NATO NEG: Compiled 9-30-20****



****NATO NEG: Compiled 9-30-20****Russia Advantage AnswersRussia---1NCNATO doesn’t cause Russian aggression---giving in only encourages further expansionNicholas Clairmont 16, Editorial Fellow at The Atlantic, “Is NATO Redundant? We'd Better Hope So”, The Atlantic – Reporter’s Notebook, 8/25/2016, idea that the blame for the situation in eastern Ukraine rests at the feet of the West is dubious. Who is more responsible for the current chaos and death? Washington, for its tepid support for the Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk government, voted in months after Russia’s unmarked brigades had already seized swathes of Ukraine? Or Russia, for invading its Western neighbor and lying about it, after its attempts to persuade the neighbor’s kleptocratic ruler to back away from a popular pro-Western deal led to his ouster? An Atlantic reader provides a nice reality check:Nobody forced Putin to invade Ukraine and no one is forcing him to start military competition. Any backing off will simply encourage him to try to rebuild the Russian empire, which is no one’s interest, not even the Russians’. We have no more reason to respect the former Russian empire than we have to respect the former British empire. Russia is a declining power with a GDP about the size of Canada's. It will decline further, and the oligarch-dominated government will neither stop the population decline nor reinvigorate the economy.Here’s one more paragraph from Tayler’s piece:As a starting point, the debate should assess whether NATO’s relentless expansion—begun during the 1990s and proceeding in waves, with Montenegro’s eventual accession, once-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia having been promised membership, and even historically neutral Finland and Sweden now pondering participation—played a role in Russia’s increasingly aggressive posturing toward the West. As the world’s most powerful military alliance slid up to Russia’s borders, the West couldn’t have expected Putin to sit idle.Whatever the merits of NATO expansion, has it been truly “relentless”? Or is it more accurate to say that the 28 members joined on seven distinct occasions over 67 years? Tayler suggests that Putin was clearly provoked by the alliance’s growth, and could not simply leave independent countries alone. Under that logic, challenging Georgia, annexing Abkhazia and South Ossetia, stirring a crisis in eastern Ukraine that has now claimed almost 10,000 lives, and playing the victim while ducking responsibility, was a reasonable response on Putin’s part. These, I would submit, are far from reasonable responses to NATO’s growth.Yet, in Tayler’s piece, there are more instances of taking Putin’s logic at face value. We are told, for example, that “NATO’s continued European expansion through the decades, like its bombing campaigns in the former Yugoslavia to coerce an end to internecine wars tearing the region apart, demonstrated a willingness to use force in Russia’s backyard against one of its historical allies." It takes some mental gerrymandering to accept this claim: Kosovo is 1,893 kilometers from Moscow. By contrast, it is 697 kilometers from Rome, 567 from Athens, 717 from Vienna, 1,238 from Geneva, and 1,043 from Ankara.In his analysis, Tayler evaded the fact that Putin’s foreign policy involves invading neighbors, threatening to nuke Danish ships in the Baltic, and conducting assassinations in places like London and Washington. Putin is attempting to morally blackmail the remaining true world powers into treating Russia like one of them, in an effort to maintain his grip on power by way of nationalist appeal. Giving into this blackmail is not a sound strategy.There are legitimate complaints Russia can and does make against America. Washington has far too close a relationship with the democracy-promoting “quasi-NGOs” or “QUANGOs” in Russia that constitute some of the U.S. support for regime change. (It is, however, worth remembering why an organization that seeks to give a country’s people a say in their own government is inherently inimical to the Putin regime.)Tayler does not address why it’s the West that should make all the concessions necessary to improve relations with Moscow. It’s especially strange that he does not explore whether Russia might itself help bring this détente, 2.0, nearer by compromising on some of its desires. That seems the better option, since the Russian leader deemed the end of the Soviet empire, under which half of Europe was enslaved, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.The most confounding idea in Tayler’s original post is this: “Détente 2.0 would entail the renunciation, in writing, of NATO’s plans to invite Ukraine and Georgia, coupled with Moscow’s recognition that both countries retain the right to join whatever economic or political union they desire.” Tayler asks us to accept a world that effectively offers the countries Russia believes reside within its sphere of influence the choice of any alliance they want, so long as it isn’t NATO—and any geopolitics they like, so long as it adheres to Moscow’s revisionism.Tayler’s piece, in the end, offers us a choice between letting Russia have its way with eastern Europe and risking war that may well be nuclear. There is every reason to think that this is a false binary. If it isn’t, NATO is more relevant than ever.There’s no risk of Russia miscalc or accidentsDr. Steven Pinker 18. Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. “Chapter 19 Existential Threats.” Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.The first is to stop telling everyone they’re doomed. The fundamental fact of the nuclear age is that no atomic weapon has been used since Nagasaki. If the hands of a clock point to a few minutes to midnight for seventy-two years, something is wrong with the clock. Now, maybe the world has been blessed with a miraculous run of good luck—no one will ever know—but before resigning ourselves to that scientifically disreputable conclusion, we should at least consider the possibility that systematic features of the international system have worked against their use. Many antinuclear activists hate this way of thinking because it seems to take the heat off countries to disarm. But since the nine nuclear states won’t be scuppering their weapons tomorrow, it behooves us in the meantime to figure out what has gone right, so we can do more of whatever it is. Foremost is a historical discovery summarized by the political scientist Robert Jervis: “The Soviet archives have yet to reveal any serious plans for unprovoked aggression against Western Europe, not to mention a first strike against the United States.”89 That means that the intricate weaponry and strategic doctrines for nuclear deterrence during the Cold War—what one political scientist called “nuclear metaphysics”—were deterring an attack that the Soviets had no interest in launching in the first place.90 When the Cold War ended, the fear of massive invasions and preemptive nuclear strikes faded with it, and (as we shall see) both sides felt relaxed enough to slash their weapon stockpiles without even bothering with formal negotiations.91 Contrary to a theory of technological determinism in which nuclear weapons start a war all by themselves, the risk very much depends on the state of international relations. Much of the credit for the absence of nuclear war between great powers must go to the forces behind the decline of war between great powers (chapter 11). Anything that reduces the risk of war reduces the risk of nuclear war. The close calls, too, may not depend on a supernatural streak of good luck. Several political scientists and historians who have analyzed documents from the Cuban Missile Crisis, particularly transcripts of John F. Kennedy’s meetings with his security advisors, have argued that despite the participants’ recollections about having pulled the world back from the brink of Armageddon, “the odds that the Americans would have gone to war were next to zero.”92 The records show that Khrushchev and Kennedy remained in firm control of their governments, and that each sought a peaceful end to the crisis, ignoring provocations and leaving themselves several options for backing down. The hair-raising false alarms and brushes with accidental launches also need not imply that the gods smiled on us again and again. They might instead show that the human and technological links in the chain were predisposed to prevent catastrophes, and were strengthened after each mishap.93 In their report on nuclear close calls, the Union of Concerned Scientists summarizes the history with refreshing judiciousness: “The fact that such a launch has not occurred so far suggests that safety measures work well enough to make the chance of such an incident small. But it is not zero.”94 Thinking about our predicament in this way allows us to avoid both panic and complacency. Suppose that the chance of a catastrophic nuclear war breaking out in a single year is one percent. (This is a generous estimate: the probability must be less than that of an accidental launch, because escalation from a single accident to a full-scale war is far from automatic, and in seventytwo years the number of accidental launches has been zero.)95 That would surely be an unacceptable risk, because a little algebra shows that the probability of our going a century without such a catastrophe is less than 37 percent. But if we can reduce the annual chance of nuclear war to a tenth of a percent, the world’s odds of a catastrophe-free century increase to 90 percent; at a hundredth of a percent, the chance rises to 99 percent, and so on.The risk of NATO/Russia war is low because force levels are stableAleksandr Khramchikhin 18, Deputy Director of the Institute for Political and Military Analysis in Moscow, 1/25/2018, “Rethinking the Danger of Escalation: The Russia-NATO Military Balance”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an atmosphere of crisis permeated by mutual recriminations and suspicions, both sides—NATO and Russia—have engaged in a series of military activities along the line of contact. These maneuvers in turn have triggered multiple warnings from both sides of a sharp deterioration in European security, a growing threat of a military confrontation between Russia and NATO, and an urgent need to deescalate the situation in order to avoid a catastrophic war with disastrous consequences for all. An emerging conventional wisdom maintains that the new Cold War in Europe, if allowed to continue unchecked, runs the risk of escalating into a hot war unless steps to reduce tensions are taken swiftly.But conventional wisdom is often wrong, and so it is this time. The hysteria that has engulfed public commentary throughout Europe about this ostensibly dire military situation on the brink of getting out of hand has little, if any, basis in fact. Both sides in the standoff exaggerate the tensions and the danger of escalation, and the risks of the military moves—their own and their adversary’s—supposedly driving these tensions.In reality, the military balance between Russia and NATO is stable, the danger of escalation is hardly approaching critical levels, and little needs to be done militarily to defuse the current tensions. The true cause of the tensions is not military, but political and diplomatic. Until those causes are resolved, tensions between Russia and the West will remain high. The likelihood of a military confrontation will remain low, however, because neither side’s posture points to a heightened state of readiness or intention to go on the offensive. Until that changes, political and diplomatic tensions will remain mere tensions.THE BALANCE, THEN AND NOWThe best evidence that the military situation in Europe is stable and that the continent is not on the brink of World War III is in the forces that each side has available for conducting military operations. Even a brief comparison of the present-day arsenals of Russia and NATO to those of the Soviet Union and NATO during the height of the Cold War should allay fears of military conflict (see table 1). This comparison should also take into account critically important political and psychological factors. Russia’s and NATO’s present-day forces do not measure up well against their predecessors of a generation ago.One remarkable feature of the present situation is that even though the number of NATO member states has nearly doubled since the end of the Cold War, the alliance’s order of battle across many classes of weaponry has decreased since 1982, when East-West tensions were high. Over the past quarter century, military technology has developed rapidly, new weaponry has come online, and many advances in warfare have taken place. However, the arsenals of most European countries have had minimal qualitative improvements that do not begin to compensate for the major reductions in their military capabilities. Major acquisitions of military hardware have been limited mostly to wheeled armored personnel carriers (APCs) to be employed in expeditionary warfare.The size of the U.S. military presence in Europe has decreased to an even greater degree since the end of the Cold War. At the beginning of 2016, the U.S. military had deployed ten brigades in Germany, but only two of these (the 2nd cavalry regiment and 12th combat aviation brigade) were actual fighting elements; the remaining eight were purely support units.1 One American airborne brigade is deployed in Italy.2 In 2017, the U.S. Air Force component deployed in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom had nine wings, but these are primarily support units, and there are only six fighting squadrons.These cuts in military hardware are consistent with a general tendency in the West (to a greater extent in Europe than in the United States) to embrace ideas of hedonism, pacifism, postmodernism, tolerance, and political correctness. A 2016 Pew survey found that Europeans overall, with the exception of the Poles and Dutch, do not support increasing defence spending. Many Europeans are reluctant to support the use of hard power in international affairs. A 2017 Pew survey found that Europeans are also divided in terms of their willingness to come to a NATO ally’s defense against Russia, with Germany, the UK, and Spain demonstrating the least support. Along with the falling birth rates experienced in these countries, this shift in defense dynamics makes it virtually impossible to conduct a war that would result in major loss of life.As a result of these shifts in attitudes and ideological trends, NATO troops may be unlikely to demonstrate heroism and willingness to make sacrifices, elements that are absolutely essential in wartime. Almost all NATO countries have transitioned to an all-volunteer military force, which has further decreased the motivation of their military personnel, or at least suggests that they are motivated more by money than by patriotism. The transition to an all-volunteer force has also resulted in increased defense spending, for reasons that deserve further consideration.Like those of its NATO rivals, Russia’s modern-day military capabilities do not compare favorably with the combined military machine of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies (see table 2). Even a cursory comparison of Soviet and Eastern European militaries at the height of the Cold War—in 1982—and now makes clear that Russia is not poised for offensive action in the European theater.THE HIGH COST OF WARNATO forces are highly sensitive to the risk of incurring casualties, and this heightened sensitivity was one of the reasons many Western countries chose to develop a concept of noncontact network-centric warfare heavily reliant on precision-guided munitions (PGM). However, this approach requires extremely expensive weaponry, equipment, ammunition, and supplies. Shrinking NATO military forces and arsenals mean that significant losses of lives or hardware have become unacceptable: losing even a few tanks and aircraft is now almost a catastrophe, comparable to losing a battleship or an armored division.A high-intensity war that calls for large stocks of ammunition is also becoming prohibitively expensive—a trend illustrated by the evolution of wars that NATO countries have waged over the last quarter century. In 1991, NATO countries, with significant support from both Egypt and Syria, roundly defeated Iraq’s large and well-equipped army in Operation Desert Storm. The coalition against Iraq used PGMs only against high-value targets in the Desert Storm campaign.Russia---NATO Not Key---2NCRussia would be upset and aggressive regardless of NATODr. Hal Brands 19, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, PhD in History from Yale University, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, “If NATO Expansion Was a Mistake, Why Hasn’t Putin Invaded?”, Bloomberg News, 5/14/2019, for the critique that it was NATO expansion that provoked Russian revisionism, this argument has always been flimsy. Yes, the expansion angered Russian officials, during Yeltsin’s time as well as Putin’s. It was undoubtedly humiliating for the fallen superpower. But the idea that NATO expansion caused Russian aggression rests on an implicit counterfactual argument that, absent NATO expansion, Russia would not have behaved in a domineering fashion toward countries on its border. There is simply nothing in Russian history — and nothing in Vladimir Putin’s personality — that supports this argument.Russia---Concessions Bad---2NCConcessions do nothing to build relations because Russia’s only driven by inferiority and grievance---scaling back NATO only emboldens themDr. Daniel Gouré 18, Senior Vice President with the Lexington Institute, Masters and Ph.D. Degrees in International Relations and Russian Studies from Johns Hopkins University and B.A. in Government and History from Pomona College, “A Competitive Strategy to Counter Russian Aggression Against NATO”, Lexington Institute Report, May 2018, Russian Threat to NATO and EuropeWhat does President Vladimir Putin want? This question has bedeviled Western government officials, intelligence officers and academics for almost twenty years. Previous American administrations constructed their policies towards Russia and relations with Putin based on the assumption that fundamentally, they were dealing with a normal state and leader. Washington’s Russian policy was driven largely by the belief that Moscow was motivated by the same set of interests and concerns as most other nations: security and prosperity at home, a recognized place in the global order and freedom to conduct its domestic politics as its government saw fit.There was some slight recognition that the Russian experience since the end of the Cold War colored the Kremlin’s views of Western intentions, the value of the existing international order and the applicability of liberal notions of domestic governance to the Russian condition. Also, there was some reluctance to totally embrace Vladimir Putin given his KGB background and how he rose to power. Overall, however, it was an article of faith in virtually every Western capital that Russia was a country with whom common interests could be found and that Putin was a leader driven by the usual and conventional set of motives.What the West never recognized, what its leaders really could not fathom, was the fact that Russian foreign and security policies were driven by an overwhelming sense of inferiority and grievance. All that the West could offer Moscow -- economic development, access to technology, membership in the G-8, arms control agreements or a special status with respect to the NATO Alliance -- were insufficient to reassure Russia that it was both safe and an equal. It turns out that the Kremlin could only feel secure if its military position was unassailable and the West was vulnerable at the same time. Security for Moscow was and remains a zero-sum calculation.None of our diplomats and intelligence officers were able to see that Putin was a man driven by overweening ambition and personal malice. His desire to be the leader of a great power, whose views and interests had to be considered by the global community and a military power to be feared took precedence over concerns for the economic well-being or political rights of his own people. Consider the magnitude of the nationalistic grandiosity behind his statement, made in 2005, that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.”9Giving ‘concessions’ on NATO emboldens Russia and increases tensions---their fundamental motive is conflictualRobert Kagan 18, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, formerly in the State Department, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled Order, Knopf, First EditionIt was in this context that the United States and the West came to be viewed as a threat: not to Russia’s security but to Russian ambition and Russian pride. Many Russians, led by Putin, have pointed to NATO enlargement as proof of the West’s hostile intent—and many American critics of the decision have agreed. But as Russian generals and strategic thinkers admitted in candid moments, NATO’s expansion did not increase the alliance’s overall military capabilities or the threat to Russian security. The two decades after the Cold War saw steady decreases in the numbers of U.S. troops in Europe and, even by Russian estimates, an overall reduction of the “joint military potential of its members.”140 Putin certainly had much less reason to worry about the U.S. or NATO threat when Barack Obama was in the White House than Gorbachev did in the era of the Reagan defense buildup. More than Russia’s security, NATO’s enlargement threatened Russia’s ability to reassert its regional sphere of interest, to reclaim its position as a dominant power in Eastern and Central Europe and its standing on the world stage as an equal of the United States. This may not have been strictly rational, but feelings of pride and honor are often more potent than rational calculations of interest. They shaped the policies of Germany and Japan, the self-described “have-not” nations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the result was to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Germany’s arms buildup accompanied by a bullying diplomacy produced the very predicament German leaders claimed to fear: the encirclement by hostile neighbors. Russia’s actions have had the same effect. By the end of the Obama administration, Putin’s attempts to restore Russian influence and military involvement from Northern Europe to the Middle East sufficiently unnerved its neighbors that the United States felt compelled to increase its military role in a region from which it had been steadily pulling away. Last year American forces in Eastern Europe increased for the first time in three decades. Many in the West have seen this as a “security dilemma” and sought ways to solve what they regard as an unfortunate misunderstanding. Such was the theory behind the Obama administration effort to “reset” relations with Russia back in 2009. That effort failed, however, and in large part because it misdiagnosed Russians’ feelings and motives. In the classic security dilemma as imagined by international relations theorists, insecurity rises on both sides despite the fact that both sides are trying to reduce their insecurity. Tensions rise even as both sides seek to reduce tensions. Yet reducing tensions has never been Putin’s objective. He has wanted to increase tensions, and insecurity, on both sides. And he has had sound reasons for wanting to do so. The problem Russia has faced since the end of the Cold War is that the greatness Putin and many Russians seek cannot be achieved in a world that is secure and stable, in which the liberal order remains coherent and cohesive, especially in Europe, and in which the United States remains willing and able to continue providing the basic guarantees that make the liberal order possible. Russia’s economy today is the size of Spain’s. Its military, except for its nuclear force, is no longer that of a superpower. Its demographic trends suggest a nation in decline. The present world order affords Russia the chance to be more secure than at any time in its history. But in this world order Russia cannot be a superpower. To achieve greatness on the world stage, Russia must bring the world back to a past when neither Russians nor anyone else enjoyed security. To return Russia to its historical influence on the world stage, the liberal order must be weakened and toppled, and international strategic competition must be returned to its normal historical state. Such a world not only offers the best chance of restoring Russian greatness. It also serves Putin’s personal ambitions. It justifies and even requires a strong leader. Like the tsars of the past, Putin tells the Russian people that to defend a “vast territory” and to occupy “a major place in world affairs” require “enormous sacrifices and privations on the part of our people.”141 Stalin said much the same, and indeed Putin’s repeated comparisons of the United States with Nazi Germany and his claim that opponents in Ukraine and elsewhere are Nazis, evokes not only the Great Patriotic War and past Russian glory but also the need for a strong leader like Stalin. Putin’s hostility to the liberal world is also personal. Ever since he consolidated power, he has worried that the external forces of liberalism would work to undermine his authoritarian rule at home. Behind every democratic revolution on former Soviet territory, in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, he saw the hand of the West, and particularly the United States, even though the role of outsiders was not the decisive factor in the toppling of the authoritarian regimes in those countries. His objection to the expansion of NATO has less to do with the eastward advance of the alliance’s military power than the presence of democracies closer to Russia’s borders. Putin is at least as worried about the eastward advance of the European Union as he is about NATO. It was after Ukraine negotiated a trade agreement with the EU that he invaded and seized Crimea. It is hard to see what concessions the United States and the West could offer to address the complex mix of feelings and motives whose sources are more internal than external, more psychological than strategic. Obama’s “reset,” his decision to trim back missile defenses in Poland in response to Russian objections, his tepid response to the attack on Ukraine, and his acceptance of a Russian military role in Syria and the broader Middle East did nothing to cure Russians’ sense of grievance or tame Putin’s ambitions. They only emboldened Putin to press for more. The election of Trump, who throughout his campaign expressed a desire for improved relations with Moscow, did not affect Putin’s approach to the world. Those who suggest we should recognize a Russian sphere of interest in its region should recall that Russia’s historical sphere of interest does not end in Ukraine; it begins in Ukraine. It includes the Baltic states, and it includes Poland. That is a dangerous path to head down, as history has shown. Even if we sacrificed Ukrainian independence or Georgian independence or Baltic independence in the hope of calming Russian anxieties and sating Russians’ ambitions, such concessions would not solve the problem, any more than feeding Manchuria to Japan and Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany solved those problems. The peace established after World War II and which endures almost seventy-five years later was not based on accommodating Japanese and German anxieties, even though those nations suffered infinitely greater horrors at the hands of the Allies than anything Russians suffered at the end of the Cold War. Among the liberal order’s greatest contributions to international peace has been the discrediting and denial of great-power spheres of interest. To begin acknowledging and accepting such spheres again would be a big step back to old patterns of history and to the conflicts and instability that characterize the international system “as it is.”Russia---Not AggressiveRealism shows Russian aggression not connected to NATOAlexander Lanoszka (2020), Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Waterloo, “Thank goodness for NATO enlargement”. Int Polit 57, 451–470 (2020). ****NCC’20 Novice Packet****In the following section, I make three related arguments. First, there are strong reasons to suspect that Russia would have developed hostile intentions against countries located in Central and Eastern Europe regardless of NATO enlargement. Accordingly, NATO enlargement has provided a useful hedge that raises the cost of aggression. Second, NATO enlargement is largely innocent of charges that it pushed Russia into authoritarianism or aggressive international behavior. Third, deterrence and defense measures appropriate to the Baltic region—where NATO’s commitments appear to be the most vulnerable—are not as costly as commonly asserted. Intentionally or not, NATO enlargement fulflled the need for a useful hedge against Russian aggression. In fact, the arguments that critics of NATO enlargement make themselves point to counterfactuals suggesting that NATO enlargement helped stabilize Europe rather than undermine its security.Take Mearsheimer’s argument that NATO enlargement provoked Russian aggression. According to him, the irresponsible pursuit of liberal hegemony in Russia’s so called sphere of influence—Eastern Europe and the Caucasus—incited Russia’s war against Georgia in 2008 as well as its annexation of Crimea and the subsequent conflict with Ukraine. Setting aside his 1990 warnings about the Kremlin, Mearsheimer is known for offensive realism, which argues that states strive to maximize their power in order to achieve security. For Mearsheimer, great powers ‘seek regional hegemony.’ Crucially, he adds that ‘a regional hegemon might someday face a local challenge from an upstart state, which would surely have strong incentives to ally with the distant hegemon to protect itself from attack by the neighboring hegemon’ (Mearsheimer 2001, 140–141).Offensive realism suggests that Russia would have sought regional hegemony after the Cold War regardless of NATO enlargement. It is a great power like any other—albeit one in relative decline—and so faces incentives to try to maximize its influence within its own neighborhood. From the perspective of Mearsheimer’s theory, regional conflict begins when other countries wish not to align with the regional hegemon and so look to foster closer diplomatic ties elsewhere. Yet this desire for external support is endogenous to the underlying conflict between the aspiring regional hegemon and its potentially wayward neighbors (Lanoszka 2018, 352). Moreover, Mearsheimer’s argument suggests that, had NATO refused to expand eastward, Russia would have had an opportunity to pursue regional hegemony more aggressively once it reconstituted its post-Soviet military capabilities. Polish decision-makers were attuned to this risk. Polish minister of foreign affairs Krzysztof Skubiszewski warned that a neutral Central Europe ‘would easily become an object of competition among stronger states or superpowers. It would be especially true of Poland, located between Germany and the former Soviet Union’ (quoted in Gorska 2010, 69). Because of its direct proximity to Western Europe, instability in Central Europe could not be quarantined as it arguably could be in Central Asia. Even as a unipole, the United States thus had an interest in stabilizing Europe so as to avoid a repeat of the regional wars that befell the continent earlier in the twentieth century— wars to which the United States committed much blood and treasure.NATO not really cause of Russian aggression, merely excuse – sources otherwise are picking up on Russian spinMarten, K. (2020), chair the Barnard Political Science Department at Columbia University, former director of the Program on U.S.-Russia Relations at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, “NATO enlargement: evaluating its consequences in Russia”. International Politics. doi:10.1057/s41311-020-00233-9, tog, ****NCC’20 Novice Packet****At its base, the causal claim that NATO’s geographic expansion by itself caused anything to happen in Russia is complicated by an important fact: NATO enlargement had no direct impact on the Russian state or Russian territory. No borders were changed, and Russia lost no alliances, trade pacts, or other institutional arrangements. In November 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Charter of Paris, affirming the right of all sovereign states to form their own security relationships. Shortly thereafter Moscow lost what it might have considered the bugger states that shielded its territory from Germany when the Warsaw Pact dissolved in March 1991 on the initiative of the Visegrad negotiating group of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. This dissolution of the Soviet Cold War alliance occurred without encouragement by any NATO member, and absent any US or NATO promise of a new security architecture for East-Central Europe (Asmus 2002, 79; Solomon 1998, 14; Binnendijk 1991). The Soviet Union itself dissolved that December because of a purely internally driven set of initiatives (which US president George H.W. Bush strongly opposed), led by Ukraine and welcomed by President Boris Yeltsin of what was then the Russian Soviet Republic (Plokhy 2014).Analysis of how NATO’s post-Cold War enlargement per se affected Russia’s relations with the West is further complicated because enlargement (which publicly began with a NATO study in late 1994, peaked from 1997 through 2004 as states bordering Russia were invited to join, and continues today) occurred alongside numerous other significant and largely negative security interactions between Russia and the West. The effects on Russian perceptions and planning of these various events are impossible to disentangle from those caused by enlargement. The most significant of these events include NATO airstrikes and NATO-led peace operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, where Russian diplomats and soldiers played complex and sometimes contradictory roles; US and British airstrikes against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in 1998 and the eventual US led coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, both of which occurred without United Nations Security Council (UNSC) approval and in the face of what would have been Russian vetoes; US unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with Russia in 2001–2002, followed by US bilateral agreements with Poland and Romania (with NATO support) to build ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems on their territories against Russian wishes; and the UNSC approved NATO mission against Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, which morphed into a regime-change operation that Russia opposed. None of these events depended on NATO enlargement—arguably not even the agreement to build BMD sites in Romania and Poland, given that the USA also has bilateral BMD equipment arrangements with a wide variety of non-NATO members (including Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates) (Reif 2019). Russia and the West also found themselves at odds during this fraught time because Russian military forces remained in Georgia and Moldova against the wishes of their UN-recognized sovereign governments, undermining the newly signed Adapted Conventional Forces in Europe (A/CFE) Treaty of 1999. NATO enlargement was not a discrete event in the panoply of Russia’s security relationships with the West and cannot be treated as if it were.There is no question that NATO’s geographic enlargement was a major irritant to Russian leaders and contributed to the decline of the overall relationship between Russia and the West—but there is little evidence that enlargement actually threatened Russia. Instead, NATO enlargement was a marker for Russia’s declining status and the growing influence of the USA in the world; it reflected, rather than caused, a shift in the relative global power balance. Given the long history of Soviet-NATO confrontation during the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Russia’s weakness and instability in the 1990s, any action that showcased the growth of relative US influence, especially in Europe, would likely have raised Russian hackles.As the Eisenhower group correctly foresaw, enlargement challenged the domestic political standing and reform efforts of President Yeltsin in particular and hence played some indirect role in complicating the push for Russia’s Westernization. US leaders were well aware of this problem and tried mightily to work around it by delaying the progress of enlargement while attempting broad outreach toward Russia (Talbott 2002). But Russian elites knew that NATO had never attempted to attack the Soviet Union or Russia and remained fundamentally defensive in orientation and mission. Indeed, every indirect effect of NATO enlargement was filtered not merely through the preexisting psychological and sociological perceptions of Russian leaders and citizens, but also through the intentional manipulations of the Kremlin and of Russia’s vocal, varied, and sometimes violent nationalist and extremist political groups. Those who predicted that nationalists would run with the enlargement issue were correct—but that is a far cry from the argument that the nationalists would defeat reformers because of it.Rather than coming up with a definitive answer to the question of what effect NATO enlargement has had on Russia, this article will concentrate on exploring the difficulties of trying to answer that causal question. First, it will look at the simplest aspect of the question: the objective military postures of the new NATO member states that bordered Russia and how Russia reacted to them. NATO was actually weakened (for both political and geographic reasons) as enlargement continued, and Russia knew it. If that were ever to change, Russia would have significant advance warning—and Russia of course retains a massive nuclear deterrent to protect its territory. Russia indeed did not react militarily to NATO enlargement, doing little to enhance the defense of its NATO-facing regions. The only aspect of geographic change that appeared to cause angst in the Kremlin was a 2006 agreement (the East European Task Force) involving US-supported military facilities upgrades in Romania and Bulgaria. It is possible that the location of these two new NATO states along the Black Sea became justification in Putin’s mind for the wars he launched in Georgia and Ukraine, even if actual NATO military activities there posed no threat to Russia.Russia---AT: US/Russia RelationsStrong US/Russian relations are impossible---their fundamentally strategy is irreconcilable with the U.S. and no policy change can alter thatThomas Graham 19, Managing Director at Kissinger Associates, Senior Russia Expert on the National Security Council Staff During the George W. Bush Administration, “Let Russia Be Russia: The Case for a More Pragmatic Approach to Moscow”, Foreign Affairs, November-December 2019, the end of the Cold War, every U.S. president has come into office promising to build better relations with Russia—and each one has watched that vision evaporate. The first three—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—set out to integrate Russia into the Euro-Atlantic community and make it a partner in building a global liberal order. Each left office with relations in worse shape than he found them, and with Russia growing ever more distant.President Donald Trump pledged to establish a close partnership with Vladimir Putin. Yet his administration has only toughened the more confrontational approach that the Obama administration adopted after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Russia remains entrenched in Ukraine, is opposing the United States in Europe and the Middle East with increasing brazenness, and continues to interfere in U.S. elections. As relations have soured, the risk of a military conflict has grown.U.S. policy across four administrations has failed because, whether conciliatory or confrontational, it has rested on a persistent illusion: that the right U.S. strategy could fundamentally change Russia’s sense of its own interests and basic worldview. It was misguided to ground U.S. policy in the assumption that Russia would join the community of liberal democratic nations, but it was also misguided to imagine that a more aggressive approach could compel Russia to abandon its vital interests.A better approach must start from the recognition that relations between Washington and Moscow have been fundamentally competitive from the moment the United States emerged as a global power at the end of the nineteenth century, and they remain so today. The two countries espouse profoundly different concepts of world order. They pursue opposing goals in regional conflicts such as those in Syria and Ukraine. The republican, democratic tradition of the United States stands in stark contrast to Russia’s long history of autocratic rule. In both practical and ideological terms, a close partnership between the two states is unsustainable.Cooperation is structural and locked-in and there’s no impact---allies fill-inAndrei A. Sushentsov 19, Director of the Institute for International Studies at MGIMO University, and Maxim A. Sushkov, Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of International Trends Analysis at MGIMO University, “The Nature of the Modern Crisis in U.S.-Russia Relations”, Russia in Global Affairs, 1/17/2019, the past four years there has been plenty of discussion about the nature and character of the degradation taking place in Russian-U.S. relations. Many analysts compare the current situation with the Cold War, when the world was divided into two opposing camps seeking to expand their influence at each other’s expense. The two superpowers were irreconcilable, balanced on the verge of war, and had complete control of the information space in their respective spheres of interest. Those were ideal conditions for confrontation.The present situation is much more complex. Indeed, a large part of the international agenda is still affected by U.S.-Russian relations. The standoff between the two countries also increases tension in the international system, while the absence of any visible solutions to the current crisis adds to the feeling of “general confusion.” But relations between Moscow and Washington no longer determine the dynamics of modern international relations as much as they did during the Cold War. The common space of confrontation—informational, economic, political—creates a high degree of interdependence when antagonisms are superimposed on the areas of cooperation. It is no longer a duel between superpowers. Many more key players are now involved in international processes (Lukin, 2016; Nikitin, 2016). Allies and opponents are becoming increasingly situational, and competition in such strategic industries as energy, communications, transport, arms trade, and information is emerging as a key international process.The current confrontation can hardly be rationalized. On the one hand, there is no complete understanding of the nature of the changes taking place: the Trump phenomenon, Brexit, conflicts in the Middle East, and the like. The opposing parties do not believe a big war is possible and allow themselves to walk on the edge. They understand the historical perspective—where exactly the world is going—differently.Russia and the United States speak increasingly different languages and use different definitions of the same notions. In this situation not only diplomacy and political expertise often fail their missions, but even intelligence services prove helpless. However, all this does not mean that the world has become as black-and-white as before or that there are only us and our conflict and nothing else. There are increasing signs of an emerging polycentric world. Bloc discipline is slackening not only between Russia and its allies, but also within the West. Many EU countries have expelled Russian diplomats, but it is much more important to look at which countries have not done so and why. The current developments in Russian-U.S. relations are not a new Cold War (Safranchuk, 2018; Legvold, 2016). Yet the exchange of political and military signals is becoming increasingly harsh: provocations, sabotage, and compromising information campaigns have become more acrid, as evidenced by events in Aleppo and Idlib, alleged chemical attacks in Syria, the Skripal provocation, attempts to derail the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline project, and the situation in Ukraine.Russia Relations: DoomedImproving relations impossible under Trump – structure of US politics means Russia just pocketsCui Heng 8/20/20, post-doctorate researcher from the Centre for Russian Studies, East China Normal University, “Trump unable to change rocky US-Russia ties”, Global Times, accessed 8/22/20 *tog **NCC Packet 2020-21**But the situation will not turn out as Trump wishes. Trump himself cannot change the course of US-Russia relations. The political infighting in the US has made Trump's efforts to improve US-Russia relations into a vain exercise. As US presidential election looms, the Democratic Party will certainly object to any moves by Trump. Even Trump invites Putin to the US with his presidential power, the US' Russia sanction bill still stands as the biggest block in US-Russia relations. Moscow is well aware of the structural contradictions with Washington. It knows that Trump's personal will is not enough to change the confrontational status between the two countries. Even if Putin visits America, this does not necessarily mean any changes will occur in bilateral ties.Moreover, Russia is clear that since the US launched its anti-China campaign, the US has taken all possible means to sow discord between China and Russia. Since the Ukraine crisis began six years ago and Western sanctions were imposed on Russia, the sustained China-Russia relationship has helped Russia survive one of its most diplomatically and economically difficult periods. Russia clearly understands that China-Russia relations support Russia's present major power status. Therefore, Russia has supported China on a number of international agendas since the Trump administration launched the anti-China campaign. It is worth remembering that Russia under Putin's rule sticks to a pragmatic foreign policy and prioritizes national interests. If Trump invites Putin to visit the US with the aim of extending the New START, Putin would be willing to go. But this does not mean changes will occur in US-Russia relations, nor that will Russia choose to side with the US. China should hold its strategic resolve as China-Russia relations will remain stable despite complex international dynamics.Russia: NATO Prevents WarRussia is emboldened absent the U.S.Valasek 18—(director of think tank Carnegie Europe and former ambassador of Slovakia to NATO). Tomas Valasek. How Trump and Putin could kill NATO. July 11, 2018. . **NCC Packet 2020-21**If so, we enter uncharted territory. Such a move would reduce the fear in Russia — whether irrational or not — that NATO is planning an offensive. But its positive effects would be limited. European countries would continue their military exercises because they remain concerned, for good reason, about Russia’s expansionist agenda and do not want to be caught unprepared. NATO’s eastern border will remain tense. Without the backstop of U.S. firepower, it would likely become a more dangerous place, as Russia would be emboldened by its heightened odds of prevailing in a conflict, and thus less likely to exercise restraint.There’s no EU fill in – NATO collapse takes them with it. Collapse of European alliances causes extinction.Zack Beauchamp 18, senior reporter at Vox, where he covers global politics and ideology, and a host of Worldly, Vox's podcast on covering foreign policy and international relations, “How Trump is killing America’s alliances”, Vox, **NCC Packet 2020-21**How the weakening of American alliances could lead to a massive war There has never, in human history, been an era as peaceful as our own. This is a hard truth to appreciate, given the horrible violence ongoing in places like Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar, yet the evidence is quite clear. Take a look at this chart from the University of Oxford’s Max Roser. It tracks the number of years in a given time period in which “great powers” — meaning the militarily and economically powerful countries at that time — were at war with each other over the course of the past 500 years. The decline is unmistakable: [[TABLE OMITTED]] This data should give you some appreciation for how unique, and potentially precarious, our historical moment is. For more than 200 years, from 1500 to about 1750, major European powers like Britain and France and Spain were warring constantly. The frequency of conflict declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, but the wars that did break out — the Napoleonic conflicts, both world wars — were particularly devastating. The past 70 years without great power war, a period scholars term “the Long Peace,” is one of history’s most wonderful anomalies. The question then becomes: Why did it happen? And could Trump mucking around with a pillar of the global order, American alliances, put it in jeopardy? The answer to the second question, ominously, appears to be yes. There is significant evidence that strong American alliances — most notably the NATO alliance and US agreements to defend Japan and South Korea — have been instrumental in putting an end to great power war. “As this alliance system spreads and expands, it correlates with this dramatic decline, this unprecedented drop, in warfare,” says Michael Beckley, a professor of international relations at Tufts University. “It’s a really, really strong correlation.” A 2010 study by Rice’s Leeds and the University of Kentucky’s Jesse C. Johnson surveyed a large data set on alliances between 1816 and 2000. They found that countries in defensive alliances were 20 percent less likely to be involved in a conflict, on average, than countries that weren’t. This holds true even after you control for other factors that would affect the likelihood of war, like whether a country is a democracy or whether it has an ongoing dispute with a powerful neighbor. In a follow-up paper, Leeds and Johnson looked at the same data set to see whether certain kinds of alliances were more effective at protecting its members than others. Their conclusion is that alliances deter war best when their members are militarily powerful and when enemies take seriously the allies’ promise to fight together in the event of an attack. The core US alliances — NATO, Japan, and South Korea — fit these descriptors neatly. A third study finds evidence that alliances allow allies to restrain each other from going to war. Let’s say Canada wants to get involved in a conflict somewhere. Typically, it would discuss its plans with the United States first — and if America thinks it’s a bad idea, Canada might well listen to them. There’s strong statistical evidence that countries don’t even try to start some conflicts out of fear that an ally would disapprove. These three findings all suggest that NATO and America’s East Asian alliances very likely are playing a major role in preserving the Long Peace — which is why Trump’s habit of messing around with alliances is so dangerous. According to many Russia experts, Vladimir Putin’s deepest geostrategic goal is “breaking” NATO. The member states where anyone would expect him to test NATO’s commitment would be the Baltics — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — small former Soviet republics that recently became NATO members. We can’t predict if and when a rival like Putin would conclude that America’s alliances seemed weak enough to try testing them. Hopefully, it never happens. But the more Trump attacks the foundations of America’s allies, the more likely things are to change. The absolute risk of a Russian invasion of a NATO state or a North Korean attack on the South is relatively low, but the consequences are so potentially catastrophic — nuclear war! — that it’s worth taking anything that increases the odds of such a conflict seriously. The crack-up of the West? The world order is a little like a game of Jenga. In the game, there are lots of small blocks that interlock to form a stable tower. Each player has to remove a block without toppling the tower. But each time you take out a block, the whole thing gets a bit less stable. Take out enough blocks and it will collapse. The international order works in kind of the same way. There are lots of different interlocking parts — the spread of democracy, American alliances, nuclear deterrence, and the like — that work together to keep the global peace. But take out one block and the other ones might not be strong enough to keep things together on their own. At the end of the Cold War, British and French leaders worried that the passing of the old order might prove destabilizing. In a January 1990 meeting, French President Fran?ois Mitterrand told British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that he feared a united Germany could seize control of even more territory than Hitler. Some experts feared that in the absence of the external Soviet threat, Western European powers might go back to waging war with each other. Thankfully, those predictions turned out to be wrong. There are multiple reasons for that, but one big one — one that also helped keep relations between other historical enemies, like South Korea and Japan, peaceful — is a shared participation in US alliance networks. The US serves as the ultimate security blanket, preventing these countries from having to build up their own armaments and thus risk a replay of World War I. But if American alliance commitments become and remain less credible, it’s possible this order could crack up. America’s partners aren’t stupid. They understand that Trump is the product of deep forces in American politics, and that his victory might not be a one-off. If they think that this won’t be the last “America First” president in modern history, depending on America the way that they have in the past could quickly become a nightmare. The worst-case scenarios for a collapse in the US alliance system are terrible. Imagine full Japanese and German rearmament, alongside rapid-fire proliferation of nuclear weapons. Imagine a crack-up of NATO, with European powers at loggerheads while Russia gobbles up the Baltic states and the rest of Ukraine. Imagine South Korea’s historical tensions with Japan reigniting, and a war between those two countries or any combination of them and China. All of this seems impossible to imagine now, almost absurd. And indeed, in the short run, it is. There is no risk — zero — of American allies turning on each other in the foreseeable future. And it’s possible that the next president after Trump could reassure American allies that nothing like this could ever happen again. But the truth is that there’s just no way to know. When a fundamental force for world peace starts to weaken, no one can really be sure how well the system will hold up. Nothing like this — the leader of the world’s hegemon rounding on its most important allies — has ever happened before. What Donald Trump’s presidency has done, in effect, is start up another geopolitical Jenga game. Slowly but surely, he’s removing the blocks that undergird global security. It’s possible the global order survives Trump — but it’s just too early for us to say for sure. Given the stakes, it’s a game we’d rather not play.Russia: Yes RevisionistRussia strives to undercut U.S. primacyKagan et al. 19 [Frederick W. Kagan, Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. Nataliya Bugayova, Research Fellow on the Russia and Ukraine Portfolio at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). Jennifer Cafarella, Research Director at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). “CONFRONTING THE RUSSIAN CHALLENGE: A NEW APPROACH FOR THE U.S.” June 2019. ] **NCC Packet 2020-21**Russia poses a significant threat to the United States and its allies for which the West is not ready. The West must act urgently to meet this threat without exaggerating it. Russia today does not have the military strength of the Soviet Union. It is a poor state with an economy roughly the size of Canada’s, a population less than half that of the U.S., and demographic trends indicating that it will lose strength over time. It is not a conventional military near-peer nor will it become so. Its unconventional warfare and information operations pose daunting but not insuperable challenges. The U.S. and its allies must develop a coherent global approach to meeting and transcending the Russian challenge.The Russian ThreatPresident Vladimir Putin has invaded two of his neighbors, Georgia and Ukraine, partly to stop them from aligning with NATO and the West. He has also illegally annexed territory from both those states. He has established a military base in the eastern Mediterranean that he uses to interfere with, shape, and restrict the operations of the U.S. and the anti-ISIS coalition. He has given cover to Bashar al Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and Russian agents have used military-grade chemical weapons in assassination attempts in Great Britain. Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons, even in regional and local conflicts. And Moscow has interfered in elections and domestic political discourse in the U.S. and Europe.The Russian threat’s effectiveness results mainly from the West’s weaknesses. NATO’s European members are not meeting their full commitments to the alliance to maintain the fighting power needed to deter and defeat the emerging challenge from Moscow. Increasing political polarization and the erosion of trust by Western peoples in their governments creates vulnerabilities that the Kremlin has adroitly exploited.Moscow’s success in manipulating Western perceptions of and reactions to its activities has fueled the development of an approach to warfare that the West finds difficult to understand, let alone counter. Shaping the information space is the primary effort to which Russian military operations, even conventional military operations, are frequently subordinated in this way of war. Russia obfuscates its activities and confuses the discussion so that many people throw up their hands and say simply, “Who knows if the Russians really did that? Who knows if it was legal?”—thus paralyzing the West’s responses.Putin’s ProgramPutin is not simply an opportunistic predator. Putin and the major institutions of the Russian Federation have a program as coherent as that of any Western leader. Putin enunciates his objectives in major speeches, and his ministers generate detailed formal expositions of Russia’s military and diplomatic aims and its efforts and the methods and resources it uses to pursue them. These statements cohere with the actions of Russian officials and military units on the ground. The common perception that he is opportunistic arises from the way that the Kremlin sets conditions to achieve these objectives in advance. Putin closely monitors the domestic and international situation and decides to execute plans when and if conditions require and favor the Kremlin. The aims of Russian policy can be distilled into the following:Domestic ObjectivesPutin is an autocrat who seeks to retain control of his state and the succession. He seeks to keep his power circle content, maintain his own popularity, suppress domestic political opposition in the name of blocking a “color revolution” he falsely accuses the West of preparing, and expand the Russian economy.Putin has not fixed the economy, which remains corrupt, inefficient, and dependent on petrochemical and mineral exports. He has focused instead on ending the international sanctions regime to obtain the cash, expertise, and technology he needs. Information operations and hybrid warfare undertakings in Europe are heavily aimed at this objective.External ObjectivesPutin’s foreign policy aims are clear: end American dominance and the “unipolar” world order, restore “multipolarity,” and reestablish Russia as a global power and broker. He identifies NATO as an adversary and a threat and seeks to negate it. He aims to break Western unity, establish Russian suzerainty over the former Soviet States, and regain a global footprint.Putin works to break Western unity by invalidating the collective defense provision of the North Atlantic Treaty (Article 5), weakening the European Union, and destroying the faith of Western societies in their governments.He is reestablishing a global military footprint similar in extent the Soviet Union’s, but with different aims. He is neither advancing an ideology, nor establishing bases from which to project conventional military power on a large scale. He aims rather to constrain and shape America’s actions using small numbers of troops and agents along with advanced anti-air and anti-shipping systems.Russia is revisionist. Maintaining primacy is key to deterrence.Daalder, 17 - President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013. (Ivo, Responding to Russia's Resurgence; Not Quiet on the Eastern Front, October 18th, Foreign Affairs, LexisNexis) **NCC Packet 2020-21**Many observers believe that the greatest damage Russia has done to U.S. interests in recent years stems from the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Although there is no question that Moscow's meddling in American elections is deeply worrying, it is just one aspect of the threat Russia poses. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has embarked on a systematic challenge to the West. The goal is to weaken the bonds between Europe and the United States and among EU members, undermine NATO's solidarity, and strengthen Russia's strategic position in its immediate neighborhood and beyond. Putin wants nothing less than to return Russia to the center of global politics by challenging the primacy that the United States has enjoyed since the end of the Cold War. He has undertaken a major military modernization designed to intimidate neighbors and weaken NATO, and he has resorted to the overt use of military force to establish new facts on the ground-not just in what Moscow calls its "sphere of privileged interests," which encompasses all of the former Soviet republics, but also further afield, including in the Middle East, an area where the U.S. military has long operated with a free hand. For some time now, "the Kremlin has been de facto operating in a war mode," the Russia scholar Dmitri Trenin has observed, and Putin has been behaving like a wartime leader. Washington's response to this challenge must be equally strong. First, it is critical to maintain transatlantic unity; divisions across the Atlantic and within Europe weaken NATO's ability to respond to Russian provocations and provide openings for Moscow to extend its reach and influence. The alliance has responded to the new Russia challenge by enhancing its presence in eastern Europe and the Baltic states, and Russia has so far not threatened the territorial integrity of any NATO member state. But NATO must do more to bolster its deterrence by sending a clear message to the Kremlin that it will not tolerate further Russian aggression or expansionism. At the same time, policymakers must remember that the United States is not at war with Russia; there is no need for Washington to put itself on a war footing, even if Moscow has. Dialogue and open channels of communication remain essential to avoiding misunderstandings and miscalculations that could escalate into a war no one wants. OLD HABITS DIE HARD After the Cold War ended, American, European, and Russian strategic objectives appeared to converge on the goal of fostering the economic and political transformation of eastern Europe and Russia and creating an integrated Europe that would be whole, free, and at peace. The military confrontation that had marked relations for more than 40 years rapidly and peacefully disappeared with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the withdrawal of Soviet forces from eastern Europe, and the negotiation of far-reaching arms control agreements. Freed from the strategic logic of the Cold War, governments focused their energies on transforming eastern Europe's command economies into functioning market democracies and on the task of unifying the continent. In Russia in the early 1990s, economic "shock therapy" rapidly dismantled the state-controlled economy of the Soviet era but failed to produce immediate or widely shared prosperity. The Russian financial crisis of 1998 imposed significant costs on the population-including a sharp rise in prices for basic goods as a result of the rapid depreciation of the ruble-and helped set the stage for the emergence of a new generation of leaders committed to stability and order even at the cost of economic and political liberalization. By the end of the decade, a demoralized Russian public welcomed the arrival of a strong new leader; Putin, the former head of Russia's security services, took office in late 1999, promising an end to chaos and a return to stability. By tightening his control over the state bureaucracy, Putin fulfilled his promise. And as rising oil and gas prices filled government coffers, he also managed to raise the standard of living of ordinary Russians. The focus during this time was on domestic renewal rather than foreign engagement, although Putin did indicate a desire for increased cooperation with the United States, especially when it came to confronting common threats, such as terrorism. As Russia's confidence and wealth grew, however, the Kremlin became increasingly concerned about what it perceived as Western encroachment in its sphere of influence, as successive countries in central and eastern Europe, including the three Baltic states, opted to join NATO and the EU. Putin chafed at what he saw as Washington's growing power and arrogance, especially in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and he gradually abandoned any thought of seeking common ground with the West. The first signs of this shift came, unexpectedly, in a speech Putin delivered at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. He railed against NATO expansion and accused the United States of running roughshod over the sovereignty of other countries in its pursuit of a unipolar world. In Putin's eyes, Washington aimed at nothing less than world domination: "One single center of power. One single center of force. One single center of decision-making. It is [a] world in which there is one master, one sovereign." And it wasn't just Putin's rhetoric that changed. That same year, Russia exploited internal disagreements between ethnic Russians and Estonians to launch a cyberattack against Estonia's government, media outlets, and banking system. The following year saw the first overt military expression of Moscow's new foreign policy direction: Russia's war with Georgia, ostensibly designed to secure the independence of two breakaway regions but in fact meant to send a clear message that Russia was prepared to stymie Georgia's ambitions to join the West. THE PUTIN PLAYBOOK Although Moscow achieved its objectives in the war against Georgia, the conflict laid bare real weaknesses in Russia's armed forces, including failing command and control, a woeful lack of military training, and significant shortcomings in its military hardware. Some 60 to 70 percent of Russian tanks and armored vehicles broke down during the five days of fighting, and although Russia's per capita military spending was 56 percent greater than Georgia's that year, the heavy armor deployed by Tbilisi was far more modern and advanced than Moscow's. None of these deficiencies went unnoticed in Moscow, and the Kremlin immediately embarked on a massive military reform and modernization program. Between 2007 and 2016, Russia's annual military spending nearly doubled, reaching $70 billion, the third-highest level of defense spending in the world (following the United States and China). Military spending in 2016 amounted to 5.3 percent of Russia's GDP, the highest proportion since Russia's independence in 1990 and the highest percentage spent on defense by any major economy that year. In 2011, Moscow announced a ten-year modernization program that included $360 billion in new military procurement. At the same time, the Russian armed forces began a wholesale restructuring and an overhaul of their training programs. The effect of these improvements became clear in Ukraine six years after the war in Georgia. As Kiev was rocked by political upheaval over its ties to the EU, Putin-who had once told U.S. President George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not even a state" and claimed that the Soviet Union had given the territory of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 as "a gift"-responded by invading and annexing Crimea in early 2014. Not satisfied with controlling this strategically vital peninsula, Moscow then fomented a separatist rebellion in the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, home to a predominantly Russian-speaking population and to many of Ukraine's heavy industries. Russia sent military equipment, advisers, and ultimately thousands of troops to the area in order to prevent Ukraine from securing control over its own territory. The thrusts into eastern Ukraine were straight out of the Putin playbook, but the Crimea operation represented a qualitatively new effort by Moscow to get its way. Crimea was not just invaded; it was annexed and incorporated into the Russian Federation after an illegitimate, rigged referendum. Putin wanted Russia's "gift" back, even though Moscow had agreed to respect the territorial integrity of every former Soviet republic when the Soviet Union broke up, in 1991, and had explicitly reiterated that commitment in a legally binding memorandum negotiated with Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom in 1994. For the first time in postwar European history, one country had annexed territory from another by force. The operation in Crimea also demonstrated a whole new form of Russian military prowess. Stealthily deployed special forces took over key facilities and organs of the Ukrainian state. Sophisticated cyber-operations and relentless disinformation diverted attention from what was happening. And the speed of the operation meant it was completed before anyone could mount an effective response. Russian special forces, dressed in green uniforms without identifying patches, suddenly appeared at strategic points throughout Crimea and effectively took control of the peninsula. Simultaneously, a large-scale propaganda operation sought to hide Moscow's fingerprints by suggesting that these "little green men" were local opposition forces that reflected the popular will to reject the political change in Kiev and reunite with Russia instead. This, in short, was no traditional military invasion; it was hybrid warfare in which goals were accomplished even before the adversary understood what was going on. It represented an entirely new threat for which neither Ukraine nor NATO was prepared. Moscow justified the invasion and annexation of Crimea with arguments based on a new form of Russian nationalism. From the outset of the conflict, Putin had maintained that Crimea was rightly Russia's and that Moscow was fully within its right in retaking it. Moreover, Russia claimed that it had to act because Russian-speaking people in Ukraine were being attacked by a violent mob of "nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites" who had carried out a coup in Kiev. Later, Putin went further, pronouncing a new doctrine aimed at defending Russians anywhere. "I would like to make it clear to all: our country will continue to actively defend the rights of Russians, our compatriots abroad, using the entire range of available means." And Putin was adamant that he was not talking about just Russian citizens, or even ethnic Russians, when pronouncing this absolute right to defend them anywhere. "I am referring to those people who consider themselves part of the broad Russian community; they may not necessarily be ethnic Russians, but they consider themselves Russian people." To many, these words echoed claims made during the 1930s that Germany had a right-and an obligation-to protect Germans in other countries, such as Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the continued fighting there have exacted a huge toll on the country. According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 10,000 people have died since mid-2014, nearly 25,000 have been injured, and some 1.6 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced. Every day brings exchanges of fire and more casualties. Yet the incursion into Ukraine represents only one part of the expansion of Russia's military footprint, which stretches from the Arctic in the north to the Mediterranean in the south. Russia's military buildup is both vast in scope and strategically significant. In the country's far north, Russia has reopened former military bases near the Arctic Ocean, establishing a position of military dominance in a region where peaceful cooperation among the Arctic powers had become the norm. From there, Russia has bolstered and modernized its military presence in its western territories, which stretch from the Norwegian border in the north to the Ukrainian border in the south. Moscow has also beefed up its presence in what is already the most heavily militarized piece of land in Europe, the Kaliningrad exclave-just under 6,000 square miles of Russian-controlled territory sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland. More than 300,000 well-trained troops are deployed in Kaliningrad, equipped with modern tanks, armored vehicles, and missile batteries, including a nuclear-capable short-range missile system-posing a significant military threat to Poland and the three Baltic states. A similar buildup has occurred farther south. Since the war in Ukraine began, Russia has sent additional brigades to the Ukrainian border and announced the creation of three new divisions that will face in a "southwest strategic direction"-in other words, toward Ukraine. In addition to deploying 30,000 troops to Crimea, Moscow has positioned 30 combat ships, five submarines, more than 100 combat aircraft, and more than 50 combat helicopters, as well as long-range antiship and antiaircraft missile and radar systems, on the strategically vital peninsula, giving Russia the ability to dominate the Black Sea region. It also has deployed thousands of troops to occupied areas in eastern Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova-as well as some 5,500 troops to Armenia, which are there with the consent of the Armenian government in support of its claim to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Finally, Russia has enlarged its air and naval presence in Syria in order to better assist the endangered regime of Bashar al-Assad, effectively ending NATO's uncontested control of the eastern Mediterranean, a strategically pivotal area that includes the Suez Canal. Although many analysts worry about the Russian threat to the Baltic states, the more dramatic shift has been in the Mediterranean, where Russia's navy now boasts missiles that can threaten most of Europe. Russia's enhanced military presence has been matched by increased military assertiveness. This trend started with the invasion of Ukraine but did not end there. In Syria, Russia has increased the tempo of its military operations in support of the flailing Assad regime and employed long-range missiles fired from naval vessels in the Caspian and Mediterranean Seas. It has flown fighter and bomber missions close to or even within the airspace of NATO member states and other European countries. It has deployed nuclear submarines armed with ballistic missiles from its northern ports to the Atlantic. And it has engaged in often dangerous air and naval activities, including buzzing NATO naval vessels and aircraft, flying military aircraft with their transponders turned off, and intentionally failing to monitor emergency communications channels. Meanwhile, the Russian military has significantly enhanced the scale and scope of its training exercises, launching many without any notice. In 2014, days before the invasion of Ukraine, a snap exercise mobilized 150,000 troops near the Russian-Ukrainian border; in September 2017, Moscow conducted its quadrennial Zapad exercise, mobilizing up to 100,000 troops in western Russia, Kaliningrad, and Belarus and requisitioning enough rail cars to transport 4,000 tanks and armored vehicles. At the same time, Russia is modernizing all three legs of its nuclear triad, building new long-range missiles, submarines, and bombers to maintain a nuclear force that is at least the equal of the U.S. arsenal. ALARM BELLS Russia's military buildup and posturing have provided Moscow with renewed confidence-a sense that Russia once again matters and that the world can no longer ignore it. In the Kremlin's eyes, Russia is again a great global power and therefore can act as global powers do. Not surprisingly, the buildup has caused concern in the Pentagon. Calling Russia's behavior "nothing short of alarming," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, concluded in 2015 that "Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security." Russia is revisionist --- Putin’s psychology, domestic and foreign actions, and official state documents prove.Natsios 18 --- Andrew S. Natsios, Executive Professor and Director of the Scowcroft Institute at the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University, 2018, ("Introduction: Putin's New Russia: Fragile State or Revisionist Power?"