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2AC v NavyRussia AdvAT: Russia is AggressiveIts international power is declining and it only wants to preserve its own security. For example, Russia showed no signs of wanting to invade Crimea before it happened because they only invaded to counter perceived U.S. aggression, which is 1AC Mearshimer.AT: No Risk of MiscalcMiscalculation is likely – 1AC Shifrinson explains that NATO expansion causes a security dilemma where both sides misinterpret each other’s attempts to gain security. When NATO expands to protect European states, Russia thinks it’s being threatened. NATO doesn’t see that IT’S the one causing Russian aggression, and tries to escalate.AT: Military Tensions LowTheir evidence doesn’t assume territorial encroachment – Ukraine and Georgia will inevitably be admitted to NATO, which makes Russia feel like NATO is encircling it and preparing for war, which causes it to lash out.AT: Backing Away From 5 Causes Russia AggressionWe’ve already explained that Russia is only aggressive IN RESPONSE to perceived NATO aggression, which means withdrawing from NATO solves by changing U.S. military posture.European Unity AdvWe’re not going for this advantage. We’ll concede the argument that they made that European countries don’t have money to spend on their defense – that takes out their Grygiel and Brands turns, because arms racing won’t happen if they don’t have enough money to build up their militaries any more.US Leadership AdvO/VNone of the cards the 1NC reads to answer this advantage are more recent than 2015, which makes it a great history lesson on U.S. grand strategy during the Obama Administration, but NOT an argument.AT: Heg SustainableTheir evidence says hegemony WAS sustainable in 2014 – check the calendar and the occupant of the Oval Office. Our 1AC Carpenter evidence explains that the only way to create sustainable military strategy is by withdrawing to signal a more restrained military posture.The thesis of their evidence is also wrong – U.S. hegemony can’t deter conflict with Russia because of difference in security doctrine that cause U.S. shows of force to be serially misinterpreted. Russia won’t back down in response to NATO membership – it feels threatened and lashes out.AT: No OverstretchOur scenario is ENGTANGLEMENT, not overstretch. The 1AC Hillison evidence says that current levels of global engagement forces us into conflicts that 1) we have no business being in, and 2) we make worse by overreacting. The aff resolves by drawing down our commitments but maintaining other forms of engagement outlined in the 1AC Carpenter evidence.AT: Engagement SolvesTheir evidence is criticizing Obama’s level of international engagement arguing we need more. That’s not the status quo, and there’s no counterplan to increase engagement, which means the turn is non-unique. It’s also about the Middle East, NOT Europe, and doesn’t even MENTION Russia.The 1AC Carpenter evidence answers it – our level of engagement in a seventy-year treaty is no longer appropriate and a better way to engage Europe is through diplomacy and culture.ElectionsOne. No impact to a 2nd Trump term—he’ll be too weak politicallyGlastris 20 – the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. He was an editor at the magazine from 1986 to 1988Paul, April/May/June. “Why a Second Trump Term Will Not Be a Horror Movie.” many people, the Trump presidency has felt like one long horror movie. To me, it’s been more like a thriller: disorienting, appalling, emotionally wrenching, but not disempowering. Almost every insane or diabolical decision the president has made has been met with countermoves—by the courts, civil servants, voters, Nancy Pelosi—that have frequently lessened the impact and fortified my faith that all is not lost. The novel coronavirus is the latest case in point. Trump’s willful dismissal of the crisis in its early weeks will almost certainly result in many unnecessary deaths. But the wise words and prudent actions of others, from the National Institutes of Health’s Anthony Fauci to ordinary citizens, give me hope that we can “flatten the curve.” Similarly, the possibility that Trump could be reelected is, for many people, like a horror flick too frightening to watch. The essays in our cover package certainly provide evidence for maximum alarm.But there are reasons to think that a second Trump term would not be as apocalyptic as we might imagine. One reason is that the direst scenarios our essayists lay out—the end of Obamacare, a slashing of the safety net—are likely to happen only if Trump is able to continue to pack the courts with conservatives. But that presumes that the GOP holds the Senate. This has not been a sure bet since vulnerable Republican senators like Maine’s Susan Collins supported him in the impeachment trial. It is even less so now that the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee is moderate Joe Biden—and not Bernie Sanders, who down-ballot Democrats rightly see as a potential drag on their chances.Another reason is that second-term presidents almost always find themselves in a weakened position. Sometimes it’s because foolish decisions they made in their first terms catch up to them in the second term—think George W. Bush putting the singularly unqualified Michael Brown in charge of FEMA two years ahead of Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes it’s because they let their reelections go to their heads and then act carelessly—as Bush did with his push to privatize Social Security, Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky, and Ronald Reagan did with the Iranian arms-for-hostages deal. Even presidents who appear invincible can suffer irreparable damage. Nixon won the 1972 election in an overwhelming landslide. He was gone in less than two years.Of course, Trump has created more scandals in his first three years than any other president did in eight. What’s protected him so far, and what gives him a decent chance of winning reelection, is the rock-solid approval of Republican voters. Even in the wake of his mismanagement of the pandemic, that support remains (as of this writing) undiminished. Will his base continue to back him unqualifiedly for four more years regardless of conditions on the ground? I doubt it. Recall that George W. Bush was also beloved by conservatives in his first term. But then, after being re-inaugurated, he tried (and failed) to privatize Social Security. Then Katrina hit. Then Harriet Miers had to withdraw her Supreme Court nomination. Between January and November 2005, Bush’s approval rating among Republican voters fell by 22 points.Sure, Trump benefits from a hermetically sealed right-wing media ecosystem that recycles his self-serving nonsense. But that system was already a BFD during the Bush years—Fox News drew more viewers during the 2004 Republican National Convention than any other TV network. In the end, it could not save Bush from the real-world consequences of his own actions. The parties are even more ideologically sorted today, and Trump plays to the racism and xenophobia of his base, which Bush mostly did not. So it’s possible that he will retain the loyalty of his supporters regardless of what happens in a second term—continuing mass deaths from the coronavirus, a brutal recession with few fiscal tools to fight it, and so on. But if his numbers do begin to slip, it will be huge news. GOP lawmakers with their eyes on the 2022 elections will start to defy him. He will lash out and do more foolish, counterproductive, unconstitutional things. His base of support will shrink further. His party will get wiped out in the midterms. The House will impeach him again, and this time the votes will be there in the Senate to convict him. He’ll helicopter to Mar-a-Lago, where federal agents will be waiting with subpoenas. After a lengthy trial over crimes committed before and during his presidency for which he no longer enjoys immunity, he will live out his final days in prison.Two. Betting markets say Trump will win – and, COVID and the economy outweighRabouin, 5/11/20 – multi-platform, award-winning journalist, Markets Editor for AxiosDion, “The money is on Trump.” after the White House's delayed response to the coronavirus outbreak, unprecedented job losses and a bruising recession, investors and betting markets are still putting their money on President Trump to win re-election.The big picture: Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden holds a sizable lead in most national and individual swing state polls — but money managers expect Trump to retake the White House in November. In a late April survey of U.S.