ways.
Given these challenges, it’s surprising to see younger firms trying to grow by tapping the same
R&D resources that fueled their initial successes. Facebook and Salesforce.com, for example,
conduct much of their R&D locally. Like a lot of young digital companies in the U.S., there is little
evidence that they harness knowledge in fast-growing global centers of excellence such as
Bangalore or Tel Aviv. However, in order to grow, companies need to draw on the world’s best
knowledge, wherever it lives geographically.
Over the past two decades, we have seen a shift in the way R&D is dispersed around the world.
Traditionally, multinationals have conducted their research in developed nations: IBM has an
R&D center in Tokyo, for example, and Google’s European engineering hub is in Zurich. But
more recently, emerging-market locations have featured prominently in global firms’ technology
portfolios. Multinationals’ knowledge-intensive activities have set in motion virtuous cycles that
have resulted in the development of innovation clusters in places including Shanghai and the
aforementioned cities in India and Israel.
What is so important about this trend is that global knowledge networks increasingly braid
together R&D activities conducted in advanced and emerging economy locations. As the
Economist Intelligence Unit has noted, emerging-market R&D is taking the lead on global
projects because it has the best ideas to offer, rather than the cheapest. In our research, we call
this “competence-creating” work. The more ideas that are brought to bear, the better chance
companies have of solving big problems, and in a connected world, those ideas can come from
a variety of places. As Julian Birkinshaw and Neil Hood noted in the pages of HBR, distance
may actually be an asset.
The global search for ideas is especially important for digital businesses. When we examine the
patents of a series of established digital-technology companies, a clear pattern emerges:
Certain companies rely on globally dispersed R&D far more than others. The more software-
driven the company, the greater the reach into global R&D networks. To us, that demonstrates
that all digital companies have an enormous opportunity as they mature and look to develop
new areas of technology.
To be sure, a number of highly successful American companies have managed to pivot to new
directions while keeping their R&D close to home. Apple’s design studio is nestled snugly in its
Cupertino, California, campus. Autodesk tries out manufacturing prototypes on wholly owned
factory floors in Manhattan. Our research on patents shows that fewer than 5% of Apple’s and
Autodesk’s patents list inventors outside the U.S. (see the chart).
By contrast, Symantec (which is all digital) and SAP (whose businesses have both physical and
digital components) source knowledge much more widely and draw on emerging-market
locations. Nearly a quarter of Symantec’s, and more than 10% of SAP’s, patents come from
outside the U.S., our research shows. And the vast majority of those patents come from
emerging markets.
Symantec’s Centre of Innovation in Chennai, India, was conceived of not as an outpost of local
adaptation but as a source of new-product innovation for the company as a whole. The
company’s stance on innovation is truly global, with engineering teams collaborating among its
network of locations. The Indian location was attractive on account of its strong engineering
talent. A few years ago, a Symantec VP, Shantanu Ghosh, pointed out the “amount of true
innovation from our India Innovation Centers.”
Meanwhile, SAP has been cultivating a worldwide R&D network through its Global Ecosystem
program, sourcing ideas from geographically dispersed individuals and organizations and
promoting diversity. The R&D coming out of SAP’s emerging-market locations has global
significance: Its technology center in Tel Aviv has leaped to the forefront of innovation. SAP’s
co-CEO Jim Hagemann noted in 2011 that the R&D group in Israel has “turned into a sort of
front line where new ideas are tested out and turned into technology, and it is succeeding well.”
Indeed, firms whose products are mainly intangible have the geographic flexibility to draw on
knowledge from all over the world. Because their businesses don’t rely on physical materials
such as tangible prototypes and lab equipment, collaborating scientists don’t need to be
physically colocated.
Yet there’s a group of young U.S. digital businesses that, while often growing at breakneck
speed, haven’t embraced the promise of globally dispersed knowledge; their R&D is still highly
localized. In our research we explored a series of such young firms, from those on the cusp of
exploration (Facebook, Salesforce.com, and LinkedIn) to a series of “unicorns”: fast-growing
start-ups such as Dropbox and DocuSign that have reached valuations north of $1 billion. The
common thread among them? None have yet seized the opportunity that global knowledge
hotspots can provide.
Facebook has recently looked beyond Silicon Valley, but its research remains in the developed
world. Its London office, which represents its first international move, has a mandate to mirror
the engineering undertaken at HQ. Salesforce.com, as a cloud-based service provider, believes
in platform-driven R&D efficiencies, which demand a centralized engineering approach.
Emerging markets present their own challenges, of course. Companies risk rapid staff turnover
and the leakage of key knowledge. Distance (cultural, geographic, technological) could lead to
substandard work. A 2011 McKinsey study showed that smaller and younger firms are wary of
global R&D plays. However, the same study showed that the challenges were well worth it: All
high performing companies in the study did at least some R&D abroad.
Ultimately these companies will face important decisions regarding idea exploration. Growth
requires a broad set of new ideas. Our research suggests that they will have to reach beyond
technological capabilities and learn how to deal with the challenges of global knowledge
sourcing — including addressing the many problems they will confront in emerging markets.

R&D fails – disregard for CEO vision means no guarantee funding is used
properly
Schrage 15 (Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital
Business, is the author of the books Serious Play (HBR Press), Who Do You Want Your
Customers to Become? (HBR Press) and The Innovator’s Hypothesis(MIT Press). Michael
Schrage, 4-13-2015, "R&D Won’t Succeed If It Ignores the CEO’s Vision," Harvard Business
Review, https://hbr.org/2015/04/rt-succeed-if-it-ignores-the-ceos-vision)
After a morning innovation workshop at the bucolic R&D campus of a top-tier but tradition-rich
technology giant, the lunchtime conversation with the Lab’s leadership turned strategic. A
charismatic CEO, imported from outside the industry, was making bold, expensive investments
in new markets. As a result, Labs management was being asked to do more with less. What
should they do? How should they better prioritize innovation?
I answered their obvious questions with my own: What new innovation initiatives had they
launched, and what dedicated team had they organized, to explicitly support their CEO’s high-
profile moves toward diversification?
Silence. With the exception of the firm’s venture arm looking at a few external start-up options,
no formal or informal Lab groups were directly working on their CEO’s newly declared priorities.
“We’re really not budgeted for that,” the leadership team explained.
These Labs were filled with talented technologists and innovators. But nobody owned the
challenge — and opportunity — of aligning them with the CEO’s ambitions.
When CEOs publicly communicate new directions and priorities for their enterprises, that
needn’t marginalize existing R&D and innovation efforts. But it strongly suggests resources be
dedicated to making those CEO visions achievable.
Ensuring that the company’s innovation culture and pipeline reflect the CEO’s vision and
priorities poses few problems for companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, or Tesla. The
challenges are tougher for more established organizations where CEOs may publicly value
consistent incremental efficiencies over new value creation and new markets. There, innovators
need to be better attuned to the tone at the top.
Take Boeing. After a series of expensive problems with its Dreamliner development, its CEO,
Jim McNerney, revised the company’s innovation ethos, declaring its era of boundary-pushing
“moon shots” over. “Airlines,” he concluded, “don’t want to pay more for advanced technology.”
“It’s not to say you don’t innovate,” explained Raymond Conner, Vice Chairman of Boeing and
President and CEO of Boeing Commerical Airplanes. He wants engineers “innovating more on
how to [design jets] more simplistically, as opposed to driving more complexity… How do you
innovate to make it more producible? How do you innovate to make it more reliable?”
Whether they agree or disagree, Boeing engineers and innovators would be wise to focus on
innovations instantly recognizable as simpler, easier to produce, and more reliable for
commercial aviation. And that needn’t eradicate the company’s technical prowess and
reputation as an aerospace pioneer.
Quarterly calls are good opportunities to ensure alignment. What would inspire the CFO or CEO
to talk to investors about a major innovation underway? How does the project make tangible an
idea the CEO raised a quarter or more ago? How might it enhance executive credibility even as
it provokes disruption in the marketplace?
Smart innovators know how important it is to make their CEOs look smart.
US Legitimacy
Neg
 1NC – Iran Deal CP
Text: The United States federal government should re-enter the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Re-entry to the JCPOA solves more than just legitimacy

NIAC 18 [National Iranian American Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to
strengthening the voice of Iranian Americans and promoting greater understanding between the
American and Iranian people, 11-19-2018, "Restoring U.S. Credibility: Returning to the Iran
Nuclear Agreement," NIAC, accessed 7-22-2019, https://www.niacouncil.org/restoring-u-s-
credibility-returning-to-the-iran-nuclear-agreement/]
*JCPOA = Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal
REPAIRING THE DAMAGE: THE U.S. RETURN TO THE JCPOA
The incoming Congress and a successor administration can respectively halt and repair much of the damage from
Trump’s JCPOA exit by signaling the political will and intent for the U.S. to re-enter the JCPOA’s
fold and resume obligations thereto, including via the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions.
Resuming commitments under the JCPOA would deliver profound benefits for the U.S.
national interest . First, it would signal to the world that the U.S. is a responsible actor in the
international arena; the U.S. intends to live up to the political agreements that it makes with other
countries; and the Trump administration was nothing more than an unfortunate aberration in the American political
system. Nothing has caused more serious damage to U.S. interests than the growing trust deficit towards
the United States. If states are unable to trust the United States, then not only is U.S. global leadership severely undermined but the
international system that has been predominate since the end of the Second World War risks unraveling. By clearly showing
the world that the U.S. intends to fully observe the commitments that it makes, a successor administration
can begin to repair the damage wrought by President Trump.
Second, the U.S.’s re-entrance into the JCPOA would have important non-proliferation benefits by
effectively disincentivizing Iran from exiting the JCPOA itself and thus undoing the risk of a burgeoning nuclear crisis in the Middle
East. In so doing, the U.S. would ensure the survivability of the tough and far-reaching constraints on Iran’s nuclear program that will
be imposed by the JCPOA through 2030 and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program does not pose the risks it did in the pre-2015 era, and
that is fully thanks to the JCPOA and the restrictions it imposes. Any policymaker should be eager to return to the JCPOA and, in so
doing, re-secure hard-fought concessions that take an Iranian nuclear weapon and war with Iran over its nuclear program off the
table for the foreseeable future.
Third, reentry to the JCPOA
would signal to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia that Donald Trump’s
blank check for their increasingly brazen behavior is at an end , and that the U.S. has alternatives to outsourcing
American policy in the region to an erratic kingdom that – in the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham – has double dealt on terror.
Perversely, both the Trump administration and numerous Washington pressure groups have warned that the administration’s
pressure campaign against Iran would be jeopardized if the U.S. dared to impose consequences on the kingdom over the brutal
murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. Such warnings expose the current administration’s approach to the
region as so hopelessly unbalanced that is susceptible to extortion by one morally bankrupt regime against another. The U.S.
needs to move to a transactional relationship with both Saudi Arabia and Iran where we can impose
consequences on each for such brazen misbehavior. In Iran, the U.S. has sanctioned itself out of influence, whereas
with Saudi Arabia the U.S. is too afraid to use its substantial leverage to rein in the kingdom’s destructive course – whether on the
disastrous war in Yemen or on the kingdom’s mounting human rights abuses. An alternative is available, and it
should start with re-entry to the JCPOA.
Finally, U.S. participation in the JCPOA Joint Commission would guarantee diplomacy with Iran that
does not presently exist amid the administration’s pressure campaign, and could lead to follow-on
negotiations addressing the full spectrum of America’s concerns with Iran – including regional security
and human rights. The present Trump administration approach of exiting the JCPOA and seeking its destruction prohibits the
U.S. from affecting Iran’s calculations on issues beyond the nuclear file. Any policymaker with justifiable concerns with Iranian
behavior or who seeks political solutions to the proxy conflicts that have gripped the region should be urging a return to the JCPOA.
Returning to the JCPOA and restoring U.S. credibility and influence with Iran is unlikely to be without cost, but
will not be nearly as costly as the alternative. The U.S. reneged on its commitments and, barring Congressional
intervention or a change of heart from President Trump himself, will have materially breached the accord by snapping back nuclear-
related sanctions for a period of at least 32 months if there is a change in administration after the 2020 elections. Judging by recent
sanctions designations, as well, the Trump administration does not appear intent to sit idly in the months ahead, but will proceed
with a dramatic expansion of sanctions designations that may go well beyond previous sanctions campaigns. These will have a
tremendous negative effect on the Iranian economy and the Iranian people’s aspirations, in addition to the economies of our allies in
Europe seeking to comply with the UNSC-endorsed JCPOA.
 1NC – Undo Trump CP
Text: The United States federal government should
 Rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
 Continue summits with the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea
 Restart counterterror efforts in Syria
 Have the Trump Administration resign
 Cut ties with Russia

Resolving Iran and North Korea solve

Shapiro 18 [Jacob L. Shapiro, geopolitical analyst who explains and predicts global trends,
director of analysis for Geopolitical Futures, 5-30-2018, "A Conversation About US Credibility,"
Geopolitical Futures, accessed 7-22-2019, https://geopoliticalfutures.com/conversation-u-s-
credibility/ ]
The limitations of this approach can be observed clearly in a debate raging over the importance of U.S. “credibility” in the world.
The U.S. made three major foreign policy moves this month: It pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal , it has
been inconsistent on trade disputes with China , and canceled , at least temporarily, a planned
summit with Kim Jong Un next month. In both the U.S. and abroad, it is becoming a common refrain to hear that
U.S. cred ibility has been damaged as a result of these moves, and that this has the effect of eroding U.S.
power and creating more geopolitical instability.

Determining whether this is true is more difficult than it may seem. After all, how does one measure credibility? We could survey a
large sample of people in a foreign country and ask whether it is commonly believed that the U.S. will follow through on its promises,
but the results would be imprecise – and mostly irrelevant. Answers would vary based on the issue, and more important, it’s foreign
governments, not their citizens, that must decide whether the U.S. is trustworthy after the foreign policy decisions of this month.

And Americans themselves are unreliable judges of U.S. credibility abroad because of the political history of the term in America.
The credibility question was ubiquitous in the 1960s not because of the United States’ relationship with foreign governments but
because a “credibility gap” opened up between the Lyndon B. Johnson government and the American electorate. The Johnson
government relied on key statistics (like “body count”) to claim that the U.S. was winning the Vietnam War even as the situation was
getting no better. Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal widened the trust gap still further. Ironically, when Americans refer to the
credibility of the U.S. abroad, they are often projecting their own lack of confidence in their government onto others.

Yet despite the shapelessness of the term credibility, and despite the political landmines surrounding discussions of it, it is not a
discussion that can be avoided. The reliability of U.S. promises is not an academic question. The U.S. became involved in the
Vietnam War precisely because it feared the implications for its containment policy against the Soviet Union if it allowed Vietnam to
fall into communist hands. What was at stake was not so much Vietnam but the value of a U.S. security guarantee. The same is
true, albeit on a much smaller scale, of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. Russia was not interested in conquering Georgia so
much as it was interested in demonstrating that a U.S. security guarantee was worthless, and therefore that countries in the
Caucasus would do well to make their peace with a resurgent Moscow.

Credibility, then, is as much perception as it is reality. The Iran nuclear deal is a useful example. The
stated goal of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (as it is officially known) was to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
But the U.S. and Iran each conceived of the JCPOA in very different terms. The U.S. wanted a willing partner in the fight against the
Islamic State. It got a partner that was too willing, because after IS was all but defeated, Iran aggressively pushed into the region
and began testing missiles. Iran wanted to rejoin the global economy and secure legitimacy for its foreign policy moves in the region.
The deal was concluded by two weak administrations, and in the U.S. it wasn’t even given the status of a treaty, meaning it was
easy to cancel.

leaving the deal is catastrophic for U.S. credibility .

Those who advocate remaining in the JCPOA argue that
They find useful corroboration of this position from Iran’s president , for whom the U.S. withdrawal is disastrous,
and from European leaders who are primarily interested in buying cheap Iranian oil. Those who advocated leaving the
deal think that Iran is a menace with no credibility of its own and that it is better to take the hit to U.S. credibility than to remain in a
political arrangement that empowers a U.S. adversary. It’s hard to argue that U.S. credibility has been damaged while Iran is trying
to buy the Iraqi election and is building bases on the Israeli border.
 Trump administration appeared poised for a
The U.S.-North Korea issue is different, if less immediately weighty. The
summit with Kim Jong Un, only to withdraw from the summit via a letter that boasted of the United
States’ own nuclear arsenal and gave the primary reason for the cancelation to be the “tremendous anger and open hostility”
of recent North Korean statements. The Trump letter came days after the U.S. insinuated that Libya was a good model for North
Korean denuclearization, an eyebrow-raising suggestion considering the U.S. helped topple Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya in
2011. Now the U.S. and North Korea are talking again, and the summit may be back on – or it may not. The whole issue has
become a farce.

But it is a farce that could be damaging to U.S. credibility . North Korea released U.S. prisoners, toned down
its criticism of U.S.-South Korea military exercises, and appeared to dismantle a nuclear test site. Though Iran, strictly speaking,
was not violating the terms of its deal with the U.S., Washington could at least point to violations of the spirit of the agreement. Not
so with North Korea.

The U.S. has also been losing the larger credibility battle in East Asia . U.S. credibility in the region won’t
rise and fall depending on whether Trump and Kim share a cheeseburger, but it matters whether countries in the
region trust the U nited S tates. And on this issue, North Korea already achieved a major objective months ago when
it exposed deep cracks in the U.S.-South Korea security relationship by pushing the U.S. to the
brink of a military strike. North Korea also successfully demonstrated to U.S. allies like Japan that U.S. resolve in halting
North Korea’s nuclear program is mainly rhetorical.

What this all really comes down to is that the United States is at the center of the world order, and when the United
States acts in ways that other countries don’t like (or that political factions within the U.S. don’t like ), it
often manifests as the weakening of U.S. credibility . Sometimes the issue of reduced U.S. credibility is real,
as it is in Asia, where the power of the U.S. is declining (compared to China and Japan), and where the United States’ inconsistent
approach to the North Korea issue is producing unease, not a tactically useful level of unpredictability. Sometimes, however,
credibility is simply a scapegoat for a policy disagreement or divergent strategic interests. Either way, the issue is not so much that
the U.S. broke this or that agreement as it is a much broader lack of strategic clarity dating back to 1991 about how and to what end
the U.S. wields its power in the world.

Restarting counter-terror efforts in Syria solves

Turak 18 [Natasha Turak, Correspondent of CNBC, 12-22-2018, “Trump risks ‘damaging
America’s reputation for the long term’ with Syria withdrawal, experts warn,” CNBC, accessed 7-
22-2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/22/trump-may-be-damaging-us-credibility-with-syria-
withdrawal-experts.html ]
U.S. President Donald Trump's abrupt announcement this week that he intends to withdraw all American
troops out of Syria risks dealing a serious blow to his country's credibility as an ally and
partner, former national security officials and regional experts warned.
That decision, announced in a Twitter post, was reportedly the "breaking point" for Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who
submitted his resignation letter a day later. The 68-year-old retired Marine Corps general said he was leaving the administration in
part because he does not agree with Trump on a number of issues, and cited the importance of alliances.
Geopolitical experts are also sounding the alarm on the state of America's international partnerships.
"(Trump's Syria move) risks not only jeopardizing the near-term U.S. interest of stabilizing a
key part of the Middle East, but also damaging America's reputation for the long term ," Turkey
expert Soner Cagaptay and former Defense Department and Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Dana Stroul wrote in a
brief for The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Trump has long opposed U.S. military involvement in Syria, and his backers view the withdrawal decision as a campaign promise
kept. He announced the defeat the Islamic State (IS), arguing that America should no longer fight others' battles for them.
But defense officials and lawmakers reject the assertion that IS is finished, and say that America still has commitments to allies on
the ground and a reputation to uphold.
"Next time the U.S. needs to challenge an imminent terror threat somewhere in the world, we'll presumably
want to do so 'by, with & through,' using local partners," wrote Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute
and author of "The Syrian Jihad."

" You think they're going to trust us now? Not a chance ."
The Kurdish alliance
That sentiment was keenly felt in Northern Syria , where America's local partners in the fight against IS
have expressed concern they're being abandoned.
The U.S. drew up the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), comprised of Arab and Kurdish fighters, as a local partner on the ground
after IS swept half of Syria in 2014. Military officials describe the Kurdish element of that coalition — known as the Kurdish People's
Protection Unit, or the YPG — as by far the most effective fighting force within the group.
The Kurdish fighters receive U.S. training, weapons and air support, but some members of the group have been accused of human
rights violations, including ethnic cleansing and the torture of Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen communities. Counter terrorism
partnerships in the Middle East have long been messy and complex affairs for Washington.
That partnership has long drawn fierce opposition from coalition ally Turkey, which sees the Kurdish militia as tied to the Kurdistan
Workers' Party, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that's waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.
Turkey has publicly threatened an imminent attack on Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria, and Trump reportedly told the
country's leader that Ankara could do as it pleases.
The Kurds now warn a fight with Turkey will detract from their ability to contain the remaining IS forces.
"A Turkish incursion would force many YPG fighters to shift their efforts away from fighting IS, risking a reversal of recent progress,"
Stroul and Cagaptay wrote.
"The war against terrorism has not ended and (the Islamic State group) has not been defeated," an SDF representative said in a
statement. "The
decision to pull out under these circumstances will lead to a state of instability
and create a political and military void in the region and leave its people between the
claws of enemy forces. "
Multiple media reports quoted Kurdish leaders and activists labeling Trump's move a "betrayal," pointing to the thousands of Kurdish
fighters killed in the anti-IS fight.
The shift is catching attention throughout the Middle East .
"This sudden change in policy is worrying ... to all U.S. allies in the region," former Iraqi foreign minister
Hoshyar Zebari told the Washington Post. "It's a question of trust. This will cause many governments to rethink their alliances with a
superpower that can throw them under the bus."
The shock has rippled to some American forces, where reports from NBC describe "U.S. special forces troops distraught, upset,
morally disturbed by having to tell their Kurdish allies in Syria that, because of orders, their promises of defense won't be kept."
The Pentagon, White House and State Department did not respond to CNBC requests for comment.
In a Saturday night Twitter post, Trump said allies "are very important-but not when they take advantage of U.S."