?South Central Review?35, no. 1 (2018): 1-21. ) **NCC Packet 2020-21**UNDERSTANDING PUTIN'S FOREIGN POLICY John Mearsheimer, the international relations scholar, argues Russia's aggressiveness towards its neighbors stems from western efforts to extend NATO membership to former members of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. According to this view, traditional national interest drives Russia's behavior, and NATO extension has been seen by Putin as a threat to Russia's vital national security interests. As a result, he is responding to that perceived threat through territorial aggrandizement, aggressive ultra-nationalist ideology, and confrontation with the West. From this perspective, the western democracies helped create Vladimir Putin's Russia by impinging on its "sphere of influence" along its borders; thus, Russia is not what international relations scholars call a "revisionist power"—one which seeks to overthrow the existing international order—but a traditional state protecting what it sees as its equities and vital national interests. Other analysts, such as Anne Applebaum, argue Putin's policies are not part of a grand strategy, but are evidence of an improvised foreign policy. Thus, Russia's aggression in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and its threats to the Baltic States, may be seen not as a carefully designed and executed strategy of conquest, but as symptomatic of Putin's ad hoc, opportunistic foreign policy. He probes for Western weakness, irresolution, and indecision, and then, if there is no resistance, he intervenes to extend Russia's reach by absorbing more territory. The limitation of these views is that they ignore what we know of the mindset in the Kremlin, the worldwide reach of Russian cyberwarfare and black operations, and the grievances which Putin himself has expressed multiple times against the Western democracies. These grievances are rooted, among other factors, in his personal experience in East Germany. [End Page 4] He and other mid-level operatives were traumatized as the USSR and its satellite Communist states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia collapsed in 1990 and 1991. The population of the Soviet Union shrank by more than 50% from 290 million to 142 million people in a matter of months. The borders of the Russia state Vladimir Putin inherited resembled Russia before the reign of Catherine the Great in the second half of the 18th century rather than Russia of the 19th and 20th century, Tsarist or Communist. Russia's Warsaw Pact occupied "allies" in Central and Eastern Europe threw off Soviet control in a chain of uprisings which swept across the region in little more than a year. Most of these states eventually joined the NATO alliance and the European Union as newly independent democratic capitalist nations. Vladimir Putin and fellow KGB operatives watched with horror as their world disappeared almost overnight; they destroyed their police files in East Germany; and fled the country. In his memoirs, Putin wrote that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the "greatest geostrategic catastrophe of the 20th century," an extraordinary, if not bizarre, statement given the other events of the century. Putin has sought to return Russia to great power status by weakening other competing powers or annexing neighboring states rather than risking reforms that could be destabilizing in the short term, but would strengthen Russia as a nation state over the long term. The immediate objectives of Russian foreign policy are not mysterious if one examines Putin's government's public rhetoric, its published documents, and its actions. One of Putin's greatest strengths has been the aggressive and systematic pursuit of these strategic objectives which include: ? efforts to regain military parity with the United States (they are nowhere near achieving this) ? the neutralization, or at least weakening, of the NATO alliance ? the end of the European Union as one of the most powerful economic blocs in the world ? the creation of an alternative anti-liberal, authoritarian, reactionary governance model of statehood for which Russia is trying to gain adherents among far right and far left parties wing in Europe (not only are the far-right wing parties of Europe pro-Putin, so too is Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left Labor leader in the U.K., and the Syriza Party elected to power in Greece in January 2015 which is dominated by Communists) ? the reconstruction of the historic Russian sphere of influence through annexation of parts of neighboring states, or at least their realignment out of NATO and the European Union into Russia's orbit of influence, and the projection of Russian power to other regions of the world such as the Middle East and Afghanistan [End Page 5] (CNN reported on July 25, 2017 that the Russians were arming the Taliban in Afghanistan). Over time Putin has ruthlessly pursued these objectives with great discipline, using some of Russia's vast natural resources to rebuild the Russian military and create a powerful cyber-security capacity to pursue asymmetrical warfare against the West and vulnerable countries on the periphery. The Russian Euro-Asian land mass contains perhaps a third of earth's minerals, oil, and natural gas reserves. This represents an extraordinary treasure and source of national power, if only they had been efficiently and entirely used to increase economic productivity, build modern infrastructure, and construct a knowledge-based economy. But they weren't. Putin's ability to use these resources has been curtailed since 2014, when oil prices collapsed from $117 a barrel to $27 at the beginning of 2016 before rising in 2018 to $68. Because of this price collapse, Russia suffered a significant drop in state revenues between 2014 and 2017 due to the decline in oil prices and western economic sanctions imposed because of the invasion of Ukraine and Crimea. The ongoing demographic decline of the country, cuts in social services and pensions because of the revenue drop, and Russia's isolation from international markets by Moscow's deliberate design has constrained Putin's ambitions. Does Russia face a new threat from the Western democracies? U.S. military presence in Europe (approximately 30,000 combat troops at the end of 2016) was at its lowest level since before World War II, down from a high of 400,000 during the peak of the Cold War. Even more significant than any real or imagined threat Putin sees coming from the United States, is that the American military is going through its most painful retrenchment since the end of the Vietnam War. The U.S. defense budget by the end of the Obama Administration had been cut by nearly $150 billion. The Trump Administration's first budget does request an increase of over $50 billion in defense spending, but Trump also declared his intention to improve U.S. relations with Russia. European countries' military forces have scaled back to such a degree they have undertaken virtual unilateral disarmament. Putin's Russia's expansionary strategy with the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, its rapid increase in its defense budget, the annexation of Crimea, the rebuilding of its nuclear arsenal, and its military intervention in Syria, has all been undertaken with no self-evident threat to Russia's survival or vital national interests. Furthermore, China is Russia's only real ally in its competition with the West, at least at this writing. If Putin's strategic objective was to minimize or reduce external [End Page 6] threats to Russia, the invasion of Ukraine was a major strategic blunder as it has slowly begun to mobilize the previous docile and distracted Western Alliance to counter the new threat. NATO officials have now begun publicly raising the alarm bells. Sweden and Finland which never joined NATO are now engaged in a public discussion about joining the Alliance, which has broad public support. In the last year of the Obama Administration, the U.S. redeployed an armored brigade to Europe which will rotate among Eastern European and the Baltic NATO members as a response to Russian aggression. DOMESTIC PRESSURES DRIVING PUTIN'S BEHAVIOR The Russian foreign policy riddle may in fact be better explained, per some essays in this issue, as a response to the power dynamics within the country rather than by any particular national security doctrine. These dynamics are internal, not external threats to Putin's rule, certainly not to Russia as a nation-state. Moscow's policies may be driven by the insecurity and illegitimacy of the small circle of Oligarchs and former KGB agents surrounding Putin who fear their own people more than they fear any outside threat, a fear which is evidence of profound, if disguised, weakness.3 After it appeared that Putin had rigged the 2012 Presidential elections to ensure he returned to power (he would likely have won anyway), hundreds of thousands of Russians took to the streets of major cities in protest, which lasted several months. His relative restraint (protest leaders were arrested and some tortured but no massacres on the streets took place) in suppressing the popular uprising may have had more to do with his fear that the internal security forces might not carry out an order to crush the protest through brute force rather than any ethical qualms he had about a bloodbath in the streets. Or, it may have been that Putin wanted to avoid the embarrassment such a solution to the street uprising would have caused him internationally. This suggests Putin fears another public uprising, which is why he has taken control of the public's sources of information. Putin gradually emasculated the electronic major media outlets, tried to block internet access to the worldwide web, and has suppressed dissent. He has been accused by his critics of allowing or ordering the assassination of prominent journalists, civil society leaders, Oligarchs who have fallen out with Putin, and political opponents. Accounts differ on the number of journalists who have been murdered since Putin took power in 1999. They range from 12, according to a professional association of journalists, to 25, according to an article [End Page 7] in the New Yorker. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered on a bridge in sight of the Kremlin the day before he was to release a report with evidence that Russian troops were fighting alongside separatists in the Ukraine. Few analysts have argued that Putin himself gave orders to assassinate Nemtsov, but the five men convicted of killing him and sentenced in July 2017 in a Moscow court were Chechens with ties to Chechnya's leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who is an acolyte of Putin's.4 PUTIN'S GRAND BARGAIN WITH THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE: SURRENDERING FREEDOM FOR GUNS, BUTTER, AND THE DREAM OF LOST RUSSIAN GRANDEUR Putin's legitimacy as a ruler has been based on a tacit agreement with the Russian people that trades individual freedom, democracy, and the rule of law for economic security. Since the severe economic contraction after mid-2014, that tacit agreement ended. Putin has now reformulated the grand bargain with the Russian people. He is promising to bring back the glorious days of the Soviet Union and earlier Tsarist Empires in exchange for the Russian public's acceptance of his autocratic rule and a lower living standard.5 Since the drop-in oil prices beginning in the summer of 2014, the central government has been shoring up the fragile banking system. Despite the balance sheet's visual appeal, Russia under Vladimir Putin faces a much greater risk of internal implosion than many in Western capitals understand. This is due to the cuts in public services and pensions, growing unrest among the Russian elites with Putin's policies, and the Russian military's discomfort with Putin's strategic gambling in Ukraine and earlier in Georgia.6 To avoid this collapse, Putin has redirected the Russian people's attention to his foreign policy adventures and away from his domestic mismanagement and policy failures, but that has not changed the Russian government's balance sheet. In fact, those adventures have made that balance sheet more precarious. The Soviet Union collapsed for many reasons in 1990, but one immediate cause was its bankruptcy. During the West German-Soviet negotiations over the reunification of East and West Germany, Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union, repeatedly asked Helmut Kohl, the West German Chancellor, for billions of dollars in loans because of the Soviet Union's internal financial crisis (which the German government provided).7 One of the leading energy economists, Daniel Yergin, argues that oil prices have been recalibrated to a lower price level, and thus we will not see [End Page 8] $100 a barrel again in the foreseeable future.8 This has created a gap between Vladimir Putin's strategic objectives and his ability to achieve them. His frustration may encourage him to take more and ever greater tactical risks which could result in unintended confrontation with NATO or the United States directly. Anne Applebaum argues in her essay that Putin has either infiltrated, co-opted, corrupted, intimidated, or shut down most of the nascent institutions of Russian democratic pluralism that developed during the 1990's and early 2000's such as non-governmental organizations, religious institutions such as the Russian Orthodox Church, think tanks, and universities. He has done this to ensure he faces no competing centers of power in Russian society, which has made him stronger personally, even as he has made Russian society weaker. This has set back Russia decades from joining other advanced countries, all of which share several critically important characteristics—a vibrant civil society (which constrains governmental abuses that would otherwise go unchecked), an independent judiciary to guarantee the rule of law, and a free press and media. Putin has now undermined all of these nascent institutions. Russia has neither rule of law nor an independent court system, and its police are corrupt and a tool of repression rather than law enforcement. Russia has evolved into what Russians call a "managed democracy," a democracy in appearance, not reality.9 Russian institutional weakness may be found in the retarded level of internal development and the dysfunctional characteristics of its governance structure. Douglass North, the Nobel-prize winning economist, argued that what distinguishes wealthy, advanced, and stable countries from those in the developing world is the density, legitimacy, resilience, and robustness of its governmental, private sector, and civil society institutions.10 By any measure, Russia has a weak private sector of formally incorporated businesses, a declining number of independent and increasingly fragile civil society organizations, and a massive state sector controlled by a small oligarchy in Moscow. During the Cold War, some Western analysts described the Soviet Union as a third-world country with the bomb because of its primitive health care system, poor infrastructure, lack of a consumer economy, and an inefficient collectivized agricultural system and industrial sector. Many of these same weaknesses continue to hold Russia back from developing into an advanced industrial democracy. Russia's current social, health, demographic, and economic indicators show a country in what could be permanent and irreversible decline, as documented in Nick Eberstadt's essay. Russia is neither a western nor even a middle-income country, but a fragile state that has more in common [End Page 9] with the poorest developing countries than middle income countries. These weaknesses suggest Russia is a declining power, and certainly not a rising power such as China.11 Paul Collier argues in his book, The Bottom Billion, that abundant natural resources can be a curse more than a blessing in a country with fragile institutions. In such a country, these resources will corrupt and undermine the legitimacy of the state and hamper the development of accountable institutions. The evidence suggests Russia is a poster-child for Collier's "resource curse" and thus its resources are a source of weakness, but, they are also simultaneously a source of strength because they allow Putin to do things he could not otherwise do. Some of this wealth has been squandered on mismanaged show and tell projects such as the $51 billion spent to prepare for the Sochi Olympics.12 And a portion of the oil and gas infrastructure revenues have been siphoned off to enrich Putin's inner circle of former KGB agents who now control perhaps a third of the oil and gas wealth of the country.13 Some of this oil and gas wealth, which makes up about 50% of the Russian government's revenues (another 15% is generated by mineral revenues), has been used by Putin to ensure pension and paychecks have been paid on time after the chaos of the 1990's. However, those pensions are now in danger as oil revenues can no longer support their current benefit levels. That oil and gas wealth also provides Russians with stable government jobs in exchange for the public's tacit acceptance of Putin's growing centralized, autocratic power, but they do little to transform Russia into an advanced economy.14 RUSSIA'S MILITARY AND CYBER WARFARE BUILD UP One of the few elements of Russian national power now on the ascendency is its military. Putin had been rearming Russia at a rapid rate until 2017 when revenues could not support the increases. The Duma recommended a 27% cut in military spending for 2017 because of the depressed oil prices, while Jane's reported a 25% cut. In fact, the reduction in the Defense Ministry operational budget was about 7% according to an analysis in the National Interest.15 This analysis argues that the Russia military industrial corporations were heavily indebted and the Defense Ministry decided to relieve this debt on a one-time basis, which made the defense cuts larger than they actually were. Putin has invested in the modernization of Russia's nuclear arsenal and the development of new and more advanced conventional weapons, even as Russia faces a depressing demographic future with high rates of drug addiction and alcoholism among young men.16 [End Page 10] Perhaps the greatest risk to Putin's strategic buildup may be this dependence on oil, gas, and mineral revenues. To minimize the effect of declining revenue on the defense buildup, Moscow has made a series of strategic decisions to choose guns over butter: cutting back public services such as education, health, and pensions. Disposable income for the average Russian family declined by 15% between 2014 and 2016, even as the military budget has been increasing. At the end of 2016, for the first time in seven years, Russian families were spending more than half their income on food and "the percentage of Russians who had any savings fell from 72% in 2013 to 29% in 2016," reported the Washington Post.17 The rising Russian military threat was on display in Putin's invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, but he miscalculated in several critical respects. According to Moscow, a corrupt and illegitimate government had taken power through street demonstrations while Putin's democratically-elected ally in Kiev was driven from office by mob rule funded by billionaire George Soros and western civil society groups. Putin expected to be greeted by at least half of Ukraine as a Slavic liberating hero because eastern Ukraine has historically been more oriented towards Russia. Instead, Russia met Ukrainian resistance, and united what had been a divided country now mobilized to oppose the Russian invasion.18 Multiple independent surveys of Ukrainian public opinion show at least 90% of the population opposes the Russian invasion and wants Russian troops to leave the country. The Russian military showed its strengths and weaknesses in the Ukrainian crisis. Its conventional weapons systems were substantially superior, eventually overwhelming the Ukrainian army, but its strategic planning was weak, its manpower pool for its army seriously constrained, and its command and control problematic.19 Russia's new cyberwarfare capabilities were on display in 2016 in a highly visible way during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the Dutch and French elections, and German parliament hacking incidents. Perhaps the most authoritative public document describing Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. elections may be found in the indictment submitted in federal court by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller on February 16, 2018 against three Russian corporations and 13 individuals employed by or affiliated with those corporations. One of these Russian corporations, Internet Research Agency, owned by a close associate of Putin, Yevgeny Progozhin, sought to manipulate American voters by creating social media pages that made it appear to be controlled by U.S. political activists and focused on divisive political issues such as immigration, race, and religion. Starting in 2014, Internet Research Agency's employees created false personas on Facebook, Twitter and [End Page 11] other platforms to post on these pages. The company also purchased advertisements online to direct individuals to these pages (funded through U.S. bank accounts and PayPal accounts established under stolen American identities), and posed as U.S. grassroots organizations to stage political rallies. Closer to the election, employees were instructed to post material to support Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and to disparage Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. Even after the election, the company coordinated rallies to protest the election results and stir up political discord. It was an effort to use America's open society, open information, and public discourse against itself, not simply to support one candidate over another but to disrupt American society and turn one group against another. One of the statutes which the Russian operatives were accused of violating was the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law enacted in 1938 to investigate Nazi propaganda efforts in the United States. The use of this anti-Nazi law to charge the Russians is one more indication of how much of a threat this is viewed by the U.S. justice system, and the state of Russian-American relations. Leaving aside the question of whether President Donald Trump or his campaign managers collaborated, intentionally or not, with Putin's operatives, the indictments have placed a bright public spotlight on Russian espionage activities in the United States. During the Cold War, the KGB undertook similar activities as did other Great Powers, so espionage is not new nor particularly shocking. Adolph Hitler undertook similar espionage tactics in the United States in the 1930's, which is why the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act was passed in the first place. What is new is that it is happening now, at this moment and what the reaction has been in the United States and Europe. More than any other single effort since Vladimir Putin, his oligarchs and operatives took power, Russian election espionage to disrupt U.S. and European elections have convinced a rising body of public and elite opinion in the western democracies that Russia under Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs is an enemy, not simply a rival. Perception is often reality in politics. The first Trump Administration National Security Strategy released in December 2017 identified the two central geostrategic threats to the United States as China and Russia, not ISIS, not terrorism, not North Korea or Iran. This assertion was made in a document signed by Donald Trump, who wished months earlier for a very different relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin. Putin's clumsy old-style KGB efforts to muck around in American politics has unintentionally ignited a new Cold War which the American and European publics, until this point, had not wanted to believe or had ignored. If that was Putin's goal, he was successful, but [End Page 12] it is very unlikely he intended this at all because it now means western governments will marshal their very considerable instruments of national power and focus them on Russia which Putin can ill afford given the fragility of the country. Some media reports stated that Putin blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the street demonstrations against the 2012 rigged election, that he apparently believed she organized through Russian civil society organizations. Putin, perhaps anticipating public hostility to the election corruption, expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Mission in Moscow months before the 2012 elections. He correctly believed USAID was responsible for helping build Russian civil society over the previous two decades. It had been funding U.S. democracy NGOs such as the International Republican Institute and the Democratic National Institute to help strengthen Russian political parties and election processes for the 2012 elections. USAID has done this openly and consistently in countries around the world since these democracy programs were created in the 1980's and is not directed for or against any particular parties or candidates. While it was certainly the case that USAID, along with European aid agencies, helped support a nascent civil society in the post-Soviet years (something most western aid agencies do across the globe), there is no evidence of any conspiracy in the U.S. government to mobilize these groups to protest. Later, Russian cyber-warfare agencies hacked into the Democratic National Committee email system and accessed Clinton campaign advisor John Podesta's emails. Several weeks before leaving office, President Obama retaliated against the Russian hacking by imposing limited sanctions on Russia and expelling a few diplomats. He was six months late in imposing these sanctions as the Washington Post has documented. The Post reported the CIA presented President Obama a detailed account in June 2016 of how the Russian government intended to interfere in the U.S. election, but the President, took no serious actions to stop Russia until late October, and then modestly. THE IDEOLOGY AND MYTHOLOGY OF THE PUTIN STATE Putin has positioned himself and Russia as a culturally and religiously conservative alternative to western secular liberal democracies. This world view is described in Project Russia, which is a curious, if alarming, collection of essays published in five-volumes as a semi-official government publication that describes the political ideology of the State, the [End Page 13] Orthodox Church's religious vision, geographic determinism, and social analysis shared by Putin and his circle of oligarchs who rule Russia. These essays form a strange amalgam of anti-democratic, reactionary, ultra-nationalist attacks on western democratic values, combined with an unhealthy dose of conspiracy theories, paranoia, xenophobia, and a defense of autocratic government and dictatorship.20 One view of Project Russia is that its publication simply reflects Putin's understanding as a former KGB agent that a great power must have an ideology to defeat and undermine its rivals in propaganda battles. But a more sinister and alarming view is that the five volumes are Putin's blue print for Russia's grand strategy, evidence of a revisionist power seeking to overthrow the existing international order. If this interpretation of Project Russia is correct, it suggests a greater level of future conflict with the western democracies and international institutions. If Project Russia is a blue print and not just a propaganda tool, the risk of an accidental global conflagration between Russia and the NATO alliance is a serious potential scenario. Vladimir Putin must find ways of explaining to the Russian people why the country is so far behind the western democracies, as did his predecessors in the Soviet Union. Putin continues to pursue the Soviet strategy of keeping the memory of World War II alive to stir up Russian nationalism among the population, but also as an explanation for Russia's underdevelopment. The evidence suggests that this strategy faces increasing hurdles. The Soviet Union's epic and extraordinary sacrifices during World War II – approximately 11 million soldiers and 9 million of their civilians having died – no longer have much resonance with the younger generation, who know little about the war, and the older generation, who tire of a war 70 years ago being used to explain Russian inability to match Western living standards today. Thus, what had been a powerful historical experience of collective suffering and sacrifice during World War II, has now become a fading memory which lacks the magnetic power it held over the Russian people during the Cold War.21 Undoubtedly, one of the motivations behind Putin's attempt to regain Russia's lost stature in the world, expand its sphere of influence, attack western democratic institutions, and annex the territory of its neighbors is driven by a need to avenge the supposed "secret conspiracy" among the Western democracies to collapse, destroy, and humiliate Russia.22 The Russian electronic media and Project Russia continue to propagate this view. The Russian government's arming of the Taliban, reported by U.S. intelligence sources and by CNN, may be a response to U.S. military intervention in Syria against the Assad Government, an ally of Russia, but it could also be payback for the CIA's arming of the Mujahedeen fighting [End Page 14] against the Russian military in Afghanistan during the 1980's.23 (Some in the Reagan Administration saw the arming of the Mujahedeen as U.S. payback for Soviet support for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.) The Cold War certainly involved the arming of U.S. and Russian client states against each other, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, U.S. policy changed to one of facilitating the integration of Russia into the international system and its conversion into a democratic capitalist system. Both the U.S. and Europe spent billions of aid dollars in programs in Russia from 1991 to 2012 to support these political and economic reforms. If they intended to destroy Russia permanently, why would they have made these large investments? It is also the case that President George H.W. Bush went to great lengths to avoid dancing on the grave of the Soviet empire as it collapsed to avoid giving fodder to Mikhail Gorbachev's critics.No Russia Nuclear WarNo Russia war – they won’t risk itAmy F. Woolf 20, Specialist in Nuclear Weapons Policy in the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division of the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress, received a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1983, “Russia’s Nuclear Weapons: Doctrine, Forces, and Modernization”, **NCC Packet 2020**One analyst has postulated that Russia may actually raise its nuclear threshold as it bolsters its conventional forces. According to this analyst, “It is difficult to understand why Russia would want to pursue military adventurism that would risk all-out confrontation with a technologically advanced and nuclear-armed adversary like NATO. While opportunistic, and possibly even reckless, the Putin regime does not appear to be suicidal.” 