-based investors with at least $1 million of assets, UBS found that 53% said they planned to vote for Biden. But 52% think Trump will win.The intrigue: The world's most popular betting destinations show Trump as the clear favorite. The RealClearPolitics average of betting websites gives the advantage to Trump with an average spread of 8.2 as of Sunday night. Casino sportsbooks are paying around $83 for winning bets on Trump versus $135 for winning bets on Biden, making Biden the unequivocal underdog, Bovada shows.What we're hearing: The expectation for Trump to triumph seems to largely reflect optimism about the economy once various state and local lockdown orders end, economists say."We can’t expect that the economy is going to be in very good shape, although the trajectory ought to be pretty positive by November," Steve Skancke, a former Treasury Department and Council on Economic Affairs official in the Carter and Reagan administrations, tells Axios. As November approaches, it's "more than likely we’re going to see a positive stock market and there will be positive job growth," says Skancke, now chief economic advisor at wealth manager Keel Point.Between the lines: "The wildcard obviously is the virus and the [potential] vaccine," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Investor Service, tells Axios. "And that’s a very significant wildcard both on the downside and the upside for people’s perceptions of how the president managed all this and how they’re going to vote in November."Yes, but: Thus far Trump has not gotten the expected bump that comes from national catastrophes as Americans typically rally around the flag and the president, says Bernard Baumohl, chief economist at The Economic Outlook Group. "These are times when the nation as a whole, the American people, will look to the president and the White House for policies that will get them out of this mess and all they’re seeing is rhetoric designed to get Trump re-elected," he tells Axios. "He wants to see the economy be revived again but before it’s safe to do so. That I think is going to become somewhat catastrophic when the numbers start to pick up for that second wave" of infections.The bottom line: The election is likely to be a referendum on how Trump handles the pandemic and whether his push to restart the economy got the U.S. back on track or drove a second wave of infections that did even more damage.Three. Their link story is nonsense --- only a few voters aren’t locked in, and those voters won’t make up their minds until the very endCatanese 20 – national political correspondent for McClatchy in Washington. He’s covered campaigns for more than a decade, previously working at U.S. News & World Report and PoliticoDavid, 5/27/20. “The 5 percent: Biden and Trump chase shrinking pool of undecided voters.” Vissa, a 31-year-old Indian-American digital marketing entrepreneur in Tampa, Fla., as part of a pivotal and shrinking voting bloc: the undecideds.Biden and Trump campaign officials estimate this crop of swing voters only makes up somewhere around 5 percent of the total electorate in 2020, a considerably smaller available slice than in the last election. One pre-election panel found as many as 21 percent of voters were undecided in late October 2016. Recent national surveys from Fox News and The Economist found just 5 percent of voters said they didn’t know who they would choose in the presidential race.Both campaigns have already identified most of the voters in this small universe and are heavily targeting them with ads, knowing they could determine the outcome in the handful of battleground states that are typically won by the narrowest of margins.“They don’t go to the rallies, they don’t watch the briefings. They tend to get their news through reports and they’re not really focused on Biden,” John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s pollsters, said of this year’s undecided voters. “A lot of them haven’t heard many negative things about Joe Biden. They only hear negative stuff about Trump from the media.”Pollsters agree that truly undecided voters are a dwindling group, the result of accelerated polarization in the Trump era where even a national pandemic ends up breaking down by partisan tribe. And they surmise that even some who claim to be undecided are actually leaning in one direction or the other, making the bloc even smaller.The potential voters who sit on the fence in 2020 tend to be younger than 50, college-educated and in the middle to upper-middle class income bracket. They’re not all necessarily uninformed or even disengaged ?— Vissa himself has personally logged the disparity in references to Trump and Biden during CNN programming?— but they are generally skeptical of politicians and often the media. And while they hold disparate personal ideological leanings, they maintain their independence by repelling from major party labels.The Trump campaign believes a certain percentage of Biden’s core support ?— currently averaging at 48 percent?— is soft and ultimately movable more than five months out from the election. The Trump ad blitz that commenced earlier this month highlighting Biden’s verbal gaffes and portraying the former vice president as a pawn of China is designed to plant seeds of doubt among the softest portions of Biden’s base.“They also know which of their voters are soft and we’re coming after them,” said McLaughlin. “We haven’t laid a glove on them yet. But that’s going to change.”Part of this outreach involves a targeted project in which the Republican National Committee, in conjunction with the Trump campaign, keeps close tabs on around 20,000 swing voters in each key state, using local organizing teams to facilitate communication that ironically mirrors the strategy of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.But Biden’s numbers have been largely resilient in the face of Trump’s attacks. The former vice president’s advisers believe that is a testament to Biden being a known quantity that Trump will struggle to redefine.The presumptive Democratic nominee’s campaign is targeting some of its digital advertising, like a spot portraying Trump as a deer in headlights in the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, to persuadable voters in battleground states.Biden’s campaign is also betting that its recently formed issue task forces — constructed as an olive branch to progressives who supported Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary — will reduce defections and abstentions from liberals and younger people less enthusiastic about Biden. Surveys of some of the most disaffected voters are already showing a preference for Biden.Additionally, the lack of major third-party candidates this year may serve to underline a stark binary choice.“There are fewer undecided voters and there’s more energy this election because Americans have seen how badly Trump has mismanaged the coronavirus, and how it’s affected them, and they know the stakes couldn’t be any higher,” said Biden spokesman Mike Gwin.Some prominent Democrats, like pollster Cornell Belcher, have publicly argued that attempting to convert Trump supporters is a waste of time. Biden himself acknowledged last month he was unlikely to reach the president’s base. It could mean that this presidential election becomes more driven by base-motivating messages than appeals packaged to convert.But Trump’s support in public polls this year has consistently lagged from his 2016 total by about 3 percentage points, an indication that the softest part of his coalition is gravitating to Biden.Still, the most fluid voters characteristically remain volatile until the bitter end, susceptible to late breaking events and candidate mishaps. Trump, after all, pulled off his surprise win in 2016 by capturing double-digit margins among voters who decided in the last week of the campaign in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida.“It’s May and the only thing that matters right now is how much Donald Trump is screwing up,” said Jef Pollock, a Democratic pollster whose firm is conducting surveys for the pro-Biden super PAC Priorities USA. “In general, these are the voters that shift around at the close.”Four—No Impact — global democracy will survive TrumpHirsh, 19 – senior correspondent and deputy news editor?at?Foreign PolicyMichael, “Why the Liberal International Order Will Endure Into the Next Decade," Foreign Policy, "It’s become fashionable to wonder whether the liberal international order can survive the malign forces that have been lining up against it during the 2010s—what the?Wall Street Journal?called?the “Decade of Disruption.”