Resignation solves – Trump singlehandedly decks US legitimacy due to lies

Baker 19 [Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, 6-14-2019,
"As Trump Accuses Iran, He Has One Problem: His Own Credibility," No Publication, accessed
7-22-2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/us/politics/trump-iran-credibility.html ]
WASHINGTON — To President Trump, the question of culpability in the explosions that crippled two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman
is no question at all. “It’s probably got essentially Iran written all over it,” he declared on Friday.
The question is whether the writing is clear to everyone else. For any president, accusing
another country of an act of war presents an enormous challenge to overcome skepticism at home and
abroad. But for a president known for falsehoods and crisis-churning bombast, the test of credibility
appears far more daunting .
For two and a half years in office, Mr. Trump has spun out so many misleading or untrue statements
about himself, his enemies, his policies, his politics, his family, his personal story, his finances
and his interactions with staff that even his own former communications director once said “he’s
a liar” and many Americans long ago concluded that he cannot be trusted.
Fact-checking Mr. Trump is a full-time occupation in Washington, and in no other circumstance is faith in
a president’s word as vital as in matters of war and peace. The public grew cynical about presidents and intelligence after George
W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq based on false accusations of weapons of mass destruction, and the doubt spilled over to Barack Obama
when he accused Syria of gassing its own people. As Mr. Trump confronts Iran, he carries the burden of their history and his own.
“The problem is twofold for them,” said John E. McLaughlin, a deputy C.I.A. director during the Iraq war. “One is people will always
rightly question intelligence because it’s not an exact science. But the most important problem for them is their own credibility and
contradictions.”
The task is all the more formidable for Mr. Trump, who himself has assailed the reliability of America’s intelligence agencies and
even the intelligence chiefs he appointed, suggesting they could not be believed when their conclusions have not fit his worldview.
At one point shortly before taking the oath of office, he compared intelligence agencies to Nazi Germany and ever since has cast
doubt on their findings about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. This year, he repudiated his intelligence chiefs for their
assessments of issues like Iran, declaring that “they are wrong” and “should go back to school.” And just this week, he rebuked the
C.I.A. for using a brother of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un as an informant, saying, “I wouldn’t let that happen under my auspices.”
All of that can raise questions when international tension flares up, like the explosion of the two oil tankers on Thursday, a
provocation that fueled anxiety about the world’s most important oil shipping route and the prospect of escalation into military
 When Mr. Trump told Fox News on Friday that “Iran did do it,” he was asking his country
conflict.
to accept his word.
“Trump’s credibility is about as solid as a snake oil salesman ,” said Jen Psaki, who was the White House
communications director and top State Department spokeswoman under Mr. Obama. “That may work for selling his particular brand
to his political base, but during serious times, it leaves him without a wealth of good will and trust from the
public that what he is saying is true even on an issue as serious as Iran’s complicity in the
tanker explosions.”
White House officials declined to discuss the president’s credibility on the record on Friday, but a senior administration official who
asked not to be identified said Mr. Trump was not hyping a threat to justify a war. If anything, Mr. Trump has made clear since
becoming a presidential candidate that he did not favor the sort of military interventionism that characterized Mr. Bush’s presidency
and, to a lesser extent, even Mr. Obama’s at times.
Indeed, in his telephone interview on Friday with Fox News, Mr. Trump offered a measured response, avoiding any kinds of threats
or discussion of military action. While he condemned the Iranians, he has pointedly not publicly floated the possibility of retaliation,
and, in fact, he once again said he was open to talks with Tehran. “I’m ready when they are,” he said.
Still, Mr. Trump’s strained relationship with the truth has been a defining feature of his presidency. As of June 7, The
Washington Post’s fact-checker had counted 10,796 false or misleading claims since he
took office .
The president dismisses that as so much “fake news” by journalists who are “enemies of the people.” Just this week, he told George
Stephanopoulos of ABC News that he was the truthteller, not reporters. “I like the truth,” Mr. Trump said. “You know, I’m actually a
very honest guy.”
But it has taken a toll on his credibility with the public. A Quinnipiac University poll last month found that only 35 percent of
Americans trust Mr. Trump to tell the truth about important issues versus 52 percent who trusted
the news media more.
When it came to this week’s oil tanker explosions, Mr. Trump at first left it to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to point the finger at
Iran and he followed up a day later. To bolster the case, the United States military released video footage that American officers
said showed an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps patrol boat pulling alongside one of the stricken ships several hours after the
first explosion and removing an unexploded limpet mine in broad daylight. That mine is what Mr. Trump said had “Iran written all
over it.”
Iran has denied responsibility and suggested that the episode was a “false flag” operation by the United States to frame it and justify
aggression. But Iran has its own credibility issues, and even Mr. Trump’s critics were generally not rushing to accept Tehran’s word.
“Look, it could very well have been the Iranians,” said Trita Parsi, a scholar at Georgetown University and the founder of the
National Iranian American Council. “I don’t think anyone can say they’re innocent.”
But Mr. Trump’s “relationship with the truth” is so suspect, he said, it argues for stepping back and
not drawing conclusions until there is more evidence. “With this president, with the country already so divided,
even those who support him may not be totally confident that everything he’s saying is truthful,” said Mr. Parsi, the author of “Losing
an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy.”
Even supporters of Mr. Trump’s tougher approach to Iran acknowledge the credibility challenge. Mark
Wallace, the executive director of United Against Nuclear Iran and a strong critic of Mr. Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran that
Mr. Trump has since renounced, said the government needs to rely on its career professionals to inform the public about Tehran’s
activities.

Russia decks legitimacy of Trump and the US

The Guardian 18 [The Guardian, news outlet, 11-30-2018, "The Guardian view on Donald
Trump’s credibility: America’s compromised leader," Guardian, accessed 7-22-2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/30/the-guardian-view-on-donald-trumps-
credibility-americas-compromised-leader ]
Earlier this week Donald Trump stood on the south lawn of the White House and ridiculed Theresa May’s Brexit agreement as a
“great deal for the EU”. He is likely to make the same contemptuous case during the G20 summit in Argentina this weekend,
although pointedly there is no planned bilateral. Given the political stakes facing her back home, Mrs May must feel as if 14,000
miles is a long way to travel for the weekend merely to be trashed by supposedly her greatest ally.
When this happens, though, who does Mrs May imagine is confronting her? Is it just Mr Trump himself, America First
president, sworn enemy of the international order in general and the European Union in
particular? That’s a bad enough reality. But might her accuser also be , at some level, Vladimir Putin , a leader
whose interest in weakening the EU and breaking Britain from it as damagingly as possible
outdoes even that of Mr Trump? That prospect is even worse.
Such speculation would normally seem, and still probably is, a step too far. The idea that a US president is in any way doing the
Kremlin’s business as well as his own is the stuff of spy thrillers and of John le Carré TV adaptations. Yet the icy fact is that the
conspiracy theory may now also contain an element of truth.
On Thursday, Mr Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty – in a court filing by the special counsel Robert
Mueller – to lying to the US congress about Mr Trump’s Russian interests and connections during the
months when the New York property magnate was running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. It was not true, Mr
Cohen has now admitted, that the Trump organisation ended its interest in Russian deals in January 2016; not true that there were
no plans for Russian visits by Mr Trump later in 2016 to make property deals; not true that the Russian government did not respond
to the deal overtures. Indeed, as late as May 2016, Mr Cohen was in indirect contact with Mr Putin’s office about the
possibility of a meeting with Mr Trump in St Petersburg in June.
Days before he took office in 2017, Mr Trump said that “the closest I came to Russia” was in selling a
Florida property to a Russian oligarch in 2008. If Mr Cohen’s statement is true, Mr Trump was telling his country a
lie. What is more, the Russians knew it. Potentially, that raises issues of US national security. If Mr Putin knew that Mr Trump was
concealing information about his Russian business interests, this could give Moscow leverage over the US leader. Mr Trump might
feel constrained to praise Mr Putin or to avoid conflicts with Russia over policy.
All this may indeed be very far-fetched. Yet Russia’s activities in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton and in
favour of Mr Trump are not fiction . They prompted the setting up of the Mueller inquiry into links
between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Another document this week suggests a
longtime Trump adviser, Roger Stone, may have sought information about WikiLeaks plans to release
hacked Democratic party emails in 2016.
There is nothing in the documents released this week that proves that Mr Trump conspired with Russian efforts to win him the
presidency. Yet those efforts were real. For two years, Mr Trump has gone to unprecedented lengths to attack
the special counsel. After November’s midterms, he seemed on the verge of firing Mr Mueller. He may
yet do so. But this week’s charges suggest that there is plenty more still to be revealed. Mr Trump still has questions to answer from
the investigating authorities, from the new Congress – and from America’s long-suffering allies.
 2NC – Iran Deal
Re-entry to the JCPOA solves more than just legitimacy
NIAC 18 [National Iranian American Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to
strengthening the voice of Iranian Americans and promoting greater understanding between the
American and Iranian people, 11-19-2018, "Restoring U.S. Credibility: Returning to the Iran
Nuclear Agreement," NIAC, accessed 7-22-2019, https://www.niacouncil.org/restoring-u-s-
credibility-returning-to-the-iran-nuclear-agreement/]
*JCPOA = Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal
REPAIRING THE DAMAGE: THE U.S. RETURN TO THE JCPOA
The incoming Congress and a successor administration can respectively halt and repair much of the damage from
Trump’s JCPOA exit by signaling the political will and intent for the U.S. to re-enter the JCPOA’s
fold and resume obligations thereto, including via the lifting of nuclear-related sanctions.
Resuming commitments under the JCPOA would deliver profound benefits for the U.S.
national interest . First, it would signal to the world that the U.S. is a responsible actor in the
international arena; the U.S. intends to live up to the political agreements that it makes with other
countries; and the Trump administration was nothing more than an unfortunate aberration in the American political
system. Nothing has caused more serious damage to U.S. interests than the growing trust deficit towards
the United States. If states are unable to trust the United States, then not only is U.S. global leadership severely undermined but the
international system that has been predominate since the end of the Second World War risks unraveling. By clearly showing
the world that the U.S. intends to fully observe the commitments that it makes, a successor administration
can begin to repair the damage wrought by President Trump.
Second, the U.S.’s re-entrance into the JCPOA would have important non-proliferation benefits by
effectively disincentivizing Iran from exiting the JCPOA itself and thus undoing the risk of a burgeoning nuclear crisis in the Middle
East. In so doing, the U.S. would ensure the survivability of the tough and far-reaching constraints on Iran’s nuclear program that will
be imposed by the JCPOA through 2030 and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program does not pose the risks it did in the pre-2015 era, and
that is fully thanks to the JCPOA and the restrictions it imposes. Any policymaker should be eager to return to the JCPOA and, in so
doing, re-secure hard-fought concessions that take an Iranian nuclear weapon and war with Iran over its nuclear program off the
table for the foreseeable future.
Third, reentry to the JCPOA
would signal to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia that Donald Trump’s
blank check for their increasingly brazen behavior is at an end , and that the U.S. has alternatives to outsourcing
American policy in the region to an erratic kingdom that – in the words of Sen. Lindsey Graham – has double dealt on terror.
Perversely, both the Trump administration and numerous Washington pressure groups have warned that the administration’s
pressure campaign against Iran would be jeopardized if the U.S. dared to impose consequences on the kingdom over the brutal
murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. Such warnings expose the current administration’s approach to the
region as so hopelessly unbalanced that is susceptible to extortion by one morally bankrupt regime against another. The U.S.
needs to move to a transactional relationship with both Saudi Arabia and Iran where we can impose
consequences on each for such brazen misbehavior. In Iran, the U.S. has sanctioned itself out of influence, whereas
with Saudi Arabia the U.S. is too afraid to use its substantial leverage to rein in the kingdom’s destructive course – whether on the
An alternative is available, and it
disastrous war in Yemen or on the kingdom’s mounting human rights abuses.
should start with re-entry to the JCPOA.
Finally, U.S. participation in the JCPOA Joint Commission would guarantee diplomacy with Iran that
does not presently exist amid the administration’s pressure campaign, and could lead to follow-on
negotiations addressing the full spectrum of America’s concerns with Iran – including regional security
and human rights. The present Trump administration approach of exiting the JCPOA and seeking its destruction prohibits the
U.S. from affecting Iran’s calculations on issues beyond the nuclear file. Any policymaker with justifiable concerns with Iranian
behavior or who seeks political solutions to the proxy conflicts that have gripped the region should be urging a return to the JCPOA.
Returning to the JCPOA and restoring U.S. credibility and influence with Iran is unlikely to be without cost, but
will not be nearly as costly as the alternative. The U.S. reneged on its commitments and, barring Congressional
intervention or a change of heart from President Trump himself, will have materially breached the accord by snapping back nuclear-
related sanctions for a period of at least 32 months if there is a change in administration after the 2020 elections. Judging by recent
sanctions designations, as well, the Trump administration does not appear intent to sit idly in the months ahead, but will proceed
with a dramatic expansion of sanctions designations that may go well beyond previous sanctions campaigns. These will have a
tremendous negative effect on the Iranian economy and the Iranian people’s aspirations, in addition to the economies of our allies in
Europe seeking to comply with the UNSC-endorsed JCPOA.
 2NC – North Korea
Embracing North Korea solves legitimacy – perception matters more than
material action
Collinson 7/1 [Stephen Collinson, reporter, 7-1-2019, "Trump's North Korean gambit is
already a political win," CNN, accessed 7-23-2019,
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/politics/donald-trump-kim-jong-un-north-korea-diplomacy-
2020-election/index.html ]
If history is to remember one of the most audacious photo ops in American diplomacy as
anything more than a stunt, the President must now produce breakthroughs from his friendship
with the brutal dictator Kim Jong Un.
Yet even if that progress is slow to emerge, Trump can still chalk up a valuable political win that
will underscore how his foreign policy is often directed by his electoral priorities.
He can use his singular televised moment to bolster his claims to be a statesman and a
peacemaker. And it's not just about winning the Nobel Prize that the President believes he
deserves for forging an opening with one of the most despotic regimes in modern history.
Trump also has a vital political interest in keeping alive the idea that he personally headed off
war with North Korea and that historic progress is possible as he runs for reelection.
His meeting with Kim is a centerpiece of the "peace and prosperity" platform on which he plans
to anchor his bid for a second term and to use to rise above his Democratic rivals.
Trump will be praised by conservative media and the reality of US-North Korea relations will
be glossed over , all in the service of his 2020 campaign.
The political significance of Sunday's eye-popping encounter was revealed in the quick
condemnations offered by Democratic presidential candidates seeking to deny him a political
win.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted that Trump shouldn't be "squandering American
influence on photo ops and exchanging love letters with a ruthless dictator."
But politics is often shaped more by perception than reality. And the North Korean summit is an
example of how Trump can use the office of the presidency to his own benefit ahead of 2020.
And Trump, by becoming the first sitting President to step into North Korea, also outdid his
predecessors, some of whom simply climbed atop the border wall and peered over the other
side into the isolated state.
 2NC – Syria Counter-Terror
Withdrawal from Syria decks legitimacy – staying solves
Fsi Stanford 18 [Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford’s premier
research institute for international affairs, 12-20-2018, "President Trump Says He’ll Pull US
Troops out of Syria. Now What?," Medium, accessed 7-23-2019, https://medium.com/freeman-
spogli-institute-for-international-studies/president-trump-says-hell-pull-us-troops-out-of-syria-
now-what-f9fae70600 ]
On Wednesday, President Trump announced he wants to pull troops out of Syria because the United States
military had achieved its goal of defeating the Islamic State militant group there. In this Q&A, terrorism expert Martha Crenshaw
addresses the president’s decision.
Has the U.S. defeated the Islamic State in Syria? What does “defeat” mean in this context?
U.S. leaders have talked optimistically about “defeating” first Al Qaeda and then the Islamic State since the declaration of a global
war on terror in 2001. If it were possible to vanquish such an adversary on the battlefield through the application
of superior military force, we would already have accomplished the mission. The Islamic State combines
insurgency with transnational terrorism, and its operations flow easily across national borders. Since its beginnings in 2003, it has
demonstrated a capacity for resilience and reconstitution — and for surprising us. The loss of the Caliphate has not changed this
equation.
What regional impacts might this decision have?
The Iraqi government has not shown itself capable of providing the security or legitimacy that
might undermine the appeal of the Is i S . Despite [Syrian President] Assad’s ruthless consolidation
lam c tate