144 As a study from the RAND Corporation noted, Russia has “invested considerable sums in developing and fielding long-range conventional strike weapons since the mid-2000s to provide Russian leadership with a buffer against reaching the nuclear threshold—a set of conventional escalatory options that can achieve strategic effects without resorting to nuclear weapons.”145 Others note, however, that Russia has integrated these “conventional precision weapons and nuclear weapons into a single strategic weapon set,” lending credence to the view that Russia may be prepared to employ, or threaten to employ, nuclear weapons during a regional conflict.Even if, no nuclear escalationViljar Veebel 19. Department of Political and Strategic Studies, Baltic Defence College. 06/01/2019. “Researching Baltic Security Challenges after the Annexation of Crimea.” Journal on Baltic Security, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 41–52. **NCC Packet 2020**It should also be noted in this respect that the most recent reports of the RAND Corporation are more modest in their assessments compared with the results of the previous studies. For example, a study by Scott Boston and co-authors entitled ‘Assessing the conventional force imbalance in Europe: Implications for countering Russian local superiority’, argues that based on their analysis, there is no reason to believe that Russian conventional aggression against NATO is likely to take place. However, they also emphasize that steps should be taken to mitigate potential areas of vulnerability in the interest of ensuring a stable security relationship between all NATO members and Russia. The authors conclude that NATO has sufficient resources, personnel, and equipment to enhance conventional deterrence against Russia (Boston et al., 2018).More specifically, most conventional threat scenarios clearly point to the same problematic issue: the possibility that Russia could isolate the Baltic countries from its Western allies by closing the ‘Suwalki gap’ (called also ‘Kaliningrad corridor’), a 110–115 kilometre wide land border between Lithuania and Poland. One of the most comprehensive studies on this matter is a research by Leszek Elak and Zdzislaw Sliwa, ‘The Suwalki Gap – NATO?s fragile hot spot’. The article analyses various characteristics of the Kaliningrad region from the military perspective as well as suggests in a very detailed manner the potential tactics that could be used in military aggressions within the Suwalki gap. Elak and Sliwa conclude that the loss of the land connection between the West and the Baltic countries would allow Russia freedom of action over an extended period of time. Furthermore, they argue that if the terrain is lost, it will require significant efforts to control the area again. The authors stress that the Kaliningrad region is critical for Russia to gain time, which is the third important operational factor supporting other two factors, such as space and force, enabling the desired speed to reach the desired end state (Elak and Sliwa, 2016). This issue is further elaborated, for example, in the articles ‘Kaliningrad: A useless sliver of Russia or the cause of a new Fulda gap?’ by Vaidas Sald?iūnas (2016), ‘Why it would be rational for Russia to escalate in Kaliningrad and Suwalki corridor?’ by Viljar Veebel (2018d), ‘Kaliningrad oblast as the forward anti-access/area denial hub’ by Zdzislaw Sliwa (2018), and others.3 Studies on potential nuclear escalation scenariosThe question whether Russia would use its nuclear forces in the Baltic region has also intrigued many academics and military experts recently. One of the most radical discussions in this field is a blog post by Loren B. Thompson, ‘Why the Baltic states are where nuclear war is most likely to begin’. He argues that the likelihood of nuclear war between Russia and the United States is probably growing and is the reason why it is most likely going to start is a future military confrontation over three Baltic countries. Thompson describes eight reasons why nuclear weapons could potentially be used in future warfighting scenarios with regard to the Baltics and argues that according to the bottom-line scenario, the East–West conflict escalates into the use of nuclear weapons in the Baltic area, and neither side of the conflict understands what actions might provoke nuclear use by the other. Thompson comes to a somewhat surprising conclusion – at least in the eyes of the Baltic countries – that the United States needs to reassess the situation, suggesting that it would make no sense to tie security of the United States to countries of ‘such modest importance that are situated in such unpromising tactical circumstances’ (Thompson, 2016).Potential nuclear conflict escalation scenarios are in more detail discussed in another publication, a NATO playbook entitled ‘Preventing escalation in the Baltics’ by Ulrich Kühn. The author argues that the risk of escalating a wider conflict between Russia and NATO is dangerously high particularly in the case of the Baltic countries because it would be difficult for NATO to defend the region. Kühn suggest three possible escalation scenarios, i.e., deliberate escalation, inadvertent escalation, and accidental escalation. All three scenarios also involve nuclear threats; however, two of the scenarios stop short of actual Russian nuclear-weapon usage (Kühn, 2018). The analysis provides an interesting hypothetical construct for the experts at both the transatlantic and local levels, as it points to many practical issues in regard to the nuclear deterrence from the NATO’s political decision-making process to the role of domestic policies in tackling such a crisis.Conflict escalation scenarios that involve nuclear capabilities are discussed also in other studies. For example, in a study called ‘Reducing the risk of nuclear war in the Nordic/Baltic region’ by Barry Blechman and co-authors, two scenarios of conventional war ending in the exchange of nuclear weapons are constructed (namely, ‘Escalation in Estonia’ and ‘Regional War’). Although the authors emphasize that the scenarios are purely illustrative and the probability of nuclear use is low, they argue that it is useful to reduce these risks even further and suggest two initiatives, such as a strengthening of the Alliance’s conventional military capabilities and particularly the ability to move quickly into the Baltic region, as well as to establish a Baltic nuclear weapons free zone, or at least examining the possibility to do so (for further discussion, see Blechman et at., 2015). Jüri Luik and Tomas Jermalavi?ius in their article ‘A plausible scenario of nuclear war in Europe, and how to deter it: A perspective from Estonia’ point to various alarming signs, e.g., Russia’s large-scale exercises incorporate limited nuclear strike scenarios against NATO as part of Russia’s ‘escalation to de-escalate’ strategy; Russia is expanding the range of its tactical delivery systems, the country’s political rhetoric includes nuclear threats toward the West, and so on. They emphasize that the Alliance’s range of response options to such threats and limited nuclear war scenarios has shrunk considerably and that the Alliance lacks a collective will to call those threats a bluff (Luik and Jermalavi?ius, 2017).A large part of the research in this field more or less considers it likely that Russia could use its nuclear forces in the Baltic region. However, there are also articles that oppose this conviction. For example, Viljar Veebel and Illimar Ploom in ‘The deterrence credibility of NATO and the readiness of the Baltic states to employ the deterrence instruments’ disagree with the idea that the Baltic countries could be under potential nuclear attack, which could in turn evolve to a nuclear war. They argue that although Russia and NATO as potential conflict parties have a striking capability, it would be irrational for both of them to execute a nuclear strike even as a measure of last resort. The authors stress that it is hard to believe that Russia has any rational motivation to use nuclear weapons in the Baltic countries because a large share of the population in the Baltic countries are Russian-speaking. Likewise, in case of a potential conflict, territorial proximity of Russia and the Baltic countries, as well as Russia’s possible further ambition to legitimate the annexation comes into play. The argument of irrationality applies also to the NATO alliance as it would raise a question about morality and escalation should NATO consider using nuclear attack as a preventative measure. In addition, there are several logical gaps in the chain of arguments justifying the use of nuclear weapons against Russia if the latter has fully or partially invaded the Baltic countries. The authors hereby point to the following questions: First, how could the strategic use of nuclear weapons against Russia be believable in a regional conflict? Second, how would it help to solve the conflict which has already started? Third, what would be the possible positive outcome for NATO, having initiated mutually assured destruction with Russia to stop the occupations of Baltics? (Veebel and Ploom, 2018a).European Unity Advantage AnswersEntanglement AnsEntanglement doesn’t explain US security policy---the Aff doesn’t make war less likely.Michael Beckley 15. Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University. "The Myth of Entangling Alliances: Reassessing the Security Risks of U.S. Defense Pacts". International Security 39:4. Spring 2015. **NCC Packet 2020-21**In sum, the empirical record shows that the risk of entanglement is real but manageable and that, for better or worse, U.S. security policy lies firmly in the hands of U.S. leaders and is shaped primarily by those leaders’ perceptions of the nation’s core interests. When the United States has overreached militarily, the main cause has not been entangling alliances but rather what Richard Betts calls “self-entrapment”—the tendency of U.S. leaders to define national interests expansively, to exaggerate the magnitude of foreign threats, and to underestimate the costs of military intervention.188 Developing a disciplined defense policy therefore will require the emergence of prudent leadership, the development (or resurrection) of guidelines governing the use of force,189 the establishment of domestic institutional constraints on the president’s authority to send U.S. forces into battle, or some combination of these.190 Scrapping alliances, by contrast, would simply unleash the United States to act on its interventionist impulses while leaving it isolated diplomatically and militarily.To be sure, certain alliances may need to be revised or dissolved as circumstances change. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, and U.S. entanglement risk may shift over time. For example, China’s development of antiaccess/area-denial capabilities may substantially increase the risks to the United States of maintaining alliance commitments in East Asia.191 Conversely, U.S. allies may be able to use similar capabilities to defend themselves and thereby allow the United States to maintain alliance commitments while limiting risks to U.S. forces.192 This study does not account for such emerging trends and, therefore, cannot rule out the possibility that the U.S. alliance network will need to be revised in the future.What this study does suggest, however, is that such revisions should be modest. The historical record shows that allies often help keep U.S. troops at home not only by bearing some of the burden for U.S. wars, but also by encouraging the United States to stay out of wars altogether. Large-scale retrenchment would sacrifice these and other benefits of alliances while doing little to compel U.S. leaders to define national interests modestly or choose military interventions selectively. How to accomplish those goals will continue to be the subject of debate, but those debates will be more productive if they focus on domestic culprits rather than foreign friends.Measuring the risk of entrapment is too difficult to be causally significant.Alexander Lanoszka 17. Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Waterloo. "Tangled up in rose? Theories of alliance entrapment and the 2008 Russo-Georgian War". Contemporary Security Policy. 12-18-2017. **NCC Packet 2020-21**ConclusionCritics charge that NATO has been reckless in its outreach to countries like Georgia and Ukraine. In so doing, it has encouraged those countries to behave more aggressive towards Russia, risking war in such a way that implicates NATO members against their own interests. The dangers of entrapment abound.This article analyzes the different causal pathways and variables that scholars have invoked to describe how entrapment risks arise. According to the international relations literature, four broad sources of risk exist. The strength of the commitment given to the ally—actual or potential—is an institutional source. The greater the commitment, the more perverse incentives it creates for the ally to behave recklessly. System polarity and the offense-defense balance are systemic factors insofar as no one country can manipulate them. Multipolarity raises the value of allies for maintaining the balance of power, whereas the offense-defense balance affects how a defender might manage its ties with its ally. Reputational sources of risk arise when an ally exploits the defender’s interest to defend its commitments for intrinsic reasons. Finally, entrapment risks can have ideological sources: An ally strategically appeals to the ideological prejudices of its defender, thereby reshaping the defender’s own sense of strategic interests on favorable terms. Some of these arguments regarding how entrapment unfolds have already been subject to criticism on empirical and logical grounds. Besides organizing these arguments typologically, I demonstrate how uncovering clear evidence of entrapment is a difficult enterprise, even when the theories themselves seem straightforward.The main problem concerns counterfactuals. The factors that allegedly generate entrapment risks can be so wide-ranging that imagining a world in which they operate differently would require changing other variables, which in turn can make war more or less likely. Alternatively, they might not exclude other factors that could lead to the same violent outcome. After all, conflict drives both alliance formation and the likelihood of war. States join alliances because they assess that the possibility of war is non-trivial. Similarly, a defender might be receptive to the overtures of an ally precisely because it has a pre-existing desire to see conflict with the adversary of that ally. In social scientific parlance, endogeneity problems are pervasive when trying to understand whether entrapment has occurred or is at risk of occurring. The case of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War is instructive by revealing these ambiguities. Many NATO members—especially those in Western Europe—were lukewarm towards Georgia’s bid to become a treaty ally, arguably because they recognized that Georgia posed certain entrapment risks. The United States was the most supportive of Georgia, but it might have overstated its support to Georgia in order to gain a bargaining chip with Russia. It might have even done so because Western European countries were so hesitant, thereby ignoring Saakashvili’s non-democratic tendencies. But by this very token, the United States limited its response to the outbreak of hostilities between Georgia and Russia in August 2008. The Georgian case suggests that states do not forge alliances mindlessly nor do they follow their allies off the cliff thoughtlessly. One cannot by definition want to be entrapped.The Russo-Georgian War of 2008 illustrates the need to disentangle the factors that push states to fight wars and to seek alliances while carefully investigating the mechanisms through which alliances fuel wars. As noted, some baseline probability of war had already existed between the two former Soviet republics when Saakashvili became President. Their conflict centered on an unresolved dispute regarding the political status of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Neither could commit to a durable settlement. Moreover, territorial concessions and submission to salami tactics could have signaled Georgian weakness, thereby encouraging new or more assertive territorial demands. Georgian leaders might have also faced domestic incentives to stand firm towards Russia—incentives that would have existed independent of NATO. To the extent that alliance politics mattered from Georgia’s perspective, Saakashvili might have cherry-picked information that confirmed his beliefs regarding Western support. Nevertheless, these factors are idiosyncratic because they stem directly from his personality. In a counterfactual world where NATO was not a factor, he could have had these and other cognitive biases that would have elevated the likelihood of war.By undertaking this sort of counterfactual analysis, scholars thus must take care to isolate the effect of an alliance commitment—to the degree that it exists—from the underlying propensity of war. Georgia bears a methodological and analytical lesson for thinking about entrapment: Just because NATO was an issue for Georgian security in 2008 does not mean the alliance was causally responsible for the war. Future research on alliances and war must not only identify correlations between alliances and conflict, but also sort out various causal mechanisms that connect different causal factors with war.Carefully disentangling the factors that could lead to entrapment matters not only for theory and methodology but also for policy. If entrapment concerns are real, then defense planners must have a clear idea as to where they come from. Some entrapment risks can be attenuated with active policy measures. Conditioning a political or military commitment when dealing with a risk-acceptant ally is one example. But doing so might not matter if we have reason to think that systemic forces make that ally more aggressive. Strong commitments could even make seemingly jumpy allies more secure. And so, armed with a better understanding of what drives entrapment risks, defense planners would be more confident in modulating political and military commitments appropriately. As such, critics of NATO expansion and American foreign policy may be overstating their case. NATO might bear some indirect responsibility for the Russo-Georgian War, but its culpability lessens when we consider the other factors that increased the likelihood of war: misperceptions, overconfidence, and the commitment problems underlying the territorial disputes themselves. If anything, the key policy challenge is for NATO to determine whether prospective partners like Saakashvili have psychological traits or cognitive biases that would make them unjustifiably optimistic about the level of support that they would receive.European Force FailsEurope wouldn’t be able to establish an independent force – takes years and prompts aggressionEconomist 19 – (“What would happen if America left Europe to fend for itself?” March 14, 2019. )//GK**NCC Packet 2020**A pale shadow Yet the Europeans would immediately face institutional hurdles. Compared with Russia’s top-down system, command and control is hard enough in consensus-bound nato. It would be a bigger challenge for Europeans alone, especially if they did not inherit nato’s command structure. The eu may want to take the lead, but military thinking is not in its dna. Besides, an eu-only alliance would be a pale shadow of nato: after Brexit, non-eu countries will account for fully 80% of nato defence spending. There would be gaps in capabilities, too. How bad these were would depend on the mission, and how many operations were under way at the same time. The European-led interventions in Libya and Mali exposed dependence on America in vital areas such as air-to-air refuelling and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. A detailed look at the sort of scenarios Europe might face would help to identify other gaps, and what it would take to fill them. Bastian Giegerich of the iiss, who is starting to work on such assessments, reckons that realistically the gap-filling could take 15 years or so. That is a long time for places like Poland and the Baltic countries that feel under threat. Fear and mistrust could quickly conspire to make narrow national interests trump efforts to maintain European unity. Hence a second, perhaps likelier, version of what might follow an American withdrawal: Europe Divided. Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute in London imagines a frenzy of activity, a cacophony of summits—and a renationalisation of defence strategies. Lots of countries would seek bilateral deals. In central Europe he would expect an alliance between Poland and Romania to guarantee the eastern border. The Russians and Chinese would not sit idly by, he says, but would play their own games with the Greeks, Hungarians and others. It is these games of mistrust that the American security guarantee has largely helped to avoid. They could all too easily resurface. “Establishing a purely European defence”, warns Michael Rühle, a long-time nato official, “would overwhelm the Europeans politically, financially and militarily.”Scaling back Article 5 does not cause EU common defense---deep, structural barriers ensure the only result is a scramble of side-dealsMichael Rühle 16, M.A. Degree in Political Science from the University of Bonn, Former Volkswagen-Fellow at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “Daydream Believers”, Berlin Policy Journal, 11/23/2016, **NCC Packet 2020**Alas, such concentration is nowhere in sight. Quite the contrary. Instead of reflection, some have chosen to panic: The vision of a Europe unified on security and defense has suddenly re-emerged. European nations – some of which aren’t even close to the NATO-agreed goal of spending two percent of GDP on defense – are suddenly embracing bold defense schemes that would involve spending far more than they would ever be willing or even able to deliver. But what a scheme it is: A new, defense-minded Europe would finally be able to look after its own backyard. Some observers have even suggested that a stronger Europe could keep an assertive Russia in check. Take that, Donald!Sadly, the old continent is merely shooting from the hip replacement. The reflex of pushing military initiatives in order to jump-start a stagnating European integration process has never worked in the past, and it’s not likely to do so now. If the EU cannot make progress on far simpler issues, it is even less likely to do so in the area of security and defense, where considerations of national sovereignty and status (as well as defense-industrial protectionism) run deep. For decades, most EU aficionados have agreed that security and defense can only ever be among the very final steps of the European integration process. Trying to reverse that sequence in the face of US disengagement will fail, for a variety of reasons.No “Strategic Culture”First, there is no European “strategic culture,” and the prospects of it emerging now remain as dim as ever. Europe remains a conglomerate of nation states of different sizes, cultures, historical experiences and geographic outlooks. “Brexit” and the return of populism are only the most visible signs of the bloc’s limitations: it has never forged a unified vision of the continent’s ultimate shape and future. US leadership in NATO ensured that these differences didn’t matter much when it came to security and defense. Exit the US, however, and these differences will quickly come to the fore. The fear of being left defenseless will not force the Europeans towards more unity on security and defense, but rather to make separate deals with the United States.Second, military realities are conveniently ignored. Europe is capable of smaller-scale military interventions along the continent’s periphery, but even the intervention in Libya in 2011 would not have been possible without the US suppressing Libyan air defenses and supplying the Europeans with ammunition (which they had run out of after just a few days). In theory, Europe could buy everything it needs for such operations. In practice, however, it won’t. The bill for a genuine satellite network, a fleet of transport aircraft, advanced cruise missiles and more would force European nations to at least double their defense budgets. Given the risks and costs of intervening without the US, Europeans will be more hesitant than when they had Uncle Sam on their team.Third, the nuclear dimension remains conspicuously absent in the debate. Many proponents of a stronger European effort in security and defense are making the case for a conventional force strong enough to deter Russia. But they seem to overlook that Russia is a nuclear power and can therefore trump whatever conventional improvements the Europeans might be able to muster. With the United Kingdom “Brexiting”, the EU (unlike NATO) cannot count on London’s nuclear support. France would never let an EU body decide over the “force de frappe.” And EU members Austria and Ireland have championed a global ban on nuclear weapons that is fiercely opposed by the nuclear powers and other NATO members. In short, a European nuclear deterrent is a myth; Europe’s only credible nuclear umbrella remains the one “made in the USA.”Fourth, the debate also ignores the political and legal obstacles that stand in the way of a more unified security and defense. For example, the oft-repeated argument that harmonizing armaments planning and procurement could avoid wasteful duplication is as correct as it is irrelevant. The larger European nations do not plan their defense in such a way; when it comes to key military areas, they don’t want to be dependent upon the agreement of their smaller neighbors. On closer inspection, even seemingly successful examples of “streamlining” are the result of budgetary constraints, not of deliberate planning. And in several EU member states, the national parliaments have a crucial say in the decision to employ military force – a privilege they are not likely to surrender to a collective EU body.Internal fractions and distrust thwart European self-defense --- the plan accelerates disunity and collapse Kluth 19 [Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist, “A European Army? It’ll Never Happen,” Dec 2, 2019, ] **NCC Packet 2020**That dream is as old as the European project. There were plans for a European army in 1952, drawn up by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. This was before postwar Germany was allowed to have soldiers again. West Germany’s parliament ratified the idea, but France’s nixed it, which led to the founding of a West German army in 1955, embedded into NATO. European integration followed an economic rather than a military path.The complications that caused that stillbirth linger. The nations in what is now the European Union still care about their sovereignty, which is expressed above all in the decision to send young soldiers into harm’s way. They also have different interests. The French are busy in their former African colonies. The Poles and Balts feel most threatened by Russia. Germany, caring not a whit about all that, is merrily building itself a second gas pipeline to Russia, circumventing the eastern EU.Member states also have dissonant historical traditions, which make integration into one command hierarchy almost impossible. Postcolonial France considers military action a legitimate tool of foreign policy, and its president has ample powers to direct its army. Germany, still atoning for World War II, disavows military interventionism. Unlike France, it has a “parliamentary army,” which must get explicit approval from the Bundestag to do anything. Would a French president patiently wait for the German legislature before deciding whether to shoot at little green men speaking Russian in an Estonian forest? Would 27 states cede that decision to Brussels?The fundamental problem, as Jan Techau of the German Marshall Fund puts it, is distrust: The French and Germans don’t fully trust each other, the Italians trust neither of them, the Germans don’t even trust themselves, Warsaw distrusts Berlin, Bucharest and Budapest distrust each other, people in the Balkans don’t trust anybody, and so forth.That’s why Macron is seen in central Europe as a neo-Gaullist. When he talks about “strategic autonomy” or “European sovereignty,” he seems mainly to be eager for France, the EU’s only nuclear power after Brexit, to lead Europe, snubbing its nose at the U.S. and accommodating Russia. To advance that vision, he’s sponsored a fledgling alliance called the “European Intervention Initiative,” which is part of neither NATO nor the EU. Needless to say, the EU’s eastern members would much prefer to keep relying on the U.S.All this helps explain why the EU’s new push for a “defense union” is not actually about integrating armies, but about creating a common market for weapons procurement. How very European. Exhibit A is a European Defense Fund, which will have 13 billion euros ($14.3 billion) to plow into weapons research. Exhibit B is a bureaucracy called PESCO, which aims to coordinate building and buying corvettes, helicopters, drones, and the like across the EU.A common defense market is a good idea. But confusing markets with might is exactly the sort of pusillanimity that drives Macron crazy, and amuses Russian President Vladimir Putin. The biggest danger is that it might one day also tempt Putin or his ilk to test the West. They wouldn’t need to launch an all-out strike; a good dose of hybrid warfare might suffice to divide Europe. That, at least, is the upshot of scenario games now being played by think tanks. For the sake of peace, let everyone in the Grove Hotel this week remember what’s at stake.Withdrawal fractures Europe, making collective defense impossibleMichta 19 [Dr Andrew A., Political Scientist and Dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, Former Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, Ph.D. in International Relations from the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, “Without the US, European Defense Will Fall to Pieces”, The American Interest, Oct 23, 2019, ] **NCC Packet 2020**Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, there has been a rising chorus among Europe’s politicos that the Continent can no longer rely on the United States for its defense. This narrative had already begun to coalesce during the campaign, when European media interpreted then-candidate Trump’s calls for NATO countries to share more defense costs as the beginning of the end for America’s traditional role as security provider and defender of human rights. Some European commentators even questioned whether, in the event of Trump’s election, the United States might simply walk away from NATO altogether. Others sought to reassure themselves and their increasingly unsettled publics that, while President Trump might indeed be unpredictable, his cabinet would be staffed with consummate professionals who understood the “bigger picture.” So it came as perhaps a bit of a shock when U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, on his first official visit to Europe in February 2017, delivered a stern warning to the other 27 NATO members at a closed meeting in Brussels, telling them that the Allies must either meet their financial pledges on defense or America would “moderate” its commitment to the organization. Since then, the accusations of “Trumpian transactionalism” on defense have only gathered in speed, alongside renewed talk of a “European army,” “European defense,” and finally “strategic autonomy”—the latter presumably implying progressive independence from the United States on security issues.Action followed words. In December 2017, the European Union launched the so-called Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), with 25 EU members promising to participate in a plan to develop and invest in shared military capability projects. Augmented by the Coordinated Annual Review on Defense (CARD) and the European Defense Fund (EDF), PESCO was intended to focus on specific projects reportedly to avoid duplication and to enhance their effectiveness. However, critics in the United States charged that PESCO would at best have a marginal impact on European military capabilities, lead to duplication and non-interoperable systems within NATO, and was in reality intended to lock out U.S. defense companies from bidding for European contracts. Washington also conveyed the Trump Administration’s concerns that rules for the EDF would prevent companies based outside the European Union, including U.S. defense contractors, from participating in the projects. In short, though PESCO and the EDF were initially met by the Trump Administration with cautious optimism and seen as potentially positive steps to enhance European defense capabilities, both initiatives soon became synonymous with protectionism and a diversion of Europe’s scarce defense resources in a direction that risked creating competition between the EU and NATO.There was more to come. In November 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron called for the creation of a “true European army,” an initiative subsequently endorsed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who called for a European army to complement NATO. Soon, and perhaps rather predictably, the idea became muddled by the semantics of the choice between calling it a “European army” or an “army of Europeans;” a year later the conversation had devolved into yet another European debate on “cooperative security” that failed to acknowledge the persistent lack of political will necessary to make the dream a reality. In fact, three years into the “we need to become independent on defense” debate in Europe, there is a real danger that a “common European army” of the sort advocated by some in Europe will do little more than further polarize the EU. Indeed, the assumption that there would be such a thing as “European” (as opposed to national) officers and soldiers is as dubious today as the previous attempts to create similar forces, from the Western European Union (WEU) through the Eurocorps and the Franco-German brigade.The European media and policy elite’s continuing efforts to call into question America’s commitment to Transatlantic defense carries with it a serious risk—one that goes beyond intra-European relations. The anti-Trump sentiment pervasive among European policy elites has increasingly aligned with anti-American strains of European public opinion, to the detriment of the larger relationship. For instance, according to a February 2019 Pew study, between 2013 and 2018, 30 percent more Germans stated that they viewed U.S. influence as a major threat to their country, with increases of 29 percent in France, 25 percent in Spain, 15 percent in the UK, and 12 percent in Italy. Among NATO countries only Poland saw a 5 percent decline. There is a danger that the current round of posturing on European defense will feed into the perception that, while allies refuse to meet their pledges on defense spending (NATO’s 2019 annual report showed that only seven of the 29 allies met the 2 percent target), they nonetheless have the resources to pursue their national defense industrial priorities. The damage to already-strained U.S. relations with key allies in Europe, especially Germany, may become enduring, bolstering the growing chorus in Washington that what Europeans want is to continue to free-ride on defense.The larger problem is that the impasse in the current debate about “European defense” is playing out against the backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating security environment around Europe (and increasingly also within), while the push for an autonomous European army seems increasingly to be the result of ad hoc politics rather than a sound defense calculus. Amidst the various acronyms and semantic exercises of the past three years, what is missing in Europe today is a keen grasp of history as well as strategic foresight. First, politicians seem to have all but forgotten that the European project was possible to begin with precisely because the United States, through the NATO alliance, provided the overarching security umbrella for the Continent, defusing postwar resentments and assisting in Europe’s reconstruction. It bears remembering that, without America’s commitment to Europe, the Franco-German “grand reconciliation” would have taken much longer to attain, if it were to be achieved at all. And so today, as during the Cold War, it makes sense for European states to speak of “Europe” when it comes to trade and economic policy integration. However, Europe’s security has since 1945 been a direct function of its having been embedded into the Transatlantic system, and this fundamental reality still remains true today. Simply put, there is a great deal of difference between the notion of a protected “common market” linking the economies of likeminded democratic governments, and that of Europe acting as a unitary actor on security and defense.And yet, if a number of governments in Europe believes—as seems increasingly to be the case—that they can establish a “European” defense structure and a “European security architecture,” then the outcome will be a hollowing out of NATO and at the very least a bifurcation of Europe between the countries facing Russia along the eastern flank and the those that during the Cold War constituted Western Europe. (Even here the divergent security optics are likely to pull individual countries in different directions, with countries like France looking south, and others, such as the Scandinavians, focusing on the north.) The endgame will not be a “pan-European” security and defense system but rather a back to the future scenario: a new age of insecurity in Europe, where deep power differentials among states on the Continent will yield a hierarchy of national interests that will quickly decompose a larger sense of European solidarity. The countries in Central Europe, which are deeply invested in the European Union as a pathway to economic modernization, will nonetheless never wager their national survival on a pan-European defense and security architecture, any more than powers in Western European will be able to credibly guarantee that in an extreme situation—without America’s backing—they would be able to bring their societies to the brink of war and beyond to defend the Baltic States, Poland, or Romania.Europe’s political leaders seem to be losing sight of the fact that, notwithstanding their differences with Washington, they do not have a better security option than working closely with the United States and strengthening NATO as the centerpiece of Europe’s security and defense policy. In the current atmosphere, in which criticizing the Trump Administration and questioning the U.S. commitment to its allies has become a mantra for European media, the situation on the ground tells a different story. A case in point: Next year Defender 2020 will be the U.S. Army’s largest exercise in Europe in 25 years, ranging across ten countries and involving 37,000 troops from at least 18 countries, of which 20,000 soldiers will be deployed from the United States to Europe.The impasse in the current debate about European security is driven by a seeming unwillingness in key European capitals to realize the core reality that, without U.S. strategic engagement, a “European security architecture” is a lark. It is time for Europe to stop daydreaming about a “European army” or an “army of Europeans,” or whatever the latest institutional permutation might be. Amidst a period of rapidly growing state-on-state competition, it is high time to focus on the fundamentals. If the common European project is to continue, the United States needs to stay in Europe, and NATO needs to remain the centerpiece of our mutual security and defense.It is worth remembering that, regardless of occasional policy differences, Europe today has no better friend and no stronger ally than the United States of America. This strategic reality should be the starting point of any conversation in Europe’s capitals about the Continent’s security and defense. However, if the current discussion about European defense as autonomous, parallel, or even complementary to NATO continues on its present course, it will cause lasting harm to Transatlantic relations, with the much-vaunted “strategic autonomy” becoming, in an extreme case, a self-fulfilling prophecy and, as such, Europe’s undoing. If NATO becomes dysfunctional, the European project will be reduced to regional groupings, bilateral alignments, or it may fragment altogether.Multilat BadMultilat is outdated, bogged down, and too complex.Ferry 18 Jean Pisani-Ferry, Economics Professor with Sciences Po of Paris and the Hertie School of Governance of Berlin, former campaign director for Emmanuel Macron and Commissioner-General of France Stratégie, the Founding Director of the think tank Bruegel. [Should we give up on global governance? Policy Contribution 17, October 2018, (table 1 omitted)]//BPS**NCC Packet 2020**C. Obsolescence of global rules and institutions Although the previous argument primarily rests on the broad pattern of international trade and finance, the adverse effects of external liberalisation can be compounded by inadequate governance. As far as trade is concerned, two cases in point are, first, inertia in the categorisation of countries, especially the fact that emerging countries, including China, still enjoy developing country status in the WTO; and, second, failures to enforce the adequate protection of intellectual property (an issue on which the EU recently joined the US and filed a complaint at the WTO against Chinese practices; see European Union, 2018). These grievances, and others concerning subsidies or investment, are not new: they were clearly spelled out by policymakers from the Obama administration (see for example, Schwab, 2011, and Wu, 2016). The underlying concern is that the systemic convergence on a market economy template that was expected from participation in the WTO has failed to materialise. The rules and institutions of global trade have brought shallow convergence but not the deeper alignment of economic systems that was hoped for. More generally, existing rules and institutions were conceived for a different world. This is very apparent in the trade field: the GATT/WTO framework dates from what Baldwin (2016) has called the “first unbundling” of production and consumption. They were not designed for the “second unbundling” of knowledge and production that gave rise to the emergence of global value chains. For decades, the implicit assumption behind the structure of trade negotiations has been that nations have well-defined sectoral trade interests: they are either exporters or importers. But in a world of global value chains, they are both importers and exporters of similar products simultaneously. Even if the principles of multilateralism remain valid, important features of the rules and institutions in which they are embedded are increasingly outdated. In the same way, opening to capital movements was supposed to result in net financial flows from savings-rich to savings-poor countries. What has happened instead is a massive increase in gross flows resulting in the interpenetration of financial systems and the coexistence of sizeable external assets and liabilities. The consequence has been the emergence of a global financial cycle (see for example Rey, 2017) and of policy dilemmas that are quite different from those arising in a simple Mundell-Fleming framework, in which interdependence takes place through net inflows and outflows of capital. Developments in the climate field further illustrate the point. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was negotiated under the assumption that the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions would continue to originate in the advanced countries. But by the time the Protocol was meant to enter into force, it was clear already that the hypothesis was deeply wrong. The exemption of developing countries from emissions reductions was one of the reasons why the US did not ratify the treaty. The failed Copenhagen agreement of 2009 was an attempt to replicate Kyoto on a global scale, but there was no consensus for such an approach. Rules can be reformed and institutions can adapt. But this is a long and demanding process, especially when it requires unanimity, when participating countries have diverging interests and when changes require ratification by parliaments where there is no majority to support them. Global rules therefore exhibit a strong inertia that often prevents necessary adaptations. Trade rules, amendments to which require unanimity, are a case in point. Institutions are nimbler and can adapt to changing priorities or perspectives on interdependence. The IMF for example has succeeded in adjusting to major changes in the international economic regime and major shifts in the intellectual consensus. But even institutions face limitations to their ability to keep up with underlying transformations. This is one of the reasons why solutions to emerging problems have often been looked for outside the existing multilateral, institution-based governance framework (Table 1). D. The imbalances of global governance A further reason for popular dissatisfaction with global governance is its unbalanced nature. The deeper international integration becomes, the broader the scope of policy its management should cover, and the more acute the tension between the technical requirements of global interdependence and the domestically-rooted legitimacy of public policies. This is most apparent in the field of taxation. International tax optimisation by multinationals has become an issue of significant relevance and it is estimated that 40 percent of their profit is being artificially shifted to low-tax countries – with major consequences for national budgets (T?rsl?v et al, 2018). But the fact that taxation remains at the core of sovereign prerogatives limits the scope and ambition of initiatives conducted at international level. The result, which can be regarded as an illustration of Rodrik’s trilemma, is that global coordination in tax matters falls short of what equity-conscious citizens regard as desirable and, at the same time, exceeds what sovereignty-conscious citizens consider acceptable. The imbalances of global governance are by no means limited to the taxation field. The same can be found in a series of domains, for example biodiversity and the preservation of nature. E. Increased complexity The final obstacle to multilateral solutions has to do with the sheer complexity of the challenges global governance has to tackle. In recent decades channels of international interdependence have both multiplied and diversified. They now link together countries with significantly differing levels of technical, economic or financial development. Because they have developed outside the scope of negotiated rules and established institutions, some of channels of interdependence also escape the reach of international agreements to an unprecedented degree. This is especially, but not only, the case of the internet and the multiple networks that rely on it. The world does not fit anymore the usual representation whereby individual nations trade goods, capital and technology. Even putting aside geopolitical consequences and assuming a shared commitment to openness and multilateral solutions, such complexity is bound to test the limits of existing international governance arrangements.Multilateralism is unsustainable—its successes cause multipolarity that deters future cooperation. Competition solves public goods better. Harlan Grant Cohen 18, UGA law professor, January, “Multilateralism's Life Cycle,” American Journal of International Law, 112.1, 47-66**NCC Packet 2020**This insight suggests a seeming paradox: that the anti-globalist turns described above are a reflection not of multilateralism’s failures, but of its successes. The great multilateral institutions of the post-World War II world—the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the WTO, the United Nations, human rights treaties, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—reflected efforts to increase and spread global wealth, stability, and peace (among other goals). And while much work remains to be done, these institutions have in many ways succeeded. Wealth and power are now widely dispersed across the world.13 Human rights remain under serious threat (in some places, more than before14), but institutions have developed tools that can be effective, at least some of the time.15 Success, however, has fundamentally changed the calculus of individual states, and in turn, their views of global goals and multilateral strategies. The success of multilateralism may have made that strategy more difficult over time.16 The success of post-World War II mass multilateralism, this essay argues, has had four profound and intertwined effects on global negotiating dynamics, which together should shift and may be shifting states away from that strategy. The first is true global multipolarity.17 Current global institutions were founded against a backdrop of unipolarity, bipolarity, or even tripolarity. It is fair to ask whether those institutions are mere reflections of earlier power relations that no longer exist, whether existing global institutions are compatible with true multipolarity. Multipolarity highlights a second effect of success: the diminishing value of issue linkages. When one or a few wealthy, powerful states dominate the international order, they can demand much more of others. Previously, in return for access to markets or security, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the European Union could demand that other states sign up to rules in which those others states had little to no interest. True multipolarity, though, radically diminishes the force of those linkages. Smaller states no longer “need” the more powerful ones in the same way. They may be powerful or wealthy enough to hold out for better deals. They may have greater relative regional power that offsets losses in dealing with traditional global powers. And, the wider dispersion of power means that the more traditional powers now face competition. No state is essential. This second effect combines with a third—the increased effectiveness of these institutions— to further change global negotiating dynamics. For states with little interest in particular institutions, greater effectiveness means greater cost. If the value of linkages decreases while the costs of membership increase, states may have little incentive to remain. For other states, effectiveness results in real benefits, increasing the value of membership. This though can make it easier for certain states to free-ride on the regime, betting that they can benefit from the global goods the regime produces, even as they seek special benefits at everyone else’s expense. Fourth and finally, multipolarity and success may change what states fundamentally want out of these negotiations, increasing focus on relative as opposed to absolute