?But based on recent trends, it’s a fair bet that democracy, globalism, and open trade will endure handily into the third decade of the 21st century.Start with the state of democracy. Nothing has been more alarming to internationalists than the one-two punch of U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who have taken power in two of the world’s oldest and most important democracies by awakening the old demons of nationalism. With Trump focusing his ire on NATO and the World Trade Organization, and Johnson stalking out of the European Union, the two leaders have transformed the once-hallowed “special relationship” from a bulwark of global stability (sullied though it was by the Iraq War) into what looks more like a wrecking ball. Elsewhere, illiberalism has overtaken young democracies, such as Hungary and Poland, and even threatened mature ones with the rapid rise of nationalist parties such as the Alternative for Germany and Norbert Hofer’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party of Austria. In the world’s largest democracy, India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party appear to be sending the same message. And there are considerable doubts about whether the democratic body politic possesses an immune system strong enough to fight off a plague of cyber-generated misinformation and disinformation, and systemic hacking by such autocrats as Russian President Vladimir Putin.But democracy just won’t give up, and in 2019—which could justly be called the year of global protest—it kept reinventing itself at the grassroots. This has been happening in the most unlikely of places around the globe, in countries such as Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Chile, and above all in Hong Kong, where thousands of determined protesters have braved bullets and tear gas, embarrassing Chinese President Xi Jinping even as he brutally consolidates his autocratic rule on the mainland. Perhaps the U.S. and British democracies are becoming decadent—and 2020 will tell us a lot about that question come November—but the idea of democracy remains a powerful, ever-replenishing urge that, as sociologists and political scientists have long told us, only gets stronger the more that income and educational levels increase around the world.The international economy is also undergoing some severe stress tests—and surviving remarkably intact. The year 2019 began with deep-seated fears that Trump’s trade wars would help trigger a global recession—and among the most concerned was Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who midway through the year suggested he and other central bank chiefs simply didn’t know how bad things could get. “The thing is,”?Powell said, “there isn’t a lot of experience in responding to global trade tensions.” Growth and investment are still slowing due in large part to the uncertainty Trump has created, but fears of a recession have receded. It turns out the U.S. president cannot single-handedly return the United States to the days of Smoot-Hawley—even his fellow neonationalist Boris Johnson believes in free trade—and the domino effect of retaliatory tariffs that followed in the 1930s, setting the stage for world war. (In June 1930, under the Smoot-Hawley Act, the United States raised tariffs to an average of 59 percent on more than 25,000 imports; just about every other nation reacted in tit-for-tat protectionist fashion, severely depressing the global economy.)Today, the complexities of a deeply integrated global economy and its supply chains may prove too much to undo—even for the most powerful person on the planet.And what of the institutions of the international system? The United States has always had an uneasy relationship with its post-World War II progeny, principally the United Nations, the WTO, and NATO—despite helping create them—and Trump only gave expression to an American id that was long seething under the surface. True, Trump is demeaning these institutions to an unprecedented degree and demanding far more of them. But he’s only saying more stridently what was said by, say, President Barack Obama, who also criticized the NATO allies for being free-riders, and former President George W. Bush, whose administration privately mocked the alliance and sneered at the U.N. (Another little-remembered precursor to Trump was President Bill Clinton’s feisty first-term trade representative, Mickey Kantor, who once said he wasn’t interested in free-trade “theology” and preferred that Americans behave like mercantilists.)Trump is making a serious run at denuding the WTO by?taking down its appellate court, but even that institution is likely to outlast a 73-year-old president who, at most, has only four more years in office to wreak havoc on the global system. This is especially likely because he is now mostly alone in his anti-globalist passion with the departure of his deeply ideological national security advisor, the militant John Bolton.Let’s not forget either that the advent of Trump and Johnson represents a legitimate backlash to major policy errors made by the elites who have dominated the international system. George W. Bush led the Republican Party badly astray with his strategically disastrous Iraq War and fecklessness over the deregulation of Wall Street, which set the stage for the biggest financial crash since 1929 and the Great Recession. That turned voters off to traditional Republican thinking and opened the door to Trump’s unlikely takeover of the party. Something similar happened in Britain, when Bush’s partner in these neoliberal economic delusions and his ally in an unnecessary war, the once-popular Labour leader Tony Blair, set the stage for Labour’s eventual handoff to the socialist Jeremy Corbyn. (A shift that was, in turn, analogous to the ascent of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and the left inside the U.S. Democratic Party in response to the rise of Trump’s 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton, who was seen as pro-war and too friendly to Wall Street.)But the larger point is that Trump and Johnson are only the latest stresses to a system that, since the end of the Cold War, has suffered some pretty major ones and yet endured. In the quarter-century since then, financial markets collapsed several times, and the global economy has remained intact. Islamist terrorists have struck at major capitals around the world, and a clash of civilizations hasn’t ensued. The world’s two largest economies, the United States and China, incessantly bicker, but they’re still doing business. Ivory tower realists continue to be dead wrong in their predictions that the international system will fall back into anarchy, even when politicians like Trump are doing their best to make that happen. On the realist view, the so-called West and its institutions should have disintegrated after the Cold War with the disappearance of the Soviet Union; as Owen Harries?wrote?in?Foreign Affairs?in 1993, “The political?‘West’?is not a natural construct but a highly artificial one. It took the presence of a life-threatening, overtly hostile?‘East’?to bring it into existence and to maintain its unity. It is extremely doubtful?whether it can now survive the disappearance of that enemy.”Instead, these international constructs only expanded—so rapidly and intensively that they generated a backlash. And that expansion is plainly still?outpacing the efforts to block or destroy it,?especially as we see other nations forging free trade deals behind Trump’s back. Above all, while plainly America’s stature as stabilizer of the international system has been seriously set back—first by Bush, most recently by Trump—there is some positive news even in the impeachment drama now underway. Although Trump is all but certain to be acquitted in the Senate, the impeachment vote in the House, following weeks of testimony by career U.S. diplomats, was a dramatic reaffirmation of traditional American values for fair dealing not just with Ukraine, but with all nations.Perhaps, for now, that will be enough to keep things intact.Five. Democratic president cannot solve warming — it requires collective action ---COVID proves it’ll failBordoff ‘20Jason, March 27, 2020, former senior director on the staff of the U.S. National Security Council and special assistant to President Barack Obama, is a professor of professional practice in international and public affairs and the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. "Sorry, but the Virus Shows Why There Won't Be Global Action on Climate Change," Foreign Policy, reality, COVID-19 reveals three reasons why fighting climate change is so hard.First, stopping the spread of this highly contagious disease requires that we all upend our daily lives in dramatic ways—and often do so for the benefit of others. Saving lives and sparing our medical system from becoming overwhelmed requires slowing the pace of the disease’s spread. Doing that, in turn, requires a range of public health measures including avoiding contact with others, especially since those carrying the virus may not even know they have it. Many young and healthy people should be able to recover from COVID-19, but “social distancing” is necessary to help others avoid contracting the disease, particularly the elderly or those with underlying medical conditions.In other words, “flattening the curve” of the pandemic is a classic collective action problem. Some people will choose to self-isolate to be responsible and help others, but if most others don’t do the same, there will be little benefit from that sacrifice to slow the disease’s spread. On the other hand, if everyone else self-isolates, a low-risk individual might choose to “free ride” on those sacrifices by continuing to live life as normal.Indeed, this behavior has been pervasive during the pandemic, undermining efforts to slow the spread. Despite the public health warnings, bars and restaurants remained full in major cities like?New York, beaches in Florida remained?crowded, and?revelers?in many other places around the