of power with the aid of Iran and Russia, opposition to his regime will continue. If the American-supported
Kurdish resistance is abandoned by the U.S. and then destroyed or weakened by Turkey, there will be even
more scope and rationale for jihadists such as the Islamic State. Also, we shouldn’t forget that the Al
Qaeda branch in Syria is still active.
What about in terms of the U.S. relationship with Russia and Iran versus with allies in the region?
It seems that the assumption behind the withdrawal is that the U.S. is willing
to leave Syrian affairs to
Russia and Iran and to allow Turkey to pursue an offensive against our Kurdish allies. We
should probably call them “former allies” now. Turkey is likely to draw closer to Iran and Russia.
Some American military leaders have spoken up against this decision, calling it wrongheaded. Does that matter?
Probably not to the President’s decisions, but vocal military opposition would matter to Congress and other opinion leaders.
 2NC – Syria Counter-Terror – Solves China Fill-In
Withdrawal from Syria invites Chinese influence – the CP avoids China fill-in
Tay 4/4 [Shirley Tay, CNBC contributor, 4-4-2019, “As the US withdraws from Syria, China may
boost its influence in the country,” CNBC, accessed 7-23-2019,
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/05/as-us-withdraws-from-syria-china-may-boost-influence-in-the-
country.html ]
As U.S. troops withdraw from Syria, another country may be stepping up its presence in the war
torn nation: China.
Beijing sees the situation in Syria as an opportunity to benefit economically, expand its influence
in the Middle East and even boost its globe-spanning Belt and Road infrastructure investment
initiative.
“As the U.S. is withdrawing its troops, the EU and U.S. have shown little interest in supporting Assad and
leading the efforts of reconstructing Syria. China is facing little competition in Syria to realize its
plans, ” said Mollie Saltskog, an analyst at security intelligence firm The Soufan Group.
U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly ordered the withdrawal of 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria last
December, saying the extremist group Islamic State had been defeated — the “only reason” he’s wanted
troops in the country. As the American forces withdraw, the spotlight has turned to the other nations with strategic interests in Syria’s
ongoing civil war.
While experts and lawmakers suggest the U.S. drawdown may strengthen the hands of Russia and Iran, Syrian President Bashar
Assad’s partners, others have highlighted China’s potential role in coming years.
That is, with diminishing U.S. influence in the region, China is presented with an opportunity to increase its economic presence in
Syria, Saltskog said.
A $250 billion investment opportunity
According to UN estimates, rebuilding Syria from its years of civil war will reportedly cost about $250 billion.
As Assad’s administration faces growing economic pressure from U.S. sanctions and the war, it is
likely to look for even more support — and China is poised to lend a hand.
The world’s second-largest economy is already vying to take the lead in post-war reconstruction
even before the conflict has ended. At the 2017 Trade Fair on Syrian Reconstruction Projects in Beijing, the nation
pledged $2 billion to establish an industrial park in Syria.
Chinese auto companies Geely and Changan have reportedly partnered with Syrian car manufacturer Mallouk & Co, and its
manufacturing plant in Homs is set to produce both brands of cars.
”It serves (China’s) interest to first enter Syria economically, and be seen as contributing to the
overall economy, ” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior Asia advisor at a Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and
International Studies.
“This can create greater, sort of more positive sentiments and attitudes toward China . Ultimately,
that could translate to more Chinese influence in the region,” she added.
On top of that, Beijing is likely to leverage a role in Syria’s reconstruction to advance its Belt and Road
Initiative, Saltskog said.
 2NC – Trump
The Trump administration lacks credibility
Paul Waldman 1/8 [Paul Waldman, opinion writer covering politics, 01-08-2019, "Opinion,"
Washington Post, accessed 7-22-2019,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/08/no-one-trump-administration-has-any-
credibility-left/?utm_term=.becdd3b7f8bf ]
Something curious is happening right now: The president of the United States is giving a prime-time address on
an urgent political controversy, and pretty much everyone acknowledges that in that address
he is going to lie to the American people.
The TV networks, which often have aired such speeches when the president asks, are struggling to figure out how to handle it; they
seem to have decided that allowing a Democratic response, plus some post-hoc fact-checking, will fulfill their journalistic
responsibilities.
But there’s something else going on here, too. This administration is so morally and intellectually
degraded that there is not a single major figure within it who retains credibility with the press
or the public. In the midst of a political crisis, there is no administration official whose word we can take on anything.
For context, I want to look back on a relevant episode from the recent past. In 2002 and 2003, George W. Bush’s administration was
waging one of the great propaganda efforts in American history to convince the public that if we didn’t invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein
would soon attack us with his fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. As Vice President Dick Cheney put it in a speech,
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing
them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
This was a lie, and though most of the public seemed to be buying it, as it approached the time when Bush was ready to launch the
invasion, the administration needed a rhetorical coup de grace to make the momentum for war unstoppable. So they turned to
Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former general who was not only known to be harboring some skepticism about the case for
invading, but who was held in such high esteem by both the news media and the public that not only would he be given the benefit
of the doubt, but just about anything he said would be assumed to be unimpeachable.
Powell gave a speech to the United Nations in February 2003, laying out the administration’s case for war — a speech that we
would later learn was as full of falsehoods, distortions, and tendentious claims as everything else coming out of the administration at
the time. But the reception to the speech, just as the administration hoped, was positively rapturous. Such was Powell’s reputation
that if he said it, nearly the entire news media concluded, it had to be true.
The point of this story is that Powell's credibility was a potent resource on which the administration could draw. It happened that they
drew on it in service to propagating lies to enable a catastrophic war, but in theory they could have drawn on it to justify something
worthwhile.
But try to imagine something like that happening today. Which of President Trump’s senior aides would be able
to come before the public and say, “These are the facts, and this is what we must do about
them,” and be taken seriously?
Indeed, these days when administration officials do interviews, they're forced to spend much of their
time defending the lies their boss has told on the issue at hand. That's what happened when Vice President
Pence did a round of interviews to make the case that we're facing a "crisis" on the border that justifies a government shutdown and
the declaration of a national emergency that would allow President Trump to exercise powers not ordinarily available to the
president. Pence's ability to spin was put to the test, with sad results, as he was questioned about Trump's lie that previous
presidents told him they wished they had built a wall on the southern border, and the lie the entire administration is telling that
thousands of suspected terrorists have been apprehended trying to come in from Mexico.
The vice president isn't going to convince anyone who isn't already in Trump's camp of what the
administration would like the country to believe. The president's press secretary may be the most shamelessly
dishonest person ever to occupy that post, which is saying something. The secretary of homeland security is a joke. The acting
attorney general is a widely viewed as a contemptible sycophant grossly unqualified for his position. And the person with the highest
reputation among Trump officials, former secretary of defense James Mattis, just quit in disgust.
That isn’t to say that Trump doesn’t have a few people in his administration who have managed to hold on to their reputations. But
they have done so only by being invisible. It isn’t as though the administration is going to say, “The American people must know why
the flow of asylum seekers at the border is such an urgent crisis. Here to make that case...Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao!”
With no one else able to convince the public, Trump himself — the one with the least credibility
of all — is set to step up to do the job himself. And he will fail.
Trump destroys US foreign policy – removal is key
Shepp 18 [Jonah Shepp, freelance blogger, 5-26-2018, "Trump’s Credibility Problem Is Now
America’s," Intelligencer, accessed 7-22-2019, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/the-
trump-administration-has-a-credibility-problem.html ]
Less than a year and a half into his term, President Donald Trump has done more damage to U.S.
foreign policy credibility than even the right-wing bogeyman version of Obama managed to do
in eight years . Yet, strangely, few of these credibility hawks seem particularly perturbed by his choices. Of course, Trump is
guilty of some of the exact same sins they pin on Obama, particularly in Syria, where the U.S. is still failing to hold Assad
accountable for his continued brutality. Yet, he is also undermining our credibility in another, equally important
way: by diluting our allies’ confidence that the U.S. can be relied on to uphold its
commitments.
Take for example his abrupt decision on Thursday to cancel a planned summit with North Korean dictator Kim
Jong-un over his country’s nuclear weapons program. The summit was the product of Trump’s own
misunderstanding and rash decision-making in the first place, and not in any way coordinated with our allies or other key players in
East Asia (i.e., China).
Trump’s letter to Kim announcing the cancellation was likewise uncoordinated and came as a surprise
to Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, and even Foggy Bottom, from which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had been touting the diplomatic
progress the administration was making a mere hour before the letter was published. (Welcome to the Trump State Department,
Mike. It isn’t going to be any better for you than it was for Rex Tillerson.)
Right-wing pundits were quick to spin the letter as an example of Trump’s muscular, dominating, alpha-male approach to
negotiation. Trump’s (ghostwritten) book, The Art of the Deal, was referenced repeatedly. Forget that namby-pamby consensus-
building crap that comrade Obama trafficked in; this is how Real Men do diplomacy. North Korea responded respectfully to the
letter, saying it was still interested in talking to the U.S., and now the summit may or may not be back in the cards. (Kim Jong-un and
South Korean President Moon Jae-in held a surprise meeting on Saturday, as well.)
See, say the right-wing pundits: Trump’s abusive style of negotiating works. Don’t believe the nattering naysayers of the liberal
media.
Aside from the facts that the summit could still get canceled again or end in failure, that North Korea might still be playing a long
game to embarrass the U.S., and that Trump probably could have achieved this turnaround without making such a dramatic gesture,
there’s a glaring problem with this line of argument. In business, sure, suddenly pulling out of a deal in order to
scare your counterparty into meeting your terms can work, sometimes.
Imagine, however, how you might feel if your business partner in a joint venture pulled such a stunt
without asking, or even so much as warning, you about it. Would you ever trust or work with that
partner again? That’s precisely what Trump did on Thursday to Moon, with whom he had met just two days
before in Washington.
The South Korean government was blindsided by the announcement that the summit was canceled, and none too pleased to be
treated this way by its ally. Trump’s hardball tactics have undercut Moon’s efforts at reconciliation, whereas what little enthusiasm
China had for participating in sanctions against North Korea has waned. If Trump’s strategy is to pressure Kim into making a deal,
he has done a fine job of alienating the regional partners he will need to apply that pressure effectively.
In the right-wing critique of Obama’s foreign policy, U.S. credibility is defined rather one-dimensionally, as the willingness to follow
credibility also means keeping your
through on threats and to back up our words with hard power. But
promises , especially to friends and partners, which the Trump administration appears unwilling
or unable to do. Is the U.S. actually committed to resolving the Korean situation diplomatically or not?
Right now, nobody in Seoul can really say for sure — and that’s a big problem, because they’re the
ones who will suffer and die if the crisis spirals into war.
Trump has treated our allies no better when it comes to the other item on his foreign policy agenda this year: Iran.
The president withdrew the U.S. from the deal to contain Iran ’s nuclear program — effectively
ensuring its demise — over the objections of every other country involved in making it, including key
American allies in Europe along with Russia and China. That he did so at the urging of Iran’s enemies Israel and Saudi Arabia does
not inspire confidence in foreign capitals that the U.S. is committed to avoiding yet another catastrophic war in the Middle East.
Trump’s threats to U.S. credibility also include his unilateral withdrawal from the Paris
climate agreement and his reluctant commitment to NATO’s common defense . Needless to
say, the increasingly visible web of personal and money connections between Trump and the Russian plutocracy also diminishes
American credibility in obvious ways, as even the suspicion that the U.S. president might have unsavory ties to Moscow could lead
other world leaders to second-guess his decisions.
But to the right, none of this matters. To them, credibility means we do what we threaten to do and nothing more, keeping our
promises to allied countries only as those allies pay up or kowtow. This is in keeping with the contempt for internationalism that
forms a core principle of Trump’s self-centered, jingoistic ideology, which the GOP has with few exceptions wholeheartedly
embraced. It is certainly what you’d expect in a foreign policy directed primarily by National Security Adviser John Bolton, who
despises the United Nations, has no interest in what the rest of the world thinks, and openly favors military “solutions” in both Iran
and North Korea.
For decades, the free world has operated under the assumption that the United States will act
as its leader, using its might to advance not only its own interests but also those of its kindred
nations and the international community writ large. Under Trump, the world is finding that we
can no longer be trusted to engage in consultation, deliberation, or dialogue of any kind.
Instead, we do whatever we want (or whatever he wants) with no real concern for the impact our
decisions have on other countries, be they allies or adversaries.
When other countries behave this way, we have a word for it: We call them rogue states. How long will our allies put up with this
behavior before they simply stop believing a word we say? And how long will it take to repair that damage after the Trump era is
over?

Trump is the root cause of many foreign policy issues

Azari 18 [Julia Azari, political science blogger, professor at Marquette University, 4-17-2018,
"The challenge of Trump’s presidency is legitimacy, not power," Vox, accessed 7-22-2019,
https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2018/4/17/17248488/trumps-presidency-challenge-
legitimacy ]
The executive branch is making a lot of people nervous lately. On April 13, President Trump ordered
missile strikes in Syria without congressional authorization . He’s reputedly looking into the
finances of the US Postal Service because of its deal with Amazon, a company Trump has attacked on
Twitter a bunch of times. A few weeks ago, he dismissed FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Rumors are circulating that Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will be fired soon (or perhaps special counsel Robert Mueller himself). Rex Tillerson was
dismissed as secretary of state last month, and possibly notified of it by Twitter (or worse). There have probably been a
few scandals while I was writing this.
Among some analysts, it’s been a popular move to suggest that Trump
fits into a group of world leaders who
have recently risen to power on promises to curb the power of elites and their pesky institutions.
The impact of these populist leaders in Eastern European democracies has included the curbing of press freedom and formal
constitutional changes that strip courts of their powers. In Western Europe, right-wing populist movements have stoked nationalist
sentiment in order to undermine institutions; the unexpected Brexit vote in 2016 is an example of this.
Despite this context and the apparent strongman tactics in the White House, the brewing crisis in the US is one of
legitimacy rather than power. This isn’t to say that Trump hasn’t used presidential power in highly unorthodox and problematic
ways — the language that comes out of the White House reflects a profound lack of understanding of constitutional government. It’s
pretty standard for presidents to be more responsive to their supporters and to the needs of politically pivotal groups (see, for
example, The Particularistic President, which illustrates this phenomenon looking at a wide range of data). But Trump has
been more transparent about these aims, with actions and language that suggest he means to
punish political opponents.
Speaking of transparency, the executive branch has taken some steps to limit public access to records and information. It’s
sometimes lost in the “cover-up was worse than the crime” narrative, but when the House Judiciary Committee brought up articles of
impeachment for Richard Nixon, one of them focused heavily on his use of state power to track and punish his political opponents.
The heart of abuse of power isn’t that the president has expanded the power of the executive branch; it’s that he’s used his position
atop the branch that carries out laws for reasons that are unacceptable in a liberal democracy.
When we look at presidential history, though, we see many broad and dramatic expansions of executive power. Barack Obama’s
actions in Libya were widely criticized as unconstitutional, as were some of his unilateral actions on other policy issues. George W.
Bush and his staff invoked an entire theory of presidential power to justify their actions in the war on terror. The way Harry Truman
entered the Korean War expanded presidential war powers, a trend continued by nearly all of his successors in some way.
Numerous presidents — ones who frequently top the rankings — broke into areas of domestic policy where presidents hadn’t gone
before. Andrew Jackson’s use of the veto as a policy instrument, Theodore Roosevelt’s involvement in mediating the 1902 coal
strike, Woodrow Wilson’s hands-on approach to legislation, and basically FDR’s entire domestic presidency were all examples of
expanding presidential authority on the grounds that it was necessary to ensure the health of the country in some way. And all drew
criticism for those expansions and for their policy positions.
But in the long run, presidents are often rewarded for these kinds of institutional boundary violations. In
other words, presidential power expands in ways that are often useful but unchecked to varying degrees.
Trump hasn’t offered a new constitutional doctrine or argued for stretching the “take care” clause. He has used regulatory
power to alter policy, including trying to kill the Affordable Care Act and severely curtail
environmental protections.
Making policy — especially consequential and controversial policy — out of the executive branch is not ideal, nor is it new. The idea
that the president could be a more responsive than the constitutional system, with its veto points and its parochial Congress, is what
informed the whole idea of the progressive presidency.
Under different conditions, too much policymaking in the executive branch alongside a gridlocked Congress might be cause for a
reckoning over the lawmaking process. Most analysts agree that congressional paralysis and dysfunction is behind some of the
executive expansion. But it’s not necessarily a crisis, at least not one of the same magnitude that’s happening elsewhere.
Trump has not changed the content of the Constitution. Some have identified his behavior as a lack of institutional forbearance, or
restraint, in the use of all available capacities. But what’s at the heart of the brewing crisis is legitimacy: the
reasons behind the use of executive power. In other words, the crisis lies less in the specific
actions than in the fact that they seem to be driven by nepotism, personal loyalty, and
sometimes ethnonationalism.
These are all principles that most Americans don’t associate with democracy, to say the least. Despite Trump’s nationalist rhetoric,
some of his most controversial actions have been justified not in terms of saving the nation, but in terms of avoiding accountability in
the administration.
This kind of legitimacy issue is not entirely new. When presidents have pushed at the boundaries of their accepted authority, they’ve
needed to draw on core concepts, like electoral mandates, to reframe what they’re doing. And the Nixon parallels that we keep
hearing about have a strong legitimacy component. Abuse of power is partly about what’s being done, but a great deal of it is about
the reasons — self-serving and anti-democratic — behind the actions.
The situation the country finds itself in now inverts the usual question of presidential power: Do the ends justify the means? Can
presidential action that pushes against. or past, accepted boundaries be justified if it addresses a pressing problem? Who gets to
decide?
Trump is something different. Presidents have plenty of means to achieve what they want. Trump’s predecessors have ensured
that. But there are two distinct debates happening about whether the ends justify the means with Trump.
One is among Republicans, and it’s been going on for some time. A few elite Republicans were early adopters of the Trump
message, though not very many. A few have consistently been critical of at least some aspects of the administration, particularly
where fundamental rule of law issues are concerned. And the question for those Republicans remains as to whether Trump’s
nonstandard approach to tweeting, accountability, etc. is worth hanging on to some form of party unity.
For Democrats, many of the ends were never desirable. But that’s how it goes in a democracy — what you agree on is the process,
or at least the acceptable boundaries. This has obviously broken down under Trump, but not in a way that is strictly about tweets or
administrative procedure violations. There are questions about the election, of course. At a deeper level, there are ideas that
animated Trump’s candidacy — about the role and status of immigrants, about “law and order” politics — that would never have
been seen by some Americans as legitimate. The most impeccable process would not have changed that.
What does this all mean for the current moment, particularly for Trump’s recent decision to order airstrikes in Syria? Scholars of
presidential power are skeptical of the legality of the action, and the justification seems to be an even bigger problem. Presidents
have been forgiven for a lot of unilateral action in the name of national security — which isn’t part of the story here — as well as
humanitarian intervention. Importantly, public patience is still often limited when these missions drag on. But Trump’s actions
alarmed observers , even those who were inclined to support military action in Syria,
because of their lack of clear doctrine and justification.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Trump’s use of presidential power has been entirely standard. It has not. But it’s also not
responsible for a new doctrine of executive action or new spheres of presidential involvement. Trump’s predecessors, Republican
and Democratic alike, have created an office with expansive power, leaving the door open for someone like Trump, who is
untethered by ideology or deep affiliations with a party or faction, to make governing decisions without clear justifications for the
electorate to weigh in on.
A crisis of legitimacy means there are real questions about whether governance is possible. In this case, it’s substantially but not
entirely about the person in the White House. There are also questions about policy differences, identity-based conflicts, and
negative partisanship. Having a president who treats governance and accountability recklessly may be a symptom of these issues,
but it’s also an obstacle to addressing them.

Get this guy out of office – Trump has changed too much
Cohen 2/19 [Richard Cohen, journalist, 2-19-2019, "After the Damage Done by Trump, Can
America Ever Be Great Again?," RealClearPolitics, accessed 7-23-2019,
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/19/after_the_damage_done_by_trump_can_a
merica_ever_be_great_again_139504.html ]
There will be no Mount Rushmore for Donald Trump. But, if there's a presidential library, it should contain a Hall of Tweets, a Hall of
Lies, a Hall of Insults and, with the "Marines' Hymn" softly playing, a Hall of Montezuma, with a section of his border wall.
Finally, there should be a Hall of Consequences, the grandest in the place. No president since
Franklin D. Roosevelt has mattered as much.
Trump has remade the Republican Party. It is no longer the party of Lincoln or Reagan, but
increasingly a snarling, sneering collection of score-settlers, white nationalists, immigrant
bashers, homophobes, science-deniers and religious reactionaries who praise a president who has
lived a squalid personal life but who promised them a Supreme Court in their own image. Trump's GOP may not endure,
but for the foreseeable future it reigns supreme.
Trump's dominance of his party is personified by Mitch McConnell. The Senate majority leader's first love was once the institution
and its prerogatives. Just last week, however, he endorsed Trump's emergency decree, which rolled right over Congress, usurping
its traditional role in order to fulfill a silly campaign pledge. Trump has personally berated McConnell, but -- unburdened by either
pride or principle -- McConnell does what the president wants. He faces re-election next year in a state, Kentucky, whose heart
throbs for Trump. Understandably, McConnell fears vilification as a moderate.
In foreign affairs, the Trump presidency has had a huge impact. By fiat, by insult and by a dazzling display of historical ignorance,
Trump has diminished the Atlantic alliance which every president since Roosevelt has
supported and nourished. The lessons of World War II and of the implosion of the Soviet communist
empire -- signal achievements of American involvement and leadership in the affairs of Europe -- are being discarded. At
the Munich Security Conference last week, much of Europe stood to applaud German Chancellor Angela Merkel but
stayed seated for Vice President Mike Pence. Merkel reproached Trump's foreign policy; Pence defended it. The
symbolism was stark: America may not yet be isolationist, but it is isolated .
Under Trump, the judiciary is being transformed . His judges not only are bitterly conservative but
have been deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association at an unprecedented rate. He has vitiated
Cabinet and other offices dealing with the environment and natural resources, turning over the
grandeur of America to despoilers. Only his appointees' ineptness or sense of grandiosity -- EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's
$25,000 phone booth, for instance -- has slowed the onslaught. Pruitt did manage to get Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate
agreement before he resigned.
It's hard to know which of Trump's actions have had the greatest consequence. But maybe the most damaging is how he has
soiled the presidency itself . His incessant lying -- The Washington Post counted 8,459 false or misleading
statements as of Feb 3 -- has turned the presidency into a gong show. He sits at the desk of presidents who took
the truth seriously, who may have lied on occasion but never routinely. Trump, though, spouts lies like a drunken
parrot, with, approximately, similar plumage. He has diminished the importance of truth, making it
indistinguishable from lies -- just more noise.
Trump's attacks on the press are vividly demagogic . He has weakened its ability to be
believed, to uncover scandal, to hold accountable the otherwise unaccountable. He applies the prefix "fake" to any
news he does not like. He does not simply disagree. He de-establishes and then concocts his own version. He has
weakened the FBI, denigrated the CIA, praised Russia's Vladimir Putin and shrugged at the murder of a Post columnist by the
Saudis. He is a president out of Orwell, a creature out of Kafka, a nightmare out of the Electoral College.

Trump is uniquely bad – no president’s legitimacy has stooped this low

Xinyan 6/2 [Wang Xinyan, 06-02-2019, "How to restore the damaged U.S. credibility?," CGTN,
accessed 7-23-2019,
https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514e3251444d35457a6333566d54/index.html ]
Thomas Schelling, a famous American professor of political economy and Nobel laureate, pointed out in his book Arms and
Influence that "face is one of the few things worth fighting over."
Americans have always regarded their strong and reliable reputation or credibility as the pillar
underpinning the world order, and they even resort to limited wars to establish a firm reputation and increase their
bargaining chips in international affairs.
However, the
credibility of the U.S. has eroded in recent years , because the U.S. government
reneged on its commitments in a series of international affairs. Especially after the current
president took office , the credibility of the U.S. has dropped to a new low .
In fact, the U.S. government has been going back on its words and behaving irresponsibly for a long time. As early as 2001, the
Bush administration announced that the "Kyoto Protocol" had "fatal defects" and decided to unilaterally withdraw from it, which
greatly reduced the effectiveness of the "Kyoto Protocol."
Under the Obama administration, the U.S. pushed for reconciliation with Iran and finally reached a six-party nuclear agreement,
which "set free a tiger back to the mountains" in a way that betrayed the U.S.' closest ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. The
"treachery" of the U.S. has gradually deprived it of its influence over Saudi Arabia.
Even more reckless and unscrupulous, the current U.S. government reneges on its words with a
vengeance .
 the U.S.
As the main builder and participant of the international economic order and the multilateral system after World War II,
should have taken the lead in abiding by multilateral rules, but the U.S. government, advocating
"America first," withdraws from international agreements and institutions at every turn :
withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,
the United Nations Human Rights Council.
In the China-U.S. trade war, in defiance of the WTO rules advocated by the U.S. itself and the outcomes of the China-U.S. trade
talks over the past year, U.S. President Donald Trump insisted on imposing a 25 percent tariff on 200 billion U.S.
dollars' worth of Chinese
exports to the U.S.
He even accused the Chinese side of "going back on its words" which once again gives the world a chance
to see the true colors the U.S. government as "giving a false account of the facts."
In addition, President Trump, who has been prone to "governing the country by tweets," has taken the U.S. further
down the road of dishonesty through a large number of "tweets" that have proved to be false.
Public opinion polls reported by the U.S. media show that "between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans do not find Trump
trustworthy."
According to a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center of the U.S., Trump has become the world's least trusted leader of great
power. Americans have more confidence in French President Macron, Japanese Prime Minister Abe and
German Chancellor Merkel than Trump in dealing with international affairs.
At the same time, traditional U.S. allies, such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Saudi
Arabia, Japan, South Korea, and Australia have little confidence in the U.S. president.
Although the U.S. government does not derive its credibility from the president's words and deeds alone, Trump's failure to
keep promises undoubtedly carries serious consequences for the U.S . His "inconsistency in policy
making" and "capriciousness" have led to a sharp decline in the credibility of the U.S. around the world, making it difficult for U.S.
allies to trust the commitments made by the U.S.
According to a poll conducted by market research firm YouGov cited by SPUTNIK, a Russian media outlet, on May 13, 45 percent of
Europeans believe that the U.S. is no longer a reliable security partner of the European Union.
In addition, Trump does not have political experience and does not listen to White House aides. Internationally, he often speaks
carelessly and makes remarks that are not in the interests of U.S. foreign policy; domestically, in order to win the general election,
he attacks the "dissidents" within the Democratic Party and the Republican Party without any scruple.
People no longer believe that he can effectively safeguard the fundamental interests and the strategic intentions of the U.S., which
has led to the decline of the credibility of the U.S. government and the weakening of the U.S. deterrence. The risks of deadly
miscalculation will increase.
As pointed out by a review in Foreign Affairs, a U.S. magazine, "the United States has already paid a significant price for Trump's
behavior: The president is no longer considered the ultimate voice on foreign policy. Foreign
leaders are turning elsewhere to gauge American intentions. With the U.S. domestic system so
polarized and its governing party so fragmented, communicating intent has become more
difficult than ever. The more bipartisan and univocal U.S. signaling is, the less likely it is that Trump's damage to American
credibility will outlast his tenure.”
As ancient Chinese philosophers said: "In communication with his subjects, he (a king) rested in good faith"; "he who does not keep
his promise can hardly act resolutely." As the most powerful country in the world, the U.S. may be used to "conquering" the world
with hard power like a powerful economy and military prowess.
It must not forget that in the information age, soft power, represented by credibility, is more important than ever. If the U.S. is to
achieve its goal of "America first," perhaps it should first think about how to restore its perilous credibility.
 2NC – Russian Ties
Russia had many negative impacts on the US
Bump 18 [Philip Bump, national correspondent, 12-18-2018, "Analysis," Washington Post,
accessed 7-23-2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/18/were-giving-russias-
trolling-team-too-much-credit/?utm_term=.a594151965d3 ]
There’s not really much question that Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election had a
significant effect . Hackers believed to be working for the country’s intelligence agencies gained access to the
computer network of the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Hillary
Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Material stolen from those sources was released
through WikiLeaks first in July and then about a month before the election. Day after day during October 2016, new
files stolen from Podesta were released, frequently giving new ammunition to Clinton’s opponents,
including then-candidate Donald Trump.
"I love WikiLeaks!” Trump declared in October, and for good reason: In short order, those
leaks dominated
media attention, distracting from allegations of improper sexual conduct by Trump that
were slowly emerging in the wake of the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. It was really only
later that month, with former FBI director James B. Comey’s announcement that the FBI had obtained new emails related to
Clinton’s personal server, that attention paid to WikiLeaks — to that material apparently stolen by Russian actors — was overtaken.
But those hacks were not the only thing that Russia was allegedly doing. A group called the Internet Research Agency (IRA)
created fake social media accounts, bought ads on Facebook and other places, and posted
information meant to distort, disrupt and influence the political conversation in the United States.
These were the infamous Russian trolls, interested in affecting the election by changing people’s minds about the
U.S. political system or about Trump and Clinton.