welfare. In an era of massive wealth and power disparities, all states can focus on the absolute gains of global agreements. Raising the welfare of the poorest serves the interests of the wealthy, and the poorest want only to better their position. Multipolarity, however, changes that dynamic. Studies in behavioral economics have shown that people often care more about relative wealth than absolute. At the international level, the United States worries about its shrinking wealth relative to China or Mexico, questioning trade agreements that, while valuable to the United States, give their rivals too large a share of the growing pie.18 President Trump complains openly about how little other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are paying for their defense.19 China and India, worried about the environment, worry equally that new environmental rules will burden them more than others, hurting their relative global position.20 The events listed above may thus best be described as the growing pains of an increasingly mature, successful, global system. But if multilateralism’s success makes further multilateralism more difficult, those seeking to solve global problems and provide global public goods face a quandary. The last part of this essay thus suggests some ways forward. Again paradoxically, as multilateral institutions deepen, the best strategies to achieve global solutions may be ones that encourage competition rather than foster cooperation. Regional, club, and national strategies may need to pick up where multilateralism leaves offEU Unity---1NCStatus quo solves EU defense integration---they’re incrementally shifting to improve capabilitiesDr. John R. Deni 20, Research Professor of Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, and Multinational (JIIM) Security Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute, Ph.D. in International Affairs from George Washington University, “The United States and the Transatlantic Relationship”, Parameters, Volume 50, Number 2, Summer 2020, p. 20Improved Security SituationIn some respects, Europe has entered a security stasis over the last two years particularly in contrast to the 2014–16 period and especially with regard to the most acute security threats confronting Europe— namely, Russian aggression and international terrorism. This security stasis was mostly the result of two key factors. First, most North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states implemented a series of budgetary, force posture, readiness, and modernization initiatives intended both to reverse years of steadily declining defense budgets, on average, and to begin correcting the deficit of territorial defense capability and capacity across Europe.1Second, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and others improved their homeland security postures. Since the mid-2010s, European states have significantly enhanced intelligence collection and sharing, tightened counterterrorism laws and border controls, strengthened communitybased monitoring and reporting networks, and devoted more funding to domestic law enforcement and for other counterterrorism capabilities.2Any more is impossible because it confronts obstacles that are too engrained for U.S. withdrawal to changeAndrea Gilli 17, Senior Researcher in Military Affairs at the NATO Defense College in Rome and an Affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation of Stanford University, “The Trump Administration Wants Europe To Pay More To Defend Itself. It’s Not That Easy.”, Washington Post, 2/3/2017, ) Implementing defense cooperation in Europe won’t be easy — Some analysts think that by promoting cooperation among NATO allies, any U.S. retrenchment from Europe would help address existing problems, but there are strong reasons to be skeptical.With Europe’s limited funds to spend on defense, large cooperative projects will be difficult to launch. In the past, countries in Europe abandoned cooperative projects because of their negative domestic implications for jobs, technological know-how or military exports. In an age of austerity, amid a refugee crisis and high youth unemployment, this mind-set is unlikely to change anytime soon.And some countries may have little interest in cooperation. They may operate in completely different environments — Mediterranean vs. North Sea, for example. Or they perceive a different strategic threat at home — think Russia vs. the Islamic State. Some countries may even have a strategic interest in leaving unaddressed some capability gaps — to compel proximate allies to come to their defense. This was Finland’s military strategy during the Cold War.Can the European Union step in and mandate greater defense cooperation?At the moment, anti-E.U. rhetoric complicates any additional transfer of power toward Brussels. Similarly, E.U. member states have different options to resist initiatives that do not fit their particular needs.Two 2009 directives from the European Commission aimed at liberalizing the European defense market and thus at preventing member states from acquiring weapon systems from their national industry remain largely stalled. After almost a decade, their effects have been limited and it is not clear that the situation can change anytime soon.And the E.U. has its own legal and budget constraints. For instance, the European Commission recently created a platform to fund defense research and got just under €90 million ($97 million) in contributions. Although the Commission expects to see this funding grow to €3 billion ($3.2 billion) through 2027, this sum still pales in comparison to the $70 billion in U.S. defense research funding.So what changes can we expect to see?Because of financial, budgetary and political constraints, European countries will not be able to generate a significantly higher defense output in the short and medium term, even if military expenditures or defense cooperation were to grow remarkably.There may be some enhanced European capabilities, assuming some uptick in cross-border cooperation and a growing role for E.U. defense-related institutions. The more likely scenario is that, overall, these initiatives will not be able to alter the conventional balance in Europe.The plan causes continental infighting---U.S. security commitments allow European unity and confidenceDr. Jakub J. Grygiel 20, Associate Professor at the Catholic University of America and Fellow at The Institute for Human Ecology, Ph.D., M.A. and MPA from Princeton University, “Vladimir Putin’s Encirclement of Europe”, National Review, 3/19/2020, a situation creates a great leadership opportunity for the United States. Because Europe and its institutions cannot resolve the deep divisions on the Continent, the ability of the United States to shape European dynamics will only increase, if it chooses to exercise that ability. The only power capable of slowing the ongoing Russian encirclement of Europe is the U.S., in part through its leadership in NATO but in part on its own with a select group of interested allies. The United States can therefore limit some of the intra-European divisions by removing the source of insecurity, mitigating the effects of the geopolitical encirclement of Europe by Russia. This is the logic that characterized much of the transatlantic dynamics of the last century: U.S.-led protection allowed Europe to be confident and united. There is nothing to indicate that conditions have dramatically changed and that therefore this logic has become obsolete.Broader EU unity is impossible post-COVIDStefanie Babst 20, Senior Associate Fellow at the European Leadership Network, “The Coronavirus Pandemic Hits NATO: Five Potential Implications”, 4/14/2020, post-coronavirus world, whenever it arrives, will likely be profoundly different from the one we knew before Covid-19 killed its first victim in Wuhan. While it seems too early to determine all the long-term consequences of this global health emergency, there should be little doubt that the strategic ramifications of the current crisis will be multi-faceted, profound and far-reaching.Below are five potential implications of Covid-19 for NATO, which Secretary General Stoltenberg and his advisors may wish to consider.No 1: Shrinking defence budgetsA few months after Covid-19 started to travel the world, it is clear that large parts of the global economy are bound to face a deep recession in the near-future whose scope and impact, according to the International Monetary Fund, may go far beyond the 2008/2009 global financial crisis. Due to the many unknowns related to how the pandemic will further evolve, economic forecasts range between a 5-10 % drop in global GDP. Once national lockdown restrictions are lifted, national governments will have to focus their political energies on reinvigorating economic productivity, encouraging public consumption, reducing mass unemployment and delivering on basic social and public services.Depending on how long Covid-19 continues to ravage Europe, North America, Asia and other continents, economic recovery will take years, not months. Despite substantial financial support from the European Union’s financial institutions, the vast majority of European countries will be extremely reluctant to assign their limited financial resources to upgrade national defence capabilities and maintain costly procurement programmes. Making the case in favour of spending billions of euros on increased defence budgets – something that was agreed prior to the outbreak of the pandemic – will neither be acceptable to the public nor to policymakers, across Europe. Habitual finger-pointing exchanges across the Atlantic about security free-riders will not be helpful. Rather, NATO Allies will have to find smart ways to adjust defence capability requirements geared towards traditional security threats (nuclear, conventional, cyber and hybrid) and new challenges that stem from climate change, pandemics, mass migration or disruptive technologies. All this is bound to turn into difficult political discussions in Brussels.No 2: Leadership without leadingIn recent years political relations between the two sides of the Atlantic have turned sour, due to US President Trump’s transactional policies and his erratic style. But transatlantic solidarity hit another low point since the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis. Instead of garnering political solidarity among America’s closest allies, providing practical support for Europeans in dire need (such as Italy and Spain) and leading a consolidated effort to mitigate the global health crisis, President Trump has made abundantly clear that he is solely eyeing his personal and political gains. More significantly, he continues to question the urgency of the threat. The prospect of building a US-led grand coalition to combat Covid-19, using, for example, NATO or a coalition of the willing, seems remote. Meanwhile, evidence is growing that the US is being dramatically affected by the pandemic; both in terms of the skyrocketing numbers of infected people and, more broadly, economically and politically. America’s economy seems to be on the verge of suffering a major blow with potential long-term consequences for its status as the world’s leading power.Looking ahead, it may prove difficult for President Trump to survive the pandemic politically. If the November elections still take place as planned, plausible arguments can be made that either a Democrat or a surprise candidate could win the White House. Top leadership changes could eventually also occur in those NATO and EU countries where governments are gravely mishandling the coronavirus crisis, public health systems are severely stressed, and governments lack financial resources to relaunch the national economy. Whatever the long-term political fallout of the current health crisis for individual NATO member countries, America’s reputation as a global leader has already taken a heavy toll.No 3: Intra-Alliance unity and cohesionThese two terms – that NATO ritually uses in its strategic messaging – are also bound to become even more strained than before. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, controversial issues ranged from Turkey’s intervention in Syria and burden sharing all the way to how to respond to security challenges on NATO’s southern borders. At the heart of these issues and related political disagreements, rests an extremely fragile consensus on NATO’s core threats and the way to respond to them. To be sure, these and other political disagreements will not go away in the future, but intra-European rivalry regarding access to financial funds and EU-sponsored modalities for economic recovery will strongly come to the fore once national lockdowns are lifted.Disagreements between NATO allies must also be expected about their future relations with China. Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, Washington pressed European capitals hard to ban Huawei G5 technologies from their markets. Under US pressure China was described as an “aggressive strategic competitor” in NATO documents. But will this view be as strongly held by all Allies now that Beijing has provided considerable medical support to Europe? Whilst China’s Communist leadership will not reconsider the country’s long-term strategic goals, in the absence of a credible US leadership role in this global emergency, a number of European allies may be tempted to look more at Beijing and somewhat less towards Washington as they absorb the many ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic.U.S. commitments stop intra-European conflict and arms racing---that escalatesDr. Hal Brands 19, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, PhD in History from Yale University, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, “The History American Alliance with Europe”, Hearing Before The Subcommittee On Europe, Eurasia, Energy, And The Environment Of The Committee On Foreign Affairs House Of Representatives, 3/26/2019, [typo corrected]Similarly, NATO (and the U.S. role therein) have long tamped down international instability more broadly, by suppressing potential security competitions within Europe and making it nearly unthinkable that war could occur between the countries that make up NATO's membership. It is remarkable that no one worries today about a war between France and Germany or Gennany [Germany] and Poland, given the pre-1945 history of those relationships, and NATO has everything to do with this achievement. Given that wars in Europe repeatedly reached out and touched the United States prior to 1945, moreover, this achievement directly serves American security interests.Finally, NATO acts as an impediment to dangerous geostrategic phenomena such as nuclear proliferation, by convincing historically insecure countries-such as Germany and Poland-that they can afford to forego possession of the world's absolute weapon. The guiding principle among the framers of the post-World War ll order was that massive instability, arms racing, and violence in key regions posed a threat that would ultimately imperil the United States. The U.S. alliance relationship with Europe has restrained precisely these phenomena.EU Unity---Status Quo Solves---2NCNew management structures create a foundation for gradually strengthening joint defenseErik Brattberg 19, Director of the Europe Program and Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, MA from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and Tomá? Valá?ek, Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe, MA in International Affairs from George Washington University, “EU Defense Cooperation: Progress Amid Transatlantic Concerns”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, defense cooperation has made unprecedented strides since 2014 and further progress is expected under the new European Commission. Driving these developments are a combination of internal and external factors. Among them is a more challenging security environment in Europe, the disruptive impact of the Brexit negotiations and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, demands for deeper European Union (EU) integration in the wake of the 2009 eurozone debt crisis, and defense industrial rationales. As the 2016 European Global Strategy makes clear, the EU’s ambition is to become a more strategically autonomous security player capable of taking more independent action, especially in its own neighborhood. But this will require the decisionmaking structures that can act swiftly and autonomously in crises, the necessary civilian and operational capabilities to carry out these decisions, and the means to produce the necessary capabilities through a competitive high-tech European defense industrial base.The evolving EU defense cooperation goes far beyond crisis management operations. At its core, it has the goal of leveraging EU tools to strengthen European security. In particular, new EU defense initiatives such as Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) and the European Defense Fund (EDF), though still nascent, are potential game changers in this regard. PESCO operates as a platform for groups of member states to cooperate on defense capability projects. The EDF, as an internal market instrument backed up by European Commission co-funding, has the potential to spur and incentivize collaboration on the development and acquisition of new capabilities between member states. These initiatives lay a framework upon which stronger cooperation can gradually be structured. Nevertheless, these new European defense schemes will have to have the right level of ambition, be successfully implemented, and contribute to strengthening both European and transatlantic security.Spending is rapidly increasing, it’s in key new equipment, and more is comingJohn A. Tirpak 20, Editorial Director of Air Force Magazine, Written for Aviation Week & Space Technology, Aerospace Daily, and Jane’s, Recognized with Awards for Journalistic Excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Aviation and Space Writer’s Association, the Association of Business Publications International, Recipient of the 2018 Gill Robb Wilson Award in Arts and Letters from the Air Force Association, Lectured at the National War College and did Postgraduate Research at the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum, “Who’s Paying Their Share in NATO?”, Air Force Magazine, 2/1/2020, then, Europe and Canada had already begun to increase spending, driven by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014 and its ongoing “hybrid war” against the rest of that country. Though Ukraine is not a NATO member, nations that lived for decades under Russian domination in the former Soviet bloc, including the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, feared they might be next.After Trump became president, his first Defense Secretary, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, sought to reassure the world that NATO membership was the bedrock of American international power and influence, even as Trump continued to insist that other NATO members pick up more of the alliance’s financial burdens.The tactic appears to have worked. NATO statistics released in November 2019, just ahead of the London Summit, shows Europeans and Canada increased their collective spending by a combined by 5.6 percent in the last five years. That includes a 1.7 percent in 2015, 3.0 percent in 2016, 5.7 percent in 2017, and about 4.5 percent each in 2018 and 2019.From 2015 to 2019, non-US NATO countries increased defense outlays more than 20 percent to $302 billion, while US defense spending increased from $660 billion to $685 billion. In all, NATO members’ total defense investment could top $1 trillion in 2020. Today, while nine NATO-member countries meet or exceed the 2 percent target (including the US) seven are within 0.5 percent of the target, and all 28 have increased defense spending since 2014.When it comes to investing in new equipment, the trends appear to be even better. NATO members have all agreed to invest 20 percent of their defense spending on new gear, and now, 16 NATO members are hitting the mark. Indeed, only Albania, the UK, and France have reduced their level of investment in weaponry since 2014. This separate accounting is useful because member states spend differently on pay, amenities and support for their troops, while the cost of equipment is largely equalized across the alliance.At a lunch Trump hosted at the London meeting for the “2 percenters,” he lauded the progress in investment and took credit for spurring allies to spend more on defense. “Someday,” he said, “we’ll raise it to 3 percent and 4 percent, maybe.”NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg celebrated the achievement, saying the growing number of 2 percenters “demonstrates we are making real progress.” More is to come: Most other NATO members “have plans in place to meet the 2 percent guideline by 2024,” he said. The European allies and Canada have added $130 billion to their defense budgets since 2016, he said, “and this number will be $400 billion by 2024. … So this is making NATO stronger.”EU Unity---Link Turns---2NCThe plan goes too far and creates confusion and disunity---now’s key because a united front is needed against Russian probingHans Binnendijk 18, Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University, Former Senior Director for Defense Policy and Director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Security Council, “What NATO’s Burden-Sharing History Teaches Us”, Defense News, 7/9/2018, should President Trump maximize his efforts at the summit to deal with those whom he calls “free riders”? He has actually set the stage to declare a victory. But if he pushes too hard and disrupts the unity and cohesion that summit planners seek to attain, it will backfire. NATO can not afford a broken summit as happened at the recent G-7 meeting.Trump’s best tactic is to recognize that burden-sharing is not only a trans-Atlantic problem. It is also a European problem. About half of the allies plan to live up to their spending pledge, while the other half does not. The half will let down not just the U.S. but its own European neighbors. That should be Trump’s message.If handled with some dexterity, the factors now at work should yield results similar to those of the 1970s. Overreaching will just create confusion and disunity at a time when the alliance needs to show strength in the face of tough challenges from the east and south.EU Unity---Alt Causes---2NCDebt, populism, and the Euro crisis will splinter Europe, regardless of U.S. commitment to NATOMax Bergmann 20, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Ben Judah, Author of Fragile Empire and This Is London, “The United States Needs a Euro Policy”, The American Interest, 5/28/2020, of the latest “eurocrisis” can trigger eye-rolls in Washington. Von der Leyen’s proposal should not. The intense negotiations that led to the breakthrough Franco-German proposal, which permitted the Commission to launch the European Recovery Package, had been marked by deep fissures appearing in the Union, which should alarm this generation of U.S. foreign policy hands.Washington needs to take stock. The real significance of the plan is not economic but political. These proposed new resources are to be made available thanks to unprecedented massive borrowing by Brussels. It also opens up the possibility for the European Commission to raise its own resources through taxes down the line. This clearly opens the door to an eventual European treasury, greatly strengthening the federal powers of Brussels. But is it enough, now? This is significant ammunition to fight Europe’s immediate crisis. The European Recovery Package, armed with roughly €450 billion in new grants and transfers, buttresses the Union against the upfront impact of the coronavirus. New resources equivalent to roughly 2 percent of European GDP are being made available this way. Still, it probably is not big enough. Even this injection still pales in comparison to the likely jump in the debt-to-GDP ratio in most member states by 2021—estimated to get up to roughly 20 percent in the most affected countries. By this calculation, as little as 10 percent of the costs of fighting the crisis will be mutualized. The plan is thus far from enough to avoid a second decade of depression and austerity in Europe’s south. Europe’s populists have little reason to fret about their future political prospects. With French, Italian, Spanish, and other weaker member states’ debt levels set to soar, and with the ECB’s critical bond-buying program running into legal difficulty in Germany’s constitutional court in Karlsrühe, the EU’s coronavirus generation’s grand compromise can still fail.And what is more, this compromise plan cannot solve Europe’s deeper crisis: the growing economic chasm between north and south, which has been greatly exacerbated by this crisis. The single currency, without either mutualized debt or a single fiscal authority, has become a device pushing EU states apart and engendering conflict, not cooperation. To put it even more bluntly, the euro, in its current form, is the biggest threat to the European Union. Americans would be wrong that this internal European dispute is none of their business. Its outcome is critical to the future of Europe, and, as a result, to the health of the Transatlantic alliance. It has direct implications on the renewed geopolitical contest with China and Russia. For too long, the current generation of Washington policymakers have been aloof to developments in the EU and have failed to see the link between European economic crises and the kind of political instability on the continent that makes member states weak allies.Washington has its work set out for it. Reviving and sustaining the Transatlantic alliance after Trump will require more than just restoring diplomatic norms with Europe and recommitting to NATO. It will require a sustained and far-sighted euro policy. And in order to achieve this, America needs to rediscover its own “European” foreign policy heritage, from a previous generation, whilst working consistently to promote the necessary policies to fix the Eurozone and relaunch the European economy. Above all, the United States needs to support Europe taking on a share of its members’ debt. In a word: The U.S. should back the creation of Eurobonds.EU Unity---European War Turns---2NCCommitments create a pacifier that suppress arms racing and war, moderates allied aggression, and allows regional economic integrationDr. Hal Brands 15, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, PhD in History from Yale University, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, “The Limits Of Offshore Balancing”, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 9/1/2015, relative international stability of the postwar