world continued to ignore official orders to avoid congregating. “If I get corona, I get corona,” as one spring break student in Miami nonchalantly?put?it.Like COVID-19, climate change is the ultimate collective action problem. Each ton of greenhouse gas contributes equally to the problem, no matter where in the world it is produced. The United States contributes 15 percent of emissions each year; Europe, a meager 9 percent. Lawmakers in Brussels may choose to impose an economic cost on Europeans by ratcheting up the pace of decarbonization, but there will be little benefit in avoided climate impacts unless others around the world do the same.The global nature of climate change should rally nations to do even more to address it because they want others to follow. When the Obama administration was developing an estimate for the harm to society from carbon emissions, for example, it?chose?to use the global rather than domestic estimate of damage precisely for this reason. Because carbon dioxide impacts are global, and every ton of CO2 contributes equally to climate change, if all nations looked only at the impact of a ton of CO2 on their own nations, the collective response would be vastly inadequate to address the true damage from climate change.Unfortunately, too often the need for collective action is an excuse for inaction. House Republicans often?argue?that if China won’t commit to major emissions reductions, neither should the United States. As U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander recently?put?it, “When it comes to climate change, China, India, and developing countries are the problem.”To slow the spread of COVID-19, governments are clamping down to force collective action when individuals fail to follow guidelines. Cities across the world are shutting down businesses and events, at great cost. Yet the effectiveness of any one government’s action is limited if there are weak links in the global effort to curb the pandemic—such as from states with conflict or poor governance—even if the world is in agreement that eradicating a pandemic is in every country’s best interest. Climate change is even harder to solve because it results from the sum of all greenhouse gas emissions and thus requires aggregate effort, a problem particularly vulnerable to free-riding, as my Columbia University colleague Scott Barrett explains in his excellent?book?Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods. And whereas governments can force people to stay home, there is no global institution with the enforcement power to require that nations curb emissions.Even if the young and healthy are unpersuaded by appeals to the greater good, they should still avoid crowded beaches and bars because of the high degree of uncertainty about COVID-19, which may?impact?young people more than previously thought. Practicing social distancing not only helps others but is a risk mitigation strategy for oneself. Similarly, taking climate change action, even by countries less at risk than others, is a risk mitigation strategy because of the high degree of?uncertainty?over how severe the impacts of climate change will end up being—the so-called “of climate risk.The second sobering lesson from COVID-19 for climate change efforts is the importance of public buy-in and education. The problems of collective action described above are less acute when the public broadly understands the gravity of the threat.After suffering from failed responses to previous disease outbreaks, several Asian countries learned their lessons and have responded to COVID-19 far more rapidly than the United States and those in Europe. Residents of Hong Kong, for example, which suffered during the SARS epidemic,?canceled?gatherings and practiced social distancing before the government even ordered it because they understood the risks.While public concern with climate change is rising, there remains a long way to go. Only?half?of Americans believe climate change should be a top priority for the federal government, and the figure is far lower on the Republican side of the aisle.Indeed, COVID-19 itself may actually erode public support for stronger climate action, as the pace of climate ambition wanes during times of economic hardship. Historically, there is an inverse?relationship?in the United States and Europe between public concern about the environment and worries about economic conditions. Similarly, concern about economic growth has often caused China to ratchet back its environmental ambitions.? Just last week, China was?reportedly?considering relaxing emissions standards to help struggling automakers.The third reason COVID-19 should give pause to expectations about climate change action is because of what it reveals about the strong link between carbon emissions and economic activity.For decades, the energy intensity, and thus carbon intensity, of economic growth has declined, as economies become more energy-efficient. Each unit of economic growth contributes less to carbon emissions than it previously did. From 2014 to 2016, global greenhouse gas emissions did not rise at all, leading many to celebrate that emissions and economic growth had decoupled. Yet there remained a strong relationship between growth and energy use. As Harvard’s Robert Stavins?pointed?out, the rate of gross domestic product growth still very much affects emissions, as slower growth would have led emissions to fall.As COVID-19 brings the global economy to a standstill, economists?worry?about not just a recession, but even a global depression. In the United States alone, a record 3.3 million workers filed for unemployment benefits last week, a number likely to rise sharply. On the stock market, the Dow Jones index?wiped?out all the gains of Donald Trump’s presidency before rebounding on reports the U.S. Congress would pass a stimulus bill. As air travel and other transport is ratcheted back globally, oil demand has fallen by around 20 percent, and analysts estimate it will be down by at least 5 percent in all of 2020 compared to last year. A huge hit to economic growth would likely mean carbon emissions will fall in 2020 for the first time since the Great Recession of 2008.That may seem like good news, but it is not. First of all, economic contractions are not a desirable or sustainable way to curb emissions; emissions rebounded sharply after 2009. More importantly, the fact that it takes severe economic slowdowns like the Great Recession or COVID-19 to bring emissions down serves as a reminder of just how strongly tied emissions remain to economic growth—and thus how hard it is to lower them.That is why energy from renewable sources can grow as rapidly as it has over the past decade and yet fossil fuel use can keep rising at the same time as total energy use rises around the world, especially in fast-growing economies like China and India. As one example, Marianne Kah, an economist at the Center on Global Energy Policy, deconstructed a range of projections of oil demand growth to understand why analysts differ on when oil demand will peak and?found?that assumptions about economic growth are as important as assumptions about the penetration of electric vehicles.Policymakers have spent trillions of dollars and passed countless regulations, standards, and mandates to spur clean energy. That it takes a pandemic-induced economic standstill to actually bring emissions down should be a sobering reminder of just how hard addressing climate change will as living standards, fortunately, continue to rise in emerging markets.COVID-19 may deliver some short-term climate benefits by curbing energy use, or even longer-term benefits if economic stimulus is?linked?to climate goals—or if people get used to?telecommuting?and thus use less oil in the future.Yet any climate benefits from the COVID-19 crisis are likely to be fleeting and negligible. Rather, the pandemic is a reminder of just how wicked a problem climate change is because it requires collective action, public understanding and buy-in, and decarbonizing the energy mix while supporting economic growth and energy use around the world.Six. Disregard uniqueness claims based on polling --- they’re poorly focused snapshotsBlack 20 – Veteran journalist, writes Eric Black Ink for MinnPost. His latest award is from the Society of Professional Journalists, which in May 2017 announced he'd won the national Sigma Delta Chi Award for online column writingEric, 5/22. “On potential ‘Trump-Biden voters’ — and what fresh polls are showing.” I and every poll addict like me should constantly remind ourselves, fresh poll results are, as the cliché has it, merely a snapshot in time. Another, harsher saying has it that fresh poll results are like “crack cocaine for politics junkies.” Not only are they addictive, but their effect doesn’t last.By the time you read a poll result, it’s out of date. And the out-of-date snapshot is also somewhat out of focus. As you know, every poll result comes with a margin, plus-or minus three-or-four percentage points for “sampling error,” which mostly means it’s an estimate, based on the fact that only a sample of the