Trump is swayed by Russia – only by cutting ties can we solve

Bertrand 17 [Natasha Bertrand, political correspondent at Business Insider, 7-9-2017, "'We'll
talk to the White House and tell them to fix that': Putin is exploiting Trump's 'credibility deficit',"
Business Insider, accessed 7-23-2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-trump-meeting-
expert-reactions-russia-meddling-2017-7 ]
As President Donald Trump finished his two-hour meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday,
Moscow was already declaring the bilateral sit-down a victory for Russia and preparing to tell the
press that Trump had accepted Putin's assurances that he did not interfere in the 2016 election.
Russian media began celebrating the meeting before it even ended. Anchors remarked on its length,
deciding a two-hour meeting meant that Putin must be Trump's favorite world leader, as tabloids declared it "historic."
A Russian body language expert told Russia's Komsomolskaya Pravda that Putin "controlled the situation and
decided its tone," and called the meeting "a psychological victory for the Russian president." Another tabloid said the lengthy
meeting showed Trump had become a "pragmatist."
Emerging from the meeting, which he observed along with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov told reporters in an on-camera press briefing that Trump "said he's heard Putin's very clear statements that this is not true
and that the Russian government didn't interfere in the elections and that he accepts these statements. That's all."
The White House was effectively forced to play catch-up, issuing anonymous statements to dispute Lavrov's
characterization of the talks. "Not accurate," one official told NBC.
By the time the Trump administration began pushing back, however, Lavrov's comments had ignited a
social media firestorm, and were widely accepted given Trump's well-documented reluctance to accept the US intelligence
community's assessment that Putin tried to help him win the presidency.
"I'm inclined to trust Lavrov, who maintains that Trump accepted Putin's denials that the Russian government was involved," said
Mark Kramer, the program director for the Project on Cold War Studies at Harvard's Davis Center for Eurasian Affairs.
'If, as I suspect, that is what happened, it was a key victory for Putin," Kramer said. "It shows him that he really does have a
sympathetic friend in the the White House."
Ian Bremmer, president of the political risk firm Eurasia Group, agreed that Trump is "far closer to accepting Putin's
'assurances' that Russia didn't hack the election than others in his administration, not to mention
Congress and the mainstream media."
"I'm not surprised he didn't make a big deal about it," Bremmer said. After all, in Trump's mind, to seriously take it up would be to
delegitimize the validity of his own election win."
Tillerson, for his part, said Trump had "pressed President Putin on more than one occasion regarding Russian involvement," which
Putin denied.
But White House officials have continued to dodge questions about Lavrov's remarks, without correcting his
account: Aboard Air Force One, "neither Mnuchin nor McMaster deny POTUS 'accepted' (as Russian FM Lavrov said) Putin's denial
of US elex cyber meddling," CBS correspondent Major Garett tweeted on Saturday.
"What strikes me is that — for the first time — we have an administration in office whose credibility is
about on par with the Kremlin's ," said Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who served as the senior director of the
National Security Council under Obama.
Americans used to be able to assume that
"When it came to conflicting accounts between Washington and Moscow,
the Kremlin was peddling bald-faced lies," Price added. "With the current dispute over President
Trump's reaction to Putin's assurances, however, this administration's credibility deficit is
coming back to bite them."
The lack of cohesive messaging coming out of the White House and Trump's tendency to contradict his own aides — exemplified,
among other things, by the conflicting characterizations of his travel ban and the events leading up to his firing of former FBI Director
James Comey— has undermined trust in the administration's official statements and made it difficult to determine what is true.
The result is that, in disputes between Washington and Moscow, "we are left not knowing which side is telling the truth," Price said.
"It's truly remarkable that the White House finds itself in this position, but it does so solely due to self-inflicted wounds."
To be sure, there is "no basis for trusting" the accounts given by Putin and Lavrov, said national security expert Claire Finkelstein, a
professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. "But we have heard precious little from the American side," she said.
Putin, who has been accused of assassinating Russian journalists and whose control of the Russian media is nearly absolute,
held a press conference after the G20 where he implied on camera that the Kremlin held sway
over the White House.
"We didn't meddle, just ask Trump," Putin told reporters. When one pointed out that the White House still hadn't
released any proof one way or the other, Putin laughed and replied: "We'll talk to the White House and tell them to fix that."
In refusing to hold his own press conference, Trump allowed Putin's words — and the overall Russian narrative — to linger
unchallenged until Sunday morning, when he tweeted that he "strongly pressed President Putin twice about Russian meddling in our
election. He vehemently denied it."
"I've already given my opinion," Trump wrote. "We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save
lives. Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!"
But many experts have noted that the ceasefire deal, too, was negotiated on Russia's terms .
"The cease-fire acknowledges and formalizes Russia's ascendancy in Syria, and Assad's remaining in power post-ISIS," said Glenn
Carle, a CIA veteran. "This is a policy one can debate; but the decision gives the appearance of having earned something for the
US, when in fact it does Moscow's work, at Moscow's behest."
Kramer agreed: "Putin is out to sideline the United States in the Middle East. The meeting did not necessarily
advance that goal, but it certainly reflected it. Earlier this year, Trump, to his credit, seemed to recognize that Putin can't be trusted
on Syria, and I hope that Trump will not prove to be gullible now."
Trump added on Sunday morning that he and Putin "discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election
hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded and safe."
That plan, too, has been met with incredulity. "This is like giving the alarm code to the guys who just burglarized your home. Just
makes it easier for them next time," tweeted Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell.
Republican Sen. Marco Rubio also weighed in: "Partnering with Putin on a 'Cyber Security Unit' is akin to partnering with Assad on a
'Chemical Weapons Unit,'" Rubio tweeted on Sunday.
"Not only" was Trump's tweet '"ludicrously worded (suggesting that Trump wants to make election hacking 'safe'), but also reinforces
the notion that Trump whitewashed the Russian election interference, just as Lavrov said," noted Kramer.
Aff
 2AC – AT: Iran Deal
The Iran deal actually hurts US credibility
Oren 18 [Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013, 1-31-
2018, "How to restore US credibility in the Middle East," CNN, accessed 7-23-2019,
https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/31/opinions/iran-america-deal-opinion-oren/index.html ]
Yet no evidence was more damning than the Iranian nuclear deal. Instead of presenting Iran's regime with the choice between
retaining the nuclear infrastructure unnecessary for a civilian energy program and survival, international negotiators, led by the
United States, guaranteed both. By lifting sanctions and reopening Iran to international business, the
deal enabled the regime to overcome financial crises and more brutally suppress its
domestic opponents .
And rather than dismantling Iran's nuclear infrastructure, the deal preserved it intact and even
permitted research and development of far more advanced centrifuges. Under the deal's "sunset
clauses," the restrictions on enrichment will expire in eight to 10 years, at which time Iran will be able to
produce enough uranium for dozens of nuclear weapons in a very short time.
Hearing this same viewpoint from so many influential Arabs, I couldn't help but find it compelling. There was certainly a strong case
for accusing the Obama administration of pivoting toward Iran. Still, as an Israeli familiar with American policymaking, I did not
believe that the United States had pursued a grand strategy of abandoning the Sunni world in favor of the Islamic Republic. Rather, I
believed that American leaders made decisions in the Middle East that, even if inadvertently, benefited Iran. Yet as an Israeli, I
cannot afford to ignore widespread perceptions in the Arab world. And neither should Americans.
There is much discussion over the international impact of nullifying or amending the Iranian
nuclear deal. Advocates of the deal warn that canceling it will cost America credibility abroad and alienate important allies. But it
is the deal itself that has created a credibility deficit for the United States in the Middle East,
weakening America's ability to overcome threats and mediate peace . Destabilizing actors, first
among them Iran, have exploited the perceived decline in America's regional prestige. Now, after 50 years of US dominance in the
Middle East -- the so-called Pax Americana -- Russia has returned as a regional power.
Fortunately, the process of restoring America's stature in the Middle East has begun. President Donald Trump's recent decision to
decertify the nuclear deal and submit it for congressional revision was broadly hailed in both the Arab states and Israel. So, too, was
the 120-day deadline he set for Europe to amend the deal.
Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, similarly gained credit for focusing UN attention on the serial violations of the
Security Council bans of Iran's ballistic missile tests and its bankrolling of terror. The support that the White House gave to many
thousands of Iranians who recently demonstrated against the ayatollahs' repressive regime was also greeted throughout our region
as a sign of revived moral clarity.
But more remains to be done. The international community, led by the United States, could mount a campaign to roll back Iranian
conquests and combat Iranian-backed terror such as the reported 2011 plan -- thankfully thwarted -- to assassinate the Saudi
ambassador to the United States and blow up a popular restaurant in Washington. The production and testing of ICBMs by Iran
must also instantly and completely stop.
Most crucially, efforts must be made either to cancel the nuclear deal or link it to Iranian behavior. A regime
complicit in the massacre of a half-million Syrians cannot, for example, possess the means to make nuclear bombs. The dangers of
the "sunset clause" must be addressed by assuring that the deal's restrictions will never expire as long as Iran is ruled by a terror-
sponsoring regime. Meanwhile, international inspectors must have access to all of Iran's nuclear-related facilities, including the
military sites currently exempted by the deal.
Standing firmly with its Arab and Israeli allies against Iran will contribute immensely to restoring America's credibility in the Middle
East. It will have a material and positive effect on nonproliferation efforts elsewhere in the world. Reinstating the Pax Americana will
help Arabs and Israelis meet in an atmosphere of renewed confidence in the United States and its paramount role in our region.
 2AC – AT: North Korea
Summits only make everything worse
USA Today 7/1 [News outlet, 7-1-2019, "Trump's North Korea spectacle shows he’d do
anything, even undercut America, for attention," USA TODAY, accessed 7-23-2019,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/07/01/donald-trump-north-korea-reality-show-bad-
theater-editorials-debates/1619682001/ ]
President Donald Trump loves big foreign policy events that draw the nation’s attention to — well,
President Donald Trump.
He went to London recently for the spectacle of dining with the queen, ignoring the fact that he could have no meaningful
discussions with her government, which is in a state of transition, if not outright paralysis. He also savors his meetings with Russian
President Vladimir Putin because the outrage they draw merely amps up the attention. But nothing is like his approach to
North Korea, where he’ll apparently do anything, potentially even undermining America's
interests, for the coverage it brings.
As the result of a tweet, which seems to be the foundation of a lot of his on-the-go policymaking, Trump met with North
Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on Sunday to announce the reopening of nuclear talks.
To Trump, the get-together was a grand spectacle. Not only has he already become the first U.S. president to
meet with a North Korean leader, he did so this time on North Korean soil, which is also a first. But he has been down this road
before with little in the way of results. When Trump first met with Kim, in Singapore a year ago, he also drew the world’s attention.
Then after a second meeting in Vietnam in February, the talks broke off. Now he’s at it again.
In constantly providing a stage for Kim, Trump is giving him
There’s more here than self-promotion, though.
legitimacy and global standing that he most assuredly does not deserve .
Making matters worse, Trump is, according to The New York Times, considering recognizing North Korea as a
nuclear power and merely asking for it to freeze its arsenal , rather than giving it up. That’s a step
back from where Kim was last year, when he promised to denuclearize.
Not that it is likely Kim would follow through with either. North Korea has a long history of reneging on pledges to eliminate or freeze
its nuclear weapons program. These pledges go back to 1985, when it joined a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and 1992, when
North Korea and South Korea signed a pact to denuclearize the peninsula. In 1994, it negotiated a deal with former President Jimmy
Carter to freeze its program.
To give Kim so much upfront now, in hopes that he will reform his ways, is unwise. Other rogue nations will be encouraged to follow
suit, developing their own nuclear arsenals and forcing their way onto the U.S. president’s agenda.
Indeed, Iranian leaders, who signed a deal to freeze their nuclear program in 2015, have to see the way their nation is being treated
even as Trump coddles North Korea. Making a nuclear deal without weapons in hand has left Iran vulnerable to renewed sanctions
from an administration hellbent on blowing up the agreement. On Monday, Iran’s foreign minister announced that his country had
exceeded the enrichment caps set down by the accord.
Now, instead of one nuclear headache in North Korea, Trump's diplomacy has resuscitated a
second, making each more difficult to address. So far, Trump's diplomatic moves in Iran and North Korea have
shown great success in focusing international attention on the White House — but they show little sign of tangible nuclear progress.
 2AC – AT: Syria Counter-Terror
Trump is berated regarding Syria due to inconsistence – he’ll be under fire either
way
Sputnik International 1/10 [Sputnik International, news outlet, 1-10-2019, "'Confusion
Around US Withdrawal From Syria Undermines US Credibility'," Sputnik International, accessed
7-22-2019, https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201901101071375562-us-withdrawal-syria/ ]
Commenting on the credibility of the United States, a military analyst and retired Lebanese Army General
Amin Hteit told Sputnik that the confusion surrounding the withdrawal of American troops undermines it.
Moreover, from the very beginning, the mechanism of the pullout operation of US military forces
wasn't clear, now everything is becoming even more complicated, and trust into the statements
of American politicians is diminishing.
"Americans want to retain control over the At Tanf base for several reasons. Firstly, it is needed to
support the terrorists and their families, who live in camps nearby. Secondly, the base is close to the
border with Jordan and Iraq and this allows [the US] to influence the security situation in the entire region. The Americans
understand that as soon as they leave, the Syrian army will immediately put an end to the militants," the former Lebanese Army
General explained.
Amin Hteit also stressed that he believes that the American forces can stay in Syria for a long time to cover up for terrorists and
achieve other strategic goals. They will continue to work in the east of the Euphrates and in Al-Hasakah province in northern Syria.
His remarks came after, on 19 December, US President Donald Trump declared victory over Daesh* in Syria and announced his
decision to withdraw US forces from the country on Twitter.
"So our boys, our young women, our men, they're all coming back and they're coming back now. We won, and that's the way we
want it", Trump said in a video post.
Following a backlash over his initial announcement, Trump reconsidered his original 30-day
timeline for the withdrawal of some 2,000 US troops from Syria, reducing it to four months.

Syrian counter-terror reduces legitimacy

Itani 13 [Faysal Itani, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Middle East Programs, Rafik Hariri Center for
the Middle East, 08-29-2013, "Restoring US Credibility in Syria?," Atlantic Council, accessed 7-
23-2019, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/restoring-us-credibility-in-syria ]
If credibility is defined here as acting on a promise to do something, however aimlessly and grudgingly, in
the face of a red line violation, then perhaps the administration can claim a victory of sorts. But are the
intended recipients of this message really so naive as to be awed by such a superficial show of force? Iran, Hezbollah, and
the Syrian regime are sophisticated and seasoned political players who, despite their occasional
mistakes, will not confuse hollow gestures with political and military confidence. They will
recognize the upcoming US attack for what it is : the reactive fumbling of an administration
struggling to project a semblance of strategic coherence, and lacking the vision or resolve to
exercise power responsibly in a critical and changing part of the world.
The use of chemical weapons against one’s own population, in violation of international norms
and clear warnings from the Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military, is a watershed moment in the
Syrian conflict. Rather than restore the United States’ standing in international relations,
reacting with a symbolic US strike will show the regime that even its gravest, most
egregious acts of violence , in defiance of a vastly more powerful opponent that has officially
called for its removal, will elicit nothing but the empty rhetoric and aimless, cynical
maneuvering that has defined US policy towards the Arab uprisings.
The Syrian regime will wait for this latest storm to pass, and promptly resume its war of annihilation by
other, non-chemical means after US operations are concluded. The sort of action the United States is
contemplating may well prevent the further use of chemical weapons by the regime. It will also clearly show however that President
Obama’s red line was not aimed at constraining the regime’s ability to kill its population, but at exempting a reluctant leader from
having to address the festering conflict in Syria. It is difficult to see the US accruing any credibility in the
process.
 2AC – AT: Trump
Trump has improved US credibility – Middle East proves
Titus 18 [Alex Titus, a fellow at America First Policies, a nonprofit organization supporting key
policy initiatives that will work for all citizens in our country and put America first, 1-24-2018,
"Trump is restoring credible US leadership in the Middle East," TheHill, accessed 7-23-2019,
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/370482-trump-is-restoring-credible-us-leadership-in-the-
middle-east ]
President Trump has dramatically reshaped foreign policy in the Middle East during his first year in
office. His agenda has strengthened diplomatic relations with key allies and involved a more pro-active
approach to addressing threats in the region.
Indeed, these
policies include hindering Iran’s growing influence, combating extremist groups ,
expanding U.S.-Israeli relations , and restoring relationships with key Arab -state allies . This
policy agenda has helped stabilize the Middle East and the results are showing. Americans should feel assured that President
Trump and his team are working to restore U.S. leadership and credibility in the region.
This task hasn’t been easy coming off the shortcomings of the Obama administration’s foreign policy agenda. Obama and his team
attempted to combat threats through appeasement rather than action. Appeasement led to a failing nuclear deal with Iran, the rise of
several radical Islamic terrorist groups, and a leadership gap in the region. Our allies rightfully questioned if America was retreating
from its security obligations.
Trump decertified
Thankfully, the current administration executed a 180-degree course correction to this misguided agenda.
the Iran nuclear deal and the U.S. Treasury Department slapped new sanctions on the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Trump recently noted that he would no longer waive sanctions against Iran
unless dramatic steps are taken to fix the deal.
Trump also provided support to Iranian protestors who took to the streets to voice their opposition to the regime’s rampant
corruption, constant violation of human rights, and consistent funding of terrorism abroad. “Such respect for the people of Iran as
they try to take back their corrupt government. You will see great support from the United States at the appropriate time!” Trump
noted on Twitter.
Trump has made enhancing U.S.-Israeli relations
In addition to countering Iran’s growing influence, President
a top priority . Nowhere is this better illustrated than with the declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. “I have
determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. While previous presidents have made this a major
campaign promise, they failed to deliver. Today, I am delivering,” noted Trump during the announcement. Trump formally
recognized an obvious truth: Jerusalem is the rightful capital of Israel.
Furthermore, officials from the administration and Israeli government recently penned a joint strategic initiative to push-back against
Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program. The U.S. also opened its first permanent military base in the country.
Our Arab-state allies have felt motivated to combat Iran and other extremist groups after commitments from the current
administration. Trump doubled-down on our alliance with Saudi Arabia days after an unprecedented rocket attack
Trump reassured the Saudi government
on the royal palace from an Iranian-backed terrorist group. that any
attack on Saudi Arabia will be considered an attack on the US.
The administration has also stepped up efforts to counter radical Islamic groups in the region. To date, ISIS has almost lost over 98
percent of its territory — largely since President Trump took office. Bounties have been issued on top Hezbollah leaders and
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered an investigation into a recent Politico report that Obama looked the other way as
Hezbollah smuggled cocaine into the U.S.
Finally, President Trump has actively worked to assist religious minorities who have been displaced by ISIS. The administration
announced it will bypass the United Nations and deliver much-needed aid to Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities.
The administration has delivered on its promise to put America and its allies first and take a much more hands-on approach to
foreign policy. President Trump and his team are rightfully restoring U.S. credibility and leadership
in the Middle East. Americans should be proud of what Trump has accomplished.