electorate was interviewed and no sample perfectly captures the larger population it “represents.”Then there are problems like what portion of those identified as likely voters will actually vote, and which the undecideds break, and so on.You know all this. But your (and my) great desire to know what’s going to happen on Election Day may overpower our ability to take all that into account enough to remember that that shaky portrait of the recent past is not a reliable picture of what will happen on Election Day.If you (yes, like me) are extremely anxious, even more so than usual, to know how the presidential election of 2020 will turn out, you should mostly disregard national polling samples — as two of the last five presidential elections have reminded us, thanks to the Electoral College, a terrible system that doesn’t even reflect the intentions of the framers who gave it to us.Seven. The case outweighs and turns the disad—US hegemonic collapse and war with Russia would be much worse for warming and global democracy.CMR DAOne. Turn--Breaking bad CMR norms now key to preserving broader relations long term Lee, US Air War College Assistant Professor, 6-3-20(Carrie, “Dear Civ-Mil Community: The (Retired) Generals Are Speaking & We Should Listen,” accessed 6-17-20, ) JFNBut what the civil-military community gets wrong is that by saying any and all involvement is bad for military non-partisanship is also to say that there is no situation in which retired military officers, with three and four decades of service to and leadership of this country, should be allowed to fight for their profession. Instead, we should be thinking about the situations in which retired officers who speak out may actually preserve rather than degrade the norms of non-partisanship. This, I would argue, is exactly one of those times. Civil-military relations are full of behavioral norms; indeed, very little about how civilians and the military are supposed to interact is written into law or otherwise codified. Norms are useful for two distinct reasons. First, they provide the unwritten guidelines to behavior and generate a set of general expectations for “healthy” civil-military interactions. But perhaps even more importantly, the breaking of norms acts as a kind of alarm bell that signals to both the community and the broader public that something is terribly amiss. Deliberately undermining establish norms, especially norms that we think of as critical to the health of the profession, serves as a way to “break glass in case of emergency.” Seen in this light, norms are made to be broken—but only as a last resort. What does this kind of emergency look like? Again, the civil-military community has spent considerable amounts of time and effort exploring the conditions under which active duty officers should resign in protest or otherwise undermine the president. But the debate for retired officers has been less systematically evaluated, in many cases because retired flag officers do not de facto share the same restrictions on speech about the president and policies that the active duty must comply with. Even still, this debate is one that I have in my own classrooms in professional military education every year, in multiple forums: should generals exercise their new-found freedom of speech in policy, or should they stay silent to try and protect the military from appearing partisan—or even just political? This debate always generates fierce discussion amongst my students, and there is rarely consensus even within a small seminar. And it is true that over time, the norm has broken down as an increasing number of retired general officers endorse political candidates and get involved in partisan politics. Even still, however, groups of retired senior officers speaking out against a president or his policies have been relatively rare. Indeed, the exceptions appear to point to a single cause that would prompt groups of retired senior leaders to publicly break with a sitting administration: actions that jeopardize the military’s ability to fight and/or maintain public trust in a significant way. I would argue that we are in such a state of emergency again. The Trump administration has regularly and blatantly politicized the Department of Defense in ways the undermine the military’s ability to fight, recruit, retain, and keep public trust. The president has signed campaign paraphernalia on military bases, denigrated the opposition political party at major speeches in front of the troops, repeatedly refers to senior active duty military commanders as “my generals,” allows partisan media sources to influence decisions in military justice, revokes security clearances in retaliation for public criticism, and recently reached down to relieve a distinguished Navy Captain of command for making the administration look bad. The president’s repeated threats to use the military to establish “law and order”—which emerged in the late 1960s as a dog whistle to white Americans concerned about domestic unrest and civil rights—falls squarely within this pattern.Two. Trump’s disrespect of the JCS has tanked CMR Boot, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow, 20(Max, “A Few Good Men,” accessed 6-4-20, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2020) JFN A key turning point in the relationship was a July 2017 briefing for Trump held in what’s known as “the Tank,” a secure Pentagon conference room used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Accounts of the meeting are provided by Bergen (who begins his book with it), Snodgrass (who organized it and was present), and Rucker and Leonnig (who offer the juiciest details). Mattis had summoned the president and his senior advisers to explain why the U.S.-led system of security alliances and trade relationships still benefited the United States. It did not go well. All the accounts agree that Trump, who has a notoriously short attention span and a hair-trigger temper, openly fumed during Mattis’s presentation. According to Rucker and Leonnig, the president lashed out at U.S. allies, telling his generals, “We are owed money you haven’t been collecting!” Mattis interjected, “This is what keeps us safe,” but Trump predictably wasn’t buying it. “You’re all losers,” he spat. “You don’t know how to win anymore.” A few minutes later, the president—who had cited bone spurs to evade service in the Vietnam War—told a roomful of decorated generals, “I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”Three. CMR tensions are inevitable Gordon, Wall Street Journal Reporter, 6-14-20(Michael, “White House Ties With Military Face Major Test; Respect for military could be imperiled by embroiling it in domestic politics, retired generals have warned,” WSJ, accessed 6-17-20, p. ProQuest) JFN Getting the balance right in civilian-military relations has bedeviled Republican as well as Democratic administrations. President Clinton's push to end a ban on gay people serving openly in the military faced opposition from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell and some of the service chiefs, especially Marine Corps Commandant Carl Mundy Jr. Tensions with the Defense Department emerged during Mr. Trump's first month in office when he used the Pentagon as a backdrop to sign an edict suspending entry to the U.S. by people from a number of Muslim-majority countries. The measure fell outside the Pentagon's mandate. "You know, all the presidents that I worked for liked to use the military as a prop," said Robert Gates, who served in top security positions in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, speaking Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. "I think this president's probably taken that to a new level, but the military has to be very sensitive about being exploited in that way."Four. History proves US civil military relations are resilient even during times of tension Owens, 1-11-19(Mackubin Thomas, “Trump and U.S. Civil–Military Relations — the Generals Aren’t Always Right,” accessed 9-22-19, ) JFN The fact is that American civil–military tensions are nothing new. Indeed, they can be traced to the beginning of the republic and include Washington at Newburgh, the debate between Federalists and Republicans regarding a military establishment, Andrew Jackson’s unauthorized incursion into Spanish Florida in 1818, the very public debate between Whig generals and a Democratic president during the Mexican War, the tension between Lincoln and General George McClellan during the Civil War, the clash between Andrew Johnson and Congress during Reconstruction, the involvement of prominent military men in the “Preparedness Movement” begun prior to U.S. entry into World War I, General Leonard Wood campaigning in uniform while actively running for the Republican nomination for president in 1920. Of course, we don’t have to go that far back. Current concerns about civil–military relations began in the 1990s during the presidency of Bill Clinton, as he clashed with the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Colin Powell, over such issues as the use of American troops in the Balkans and open homosexuals in the military. During the administration of George W. Bush, we had the “revolt of the generals” during the war in Iraq. We sometimes forget that civil–military tensions during the Obama administration were also acute, fueled by the president’s belief that the military were arrayed against his policies. In their respective memoirs, both of Obama’s first two secretaries of defense, Robert M. Gates and Leon Panetta, remarked on President Obama’s deep distrust of senior military leaders.Five. Case turns the disad—current military commitments make hegemony unsustainable, and only the plan makes them effective. Great power war and hegemonic collapse would dramatically decrease CMR—multiply Vietnam times 1,000.Nationwide protests against police brutality prove that CMR is low now – ongoing use of military force makes further decline inevitable.Other withdraws should’ve triggered the DA – their evidence is from 2008, which means withdraws in the Middle East, which THEIR EVIDENCE LITERALLY CITES AS BEING BAD FOR CMR, should’ve triggered it.No link – their evidence is about military colleges and the ROTC being defunded, which the aff wouldn’t affect.No internal link – their evidence doesn’t say that CMR would be destroyed, just that people might not like the aff. People can still like the military overall while disapproving of a single decision.No impact – their impact card says NOTHING – it doesn’t explain why CMR is key to military strength.AssuranceOne. Not unique—global proliferation is inevitable due to Iran, South Korea, and Japan pulling out of the NPTSokolski, 2020, <executive director of The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, Henry>, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, The NPT turns 50: Will it get to 60?, pp 63-64, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****What makes much more nuclear proliferation more likely? Three trends, all of which have received too little attention. First is the decay of nuclear taboos. Long relied upon by anti-nuclear weapons groups in states such as Japan as a legal-political barrier to nuclear weapons acquisition, the NPT risks becoming a poster child for such decay. In 2005, the Bush administration announced it would share nuclear technology and uranium fuel with India in violation of the NPT’s prohibition on such commerce, and the world mostly went along. In 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly announced in a 60 Minutes interview that Saudi Arabia would immediately pursue nuclear weapons if he thought Iran had them. Not long after, South Korean legislators, anxious that the United States might reduce troop levels there, called on their government to develop options to make nuclear weapons. Both countries are members of the NPT. Iran has also repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the treaty. But if Tehran does, so too would Saudi Arabia. Turkey, and perhaps Egypt, Algeria, and the United Arab Emirates, might later follow suit. All of these states except the United Arab Emirates insist they have an inalienable right to enrich uranium and to recycle plutonium – activities that can bring states within weeks of acquiring nuclear weapons. Turkey, too, has lost respect for nuclear taboos. In September 2019, Turkish President Recep Erdogan complained that it was “unacceptable” that Turkey could not have nuclear weapons. Later that month, at the United Nations General Assembly, he went much further, making the case that the NPT regime of five recognized nuclear armed states was illegitimate (Gilinsky and Sokolski 2019). There are more than five important states, he explained, and either no one should have nuclear weapons, or all states should be free to acquire them. His comments at the public assembly were met with a rousing applause. Second, and arguably worse, is renewed vertical proliferation – the increase in size and sophistication of nuclear arsenals by states that already have them. Combine possible Middle Eastern withdrawals from the NPT with continued Russian, Chinese, and North Korean nuclear weapons force buildups. Add fraying US security ties with its East Asian allies South Korea and Japan and you have the diplomatic and military ingredients for Seoul and Tokyo to bolt from the treaty, likely prompting the NPT’s total collapse. After a possible Japanese withdrawal, an Australian nuclear weapons program would become conceivable, as would programs in Vietnam, Indonesia, and in any number of other states (think Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and even Germany). Two. Zero risk of Germany going nuclear—no government support, NPT blocks, and lacks capabilitiesTertrais, 2019, <Deputy Director of the Paris-based Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (Foundation for Strategic Research), Bruno>, Washington Quarterly, Will Europe Get Its Own Bomb?, Summer, vol. 42, #2, pp. 49-50, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Let us be clear: a number of options and scenarios should be taken off the table of strategic forecasting, given that they have almost zero chance of becoming real in the coming two decades. These include a German bomb, a French-German one, a EU-wide common deterrent, and a British-French deterrent. A German Bomb. In the past two years, several German officials and experts have publicly toyed with the idea of a national nuclear program. However, they do not include any highly influential figures and are hardly representative of the German debate. Such statements reflect more the current national insecurity about the future of the U.S. guarantee than anything else—as well, perhaps, as a laudable effort to lift thought taboos in German strategic thinking.3 Germany gave up any nuclear option on no less than three different occasions, in different legal forms. In 1954, it promised not to produce nuclear, biological or chemical weapons on its soil. True, up until the late 1960s, a national nuclear option was openly discussed in Bonn’s ruling circles and with allies. But a set of institutions and mechanisms was then set up that killed this option for good. Germany subscribed to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)—a treaty whose support by the Soviet Union was in no small measure driven by the need to avoid a German bomb. In parallel, NATO set up structures and procedures for nuclear policymaking and nuclear use sharing, including the Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), a body through which Bonn’s influence on NATO strategy would become significant. Finally, Germany gave up its nuclear option for the third time through the “Four Plus Two” treaty of 1990 which led the way to unification. There is zero appetite today in mainstream German policy circles for a national nuclear program—and, indeed, continued skepticism in parts of the left for NATO nuclear sharing. Furthermore, Germany does not have the required wherewithal for even a rudimentary program. Not that it would have to start from scratch: it has superb scientists and engineers, and the country is a world leader in machine tools. But contrary to Japan, it neither has any strictly indigenous uranium enrichment nor does it have fuel reprocessing capabilities any longer. Germany’s two enrichment plants located in Gronau belong to the Urenco international consortium created after the treaty of Almelo (1970). The German share in Urenco is not government-owned but belongs jointly to two utilities companies, E.On and RWE. And even though their products serve the market and not only German plants, the future of these plants remain uncertain after Berlin’s decision to give up nuclear power and phase out its existing reactors by 2022. There will be no Nuklear Sonderweg—or, more precisely, the idea of a German bomb is so far off the reasonable range of future strategic thinking that it is not worth thinking about.Three. Public opposition blocks Germany from developing nucsVolpe & Kühn, 2017, <Assistant Professor at the Defense Analysis Department of the Naval Postgraduate School and a Nonresident Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Tristan; Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ulrich>, Washington Quarterly, Germany’s Nuclear Education: Why a Few Elites Are Testing a Taboo, vol. 40, #3, pp. 19-20, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****This general reluctance toward military power extends and translates directly into the nuclear realm, the second driver of the debate. Since the Adenauer era when then-Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (CDU) secretly fathomed a potential trilateral German-French-Italian nuclear weapons program, the German public has opposed a nuclear-armed Bundeswehr, with rejection rates only increasing. Today, 93 percent of Germans are in favor of an international ban on nuclear weapons (though the German government did not participate in negotiations that only recently resulted in the successful conclusion of such a treaty). Even more telling, a majority of Germans seems to doubt the concept of extended nuclear deterrence, with 85 percent of Germans