Removing Trump doesn’t solves – anything done will be seen as reversible –

credibility is still hurt
Keating 5/24 [Joshua Keating, staff writer, 05-24-2019, "America’s Credibility Abroad Is Shot,
Even if Trump Loses in 2020," Slate Magazine, accessed 7-23-2019, https://slate.com/news-
and-politics/2019/05/trump-foreign-policy-broken-trust-america.html ]
Remember Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran? These days, you can bet that the leaders of Iran
do.
The letter, sent in March 2015, was one of those events that seemed like a major outrage at the
time but now feels like such ancient history that the letter might as well have been written on
parchment. At the height of the debate over the Obama administration’s nuclear diplomacy with
Iran, the Arkansas senator organized a group of 47 Republican colleagues to send a letter to
the “leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” explaining “features of our Constitution … which you
should consider seriously as negotiations progress.” Noting that any deal would be merely an
“executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei ” rather than a
formal treaty ratified by Congress and that Barack Obama would be leaving office in January
2017, the letter warned that the next president would revoke it “ with the stroke of a pen .”
Democrats were livid about what they saw as a Republican attempt to sabotage ongoing
diplomatic negotiations. It certainly was that, but the thing is, Cotton was completely right: On
May 8, 2018, Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal the Obama administration had
negotiated and re-imposed sanctions lifted as part of it. Tensions between the two countries
have been rising ever since.
The five other countries that were party to the deal and the European Union are still committed
to it, as is Iran, but just barely. This week, Iranian nuclear officials announced that they had
quadrupled the country’s uranium enrichment production, putting them on a path to exceed
limits set by the accord.
If the Iranian regime stays in compliance with the deal, it may be only because they know Trump
won’t be in office forever, either. Most of the Democratic candidates running for president in
2020 have promised to rejoin the Iran deal, which would entail lifting the sanctions that Trump
has re-imposed. Ironically, Democrats have been borrowing from the Republicans’ old playbook
with former Secretary of State John Kerry, who spent years negotiating the original deal,
meeting with his Iranian counterparts in an attempt so salvage it. In both cases, critics of these
actions invoked the Logan Act, the oft-cited but never enforced law barring U.S. citizens from
conducting unauthorized negotiations with foreign governments. “He told them to wait out the
Trump Administration!” an enraged Trump tweeted.
Waiting out the Trump administration is a popular idea these days. Susan Thornton, the former
acting assistant secretary of state, told a gathering in Shanghai earlier this month that China
should be patient amid the ongoing trade war and not rush to resolve it, telling the audience, “If
this skeptical attitude towards talking diplomacy continues in this administration, you might have
to wait till another administration.” The parties to the Paris climate agreement may also be
somewhat heartened that every major Democratic candidate has pledged to keep the U.S. in
the agreement. (The U.S. will technically still be a party to the Paris agreement until November
2020 at the earliest, despite Trump’s withdrawal announcement in 2017.)
This isn’t a very encouraging state of affairs, and not only because there’s a decent chance
Trump will be reelected in 2020. If it becomes the norm that agreements struck by a U.S.
president will be kept only so long as that president’s party is in power, why would any
country ever sign a deal with the U.S. ever again ? If the entire disposition of U.S. foreign
policy transforms depending on whether a Democrat or a Republican occupies the White
House, it will have a destabilizing impact on international relations long after Trump leaves
office.

Trump’s impacts are overblown – narratives

Hamid 19 [Shadi Hamid, contributing editor at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Project on
U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution, 4-11-2019, "The Fundamental
Legitimacy of Donald Trump," Atlantic, accessed 7-23-2019,
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/muellers-no-collusion-conclusion-good-
thing/586909/ ]
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into links between Russia and the president’s campaign
could have turned out so much worse for Donald Trump. It almost seemed certain that it would. But it didn’t.
The end of the Mueller investigation has now made hollow the maximalist charges of collusion against Trump and his team.
The collusion claim was an indirect—or direct—way of saying that Donald Trump was illegitimately elected.
For Mueller’s team to stop short of concluding that collusion had occurred, then, was the best possible result for American
democracy. Citizens should be relieved, not disappointed, when the legitimacy of election outcomes is strengthened, however much
we dislike them.
Conspiracy with Russia wasn’t the only thing that commentators—both liberals and Never Trump
conservatives—gotwrong, though. There was another, related charge that was graver and, on its face, more implausible: that
Trump would (or could) destroy American democracy. And he would do so with the help of his
Russian enablers. Here, the two claims came together—that the Russians wished to end the American experiment and that
Trump provided the vehicle for their ambitious designs.
This was part of a grand narrative. But what if the narrative of American democracy under mortal threat—with or without
Russian help— was
fundamentally flawed from the very start ?
Grand narratives are appealing because they help us comprehend the incomprehensible . In
this case, they helped to make sense of the endless shock of Donald Trump’s victory. The democracy-is-doomed narrative is
crumbling, and rarely do you hear it anymore—at least not with the full-throated zeal that became routine throughout 2017 and
2018.
It began before that, during the campaign. As The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote: “Hitler’s enablers in 1933—yes, we should go
there, instantly and often, not to blacken our political opponents but as a reminder that evil happens insidiously, and most often with
people on the same side telling each other, Well, he’s not so bad, not as bad as they are. We can control him.” This sort of thing
continued for more than two years.
On January 4, 2018, despite the helpful information that America hadn’t become a dictatorship in 2017, Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote in
an article titled “2018 Is the Year That Will Decide If Trumpocracy Replaces American Democracy” that “Trump has been extremely
long on demagogic bluster but rather conventional—if extremely right-wing in some respects—on policy. But … this is entirely
typical. Even Adolf Hitler was dismissed by many as a buffoon.”
Preemptively suggesting that your ideological opponents won’t accept the results of elections if
they lose isn’t nearly as bad as, well, not accepting the results of elections, but it is still bad. In the
case of the 2018 midterm elections, it also happened to be wrong. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote:
“Remember, Donald Trump claimed—falsely, of course—that millions of immigrants voted illegally in an election he won. Imagine
what he’ll say if he loses, and what his supporters will do in response.” Krugman went on, suggesting that those who voted for the
other party were, in fact, voting for autocracy: “If we take one path, it will offer at least a chance for political redemption, for
recovering America’s democratic values. If we take the other, we’ll be on the road to autocracy, with no obvious way to get off.”
Claims such as these weren’t just overblown rhetoric from pundits in the heat of the electoral moment. They came with the
imprimatur of some of the country’s most respected political scientists. Harvard University’s Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
published How Democracies Die in 2018, and the book became an alarmist bible (even though the book itself is more nuanced than
its enthusiasts let on). In New York, Jonathan Chait wrote, “It is hard to read this fine book without coming away terribly concerned
about the possibility Trump might inflict a mortal wound on the health of the republic.”
How could so many get it wrong? Underlying these various accounts of doom is a major analytical flaw. In some sense,
the flaw is so obvious that I wasn’t entirely aware of it until I started thinking about this article. If we exclude cases of military
conquest or occupation, as occurred during World War II, there is no clear case of a long-standing, consolidated democracy
becoming an autocracy. Democracies backslide—it is a spectrum, after all. But democracies, or at least certain kinds of
democracies, do not “die.”

Trump doesn’t matter – he puts spin on attacks

AP 6/29 [AP News, 6-29-2019, "Trump dismisses Carter's attacks on his legitimacy," accessed
7-23-2019, https://www.apnews.com/43d96300639a432c859fb174767460fe ]
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Saturday dismissed Jimmy Carter’s swipe at the
legitimacy of his election and said the charge was nothing more than a “Democrat talking point,”
while offering his own digs at the 94-year-old former commander in chief.
Trump said he was surprised by Carter’s comments alleging that Russian interference in the 2016
election was responsible for putting Trump in the White House. The Republican punched back , though
with a somewhat muted response, at least for him.
“ Look, he was a nice man. He was a terrible president. He’s a Democrat. And it’s a typical
talking point. He’s loyal to the Democrats. And I guess you should be ,” Trump told reporters at a
news conference in Japan, adding that, “as everybody now understands, I won not because of Russia, not
because of anybody but myself.”
Carter made his comments during a discussion on human rights at a resort in Leesburg, Virginia on Friday. Carter had said there
was “no doubt that the Russians did interfere” in 2016.
The 39th president alleged that that interference, “though not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t
actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”
U.S. intelligence agencies asserted in a 2017 report that Russia had worked to help Trump during the election and to undermine the
candidacy of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But the intelligence agencies did not assess whether that interference had
affected the election or contributed to Trump’s victory. No evidence has emerged that votes were changed improperly.
Trump insisted during the news conference marking the end of a Group of 20 summit in Osaka that he had won because he’d
worked harder and smarter than Clinton. He claimed that he’d “felt badly” for Carter because of the way he’d “been trashed within
his own party.”
“He’s been badly trashed,” said Trump. “He’s like the forgotten president. And I understand why
they say that. He was not a good president.”
 2AC – AT: Russian Ties
US-Russia relations are getting worse, but arms are key
Rumer and Sokolsky 18 [Eugene Rumer, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Richard Sokolsky, nonresident senior fellow
at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 6-20-2018, "How to Rethink U.S.-Russian
Relations Today," Time, accessed 7-23-2019, https://time.com/5610524/u-s-russian-relations/ ]
For thirty years, since the end of the Cold War, U.S. policy toward Russia has been going in circles with the
relationship getting worse as different U.S. administrations came and went. Today, the U.S.-Russian
relationship is at the lowest point since before the Cold War ended and the best we can hope
for is that it will not get even worse.
Russia is to blame for most of what went wrong in this relationship. It invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, it interfered in
the 2016 United States presidential election, and it continues to meddle in Venezuela, in Syria, in Libya, etc. But it takes two to
tango. Rarely, have U.S. policymakers questioned U.S. policy toward Russia. Have we done everything right?
A look back at the record of the Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush presidencies’ dealings with Russia produces
surprising results. These three very different administrations embraced the same set of policies toward Russia. They were built
around two pillars: a refusal to accept Russia for what it was and insistence that it reform itself to
better fit the image of what U.S. policymakers thought Russia should look like; and the view that
NATO was the only legitimate European security organization, while expanding it ever deeper
into the former Soviet lands. Russia rejected both of these, but U.S. policymakers proceeded
with these policies anyway on the assumption that sooner or later Russia would recognize
what was good for it. In the community of Russia hands it became known as the “spinach treatment”—kids don’t like
spinach, but should eat it because it’s good for them.
Every U.S. administration has gone through the boom-bust cycle in its dealings with Russia. The
Clinton administration took charge of the relationship in 1993 and promised to build a partnership with Russian democracy, Russian
reforms, Russian markets. The two presidents—Clinton and Russia’s Boris Yeltsin—built a strong personal bond.
Yet the road to partnership
became more and more difficult as disagreements arose over Russia’s slow
reform progress, NATO expansion, the Kosovo campaign, and much else. By the end of the
1990s both sides grew frustrated with each other. The Clinton chapter of that relationship ended amid fears
that Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, was backsliding on democracy.
Despite these misgivings, the George W. Bush administration attempted to build its own partnership with
Russia. In 2001, Bush and Putin pledged to build a new relationship based on a “joint commitment to democracy, free market,
and the rule of law.” That relationship followed the familiar pattern as disagreements arose —over
the Iraq war, Russian backsliding on democracy, and NATO expansion. In 2008, following NATO’s
pledge of future membership to former Soviet republics Georgia and Ukraine, Russia crushed the tiny Georgian military as the
United States and its NATO allies watched, but did not interfere. Russia effectively declared the former Soviet states off limits to
NATO. The relationship with Russia was once again at the lowest point since the Cold War.
The Obama administration attempted to “reset” the relationship with Russia and launched its own
partnership. The idea there was to modernize its economy and liberalize its politics. That too proved short-lived ,
as hopes for both political liberalization and economic modernization proved unrealistic. Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014 plunged U.S.-Russian relations to yet a new low, only to be followed by
Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The Trump administration attempted
its own “reset” with Russia but did not get far as Russia-related
scandals and investigations proliferated. Sanctions have become not just a tool of U.S. policy toward Russia, but the
replacement for it. The relationship is at an impasse, while a reasoned policy discussion about Russia is not possible because the
issue has become toxic in U.S. domestic politics.
This situation is not sustainable. The time has come to recognize that Russia is not going to change its domestic
arrangements to suit U.S. preferences, and conditioning U.S. policy on such a change is
pointless . Similarly, Russia is not going to change its view of NATO and accept further enlargement to
include Ukraine and Georgia—both countries with which it shares a long and complicated history, and in which it has much greater
interests than the United States. The United States and its allies are not prepared to go to war for Ukraine or Georgia. Russia is and
has. That is a clear indicator that the goal of their membership in the alliance is unrealistic and should be dropped.
 Instead, U.S. policy
After multiple failed attempts to build a partnership with Russia the time has come to give up that idea.
should focus on issues of critical importance to the United States. Nuclear weapons, arms
control, and strategic stability are one such set of issues.
The existing U.S.-Russian arms control framework is unraveling. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
(INF) Treaty is practically dead following Russian violations of it and U.S. decision to abandon it
in response. The New START Treaty due to expire in early 2021 can be extended and thus
saved, but the Trump administration seems more inclined to pursue frivolously a trilateral U.S.-
Russia-China treaty instead, which neither Russia nor China seems interested in discussing. The
existing arms control framework may not look like much to its critics, but it is vastly better than nothing—at a time when new
technologies are threatening to undermine the delicate balance of terror between the two nuclear superpowers.
War Powers
Neg
 1NC – War Powers CP
Text: The United States Federal Government should
 enforce Article I, Section 8, Clause 11
 comply with War Powers Resolution of 1973
 pass the Reclamation of War Powers Act

That solves – takes powers away from the President and back to Congress
Himes 17 [Congressman Himes. “Himes leads bipartisan Reclamation of War Powers Act.” Federal government, 9 March
2017, himes.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/himes-leads-bipartisan-reclamation-war-powers-act]
WASHINGTON, DC—Today, Congressman Jim Himes (CT-04) and Walter Jones (NC-03) along with Peter Welch (VT-At-Large),
Seth Moulton (MA-06), Ruben Gallego (AZ-07), Kathleen Rice (NY-04) and Kurt Schrader (OR-05) introduced The
Reclamation of War Powers Act, a bill that would explicitly return the power to declare and wage war back
to Congress, as the Constitution requires.
“The power to make war is explicitly granted to Congress in Article I Section 8 of the Constitution,”
said Himes. “Over many decades, however, this power has migrated increasingly to the President. We are now
in a situation where military actions are carried out by the US around the world without the explicit approval of Congress and under
the auspices of Authorizations for Use of Military Force from many years ago. It’s an abrogation of Congress’s
Constitutional duties and we have an obligation to take back that power on behalf of the
American people. ”
“For years, Congress has abdicated its constitutional war powers to the executive branch,” said
Congressman Jones. “It is time we reclaim our duties and hold debate over the decision to wage war. Our men and women in
uniform deserve that at the very least.”
“The explicit constitutional authority of Congress to declare war and authorize the use of military force has eroded,” said
Congressman Welch. “Our legislation reclaims that authority consistent with the Constitution and eliminates any excuse by
Congress to avoid tough votes by staying the sidelines.”
The bill has two main provisions:
· Congresses won’t fund the introduction of US armed forces into hostilities without a
declaration of war, specific statutory authorization, or a national emergency created by an attack or imminent threat of attack
upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or the Armed Forces.
· When requesting a declaration of war or Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the President
must issue a report outlining the threat faced, the objectives and justifications of the conflict and a description
of the anticipated scope and duration of the action.

Only Congress has the constitutional power to declare war

Wehle 6/25 [Kim Wehle is a former assistant U.S. attorney and a former associate independent counsel in the Whitewater
investigation. Wehle is a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. “In conflicts like Iran, Congress has ceded war
powers to the presidency.” The Hill, 25 June 2019, thehill.com/opinion/white-house/450227-in-conflicts-like-iran-congress-has-
ceded-war-powers-to-the-presidency]
Thus far, Trump ordered — and then aborted — a missile strike following Tehran’s takedown of a $100 million U.S. Navy
drone, without Congress’s blessing.
More recently, as a second-order reprimand for Iranian provocations, he increased sanctions on Iran’s supreme leader and a
handful of military commanders.
Recall, too, that in May 2018, Trump backed out of an Obama-brokered nuclear deal with Iran and five other
nations, including China and Russia. Among other things, the deal restricted the amount of nuclear fuel Iran could harbor over the
next 15 years. The idea was to stretch out the timeframe in which Iran could realistically build a nuclear bomb. In exchange, Iran
won the lifting of certain international sanctions . Trump reinstated sanctions. And here we are.
Regardless of where one stands on the wisdom of Trump’s foreign policy towards Iran, this is an (otherwise rare) area where Trump
has not yet pushed the boundaries of presidential power. Those boundaries crumbled long ago.
Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces, but Congress has the power
to declare war, to raise and support armies, to provide for a navy, and to make laws for the armed forces. This division of
military power sets up a classic chicken-and-egg problem: Must the president await a congressional declaration of war before he
utilizes military force? Or so long as Congress creates an army and a navy, can the president use those forces as he sees fit?
 the president is empowered to use his
Most scholars believe that the framers of the Constitution believed that
powers to repel sudden attacks, but not to affirmatively initiate conflicts. Others argue that the
president is the ultimate boss on this question, and that Congress can only ratify his decisions to engage in armed conflict.
Congress hardly declares wars anymore, and the U.S. has semi-permanent
But as a practical matter,
military installations all over the globe. Moreover, America coordinates its use of military forces with other nations, so
the line between war and diplomacy is a blurry one.
In 1973, Congress passed a statute known as the War Powers Resolution — over President Nixon’s veto — in an effort to claw back
the law requires that the president consult
its wartime prerogative under the Constitution. Broadly speaking,
with Congress before thrusting armed forces into hostilities. The president must also report back to Congress
for permission to keep up a war effort. But the statute has not been consistently enforced , and presidents have
balked at its constitutionality. In 2002 — in the wake of 9/11 — Congress took a big step in strengthening the president’s hand in this
power struggle: It pre-authorized President George W. Bush to use force in Iraq. Bush later launched a pre-emptive war.
At the end of the day, the president can do what he wants to do with U.S. military forces unless
somebody—that is, Congress —stops him. What would that stoppage look like? Well, Congress could pull back on military
funding, effectively starving the president’s budget so that he can’t launch attacks even if he wanted to. In the extreme, this option is
unworkable, because the president has to be able to respond to immediate threats.
Alternatively, Congress could pass a “we mean it” statute to shore up its war powers again, but without enforcement, such rules are
meaningless. We know this from everyday life: Speed limits only matter if you receive a speeding ticket. Same goes for the
government. If politicians can get away with things, they get away with things.
As a third option, Congress could go to court and ask a federal judge to order a president to comply
with the War Powers Resolution and Article I’s vesting of the power to declare war in the Congress.
But a president would be able to muster formidable constitutional arguments in response to such a lawsuit, and a court might refuse
to wade into that muck anyway.
 2NC – Solvency – Saudi Arabia
The DOE is helping Saudi’s nuclear program – giving power back to Congress
breaks up the relationship
Laslo 6/6 [Matt Laslo is a reporter who’s been covering campaigns and every aspect of federal policy since 2006. He’s
currently a regular contributor at VICE News, VICE News Tonight HBO, The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone. He also runs the Laslo
Congressional Bureau – public radio member station’s sole remaining bureau in the nation’s capital. "HOW CONGRESS PLANS TO
STOP TRUMP SELLING ARMS TO SAUDI ARABIA." VICE News, 6 June 2019, news.vice.com/en_us/article/qv7e9x/how-
congress-plans-to-stop-trump-selling-arms-to-saudi-arabia]
A bipartisan group in the Senate — including some of Trump’s top allies — are planning a vote this summer to block the sale of
$8 billion in American weaponry to a regime implicated in the death and dismemberment of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi, as
well as using those weapons to commit atrocities in Yemen.
The Senate coalition ranges from progressives to libertarians who are outraged that top administration officials are claiming there’s an emergency in
the Middle East that warrants them making those sales without approval of Congress.
“I think there’s a growing number of people and a growing resistance to allowing the government to operate by emergency,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
told VICE News while rushing through the underbelly of the Capitol on the way to cast a vote. “So I think that you’re going to see the biggest vote we’ve
had.”
It won’t be the first time Congress has tried to force a historic vote on the War Powers Act. In March, both the House and the Senate voted to end U.S.
involvement in the war in Yemen, but Trump vetoed the measure.
This time, lawmakers
are planning to force individual votes on all 22 of the arms sales already
approved by the administration. And even Trump’s normally reliable Senate allies are preparing to confront the Trump administration
on the Senate floor because they see the arms sales as an executive power grab.
EXECUTIVE POWER GRAB
“Clearly I disagree with it,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee and is a lead sponsor of this effort, told VICE News on
his way to a bank of elevators at the Capitol.
Foreign arms sales are supposed to go through Congress, but at the end of last month Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed Iran posed a big
enough threat to American interests that he declared an emergency in order to go around Congress.
“It’s a moment of confrontation with the administration over fundamental foreign policy in this country”
But senators in both parties aren’t buying that line — even after they were given classified briefings on Iran last month.
“I really think it’s a moment of confrontation with the administration over fundamental foreign policy in this country,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin
(D-Ill.) told VICE News.
While Saudi Arabia has been a top American ally for decades, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS) lost the faith of many senators after the
killing of Khashoggi last October.
American intelligence community found he'd helped orchestrate the torture and
Trump has rejected those findings even after the CIA concluded top Saudi officials not only
condoned but ordered the operation .
NUKE TECHNOLOGY
the Department of Energy has been helping Saudi Arabia attain highly
This week Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) revealed
sensitive nuclear information — at least twice since the dismemberment of Khashoggi , which the
agency has confirmed. And that information is raising red flags on its own, according to Kaine.
“I’m worried about our people getting these approvals — these business-as-usual approvals — to transfer nuclear technology to the Saudis because
they’re close to the Trump family,” Kaine told VICE News. “It’s not business as usual. It’s business as un-usual with the Saudis, and we need to
understand why.”
While Kaine’s revelation is slowly getting out to the Senate, and angering his colleagues in both parties along the way, there was already momentum
building to rebuke the Trump administration for attempting to conduct arms sales without approval from Congress.
“Even though I may support the actual sale of defensive weaponry, I don’t support the administration going around the existing congressional review
process,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told reporters on his way to vote. “I don’t believe the administration should be able to go around what Congress
has always done.”
Rubio says he still needs to review the exact language of the 22 resolutions to disapprove of the arms sales, but his gut is leaning
toward rejecting Trump’s latest attempt to circumvent Congress.
That’s what’s brought about this strange bipartisan mix of lawmakers who are ready to rebuke Trump and his top officials for what they say is playing
fast and loose with the constitutional separation of powers.
People on both sides of the political divide don't get why the president wouldn’t just ask for
congressional approval for arms sales, like most of his presidential predecessors have done.
 2NC – Solvency – Yemen War
War in Yemen is illegal – Congress checks
Golshan 5/27 [Tara Golshan covers Congress, elections, and just about anything in politics that needs explaining. "Trump
ignored Congress on war powers. Constitutional scholars want Democrats to take him to court." Vox, 27 May 2019,
vox.com/2019/5/27/18634590/nancy-pelosi-donald-trump-supreme-court-war-power]
A group of constitutional scholars and lawmakers want House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to take President Donald to the
Supreme Court over the war in Yemen.
Their case is straightforward: Trump is unilaterally involving the United States in war, and that’s unconstitutional. For four years, the United States
has participated in a war in Yemen that was never authorized by Congress and that Congress expressly told
Trump to withdraw from. Trump ignored the directive. Now, as the White House escalates tensions with Iran, there’s growing concern that unless
legal action is taken, Congress will cede more war powers to Trump.
In April, Congress passed a historic War Powers Resolution directing Trump to remove troops involved in “hostilities” in Yemen. Trump vetoed it,
cementing American fingerprints on one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world: According to the most recent United Nations report, 80 percent of
the Yemeni population — 24 million people — is in need of humanitarian assistance. The Senate failed to reach the 67-vote threshold needed to
override the executive veto on the bill.
Trump said the War Powers Resolution was an attempt to “weaken [his] constitutional authorities.” But the power to authorize a
declaration of war, of course, sits with Congress, not the president.
Constitutional scholars are now arguing a War Powers Resolution isn’t a normal bill. They say it is a fundamental constitutional question about the
power to authorize war. And the stakes are high.
“The president’s veto doesn’t end this conversation,” Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional law scholar with Yale University, told Vox. He’s one of a diverse
group of legal experts who have sent Pelosi a letter urging her to take legal action.
The United States got involved in Yemen four years ago when Saudi Arabia and its allies began a military campaign in Yemen against Iranian-backed
Houthi rebels. The US is providing Saudis with intelligence, arms and ammunition , and, until late last year, fuel for their
warplanes. The warplanes that bombed a school bus, killing at least 40 children last August, did so with an American-made bomb.
The war has killed more than 50,000 people, according to one independent estimate, and has left tens of millions more in need of assistance. Trump is
determined to keep course, and has shown he is committed to his alliance with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, even after it became clear
the prince called for Saudi Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing.
Since Trump’s veto, his administration has escalated tensions with Iran, spreading concern that Trump is itching to
stoke another war. These concerns were exacerbated on Friday, when the administration sidestepped Congress again, unilaterally authorizing $8
billion in arms sales, including to Saudi Arabia and its allies, to counter Iran.
“This is a moment of truth, both for the congressional war power and for the Supreme Court of the United States,” Ackerman said. “Does the Supreme Court of the United States
— and its claim of originalism — is that supposed to be taken seriously?”
The case for taking Trump to the Supreme Court, briefly explained
Constitutionally, Congress has the power to declare war, and the president, as the commander in chief, has the power to direct the military after Congress’s authorization.
Historically, America’s war-making has gone differently; presidents have consistently pushed the boundaries of their power.
For example, for the past 18 years, presidents of both parties have used the same 2001 congressional war authorization, passed after 9/11, as justification for going to war
across the Middle East, including Yemen. The Obama administration did not ask Congress for specific authorization before involving itself in Yemen. The Trump administration
hasn’t either, bypassing the legislative branch as it negotiated billions of dollars in arms deals, and as it conducted military operations.
presidents have increasingly turned to their internal legal counsels
Instead of seeking congressional approval for war,
to build a largely secret body of law to defend their war engagements, Mary Dudziak, a constitutional scholar with Emory
University School of Law, said.
 2NC – Solvency AUMF/Trump
CP repeals the AUMF – that’s sends a message and checks and irrational
president
Bergman 16 [Julia Bergman, who got a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Indiana University Bloomington, launched her
career in Roswell, N.M. She spent her time there writing for the Roswell Daily Record while also directing news for KBIM Radio.
"Himes wants Congress to take back its war powers." The Day, 5 Dec. 2016, theday.com/article/20161205/NWS09/161209633]
legislation that would cut off funding for the "introduction of U.S. armed forces
On Monday, Himes introduced
into hostilities" unless there has been a declaration of war by Congress, congressional authorization for the use of military force or a national
emergency such as an attack on the U.S. or its armed forces.
Himes' Reclamation of War Powers Act would also repeal the two current congressional authorizations; one from 2001,
passed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the other from 2002 that allowed the ground invasion in
Iraq.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to declare and fund wars, but in the years following 9-11, "we have ceded that power
more and more to the President to the point where, now, we operate in state of perpetual pseudo-war
where neither the executive or Congress is ultimately responsible. That has to end," Himes said in a news release announcing the bill.
In a phone interview Monday morning, Himes said he has thought, for a long time, that Congress "should be reasserting its constitutional authority."
"This seems to be the moment because President-elect Trump has no foreign policy experience. He's blustery and
unpredictable ," he added.
Himes' bill will likely face hurdles in the new Congress with an even greater Republican majority. A similar bill, introduced by U.S. Rep. Chris Gibson, a
Republican and retired Army colonel who represents New York's 19th District, failed to pass at least twice, most recently in 2013.
"Since this is going to be regarded as a hindrance to Donald Trump, my guess is my Republican friends are going to be a little shy about it," Himes
said.
That may change if they see a lot more "erratic behavior" from him, he added.
Given that the current legislative session ends Friday, Himes said he was introducing the bill Monday and then will work to find cosponsors and garner
support for it once the new session starts.
Since the administration of George Washington, Congress and the president have only officially declared war 11 times, and
since the administration of John Adams they have authorized the use of force just 12 times, according to a 2014 report from the Congressional
Research Service.
Himes' bill would require the president, when requesting a declaration of war or congressional authorization, to issue a report "outlining the threat
faced, the objectives and justifications of the conflict and a description of the anticipated scope and duration of the action."
Congressional approval sends a strong message to the rest of the world, Himes said, that "we've had a
robust discussion amongst the people's representatives and support it."
"It sends a signal that didn't exist when President (Barack) Obama unilaterally went into Libya," he added.
A resolution, led by the Obama administration and passed by the United Nations Security Council in March 2011, authorized military intervention in
Libya. Obama said at the time that the goal was to protect the people there from the Moammar Gaddafi regime, but later said failing to prepare for the
aftermath of ousting the Libyan dictator was the worst mistake of his presidency.
The Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo saying that Obama "had the constitutional authority to direct the use of
military force in Libya because he could reasonably determine that such use of force was in the national interest."
"Prior congressional approval was not constitutionally required to use military force in the limited operations under consideration," the memo says.
The president is required, under the War Powers Act, in "every possible instance" to consult with Congress
"before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent
involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstance."

Congress reclaiming War Powers stops misuse of AUMF – checks Trump

Farrar 7/12 [Douglas Farrar was a policy adviser to two members of Congress, including a senior member of the House
Appropriations Committee. He is now the director of public affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Congress
must reclaim its war-making powers.” The Hill, 12 July 2019, thehill.com/opinion/national-security/452511-congress-must-reclaim-
its-war-making-powers]
Three consecutive presidents have taken military action under the increasingly dubious legal auspices of the
2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force passed by Congress following the September 11 attacks. Now, as the House
contemplates the future of this legislation, lawmakers of both parties must consider not only what powers Congress has
given President Trump to pursue a foolhardy war with Iran, but whether or not they ought to reclaim this most sacred
of democratic government’s duties: the decision to commit American soldiers to fight and die abroad.
The 2001 AUMF was designed to allow then-President George W. Bush latitude to pursue al Qaeda across the world after its deadly
assault on the U.S. homeland. But since then, the AUMF has been cited as the legal justification for American
military intervention in at least seven places, several of which have little or very tenuous al Qaeda ties. It
appears this administration is preparing to make the argument that it allows them to initiate military action against Iran.
The current AUMF is a symptom of a larger problem, which is that the White House has too much power to initiate
and sustain military conflict without congressional review. The root problem here is politics. While there is a core
bipartisan group of lawmakers committed to ending this AUMF and triggering the need for a new one for any sustained military
engagement, the politics of voting on war in general are nearly always bad . Just ask Hillary Clinton, whose Iraq war
vote sank her presidential candidacy in 2008, or Joe Biden, who faced criticism on the debate stage recently for that same vote over
a decade later.
Take the escalating tensions with Iran, for example. Bipartisan majorities of voters oppose military
engagement with Iran. But in Congress, the Democratic House passed a repeal of the AUMF on a mostly party-line vote in
their version of the defense funding bill, while in the Senate, Democrats were unable to convince enough
Republicans to add provisions to that chamber’s National Defense Authorization Act that limited President
Trump’s ability to wage war with Iran. Partisanship and politics trumped voter preferences. This week the Congress once
against debated AUMF policy, at least in the House, thanks to Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-Calif.) amendment to the House version of the
National Defense Authorization Act.
 2NC – Solvency/Alt Cause – AUMF
Trump is using the AUMF to sell arms to Saudi – he’s not using DCS or FMS
Hartung 6/24 [William D. Hartung is director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He has
also served as a Senior Research Fellow in the New America Foundation's American Strategy Program and is former director of the
Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. "Mr. President, leave declaring war to Congress." CNN, 24 June 2019,
cnn.com/2019/06/24/opinions/congress-end-executive-branch-declare-war-power-hartung/index.html]
tensions with Iran run the risk of sparking yet another war in
This measure is particularly important now, as
the Middle East. In a closed-door briefing last month, members of Congress expressed concern that the
administration might wrongly invoke the authorization for the use of military force, approved after
September 11, to go to war with Iran. Testifying to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, the administration's
point man on Iran, Brian Hook, dodged the question, stating only that it would "comply with the law" in deciding whether to take
military action against Iran. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's dubious claims of a significant relationship
between Iran and al Qaeda suggest that the administration is at least considering using the 2001
AUMF to justify a war with Iran.
Thankfully, last week, Trump pulled back from the brink and decided not to bomb Iran in response to Tehran's shooting down of an
US surveillance drone. As Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group has noted, if a military action against Iran were to escalate to a
full-scale war, it would "make the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts look like a walk in the park." It could also cost hundreds of billions of
dollars.
The House action to restrict the President's war powers is long overdue , given the high price of our post-
9/11 wars. According to Brown University's Costs of War Project, the US wars of this century will cost over $5.9 trillion once
obligations for lifelong care of the veterans of these conflicts are taken into account. These financial costs, immense as they are,
can't begin to express the human consequences of these conflicts, which have left over 4,423 US troops dead and 31,597 wounded,
and hundreds of thousands more with traumatic brain injuries or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And by a conservative
estimate, more than 480,000 people have died on all sides of these wars. Meanwhile, the number of terrorist groups
operating around the world has multiplied .
There is growing evidence that the American public is tired of our forever wars . An October 2018 survey by the
Charles Koch Institute found that only 21% of Americans feel that the United States has a "clear strategic objective" in Afghanistan,
and a Pew poll from November of that year indicated that only about one-third of voters think hunting down
terrorists in other countries should be a priority. Veterans organizations such as VoteVets and Concerned
Veterans of America, which occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum, have joined forces to press for a withdrawal of US
troops from Afghanistan and a repeal of the overly permissive 2001 AUMF, as the House has just voted to do.
The mood in Congress with regard to war powers has been shifting over the past few years, as evidenced by the historic
passage in both houses of bills that would have ended US support for the brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen
under the War Powers Resolution. Although Trump ended up vetoing the resolution, it remains a testament to
growing congressional opposition to counterproductive unauthorized wars.
The bipartisan nature of this opposition was underscored in an April 4 letter to the President, urging him not to veto the resolution. It
was signed by a group of members that included Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, Independent Sen.
Bernie Sanders, along with Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Rand Paul. The letter called for an end to the unconstitutional US role in
Yemen as a way to "set a new precedent for cooperation with both chambers of Congress" on issues of war and peace.
Since then, Republican Rep. Andy Biggs and Democratic Rep. Khanna have started a new War Powers Caucus which, in the words
of Khanna, is designed to lead the way to "re-establish congressional war-making power, military restraint, and [remove] the U.S.
from endless wars as the pillars of our foreign policy."
Despite his veto of the Yemen legislation and his failure to end any of the wars he inherited, even Trump has, on occasion,
acknowledged that the era of perpetual war needs to come to an end. During his campaign for
President, he routinely referred to the Iraq War as a "disaster," and he has noted that the trillions spent on our Mideast
wars could have gone a long way in rebuilding America. In this year's State of the Union address, Trump stated
flatly, "Great nations do not fight endless wars."
Strong action by Congress will help tip the balance away from a policy of ever more war and toward one
grounded in diplomacy and economic cooperation -- with force reserved as an instrument of last resort when there is a serious
threat to the United States that can't be resolved through other means. Never again should the United States go to war without the
authorization of Congress.
The next step is for the Senate to take action to repeal the 2001 AUMF and for Trump to sign it into law.
America will be stronger and better for it.
 2NC – AT: WPR Bad
The President previously illegally authorized attacks on countries – the CP
reasserts Congressional authority to declare war
Fisher and Smithberger 19 [Louis Fisher is a Constitutional Scholar at POGO. From 1970 to 2010 he served as Senior Specialist
in Separation of Powers at Congressional Research Service and Specialist in Constitutional Law at the Law Library of Congress. He has testified more
than fifty times before Congressional committees on a range of constitutional issues. Mandy Smithberger rejoined POGO as the director of the Straus
Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in December 2014. She was part of a team that received the Society of Professional
Journalists' Sunshine Award for contributions in the area of open government. "Could the New Yemen Resolutions Further Erode Congressional War
Powers?" POGO, 13 February 2019, pogo.org/analysis/2019/02/could-the-new-yemen-resolutions-further-erode-congressional-war-powers/]
Congressional critics of our endless wars have been repeatedly stymied by leadership on both sides of the aisle from engaging in a real debate and
Recent resolutions to end US military support for the Saudi-led
vote. That could be changing, however.
coalition in the Yemen War appear to be a Congressional reassertion of that authority. Still, it’s
one step forward, two steps back: some of the language offered in those resolutions, as written, could legitimize and strengthen the executive branch’s
broad assertions of its powers to wage war without congressional approval.
Last year, the Senate invoked the War Powers Resolution—the first time it had done so since Congress had passed the War Powers Resolution in
1973—to formalize its disapproval of the executive branch’s use of the US military in the Yemen War. The White House threatened to veto the
resolution, and the House was unable to consider the resolution after Republican House leadership attached a provision to a procedural vote on the
2018 farm bill to prohibit considering any war powers resolutions for the rest of the year.
The House and the Senate introduced new resolutions last month that pick up where last year’s fight left off. They both offer stronger language than
what the Senate passed last year, but should still be refined further to prevent continued efforts by the executive branch to conduct illegal wars in
Americans’ names.
when Congress gives the executive branch an inch on these
Part of the important context to understand is that
powers, the executive branch takes miles and miles . In 2001 Congress authorized the President “to use all necessary
and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that
The
occurred on September 11, 2001.” Since then, each president has read that authorization as broadly as necessary to allow the use of force.
Congressional Research Service found the executive branch has used that authority to deploy our troops
to Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Kenya, and Somalia—none of which had anything to do
with the attacks on our country in 2001. Representatives from both sides of the aisle became concerned enough about these
abuses that the House Appropriations Committee supported a measure offered in 2017 by Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) to repeal the 2001
authorization. House leadership prevented a vote on that through a procedure that stripped the repeal language before the bill was considered on the
Floor.
Congress has repeatedly allowed the executive branch to
The current war powers debate often misses how
improperly infringe upon its authority. Congress allowed President Truman to set a troubling precedent that subsequent presidents
have used to continue to improperly expand their war powers.
The expansion of our wars has also been furthered by executive branch interpretations of
“associated forces”—a phrase that was not part of the 2001 authorization. The executive branch has argued that by continuing to provide
money “through an unbroken stream of appropriations over multiple years,” Congress has tacitly given its approval for those operations. Congressional
Research Service analysts wrote that Congressional challenges to hostilities absent authorization were unsuccessful “in large part because Congress
continued to appropriate money for military operations.”
If Congress wants to stop the executive branch’s broad reading, they need to push back more forcefully . The Yemen
resolution passed by the Senate included a number of loopholes that would allow support to continue. The resolution prohibits the use of American
troops or resources in “hostilities,” but it does not explicitly prohibit the indirect assistance the U.S. has provided, such as supplying bombs, aerial
targeting assistance, or intelligence sharing. Problems with this ambiguity were raised by Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), then the chair of the Senate
Foreign Relations committee. The White House made clear that without additional detail about how hostilities was being defined, it would not interpret
the United States’ role as “hostilities.”
The new resolutions clarify that in-flight refueling of non-US aircraft conducting missions is prohibited, but do not prohibit the United States providing
bombs or sharing intelligence. If Congress truly wants to stop U.S. involvement in Yemen, it needs to clarify that providing any assistance is prohibited.
Given the Administration’s past interpretation of Congressional intent, future votes limiting actions in Yemen—and not voting on proposals to revise or
repeal the underlying war authorization language—leave the door wide open to further claims of Congressional acquiescence to the Administration’s
broad readings everywhere, including keeping troops in Iraq to check Iran.
Nixon vetoed the War Powers Resolution, but Congress overrode the veto. Subsequent Presidents have sought to shield the power of the executive
branch by resisting Congress’s attempts to assert itself in this arena.President Trump is likely to veto any legislative
effort to restrict his actions in this arena as well, so it is understandable that the resolutions include some ambiguities to
garner a veto-proof majority of votes necessary for a significant reassertion of congressional authority. Unfortunately, those ambiguities
may undermine further efforts of this Congress and future ones to challenge endless war.
Congress’s war powers under the Constitution are clear: it is Congress, not the executive branch, that has the power to declare
war. While the War Powers Resolution passed in 1973 was seen as Congress attempting to reassert those
powers, Congress has otherwise allowed its authority in national security to continue to diminish. “The net result was to legalize a scope for
independent presidential power that would have astonished the Framers, who vested the power to initiate hostilities exclusively in Congress,” Lou
Fisher (co-author of this piece) and former Idaho State University professor David Gray Adler wrote in a 1998 article. As a consequence, the War
Powers Resolution “grants to the president unbridled discretion to go to war as he deems necessary against anyone, anytime, anywhere, for at least
ninety days. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has observed, before ‘the passage of the resolution, unilateral presidential war was a matter of usurpation. Now,
at least for the first ninety days, it was a matter of law.’” Fisher and Adler wrote.
Some of the challenges of ending wars came up in the Constitutional Convention, the Congressional Research Service observed in a 2008 report:
Although the U.S. Constitution expressly empowers Congress to declare war, it is notably silent regarding which political body is responsible for
returning the United States to a state of peace. Some evidence suggests that this omission was not accidental. During the
Constitutional Convention, a motion was made by one of the delegates to modify the draft document by adding the words ‘and peace’ after the words
‘to declare war.’ This motion, however, was unanimously rejected. Convention records do not clearly evidence the framers’ intent in rejecting the
motion. (internal citations omitted)
So what options are available to Congress that are realistic in this scenario? One is to legislate what they mean when it comes to the Yemen War:
Congress never authorized direct or indirect support of the Saudi government’s bombings, and will not allow the United States to provide direct or
indirect support. In the House, the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Eliot Engel (D-NY), is a cosponsor of the House Yemen
resolution and has expressed interest in reevaluating the executive branch’s interpretation of previous war authorizations. Alternatively, Congress could
use the appropriations process to prohibit funding for direct or indirect support.
These options require more political courage than we’ve seen Congress demonstrate in regard to military policy for decades, but the direct approach is
not only advisable but essential for restoring Congress’s war powers and protecting our constitutional
system.
 2NC – AT: Pompeo Circumvention
Only taking power away from the executive branch can end the ongoing war
Gilsinan 7/22 [Kathy Gilsinan is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering national security and global affairs. "How Can
Congress Authorize War When It Can’t Decide What War Is?" Defense One, 22 July 2019, defenseone.com/ideas/2019/07/how-
can-congress-authorize-war-when-it-cant-decide-what-war/158582/]
In the past few years alone, the U.S. has launched military strikes in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq—all in the name of fighting al-
Qaeda and its later offshoot, the Islamic State. For the most part, Congress has accepted this. But as Trump-administration
officials talk
ever tougher about Iran, many Capitol Hill Democrats, and some Republicans, fear that the
confrontation could spin out of control into a devastating conflict . And now they’re trying to claw back
some of the power that the president—whom they view as dangerous and reckless—has to declare war.
Administration officials such as Mike Pompeo have made the rounds to argue for the connection between Iran and al-Qaeda. The
president declares he wants to negotiate with the Iranians in one breath and threatens consequences the likes of which no one has
ever seen in the next. This worries Democrats such as Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a former Army Ranger who served
in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I learned firsthand,” he said recently, “that when politicians talk tough in this town, real
people get hurt.”
He’s one of 87 co-sponsors of a bipartisan amendment to the House defense budget that would prohibit Donald Trump from
launching a war with Iran without congressional authorization. Elissa Slotkin, a freshman Democratic House member from Michigan
who served in Iraq with the CIA, is another. When she heard Pompeo talking about al-Qaeda and Iran this summer, she said
Saturday at the Aspen Security Forum, “my ears pricked up.” It sounded to her as if Pompeo was trying to create
space to go to war with Iran, and argue that the administration could legally do so under the 2001
law that authorized military force against al-Qaeda and its associated forces.
No one who voted for that law after the September 11, 2001, attacks would have envisioned its use against the Islamic Republic of
Iran, she said. Her colleague Mac Thornberry, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee who voted for the
authorization, said at the same event that he certainly didn’t envision all the battles the law is currently being used for—including the
fight against ISIS and other counterterrorism missions all over the world.
But this is also why it has proved so hard to change, despite seemingly bipartisan agreement that it needs an update. The law
authorizes virtually all of America’s counterterrorism work overseas, and if it simply goes away without
being revised, those missions are arguably illegal. But, Slotkin said, there are wide disagreements on what, if
anything, should replace it. Some members don’t want to authorize anything. Some members want to build in restrictions other
members find unacceptable. Some want to keep things exactly the same. “We’ve got 50,000 forces in the Persian Gulf right now,”
Slotkin said. “If we took away the authorization of military force—every authorization—right now, what would we do? Would we pull
them all back by the letter of the law? We’d have to examine that.”
The debate isn’t just about an 18-year-old law; it involves much bigger questions about constitutional powers, and war and peace. These are questions members of Congress
acknowledge, but have so far declined to really answer with a debate and a vote. Thornberry himself posed some of them: “When is it war that Congress has to approve? When
is it self-defense?” Would Congress have to authorize U.S.-military escorts for tankers through the Strait of Hormuz? What about shooting down another country’s drone? What
about cyberattacks?
In the meantime, Slotkin said, she and her co-sponsors felt it necessary to at least lay down a marker that Congress wants to exercise oversight.
But despite suspicions that Pompeo is trying to build the case to use the 2001 authorization against Iran, it’s not clear the
administration would even go that route. Pompeo and his Iran adviser Brian Hook have dodged questions about this in open
congressional hearings, saying only that whatever action they took with Iran would be under their legal authority. But Mark Esper,
Trump’s nominee to be secretary of defense, said at his confirmation hearing that the 2001 authorization would not
apply to Iran. Instead, he said, the president had the authority under Article II of the Constitution as
commander in chief. “I don’t think there’s a serious attempt to use [the 2001 authorization] for that purpose,” Thornberry said
Saturday. “I don’t think anyone would support it.”
The amendment Slotkin co-sponsored would not prevent a strike on Iran in self-defense, which is the likeliest justification Trump would claim for a strike if he did order one.
When National Security Adviser John Bolton announced in May that the U.S. was sending a carrier strike group to the region in response to intelligence about Iranian threats, he
warned of “unrelenting force”—but in the event “of any attack on United States interests or those of our allies.”
A similar measure failed in the Republican-dominated Senate. The Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut expressed disgust at what he called Congress’s abdication of
responsibility to declare war in numerous theaters where the United States has recently entered into armed hostilities—in Libya in 2011, and against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in
2014. “We have given up on authorizing military force largely because it’s a lot harder than it used to be,” he said at an earlier event at Aspen. “We don’t have armies marching
against each other; we don’t have peace treaties that wrap up hostilities. It’s harder to define your enemies. It’s much harder to define what victory looks like. And we just
stopped doing it.”
Murphy noted that Barack Obama was widely seen as weak for failing to strike Syria after President Bashar al-Assad used chemical
weapons against civilians in 2013, stepping over a “red line” the president had set the year before. Instead, Obama went to
Congress, which did not authorize such a strike, and Obama backed off. Murphy said he was right to do so. “Because you
can’t get authorization is not an excuse to violate the Constitution,” he said.
Aff
 2AC – CP Corrupt
It’s a fraud – WPR emboldens Presidents
Woods 18 [Tom Woods, a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, is the author of a dozen books, most recently Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets
Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to American
History and Meltdown (on the financial crisis, featuring a foreword by Ron Paul). His book The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free
Economy, won the $50,000 first prize in the Templeton Enterprise, “The War Powers Resolution Fraud.” Mises Institute, 31 March 2018,
mises.org/wire/war-powers-resolution-fraud]
Congress did pass the War Powers Resolution, to be sure. But if anything, the Resolution — sympathetic mythology to the
contrary notwithstanding — actually emboldened the president and codified executive warmaking
powers that would have astonished the framers of the Constitution.
I have explained the intentions of the framers with regard to war powers here. Suffice it to say that the framers resolutely opposed
placing offensive war powers in the hands of the president, and deliberately assigned such authority to the legislative branch.
The War Powers Resolution does not restore the proper constitutional balance between president and
Congress in matters of war. Consider first the resolution’s provision that the president may commit troops to offensive operations
anywhere in the world he chooses and for any reason without the consent of Congress, for a period of 60 days (though he must at
least inform them of his action within 48 hours). After the initial 60 days he must secure congressional authorization for the action to
continue. He then has another 30 days to withdraw the troops if such authorization is not forthcoming.
Until the War Powers Resolution, no constitutional or statutory authority could be cited on behalf of such behavior on the part of the
president. Now it became fixed law, despite violating the letter and the spirit of the Constitution.
It so happens, moreover, that thanks to a loophole in the resolution, the 60-day clock begins only if and
when the president reports to Congress under Section 4(a)(1) of the Resolution. Surprise, surprise: presidents
have therefore reported to Congress in a more generic manner rather than expressly under that
section. They issue reports "consistent with" rather than "pursuant to" the Resolution.
Even still, in a few cases presidents have acted as if the 60-day limit were in effect, perhaps out of political considerations (even if
from a strictly legal point of view it was not). But Bill Clinton’s multi-year military intervention in Bosnia alone, without
made perfectly clear that the resolution, whatever good points
even so much as a nod in the direction of Congress,
may be buried within it, was effectively a dead letter .
The Resolution calls for "consultation" by the President with Congress before committing troops to combat. This consultation, we are
told, is to occur "in every possible instance." (Who could possibly find a loophole there?) In practice, presidents have interpreted this
provision to mean that they must notify Congress following the initiation of hostilities — not exactly what its drafters probably had in
mind.
Ever since the passage of the Resolution, opponents of presidential actions have sometimes followed a strategy of appealing to the
courts for redress, waving the War Powers Resolution before federal judges. For a variety of reasons, these judges have hesitated
to intervene in such cases. Louis Fisher and David Gray Adler1, two experts on presidential war powers, have therefore suggested
that the War Powers Resolution has diverted opponents of presidential wars into fruitless judicial
challenges instead of simply declaring that the president’s action was unconstitutional and
refusing to fund it.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – WPR Illegal
The WPR has been deemed illegal by EVERY PRESIDENT since it was passed – it
was created based off perception, not real infringement on the constitution
CRS 19 [The Congressional Research Service (CRS) works exclusively for the United States Congress, providing policy and
legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation. As a legislative branch
agency within the Library of Congress, CRS has been a valued and respected resource on Capitol Hill for more than a century. “The
War Powers Resolution: Concepts and Practice.” Congressional Research Service, 8 March 2019,
fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42699.pdf]
From its inception, the War Powers Resolution was controversial because it operated on the national war powers,
powers divided by the Constitution in no definitive fashion between the President and Congress. Congress adopted the
resolution in response to the perception that Presidents had assumed more authority to send
forces into hostilities than the framers of the Constitution had intended for the Commander in Chief. President Nixon in his veto
message challenged the constitutionality of the essence of the War Powers Resolution, and particularly two
provisions.10 He argued that the legislative veto provision, permitting Congress to direct the withdrawal of troops by
concurrent resolution, was unconstitutional. He also argued that the provision requiring withdrawal of
troops after 60-90 days unless Congress passed legislation authorizing such use was
unconstitutional because it checked presidential powers without affirmative congressional
action. Every President since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution has taken the position that
it is an unconstitutional infringement on the President’s authority as Commander in Chief.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – WPR Fails
WPA violates checks and balances AND it’s just an excuse for Congress to dodge
solving a war
Greenblatt 11 [Alan Greenblatt, a reporter at NPR, has been writing about politics and government in Washington and the states for more than a decade. He
won the National Press Club’s Sandy Hume award for political journalism while reporting for Congressional Quarterly. During his years at Governing magazine, he covered
issues of concern to state and local governments, including budgets, taxes, and higher education. Along the way, he has written about politics and culture for numerous other
publications, including the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. "Why The War Powers Act Doesn't Work." NPR, 16 June 2011,
https://www.npr.org/2011/06/16/137222043/why-the-war-powers-act-doesnt-work]
On Wednesday, 10 House members filed a lawsuit designed to block the Obama administration from further participation in the war.
Along with numerous other members of Congress, including Republican House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, they say Obama
is in violation of the War Powers Act.
The 1973 law was meant to prevent presidents from sustaining wars without congressional
approval. But no one thinks the lawsuit will succeed. And the War Powers Act has never been successfully
employed to end any military mission .
"The War Powers resolution really does not work," says former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN), who co-chaired the Iraq
Study Group and the 9/11 Commission.
Instead, the War Powers Act has largely been used as it's being used now — as a political tool that allows
Congress to criticize a president about the prosecution of a war.
"The rhetoric is sadly familiar," says Gordon Adams, a foreign policy professor at American University. "It just flips by party, depending on who's deploying the troops."
No More Vietnams
The law was passed over the veto of President Richard M. Nixon. The intention was to prevent America from entering into protracted military engagements, as Vietnam had
become, without the approval of Congress.
The president has 60 days to seek formal approval from Congress after engaging in hostilities, with the possibility of a 30-day extension. "When the United States makes a
decision to go to war, it ought not to be made by one person," says Hamilton, who was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from 1993 to 1995.
Rarely Declaring War