supporting the removal of all forward-deployed U.S. short-range nuclear missiles from Germany. The public rejection of nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, and civil nuclear energy represent the single most critical obstacle to any German nuclear weapons option —even if the federal government decided in the future that the security situation was driving them down this path. The current debate is thus an early educational effort from some elites who want to change perceptions about the necessity of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence in the twenty-first century.Four. No link—US withdrawal will cause Germany to seek nuclear protection from France and the UK and not build their own bombFix, 2020, <Programme Director International Affairs, K?rber-Stiftung, Liana>, Will NATO Die Aged 70?, February 5, p. , <accessed, 6-5-20>, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****"We are experiencing the brain death of NATO" – this statement of French President Emmanuel Macron has triggered curious reactions in Germany:?Suddenly, most German politicians – even from center-left parties – felt compelled to underline in very clear terms their commitment to the Alliance.?At this year’s Berlin Foreign Policy Forum, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas made the point: "NATO is alive and kicking!". Macron’s remarks have served as a wake-up call for the German political elite. While some European countries – namely France and the UK – can rely on their own security, thanks to?Trident?and?Force de frappe, and others like Poland have started building a special relationship with the US,?Germany has no alternative to NATO as a security provider.?A recent?K?rber Policy Game, conducted in cooperation with the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), posed the "Gretchenfrage" to high-level senior participants from Germany, France, Poland, the UK, and the US: What would be the future of NATO if the US withdrew? The results were telling – and sobering.?Without American security guarantees, the principles of European solidarity were quickly challenged and Europe was at serious risk of splitting into different camps. Confronted with a scenario of Russian escalation, the German team suggested asking France and the UK to expand their nuclear umbrellas to other European countries, since developing a German nuclear weapons capacity was considered an unlikely option. The French team even proposed a new, EU-centered, collective defense alliance after a US withdrawal, which was met with skepticism especially from the German, British and Polish side. The K?rber Policy Game thus demonstrated how existential NATO is for Germany’s security. Yet, is the German public aware of NATO’s crucial role for their country’s security? In the 2019 survey of?The Berlin Pulse, most Germans preferred a nuclear umbrella provided by the French or the British rather than US nuclear protection.?However, despite this skeptical stance towards the US, most Germans still have a favorable view of NATO – which is a positive sign for the future.Five. France and the UK will provide nuclear protection to Germany if the US withdraws from NATOTertrais, 2019, <Deputy Director of the Paris-based Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (Foundation for Strategic Research), Bruno>, Washington Quarterly, Will Europe Get Its Own Bomb?, Summer, vol. 42, #2, pp. 58-59 JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****The perspective would change in case of a significant alteration in the transatlantic security relationship, directly affecting its nuclear arrangements. As German expert Oliver Thr?nert put it, “a decisive Europeanization would only make sense if European governments arrived at the conclusion that the US no longer constituted a reliable Alliance partner in terms of extended nuclear deterrence.” Without going that far, dramatic changes in NATO would indeed affect the range of realistic scenarios. Think, for instance, of a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe—an irrational decision for sure, but which is not unthinkable in the current U.S. administration. Or think of an unraveling of the NATO nuclear basing and sharing mechanisms following a unilateral decision of a member country (such as Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands or Turkey) to cease being a part of it. Both are reasonable “what if?” hypotheses. In such scenarios, it is likely that France would be ready to consider playing a stronger, visible role in ensuring that Europe continues to feel protected by nuclear deterrence. In concrete terms, France could base part of its airborne arsenal (say, on the order of 10 missiles) in Germany or in Poland (basing) and/or agree that they could be carried by European fighter-bombers (sharing). For both political and technical reasons (the small size of the French airborne arsenal, about 40-45 missiles), it is unlikely that Paris and its European partners would seek to mirror the exact scope of current NATO arrangements. A less ambitious option would be to replace the NATO SNOWCAT (Support of NATO Operations With Conventional Air Tactics) procedure with an identical European one, where nonnuclear nations commit themselves to participate in a nuclear strike package with nonnuclear assets (for suppression of enemy air defenses, surveillance, refueling, etc.). The same arrangements could exist at sea: one could envision a European nuclear maritime task force around the French Charles-de-Gaulle carrier (which can carry air-launched nuclear missiles), with accompanying European ships and, possibly, a European nuclear squadron based on it. If such orientations were taken, they would need to be accompanied, just as is today the case in the NATO context, by an agreement on the conditions for their use. This would include legal and security arrangements (host nation support, etc.) but also, possibly, a common nuclear planning mechanism, based on a common conception of nuclear employment, which could coexist with national ones. An open question would be the role the UK nuclear force would then play. In the context of Brexit, London is eager to bolster its European security credentials. If the European deterrence question stays out of formal EU circles, it is conceivable that the United Kingdom could be part of such arrangements one way or another—unless the cost of maintaining a modernized deterrent proved excessive in post-Brexit circumstances, for instance in case a secession of Scotland forced the relocation of UK nuclear assets somewhere else in Britain. In sum, this would be a form of Europeanization of the Alliance’s nuclear arrangements (or a European nuclear pillar), though not a complete substitute for U.S. nuclear protection—the latter could only happen in the (improbable, even in the era of Trump) case of a complete breakdown of the transatlantic military bond.Six. France nuclear sharing does not violate the NPTTertrais, 2019, <Deputy Director of the Paris-based Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (Foundation for Strategic Research), Bruno>, Washington Quarterly, Will Europe Get Its Own Bomb?, Summer, vol. 42, #2, p. 60, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Would it be legal? But such countries would need to do so only to build national nuclear weapons—something that is not on the agenda. A NATO-like European nuclear deterrent would no more violate the NPT than the current NATO arrangements do. Also, the argument ignores the German and Italian reservations they made when they ratified the NPT (see above).Seven: Case outweighs— the risk of war with Russia swamps the risk of prolif.Trump destroys assurance now – he’s on record decrying having to spend money on coming to allies’ defense, and has publicly cozied up to Putin. Turn – NATO withdraw prevents Russia from lashing out and attacking Europe. That’s better for reassuring allies’ fears because we end the risk of war with Russia.The NPT is ineffective – it didn’t prevent North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Israel, or India from acquiring nuclear weapons. That either means prolif is inevitable OR means that challenges to the regime are resilient.2AC CardsAT: No R/U.S. TensionsRecent military exercises on Russian border states escalate tensionsO’Connor 2/4 – Senior writer of foreign policy for Newsweek. He specializes in the Middle East, North Korea, and other areas of international affairs and conflict.Tom O’Connor, “Russia Says It ‘Will React’ to Massive U.S. Military Move On Its Borders, ‘It’s Unavoidable,’” Newsweek, 4 February 2020, 's top diplomat has warned his government would take responsive measures to an upcoming, massive U.S. military deployment and U.S.-led exercises across multiple European states bordering Russia.Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told official government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta in an interview Monday that "naturally, we will react" to the NATO Western military alliance's Defender-Europe 20 exercise, which is due next month to begin facilitating the largest U.S. military deployment to Europe in 25 years. The majority of the drills are set to take place in May and June, involving some 36,000 personnel—including 25,000 from the U.S.—across Germany, Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania."We cannot ignore these processes, which are of great concern, but we will respond in such a way that does not create unnecessary risks," Lavrov added. "It's unavoidable. I hope that any normal military official and politician understands this.""Those who provoke this kind of absolutely unjustified doctrine want a response in order to continue to escalate tensions," he added. "But it's worth noting that everything that we do in response to the threats created by NATO members to our security we do exclusively on our own territory. Just like all our nuclear weapons are on our territory, unlike American nuclear weapons."U.S. Army Europe describes Defender-Europe 20 as "the deployment of a division-size combat-credible force from the United States to Europe, the drawing of equipment and the movement of personnel and equipment across the theater to various training areas." The large-scale movement is "linked" to six major U.S.-led exercises: Allied Spirit XI, Dynamic Front 20, Joint Warfighting Assessment 20, Saber Strike 20, Swift Response 20 and Trojan Footprint.U.S. threats to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty (OST) make tensions uniquely high – prevents diplomatic solutions and ensures military confrontationLiechtenstein 6/10 – diplomatic correspondent and freelance journalist based in Vienna, Austria. She has 18 years of experience working in international organizations, think tanks, and journalism. She received as masters degree in the history of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.Stephanie Liechtenstein, “Want to Avoid U.S.-Russian Conflict? Keep the Lines Open,” Foreign Police, 10 June 2020, little fanfare, U.S. President Donald Trump last month delivered another dangerous blow to keeping international peace when he announced the United States would leave the Open Skies Treaty (OST).The agreement—signed in 1992—allows mutual reconnaissance flights over the territories of 34 states. It was designed to allow countries to monitor military activities from the sky and thereby build confidence that neither side is preparing for war or for a surprise attack. So far, more than 1,500 unarmed surveillance flights have been conducted under the treaty since it went into effect in 2002. Trump pulled out citing Russian nonadherence, and the exit goes into effect in six months, barring an unlikely about-face.Trump and his team argue that Russian violations undermine the treaty’s goals of transparency, cooperation, and trust-building, and they believe that there must be consequences for noncompliance. The United States also believes that Russia is using OST flights to collect sensitive information about civilian infrastructure in the United States. (The counterargument here is that OST images cannot detect anything that is not already available from satellites.)But in reality, the United States will suffer the most—losing out on a critical way of keeping open communication channels with Moscow. The impacts will be felt outside U.S. borders, too. Withdrawing from the treaty further erodes the conventional arms control regime and significantly increases the risks of conflict in Europe and beyond.By withdrawing from the OST, the United States weakens the last functioning pillar of the conventional arms control architecture. The treaty is the final element of a carefully crafted framework that has helped maintain peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area since the end of the Cold War. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower first put forward the idea of an Open Skies Treaty in 1955, but it only materialized later, when President George H.W. Bush took advantage of easing tensions between East and West and initiated a negotiation process that led to the signing of the treaty. The two other main international documents of the post-Cold War era are the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty) and the 2011 Vienna Document on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures—which established limits on conventional weapons and provided for military transparency measures, respectively. Both, however, have been undermined in recent years. Russia suspended its participation in the CFE Treaty in 2007, after other state parties refused to let the adapted CFE Treaty enter into force. And the Vienna Document is outdated because Moscow is resisting its modernization.In addition, the U.S. withdrawal from the OST will most likely have negative effects on possible negotiations to prolong New START, the last remaining U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control agreement that expires in February 2021. At the beginning of June, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that “the negotiations on that crucial issue, important not just for us but for the entire world, have failed to start.”As other treaties have diminished in force, the OST has become increasingly critical. It now represents one of the very few remaining opportunities for military-to-military contacts between Washington and Moscow. This is crucial because other communication channels between the militaries have run dry in recent years, particularly since the 2014 Ukraine conflict.In truth, the OST should be considered less of an intelligence-gathering tool for the United States and more of a trust-building instrument—particularly with Russia. Dialogue between the militaries is fundamental to the OST: During surveillance flights, military officers from both the observing state and the observed state sit together in one aircraft, sometimes joined by several other officers from other countries. This builds crucial personal relationships, helping to avoid military misunderstandings.One of the key advantages of images taken during Open Skies flights is that they can be shared with all signatories of the treaty, unlike secretly collected intelligence data that states usually want to protect. European diplomats in Vienna who are familiar with the topic told Foreign Policy that it is much easier to act diplomatically (and politically) on images taken during Open Skies flights than on secretly collected data, as OST images cannot be discarded as fake or unreliable. (Every Open Skies aircraft and its cameras are examined by experts from treaty members as part of a strict certification process.)Questions that arise as a result of the OST images—for example, those showing Russian military infrastructure being built along NATO’s borders—can be raised within the Open Skies Consultative Commission (OSCC), the treaty’s implementing body, which meets on a monthly basis at the headquarters of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna. This is also the place where states can clear up any misunderstandings, avoiding military tensions and conflict. This is particularly useful in times of crisis, for example in 2014 when OST flights showed Russian military buildup along Ukraine’s borders.Indeed, according to diplomatic sources in Vienna, the Russian treaty violations have also been discussed in the OSCC in Vienna. In previous years, violations related, for example, to Russian flight restrictions over Chechnya were solved there successfully.The current Russian treaty violations relate mainly to Moscow blocking Open Skies flights over the highly militarized Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, where Moscow has imposed a flight length restriction of 500 kilometers (311 miles), citing safety concerns for other civilian aircraft in the area. Russia has also blocked flights within a 10-kilometer (6-mile) zone along its border with the Russian-occupied Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. While these regions are considered to be within the borders of Georgia, Moscow sees them as independent states and therefore not parties to the treaty. Russia in the past also banned flights over major Russian military exercises. The United States, in turn, blocked requests to fly over certain military facilities in Alaska and Hawaii and closed down airfields for overnight stopsIn Vienna, European diplomats said they agreed with Trump that the Russian violations undermined the treaty’s goals of cooperation and transparency. But they had hopes that the frictions could eventually have been resolved on a diplomatic level within the OSCC and other formats.Even James Gilmore, the U.S. ambassador to the OSCE, noted some progress in early March when he said Moscow was apparently ready to allow overflights of military exercises and conceded that even one of the recent OST flights near Kaliningrad was very “cooperative.”Yet, with the announcement of U.S. withdrawal from the treaty in six months from now, the chances for a diplomatic solution are now coming “close to zero,” as one diplomat put it, given a further hardening of positions in Moscow and Washington. ................
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