no president has accepted the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, viewing
But, as Hamilton notes,
it as a violation of the separation of powers and the president's authority as commander in chief.
In 2000, the Supreme Court turned back a challenge brought by a group of 31 members of Congress who complained that U.S. participation in a bombing campaign in
Yugoslavia violated the act.
"There's a long pattern of members going to court on War Powers cases," says Louis Fisher, a constitutional scholar who retired last year after 40 years as an adviser to
Congress.
"Ninety-five percent of the time, courts say, 'Thirty of you are saying the president violated the law, 30 others in an amicus brief are saying he didn't. We're not going to get
involved,' " Fisher says.
A Political Cudgel
As a result, the debate over violations of the War Powers Act has devolved into a distraction. Hamilton says the law's intent was valid and that "Congress ought to hold the
administration's feet to the fire with regard to Libya."
But he argues that the 1973
law has become a "political tool that allows members of Congress to dodge
taking a position on the intervention itself. As is often the case, they argue the process rather than the substance."
Both the Republican and Democratic congressional caucuses are divided about Libya. Some would prefer a more concerted effort to target Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi,
while others worry about an expansion of the mission from protecting civilians to seeking regime change.
As a result, it's difficult for Congress to speak with one voice in its battle with Obama. On June 3, the House approved a resolution criticizing the president for not providing a
"compelling rationale" for the Libya campaign, but turned back legislation that would have pulled out U.S. forces within 15 days.
Party Vs. Principle
Both Hamilton and Adams say the War Powers Act is being used primarily as a political cudgel against Obama.
"Is the War Powers Act about protecting the power of Congress relative to the president, or about the two political parties?" asks Noah Feldman, a professor of international law
at Harvard University.
Everyone in Congress wants to protect Congress, but they also want to protect the president of
their party.
While some members of Congress may use the law to criticize the president for political reasons, others will defend a president of their own party — even those who had
invoked the War Powers Act the last time the other party held the White House.
"It doesn't matter if you're [George W.] Bush or Obama, you want more power in the White House," Feldman says. "Everyone in Congress wants to protect Congress, but they
also want to protect the president of their party."
Power Of The Purse
As a result, Congressnever manages to speak with one voice and insist en masse to the courts that a
president is in violation of the War Powers Act.
Congress can ultimately express its displeasure about a war by cutting off funds. But with the defense budget so large, the Libyan
effort is being handled out of petty cash. A White House report Wednesday said the campaign had cost $715 million so far, with the
total rising to $1.1 billion by early September.
"They're taking the money out of operating costs," Feldman says. "Because we have wars going on elsewhere, Congress isn't
going to take away funds for troops elsewhere, so when the administration comes back and says we need to make up
the funds for Afghanistan and Iraq, it's going to be hard for Congress to say no."
Not Really A War?
Faced with warnings about the 90-day deadline under the War Powers Act expiring Friday, the Obama administration sent Congress a report Wednesday arguing that the law
does not apply because U.S. military operations in Libya are "distinct from the kind of 'hostilities' contemplated by the resolution's 60-day term."
The administration's argument is that NATO is in charge and there aren't any U.S. ground troops in Libya, so therefore the U.S. is not at war in the sense covered by the law.
"We are in no way putting into question the constitutionality of the War Powers resolution," Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, said Wednesday in a conference
call with reporters.
This is the sort of response that administrations typically reach for in trying to avoid a direct challenge to the law, while also avoiding adhering too faithfully to its requirements,
says Glenn Antizzo, a political scientist at Mississippi College.
"One trick that presidents try, on both sides of the aisle, is to adhere to aspects of the War Powers Act without actually saying you're invoking the War Powers Act."
The dance both sides are doing does little to clarify exactly what deference the executive branch owes to Congress in military matters.
"Again and again, you try to find some credible way to at least request that the executive branch honors the
War Powers Act," says Anthony Cordesman, a former Senate aide who is now a national security analyst at the Center for
Strategic & International Studies. "Again and again, you back away and weaken Congress ."

Presidents have broken the WPR, but the Senate hasn’t taken it to court – instead
they defer to the President
Wex 19 [Wex is a product of the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School, a pre-eminent source of legal
information. Much of its current content is based on (or directly incorporates) material developed by the LII for use on its website.
“Commander in Chief Powers.” Cornell Law School, 2019, law.cornell.edu/wex/commander_in_chief_powers]
After the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations spent nearly a decade committing U.S. troops to
Southeast Asia without Congressional approval, in 1973 Congress responded by passing the War Powers
Resolution. The Resolution sought to halt the erosion of Congress's ability to participate in war-
making decisions, an aim furthered by the Resolution's requirement that the President
communicate to Congress the commitment of troops within 48 hours. Further, the statute requires the
President to remove all troops after 60 days if Congress has not granted an extension.
Presidents have typically considered the War Powers Resolution to be unconstitutional, and so they have
tended not to follow it. This unwillingness has never been challenged by another actor (congress, civilians, etc), so the
Supreme Court has never up the issue. In one way, the resolution takes an unprecedented action
by allowing the President to unilaterally put American troops into conflict. Although the act imposes a
check on the President (by imposing a limit for the amount of time the troops can be deployed without Congressional consent), the
act has not appeared to pose any practical checks on Presidential actions.
And even though the War Powers Act exists, Congress is still largely deferential toward the President with
regard to military authorization. For example in 1995, regarding the sending of US troops into Bosnia, Bob Dole (the
Republican Senate Majority Leader) said that President Clinton (a Democrat) had “the authority and the power
under the Constitution to do what he feels should be done regardless of what Congress does.”

The Constitution distributes war powers flexibly – the CP unevenly grants

Congress extra power
Yoo 02 [John C. Yoo – University of California at Berkeley School of Law; American Enterprise Institute; Stanford University -
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. “War and the Constitutional Text.” University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 69,
No. 4, Fall 2002, dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.426862]
In a series of articles, I have criticized the view that the original understanding of the Constitution requires that Congress provide its
authorization before the United States can engage in military hostilities.1 This “pro-Congress” position ignores the
constitutional text and structure, errs in interpreting the ratification history of the Constitution,
and cannot account for the practice of the three branches of government . Instead of the rigid process
advocated by scholars such as Louis Henkin, John Hart Ely, Louis Fisher, Michael Glennon, and Harold Koh,2 I have argued that
the Constitution creates a flexible system of war powers. That system provides the president
with significant initiative as commander-in-chief, while reserving to Congress ample authority to
check executive policy through its power of the purse. In this scheme, the Declare War Clause confers on
Congress a juridical power, one that both defines the state of international legal relations between the United States and another
country and triggers domestic constitutional authorities during wartime.3
In Textualism and War Powers, 4 Professor Michael D. Ramsey agrees with much of my work and does me the honor of
recognizing me as a leading proponent of a pro-executive theory of war powers. He agrees that pro-Congress scholars
have been unable to explain the
have not advanced a convincing textual defense of their views, and that they
historical evidence that favors presidential control over the initiation of military hostilities. He
admits that pro-Congress scholars have failed to reply to my criticism of their historical arguments. Professor Ramsey even
concedes that by the eighteenth century, formal declarations of war were unnecessary to authorize the conduct of military hostilities.
Professor Ramsey acknowledges that the pro-Congressposition suffers from a “ serious textual
embarrassment ,” because the constitutional text only grants Congress “the power ‘to declare
war,’ not the power ‘to authorize hostilities,’ and it is not immediately clear why the two should be equated.”5
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Senate
CP fails – Senators think they would look irresolute and weak
DePetris 6/28 [Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, and a columnist for the Washington Examiner and the
American Conservative. “The Senate just failed to reclaim its war powers, giving Trump unlimited power to bomb Iran.” Washington
Examiner, 28 June 2019, washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-senate-just-failed-to-reclaim-its-war-powers-giving-trump-unlimited-
power-to-bomb-iran]
Senators are ready to pack their bags and head out of town before the hot, swampy weather in Washington gets any more
unbearable. But of course, not before they humiliate
themselves and let down their constituents one last time —
by voting down an amendment that would have prevented an unauthorized and
unconstitutional war with Iran, as they did on Friday.
The bipartisan amendment, sponsored by Sens. Tom Udall, Tim Kaine, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee, was short, sweet, and
appropriate at a time when the U.S. and Iran seem minutes away from a direct conflict. The language was
as clear as day: “no funds authorized by this Act may be used to conduct hostilities against the Government of Iran, against the
Armed Forces of Iran, or in the territory of Iran.”
Under this amendment, if President Trump (or any future president) thought military action was a necessity to defend the interests of
the United States, he would first need to do what the Constitution clearly requires: make his case to Congress and attain
authorization from our elected representatives. Lest there was any worry about the amendment tying the president’s hands in
extraordinary circumstances, it allowed Trump to respond militarily if U.S. forces were attacked.
Republican senators such as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe, and
Marco Rubio argued before the vote that the amendment was dangerous, unnecessary, and
counterproductive. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who would have probably invaded Iran already if he were sitting in the Oval
Office, made the ludicrous claim that reaffirming Congress’ war powers “embodies irresolution &
weakness .”
But if there is any weakness here, it’s on the shoulders of those who voted down the measure and are apparently perfectly fine with
bestowing the president with monarchical war powers. George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and the rest of the
founding fathers obviously felt much differently, understanding that taking a country to war is a decision far too important for one
man to make.
And there was nothing in the Udall-Kaine amendment that was unconstitutional or unreasonable. Indeed, the language was
in keeping with what Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution already states in black-and-white — that it is
the legislative branch, not the executive, that determines when the country goes to war. And of course if the U.S. is
attacked, the president reserves the right to strike back in self-defense without first coming to
Congress.
Paradoxically, what the Senate did today was vote against the declare war clause, the most important
provision in the country’s most important document. While the executive branch finds ever more clever ways to
expand its power, senators chose to negate their own rather than fight to preserve it. And for that,
they should be ashamed.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Arm Sales Key
Raytheon is helping Saudi build high-tech bombs – removing arms sales is key to
end the war AND stop them from copying the tech
LaForgia and Bogdanich 6/7 [Michael LaForgia is a reporter on the investigations desk. Before he joined the New York Times, he covered crime
for The Palm Beach Post. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, in 2014 for exposing problems in a Florida homeless program and in 2016 for a series on one
Florida county’s neglect of schools in black neighborhoods. Walt Bogdanich joined The New York Times in January 2001 as investigative editor for the Business and Finance
Desk. Since 2003, he has worked as an investigative reporter. In 2008, Mr. Bogdanich won the Pulitzer Prize for “A Toxic Pipeline,” a series that tracked dangerous
pharmaceutical ingredients flowing from China into the global market. He also won a Pulitzer in 2005 for “Death on the Tracks,” a series that examined the safety record of the
United States railroad industry. He won his first Pulitzer in 1988 for a series in The Wall Street Journal on substandard medical laboratories. “Trump Allows High-Tech U.S.
Bomb Parts to Be Built in Saudi Arabia.” New York Times, 7 June 2019, nytimes.com/2019/06/07/us/saudi-arabia-arms-sales-raytheon.html]
WASHINGTON — When the Trump administration declared an emergency last month and fast-tracked the sale of
more American arms to Saudi Arabia, it did more than anger members of Congress who opposed the
sale on humanitarian grounds .
It also raised concerns that the Saudis could gain access to technology that would let them produce their
own versions of American precision-guided bombs — weapons they have used in strikes on civilians since they
began fighting a war in Yemen four years ago.
The emergency authorization allows Raytheon Company, a top American defense firm, to team with the Saudis to
build high-tech bomb parts in Saudi Arabia. That provision, which has not been previously reported, is part of a
broad package of information the administration released this week to Congress.
The move grants Raytheon and the Saudis sweeping permission to begin assembling the control systems, guidance electronics and
circuit cards that are essential to the company’s Paveway smart bombs. The United States has closely guarded such technology for
national security reasons.
Multiple reports by human rights groups over the past four years have singled out the weapons as being used in airstrikes on
civilians. One attack, on a Sana funeral home in October 2016, led the Obama administration to suspend bomb sales to the Saudi-
led coalition in Yemen.
The new arrangement is part of a larger arms package, previously blocked by Congress, that includes 120,000 precision-guided
bombs that Raytheon is prepared to ship to the coalition. These will add to the tens of thousands of bombs that Saudi Arabia and
the United Arab Emirates have already stockpiled, and some in Congress fear the surplus would let the countries
continue fighting in Yemen long into the future . The move also includes support for Saudi F-15 warplanes,
mortars, anti-tank missiles and .50-caliber rifles.
The emergency declaration, invoked in part because of tensions with Iran, prompted a broad bipartisan pushback from lawmakers
who were concerned not only about the war, but also about whether the Trump administration was usurping congressional authority
to approve arms sales.
A group of senators that includes Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, and
Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat, announced on Wednesday that they would introduce 22 separate measures
expressing disapproval of the deals.
“Few nations should be trusted less than Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Paul said in a statement on Thursday. “In recent years, they
have fomented human atrocities , repeatedly lied to the United States and have proved to be a reckless
regional pariah. It is concerning and irresponsible for the United States to continue providing them arms.”
In the House, the Foreign Affairs Committee has scheduled a hearing for next week in which members plan to question R. Clarke
Cooper, the State Department official whose bureau licenses arms exports.
“The Saudis and Emiratis have become so intertwined with the Trump administration that I don’t think the president is
capable of distinguishing America’s national interests from theirs,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, a
New Jersey Democrat who sits on the committee. “The administration has presented us no evidence that
Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. face any substantially new or intensified threat from Iran that would justify
declaring an emergency.”
Mr. Malinowski, a top human rights official under President Obama, said the bombs were for use in Yemen, not for defending the Saudi or Emirati homeland from Iran, as some
Trump administration officials have suggested.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
A Raytheon spokesman said there was nothing unusual about the production arrangement.
“Industrial participation by local partners has been an element of international sales of military equipment for decades,” said the spokesman, Mike Doble. “These activities and
related technologies are governed by the Arms Export Control Act, controlled by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, and conform to all licensing rules and restrictions
of the United States government.”
Defense contractors have established close ties with the Trump administration, and key executives from several companies, including Raytheon, have made their way into high-
ranking positions. Raytheon’s former vice president for government relations, Mark T. Esper, was confirmed as Army secretary in 2017.
The defense firm has also cultivated ties to the Saudi government. During President Trump’s visit to the kingdom in May 2017, Raytheon signed an agreement to work more
closely with the Saudi Arabian Military Industries Company, a holding company owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund. It was unclear whether the new production deal
fell under that plan.
The production agreement took some lawmakers by surprise. Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat and an outspoken critic of the Yemen war, said it seemed “to
serve no purpose other than to forfeit our technology and prevent future congressional oversight.”
The arrangement, which would effectively outsource jobs, appears to be at odds with Mr. Trump’s
position that arms sales are important because of the American jobs they create.
Rob Berschinski, a senior vice president at Human Rights First, an advocacy group, said the administration’s decision was “about siding unreservedly with favored Middle
Eastern authoritarians, no matter who they kill or how they repress their citizens.” Mr. Berschinski, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, added, “It has nothing to do with
American jobs.”
Congress had been informally blocking the sale of the smart bombs at least since May last year, when Mr. Menendez and Representative Eliot L. Engel, the New York
Democrat, expressed concerns over how the Saudis were using the weapons in Yemen. Opposition intensified after American intelligence officials concluded that the Saudi
government played a role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and columnist for The Washington Post.
But then, last month, on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, Mr. Trump took the rare step of declaring an emergency to push these weapons out the door.
In a May 24 letter, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo notified congressional leaders of the emergency declaration, waiving congressional review of the weapon sales. Mr. Pompeo
said he took into account “political, military, economic, human rights and arms control considerations.” The State Department on Monday disclosed more details to Congress,
including the nature of the arms sales.
“If
Saudi Arabia is able to develop an indigenous bomb-making capability as a result of this deal, it will
undermine U.S. leverage to prevent them from engaging in indiscriminate strikes of the kind it has carried out in
Yemen,” said William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, a think tank.
The authorization paperwork signed by Mr. Pompeo offers no timeline for the shared operations to get underway, and Raytheon representatives have said they are still
negotiating over details with the Saudi government, according to a congressional aide.
Aside from potentially providing the Saudis with more bombs to use in Yemen airstrikes, the arrangement raised security concerns among lawmakers, who were seeking
assurances that the Saudis could prevent the American technology from falling into the wrong hands.
Both Republicans and Democrats also noted that it called for creating manufacturing jobs in Saudi Arabia that might otherwise have
been located in the United States. And they expressed worry that the Saudis might eventually copy the tech nology
and use it to produce their own weapons, which they would be free to use in Yemen or sell to whomever they
chose.

Only backing out sends a message to Saudi Arabia – that mitigates the risk of
harming civilians
Robiou 7/16 [Marcia Robiou, Abrams Journalism Fellow, FRONTLINE/Columbia Journalism School Fellowship. "What You
Need to Know About Trump’s $8 Billion Saudi Arms Deal." FRONTLINE, 16 July 2019, pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/saudi-arabia-
arms-deal-trump-what-to-know/]
Mounting concerns over U.S. involvement in Yemen: Experts believe that the weapons are likely to be diverted to the
frontlines in Yemen, where a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia has raged for nearly five years. In April, the House
voted to end American involvement in the war in Yemen, sending a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration’s support for the
military campaign led by Saudi Arabia in the war-battered country.
“There’s sort of an implication that the Saudi-led coalition have used up their weaponry and are in desperate need of a resupply,”
said Jeff Abramson, senior fellow at the Arms Control Association. “There are probably targets left which they have yet to hit, in
which case you could expect these weapons to be used in those cases.”
Since 2015, the Saudi-led coalition has carried out nearly 20,000 airstrikes, according to the Yemen Data Project. Over 6,000 of
those have been non-military air raids, with close to 7,000 more strikes of unknown nature. American-made warplanes
and bombs have played a central role in the coalition’s extensive air campaign.
The Trump administration maintains that direct engagement with Saudi Arabia can improve their ability to discriminate between
civilian and military targets.
Under President Barack Obama, there was a sense that U.S. efforts to improve Saudi targeting capabilities were working until 2016,
when the coalition bombed a crowded funeral home. The attack killed at least 155 people and wounded about 600, including the
mayor of the capital city, who had been playing a significant role in negotiating a peaceful end to the war.
Discomfort over U.S. involvement in Yemen grew after the incident, and Obama blocked sales of precision-guided munitions to the
coalition after the high-profile incident.
“We tried engagement, and their behavior didn’t improve ,” Abramson said. “The track record shows that it is
more by showing the Saudis that we are willing to criticize them and walk away that they get
the message that they need to improve their behavior.”
However, a State Department official told FRONTLINE that U.S. engagement with the Saudi-led coalition has contributed to a
decrease in civilian casualties.
“We remain committed to working with Saudi Arabia to improve processes which mitigate the risk of
civilian harm during combat operations,” the official said. “Sustained engagement with the Coalition is the best way to do this.”
Kori Schake, a top national security official in the George W. Bush administration, said that without U.S. assistance and support, the
Saudis are likely to be even less capable of achieving a military objective without causing exorbitant civilian damage.
The conflict’s total death toll is fast approaching the 100,000 mark, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
The U.N. attributes 65 percent of civilian deaths in Yemen to coalition airstrikes.
“Even if tomorrow the Saudis were to improve their targeting practice, people would continue to die at an
unacceptably high rate,” said Scott Paul, Senior Humanitarian Policy Advisor at Oxfam.

Arms end up in hands of terrorists and militias – removing sales are key
Elbagir et al. 19 [Nima Elbagir, Salma Abdelaziz, Mohamed Abo El Gheit and Laura Smith-Spark. Nima Elbagir is a
Sudanese journalist and an award-winning international television correspondent. Elbagir joined CNN as a London-based
international correspondent. In 2008, she picked up two Foreign Press Association Awards - TV News Story of the Year and
Broadcast Journalist of the Year. “Sold to an ally, lost to an enemy.” CNN, Feb 2019,
cnn.com/interactive/2019/02/middleeast/yemen-lost-us-arms]
Hodeidah, Yemen (CNN) – Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have transferred American-made
weapons to al Qaeda -linked fighters, hardline Salafi militias, and other factions waging war in Yemen, in violation of
their agreements with the United States, a CNN investigation has found.
The weapons have also made their way into the hands of Iranian-backed rebels battling the coalition for
endangering the
control of the country, exposing some of America's sensitive military technology to Tehran and potentially
lives of US troops in other conflict zones.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, its main partner in the war, have used the US-manufactured weapons
as a form of currency to buy the loyalties of militias or tribes, bolster chosen armed actors, and influence the complex
political landscape, according to local commanders on the ground and analysts who spoke to CNN.
By handing off this military equipment to third parties, the Saudi-led coalition is breaking the
terms of its arms sales with the US, according to the Department of Defense. After CNN presented its
findings, a US defense official confirmed there was an ongoing investigation into the issue.
The revelations raise fresh questions about whether the US has lost control over a key ally presiding over
one of the most horrific wars of the past decade, and whether Saudi Arabia is responsible enough to be allowed to
continue buying the sophisticated arms and fighting hardware. Previous CNN investigations established that US-made
weapons were used in a series of deadly Saudi coalition attacks that killed dozens of civilians,
many of them children.
The developments also come as Congress, outraged with Riyadh over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year,
considers whether to force an end to the Trump administration's support for the Saudi coalition, which
relies on American weapons to conduct its war.
In 2015, Riyadh launched a coalition to oust Iranian-supported Houthi rebels from the country's capital and reinstate the
internationally recognized government of President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi. The war split the country in two, and with it came the
weapons -- not just guns, but anti-tank missiles, armored vehicles, heat-seeking lasers and artillery -- all flooding into an unruly and
complex state.
Since then, some of America's "beautiful military equipment," as US President Donald Trump once called it, has been
abandoned in Yemen's state of chaos, where murky alliances and fractured politics
passed on, sold, stolen or
mean little hope for any system of accountability or tracking.
Some terror groups have gained from the influx of US arms, with the barrier of entry to advanced weaponry
now lowered by the laws of supply and demand. Militia leaders have had ample opportunity to obtain military hardware
in exchange for the manpower to fight the Houthi militias. Arms dealers have flourished, with traders offering to
buy or sell anything, from a US-manufactured rifle to a tank, to the highest bidder.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Circumvention
Trump will circumvent because he only cares for profit – that worsens the
humanitarian crisis in Yemen
Ward 19 [Alex Ward is the staff writer covering international security and defense issues, as well as a co-host of Vox's
"Worldly" podcast. Before joining Vox, Alex was an associate director in the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on
International Security where he worked on military issues and US foreign policy. He also wrote the #NatSec2016 newsletter for War
on the Rocks where he covered the 2016 presidential election and the candidates's views on national security. "The US may use a
loophole to sell billions in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE." Vox, 24 May 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/5/24/18638286/us-
loophole-saudi-arabia-uae-weapons-sale]
The US plans to send billions of dollars in weapons to Middle Eastern allies — including Saudi Arabia —
by declaring an emergency that experts say doesn’t really exist .
Multiple reports detail that Trump officials are considering using a legal loophole within days to export roughly
$7 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which have waged a brutal war in
Yemen against Houthi rebels for more than four years.
The idea, pushed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top officials, would allow the administration to
circumvent Congress’s authority to approve or reject weapons sales.
There is a provision in a weapons export law allowing the executive branch to sell arms without congressional sign-off if “an
emergency exists which requires the proposed sale in the national security interest of the United States.” Administrations rarely
invoke it, experts say, mainly because of how controversial it is and the high bar required to claim a dire situation exists.
President George W. Bush used the provision in 2006 to send precision-guided weapons to Israel during the
took advantage of the loophole.
Israel-Hezbollah July War, but that was last time an administration
President Donald Trump likely will claim that Saudi Arabia and the UAE need new munitions because
they face repeated attacks from Houthi rebels. However, the Yemen war has raged since 2015, with the US
supporting the Saudi-led coalition’s side. It’s jarring now to say that an emergency exists after all this time, especially when the US
previously sold weapons to the Saudis through the normal process.
There’s also the fact that introducing more weapons to the war will likely worsen a catastrophic situation.
The conflict has already claimed tens of thousands of lives; some estimates indicate that at least 60,000 people have died, though
it’s hard to keep an accurate tally because of dangerous conditions in Yemen. Last August, the Saudi-led coalition carried out a
horrific attack on a school bus where dozens of people, including 40 children, died.
The US sending more munitions to Saudi Arabia and the UAE likely won’t do much to tip the
scales of the fight — but could imperil the lives of millions of people in Yemen already suffering
from wounds, famine, and disease.
“The Trump administration is manufacturing an emergency to push through the sale of deadly weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates,” Scott Paul, a Yemen expert at the humanitarian group Oxfam America, told me. “Once again, the Trump
administration is demonstrating that it values profit and its Gulf allies over resolving the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.”
The Trump administration knows Congress likely wouldn’t approve the deal
News of the loophole plan comes at a particularly tense moment.
The US and Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival, are locked in a potentially deadly standoff. Earlier this month, the Trump administration said it had intelligence showing that Iran planned to attack Americans in the Middle East. As a result, the US put an aircraft
carrier, bomber planes, and anti-missile batteries in the region, though it’s not clear exactly where. The administration is even considering sending thousands of troops to the region, perhaps in an effort to deter an Iranian assault.
Iran, meanwhile, told its proxies in Iraq to prepare for war if the US attacks, and has greatly accelerated low-enriched uranium production for its nuclear program (though it has not said that it plans to pursue a nuclear weapon). The weeks-long crisis has split
Democrats and Republicans in Congress over just how forcefully the US should engage Iran right now, while Saudi Arabia has mostly pushed for America to seriously get involved.
Lawmakers from both parties remain enraged with the Trump administration’s handling of the killing of Saudi journalist, dissident, and US resident Jamal Khashoggi last October. Despite ample evidence showing a planned, coordinated assassination, Trump did
little to punish Riyadh other than impose a few sanctions.
That wasn’t enough for many Democrats and Republicans, including reliable Trump allies. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for example, told reporters on Thursday that he would “not do business as usual with the Saudis until we have a better reckoning” with Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler who US spies say ordered the Khashoggi hit.
The likely reason the administration wants to invoke the loophole is not that an emergency exists, then, but that Trump officials fear lawmakers might shoot down the arms sale.
“President Trump is only using this loophole because he knows Congress would disapprove of this sale,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who first raised awareness of the administration’s plan, told the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. “It sets an incredibly dangerous
precedent that future presidents can use to sell weapons without a check from Congress.”
Trump has long prioritized weapons sales over human rights
Asked by reporters last November if he would stop a massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi’s killing, Trump emphatically said no.
“This took place in Turkey and to the best of our knowledge, Khashoggi is not a United States citizen,” he said in the Oval Office. “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country,” referring to his desire to sell $110 billion worth of
weapons to Riyadh, adding that “it would not be acceptable to me.”
Trump on possibility of punishing Saudi Arabia for apparently murdering a dissident journalist: "I don't like stopping massive amounts of money that's being poured into our country... they are spending $110b on military equipment and on things that create jobs for
this country." pic.twitter.com/QkzWPa5zcL
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 11, 2018

Trump’s comments made one thing extremely clear: He cares much more about getting American companies
paid than defending human rights. It was perhaps one of Trump’s most honest articulations about how he conducts foreign
policy: He won’t call out a country that infringes on human dignity as long as it’s willing to inject cash into the American economy.
Partly for that reason, Trump has continued to strengthen America’s relationship with the Saudi regime despite its conduct in
Yemen, its stoking of tensions with Iran, and the Khashoggi murder. And now, with the impending use of the loophole, it appears
Trump has literally put a price tag on the lives of those already suffering in the Saudi-led war.
“Yemenis will continue to pay the price of the US’s indefinite and unconditional support of one side in their
country’s horrific war ,” Paul, the Oxfam expert, told me.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – National Emergency
Trump will say it’s a national emergency – that circumvents Congress
Spindel 5/30 [Jennifer Spindel is an assistant professor of international security at the University of Oklahoma and the
associate director of Cyber Governance and Policy Center. “Yes, Trump can override Congress and sell weapons to Saudi Arabia -
even over Republican objections.” Washington Post, washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/30/yes-trump-can-override-congress-sell-
weapons-saudi-arabia-even-over-republican-objections/]
The Trump administration announced last week that it will
declare an emergency to allow US companies to
sell arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That emergency circumvents Congress and the
usual bureaucratic process for approving US arms sales. By selling about $ 8 billion worth of precision guided munitions and combat
aircraft, President Trump advances his view of Saudi Arabia as a " great ally " of the United States.
Trump's move is legal . Under the 1976 Arms Export Control Act, the State Department authorizes arms sales (or
does not). As I explain below, Congress usually allows decisions to be implemented without objection. But this time, the
administration has invoked the act's provision that allows presidents to sidestep congressional reviews if they believe
a national security emergency requires the arms to be sold. In doing so, it is ignoring the bipartisan resolution that Congress passed
in April to halt US military support for the Saudi war in Yemen.
While no one is surprised that Democratic senators are voicing outrage, what is unusual is that Republicans are
forcefully objecting, too. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) Called circumventing Congress as "big mistake," and Sen. Lindsey O.
Graham (RS.C.) said , "I do not support arms sales," and criticized Trump for "doing business as usual" with Saudi Arabia.
 2AC – AT: Solvency – Pompeo Circumvention
Removing arms key to solve – Trump won’t be able to circumvent Congress
Bazzi 6/8 [Mohamad Bazzi, a journalism professor at New York University, is a former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday.
He is writing a book on the proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran. “Trump wants to sell more weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Congress must stop him.” The Guardian, 8 June 2019, theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/08/saudi-arabia-trump-weapon-
arms-sales-must-be-stopped]
On the Friday before Memorial Day, when few Americans were paying attention, the Trump administration announced that it
would circumvent Congress and sell $8bn in new weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It was
Donald Trump’s latest attempt to give a blank check to two US allies leading a disastrous war in Yemen.
If Trump succeeds in getting around Congress, these weapons sales will prolong suffering in
Yemen and eliminate one of the last levers that allowed the US to exert influence over Saudi and Emirati
actions: the threat of Congress blocking arms deals.
On 5 June, a bipartisan group of senators said they would try to block the administration from going ahead with the sales by
introducing 22 “resolutions of disapproval” – one for each of the deals cleared by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The effort is led
by two unlikely allies: Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey and frequent Trump critic, and Lindsey Graham, a Republican
from South Carolina who is one of Trump’s biggest supporters.
The two senators agree on one thing: that Saudi Arabia should face more scrutiny of its actions in Yemen after Saudi agents
murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October. Since then, members of Congress
have tried to force the Trump administration to reexamine its alliance with the kingdom – especially its
relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, the brash and ruthless crown prince often considered an architect of the Yemen war.
But Trump and his senior aides have made clear that they still support the prince and won’t try to isolate him, despite a
CIA assessment that concluded, with “high confidence”, that Prince Mohammed ordered the killing of Khashoggi.
The senators’ effort, which includes seven co-sponsors, is yet another example of Congress trying to claw back its constitutional
responsibilities. On 24 May, when Pompeo notified Congress that the administration would move ahead with the $8bn deals without
congressional approval, he cited a rarely used provision of the Arms Export Control Act which allows the
president to bypass Congress if he determines there is an emergency that impacts national security. Pompeo invoked
the Trump administration’s favored bogeyman: an increased threat of “Iranian aggression”.
But over the past month the administration has inflated the threat posed by Iran to US troops and allies in the Middle
East and several hawkish Trump aides, especially national security adviser John Bolton, have pushed for a new confrontation with
Tehran. At Bolton’s request, the Pentagon updated plans to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East. The
administration is using similar scare tactics to justify its end-run around Congress to sell more
weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Despite efforts to regulate arms sales, Trump circumvented them – only removing
solves
De Luce 7/10 [Dan De Luce is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit. "Senators warn Trump admin not to bypass
Congress again on arms sales." NBC News, 10 July 2019, nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senators-warn-trump-admin-not-bypass-
congress-again-arms-sales-n1028566
WASHINGTON — Senators from both parties on Wednesday accused the Trump administration of overstepping its
authority by pushing through arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies in May without congressional
approval, and vowed to reassert the role of Congress in reviewing weapons deals.
Lawmakers vented their frustration at a hearing with the State Department official overseeing arms sales, C. Clarke Cooper, telling
him the administration had failed to make the case why $8 billion in weapons sales had to be expedited without time for
congressional oversight.
"For whatever reason, the administration — in what seems to me a not fully baked decision-making process — decided to
circumvent the law, decided to circumvent the constitutional responsibility of Congress and act unilaterally,"
said Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Cruz added: "And don't make the mistake of thinking that it is simply Democrats who are concerned about this."
If the administration attempted to bypass Congress again, Cruz said he would oppose the move and predicted other Republicans
would as well.
Several Republicans have joined Democrats in supporting bills disapproving of the arms sales, but
President Donald Trump has promised to veto the measures. Opponents would need to secure more Republican votes to overturn a
Trump veto.
Congress usually has 30 days to review all arms sales. But on May 28, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo invoked a rarely used
provision in arms control law to bypass Congress and declare an emergency to expedite the weapons deals, which he
said were justified due to the threat posed by Iran.