period has an equally intimate relationship with America’s global posture. As even some advocates of retrenchment concede, the fact that historically warprone regions like Europe have remained comparatively peaceful in recent decades is not primarily a function of any dramatic advance in human enlightenment. Rather, that phenomenon has owed largely to the way that the “American pacifier” has soothed just those destabilizing impulses that previously caused upheaval and war. In key strategic regions, the U.S. presence has suppressed arms races and geopolitical competitions by affording the security that permits other countries effectively to underbuild their armed forces. Likewise, it has eased long-standing historical antagonisms by providing the atmosphere of reassurance in which powerful nations like Japan and Germany could be reinvigorated economically and reintegrated into functioning regional orders. Finally, the U.S. presence has been a force for moderation in the conduct of both allies and adversaries, deterring outright aggression and discouraging other forms of disruptive behavior. America “effectively acts as a night watchman,” Mearsheimer acknowledges, a geopolitical “Leviathan” that brings order and stability to an otherwise anarchical realm.97 “The contribution that the United States makes” to preventing the febrile international instability of earlier eras, another prominent political scientist observes, “is similar to the services that governments provide within sovereign states.”98Withdrawal causes war in Eastern Europe---draws the U.S. back inBranislav Micko 19, PhD candidate in political science at Charles University, and Marcel Plichta, Independent Analyst based in Washington, DC, Previously Written on Security Topics for Defense One, World Politics Review, and Small Wars Journal, “The Case For NATO: Why The Alliance’s Post–Cold War Expansion Is Vital To European Security And American Interests”, Modern War Institute at West Point, 4/5/2019, these material and expertise contributions, joining NATO ensures that these countries will take steps to solve their disputes peacefully, which is a value in itself. Issues that could have escalated into armed conflicts—such as disputes between Hungary and Slovakia or Croatia and Slovenia—have been limited to negotiations, in no small part because both sides were either members of or eyeing membership in the alliance and the European Union. Based on the experience of NATO in the Balkans, it is obvious that had any of these disputes led to armed conflict, the resources expended to ensure stability on the continent would be much higher than the costs that NATO shoulders today. It is incumbent on current and future policy makers to articulate NATO’s importance to American interests, while pushing for fair burden sharing, rather than falling into a pattern of lazy attacks that undermine the public’s confidence in the most successful alliance in history.EU Unity---No Fill-InEurope can’t replace NATO – defense spending quantity doesn’t equal qualityJulia Himmrich, September 2017, Research Fellow at the ELN, Dahrendorf Postdoctoral Fellow, LSE, PhD in International Relations at the LSE and a MA in International Peace & Security from King’s College London, “Can CARD Change European Thinking about Capabilities?”, European Leadership Network Policy Brief, accessed 6/10/20 *tog ****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Europe’s ability to defend itself, and be a reliable military ally of the US, has been questioned in recent years. The burden-sharing debate has been dominated by military spending, and therefore by the investment per GDP into military capability, referred to as input. Instead, Europe should focus on its output problem, the fact that Europe’s high investments don’t result in effective real capabilities. Europe deploys six times as many different weapon systems as the US, even though it spends only 40 percent as much.1 The European capability landscape is disparate and caters mainly to specific national needs. This results in a fragmented defence industry, duplication, and issues with interoperability.Leadership Advantage AnswersHeg D: Data—1NCZero correlation between hegemony and war – retrenchment’s stabilizing and avoids their offense – prefer empirics Fettweis 17 (Christopher J, *Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, “Unipolarity, Hegemony, and the New Peace,” Security Studies 26:3, 423-451) **NCC Packet 2020**Overall, if either version is correct and global stability is provided by US hegemony, then maintaining that stability through a grand strategy based on either primacy (to neoconservatives) or “deep engagement” (to liberals) is clearly a wise choice.75 If, however, US actions are only tangentially related to the outbreak of the New Peace, or if any of the other proposed explanations are decisive, then the United States can retrench without fear of negative consequences. The grand strategy of the United States is therefore crucial to beliefs in hegemonic stability. Although few observers would agree on the details, most would probably acknowledge that post-Cold War grand strategies of American presidents have differed in some important ways. The four administrations are reasonable representations of the four ideal types outlined by Barry R. Posen and Andrew L. Ross in 1996.76 Under George H. W. Bush, the United States followed the path of “selective engagement,” which is sometimes referred to as “balance-of-power realism”; Bill Clinton’s grand strategy looks a great deal like what Posen and Ross call “cooperative security,” and others call “liberal internationalism”; George W. Bush, especially in his first term, forged a strategy that was as close to “primacy” as any president is likely to get; and Barack Obama, despite some early flirtation with liberalism, has followed a restrained realist path, which Posen and Ross label “neo-isolationism” but its proponents refer to as “strategic restraint.”77 In no case did the various anticipated disorders materialize. As Table 2 demonstrates, armed conflict levels fell steadily, irrespective of the grand strategic path Washington chose. Neither the primacy of George W. Bush nor the restraint of Barack Obama had much effect on the level of global violence. Despite continued warnings (and the high-profile mess in Syria), the world has not experienced an increase in violence while the United States chose uninvolvement. If the grand strategy of the United States is responsible for the New Peace, it is leaving no trace in the evidence. Perhaps we should not expect a correlation to show up in this kind of analysis. While US behavior might have varied in the margins during this period, nether its relative advantage over its nearest rivals nor its commitments waivered in any important way. However, it is surely worth noting that if trends opposite to those discussed in the previous two sections had unfolded, if other states had reacted differently to fluctuations in either US military spending or grand strategy, then surely hegemonic stability theorists would argue that their expectations had been fulfilled. Many liberals were on the lookout for chaos while George W. Bush was in the White House, just as neoconservatives have been quick to identify apparent worldwide catastrophe under President Obama.78 If increases in violence would have been evidence for the wisdom of hegemonic strategies, then logical consistency demands that the lack thereof should at least pose a problem. As it stands, the only evidence we have regarding the relationship between US power and international stability suggests that the two are unrelated. The rest of the world appears quite capable and willing to operate effectively without the presence of a global policeman. Those who think otherwise have precious little empirical support upon which to build their case. Hegemonic stability is a belief, in other words, rather than an established fact, and as such deserves a different kind of examination.Heg D: Decline Doesn’t Cause War—1NCHegemonic decline doesn’t cause war—empiricsMacDonald and Parent 18 Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent. MacDonald is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley University. Parent is associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. “Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment.” Cornell University Press. 2018. **NCC Packet 2020**Since 2008, there has been vigorous argument about whether the United States is in decline. Some see clear evidence of an erosion of American power. Fareed Zakaria argues that the “distribution of power is shifting, moving away from U.S. dominance.” The National Intelligence Council asserts that one of the most important global trends will be the shift of power “to networks and coalitions in a multipolar world.” Others maintain that reports of America’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Joseph Nye contends that “describing the twenty-first century as one of American decline is likely to be inaccurate and misleading” Josef Joffe reaches a similar conclusion about the “false prophecy of America’s decline,” noting, “The United States is the default power, the country that occupies center stage because there is nobody else with the requisite power and purpose.” While there are significant disagreements about the character of American decline, there are fewer disagreements about its political consequences. Authors across the political spectrum worry about the repercussions of ebbing U.S. influence. Robert Kagan contends that “if American power declines, this world order will decline with it.” And Robert Lieber declares, “The maintenance of [the United States’] leading role matters greatly. The alternative would…be a more disorderly and dangerous world.” Christopher Layne concurs: “As [its] power wanes over the next decade or so, the United States will find itself increasingly challenged.” Charles Kupchan echoes the point: “U.S. leadership has always faced resistance but the pushback grows in proportion to the diffusion of gloal power.” While their policy recommendations differ, there is broad consensus that if the United States declines, this will usher in a period of greater uncertainty, complexity, and potential danger in world politics. Why do international relations scholars assume that decline will be dangerous? This pessimism is founded in the two main theories of how great powers respond to decline. The first contends that expansion and war are the most likely responses to shifts in power. Declining states find it hard to resist the siren song of preventive war because it holds the greatest hope that they will be able to slow or stop their decline. Rather than waiting until decline has taken its toll, states prefer to confront rising challengers while the balance of military capabilities remains favorable. The second argues that, when decline strikes, great powers stick to the status quo because they struggle with domestic dysfunction. A combination of entrenched interest groups, hidebound bureaucracies, and parochial governing coalitions prevent policymakers from altering course. Paralyzed at home, declining powers cling to untenable commitments despite sharp challengers and spiraling costs. Where domestic dysfunction scholars tend to see status quo policies as imprudent, preventive war theorists tend to see those courses of action as rational, if sometimes regrettable. In this chapter, we challenge the assumptions and logic of both of these theories. We argue that the conditions that produce dysfunctional domestic dynamics or preventive war incentives tend to be rare, and even less common when great powers are in the midst of decline. Decline creates powerful incentives for leaders to overcome domestic intransigence and push through needed reforms. Few states are so vulnerable to capture from domestic interests that they can ignore structural incentives. Decline generates equally powerful incentives for states to adjust constructively within the international order, rather than risk the grave gamble that is preventive war. Seldom are states in the position where the risks of preventive war are manageable, and yet victory will be decisive enough to solve their underlying problems. These critiques find support in the empirical record, where preventive war and political paralysis are infrequent. The true puzzle is not why states struggle to respond to decline, but why retrenchment is the most common response. Heg D: Resilient—1NCUS hegemony is resilient Hunt 17 (Edward Hunt, PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary, “The American Empire Isn’t in Decline,” March 13, )**NCC Packet 2020**The warning signs seem to be everywhere. A resurgent Russia is exerting its power in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A rising China is extending its reach across its periphery. ISIS has taken control of large parts of Iraq and Syria. Establishment Democrats and Republicans couldn’t even stop Donald Trump from becoming the president of the United States. For the foreign policy establishment in Washington, it all raises a very troubling question: is the United States an empire in decline? Some insist that the answer is yes — that the period of US global dominance that has reigned since the end of the Cold War is coming to an end. As things now stand, “the post–Cold War, unipolar moment has passed,” the National Intelligence Council reported earlier this year. Former CIA officials John E. McLaughlin and Gen. David H. Petraeus made a similar assessment before the House Armed Services Committee this past February. In the years ahead, McLaughlin argued, “the world will be without a hegemonic power — that is, without a country so powerful as to exert dominant influence and advance policy with little reference to others.” Petraeus agreed, saying that the post–Cold War era of “US domination of the world” is ending. Still, there are some reasons to think otherwise. As former US diplomat R. Nicholas Burns recently observed, the United States maintains “alliances in Europe and Asia, and the Russians and Chinese do not.” In addition, the American military has begun to wipe out ISIS, killing more than sixty thousand fighters over the past two and a half years. So do a resurgent Russia, an ascendant China, and the emergence of the Islamic State suggest that US power is ebbing, or are these challenges exaggerated? What do US officials really think about these matters? If we take stock of their public statements as a whole, the foreign policy establishment certainly appears concerned about the latest challenges to US empire, especially the uncertainty that Trump’s election has introduced. But they also remain quite confident in their power to shape the world and steer the United States into a new age of global hegemony. The World’s Superpower Over the past few years, a number of high-level officials have expressed great confidence in the durability of US hegemony. Not only have they insisted that the declinist thesis is wrong, but they have argued that the United States will remain the world’s dominant power well into the future. In May 2016, two former high-level officials laid out the more confident view for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In a statement to the panel, former Secretary of State James Baker said that the United States would continue to lead the international system. Certainly, “much of the rest of the world — countries like China, Brazil and India — are catching up with us,” Baker conceded. “Still, we should remain the world’s preeminent leader for the foreseeable future.” Former National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon agreed. As long as the United States takes the proper precautions, he said, it “will continue to be the world’s leading and most powerful nation for a long time to come.” Donilon also rejected the declinist thesis, calling it a “myth” that should not be taken seriously: “The idea that America is in decline does not stand up to a rigorous analysis of our national balance sheet of strategic assets and liabilities,” Donilon asserted. “The truth is that no nation can match our comprehensive set of enduring strengths.” Other Obama administration officials offered similar views. Last October, for example, Secretary of State John Kerry noted that the United States maintains tremendous economic advantages. “We’re the richest country on the face of the planet,” Kerry said. In fact, the Obama administration made great strides in expanding US economic power across the globe. President Obama, who acknowledged during his final months in office that he had “made it a priority to open up new markets overseas,” boasted that his administration had “increased US exports to the world by more than 40 percent — to record levels.” At the same time, administration officials also pointed to their other great advantage in world affairs: American military power. As Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter noted in April 2015, “it will take decades — and let me repeat that: decades — for anyone to build the kind of military capability the United States possesses today.” Obama expressed similar sentiments during his farewell tour. The United States possesses “the greatest military in the history of the world,” Obama declared. “Make no mistake,” he continued, “even with the challenges of recent years — and there have been challenges — our allies and adversaries alike understand America’s military remains, by far, the most capable fighting force on the face of the Earth.” In short, contrary to those who warn of waning US hegemony, high-ranking officials insist that the United States remains the most powerful country in the world. “We are, without a doubt, the world’s superpower,” CIA Director John Brennan said this past September. The Challenges Of course, every great power faces challengers. Not even the mighty United States is immune from pushback. As Carter noted last November, the United States faces enemies that are “extremely competitive,” ranging from terrorists to “high-end opponents.” Facing such a broad range of adversaries, foreign policy elites have tried to assess how seriously to treat each, weighing whether current and potential enemies can significantly weaken the United States’ hold over the world. For the most part, they agree on the issue of terrorism. Although American leaders regularly denounce terrorism as the modern world’s greatest plague, most don’t see it as a major challenge. Last November, former State Department official Daniel Serwer warned, “We shouldn’t blow up terrorism into an existential threat. It’s not.” A month later, Obama agreed that ISIS and other groups stand no real chance of defeating the United States. “Today’s terrorists can kill innocent people,” Obama stated, “but they don’t pose an existential threat to our nation.” Instead, officials have grown more concerned about other challenges. Taking a more traditional view of the world, they have largely concluded that rising powers in the international system now pose the most serious threat to US hegemony. Early last year, Carter articulated this basic rationale, describing the latest trends as “a return, in some ways, to great power competition.” Without diminishing the US’s capacity to fight terrorism, he contended that the nation should prepare for new confrontations with Russia and China. These countries, he argued, “are our most stressing competitors, as they’ve both developed and are continuing to advance military systems that threaten our advantages in specific areas.” Throughout Washington, many officials are worried that China will replace the United States as the dominant power in the Pacific. Last June, Brennan delivered this warning: “China is a growing power of great economic, political, and increasingly military influence and presence.” China, he noted, has continued expanding its presence in the South China Sea, an area American officials have identified as a strategically important transit route. “There is a reason for the United States to pay attention to what China is doing on a number of fronts, which we are,” Brennan said. A few months later, two high-level officials put the matter more directly. Appearing before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Secretary of Defense Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford claimed that the United States and China are now arrayed against each other. Alabama senator Tom Cotton asked, “Gen. Dunford, are we in great-power competition with China?” “We are, senator,” Dunford replied. Carter agreed, saying, “absolutely right.” In early January, Secretary of State John Kerry even suggested that China would eventually surpass the United States as the world’s leading economic power. “We’re the most powerful country on the planet, yes, and we’re the biggest economy in the world, yes,” Kerry stated. “But China will be eventually just by virtue of its size.” Nevertheless, US officials have also expressed certitude about their ability to deal with China. While they may identify China as a great-power competitor that is destined to grow more powerful, they have also argued the US maintains the upper hand in bilateral relations. In July 2016, Vice President Joe Biden provided one example. He recounted that after the Chinese government had tried to create an air defense identification zone over disputed territory in the East China Sea, the United States had asserted its dominance. According to Biden, President Xi had asked him, “What do you expect me to do?” In response, Biden had said, “I don’t expect you to do much, but just so you know, we’re flying B-52s through it. We’re coming.” In other words, Biden told the Chinese president that regardless of any newly declared air rights, the United States would continue to use that area. Since then, officials have only grown more confident in their capacity to manage China. Kerry himself bragged last September that China has not been able to alter the strategic calculus in the South China Sea. “In the South China Sea, we have been able to make it clear, freedom of navigation,” Kerry commented. “We’ve been able to deal with China.” In fact, the United States has maintained the dominant position throughout the entire Asia Pacific area. The United States “is the strongest military and the power of the region and will remain so for a long time,” Carter said last December. Officials in the Trump administration have indicated they may use that military power to confront China. In January, Rex Tillerson said during his confirmation hearing for secretary of state that the US will no longer tolerate China’s attempts to gain control of the South China Sea. “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops, and second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed,” Tillerson said. In short, US officials are relatively unperturbed by China’s power. Although they still fear that China may one day emerge to challenge American hegemony, they have largely ensured that China will remain a secondary power in the region for the immediate future. Russia: A Closer Look Meanwhile, state officials face another significant challenge to their plans: Russia. Last June, Brennan captured their trepidation in a statement to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: “Russia is threatening its neighbors and aggressively reasserting itself on the global stage,” he stated. The following month, diplomat Alexander Vershbow provided a more direct assessment, explaining that the United States and Russia are once again competing for influence in Europe. “We now sadly recognize that we’re in a long — what I’d call a long-term strategic competition with Russia,” Vershbow said. Earlier this year, Mattis issued the strongest warning, saying that Russia represented the main hazard to the world order. “I would consider the principal threats to start with Russia,” Mattis said. At the same time, US officials assert that the rivalry with Russia remains largely one-sided. While they see Russia as a competitor, they simultaneously insist that the country has much less power than the United States. In April 2016, US ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute argued that Russia — not the United States — has entered a period of declension. “There’s a sense that, yes, there’s a new, more assertive, maybe even more aggressive Russia,” he explained, “but fundamentally Russia is a state in decline.” A few months later, Defense Department official Elissa Slotkin made a similar argument. The Russians are “acting from a position of weakness,” she stated, before going on to note that the Kremlin faces many constraints. “I think the combination of the economic sanctions after Crimea and Eastern Ukraine plus the low price of oil has really hurt them,” she said. The United States should not “overestimate the competitor,” she continued, suggesting that her predecessors had done just that with the Soviet Union. The Russians “are not unbeatable,” she insisted. “They are not operating from a position of strength.” The highest ranking officials in the Obama administration shared her view. This past October, Secretary of State John Kerry said that very little about Russia scared him. “I don’t sit around quaking about Russia,” Kerry commented. Obama also waved away the notion that Russia posed a serious challenge, even after allegations of election interference surfaced. “The Russians can’t change us or significantly weaken us,” he stated. “They are a smaller country. They are a weaker country.” Essentially, foreign policy elites seem content in the knowledge that while Russia has emerged as a competitor on a variety of issues, it is acting from a position of weakness. As former US ambassador to Russia William Burns noted earlier this year, “I’ve learned that we have a much better hand to play with Mr. Putin than he does with us.”Solvency AnswersSolvency: Shift TurnEmpirically troop shifts trigger Russian aggressionConnor Murray 8/22/20, reporter Vox, “Is pulling US troops from Germany really a “gift to Russia”?”, accessed 8/22/20 *tog **NCC Packet 2020-21**Shortly after a similar force realignment, when President Barack Obama withdrew some US combat brigades from Germany in 2012 and 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014.Solvency: TrumperPlan fails – Trump distorts messageConnor Murray 8/22/20, reporter Vox, “Is pulling US troops from Germany really a “gift to Russia”?”, accessed 8/22/20 *tog **NCC Packet 2020-21**This would relocate about 5,600 troops to Italy and Belgium, with the rest returning to the United States to conduct rotational deployments to Europe, according to the Washington Post. The Pentagon says the plan is intended to strengthen NATO and deter Russia. But Trump — whose explanation has contradicted his own defense officials — says it’s because Germany is taking advantage of the US by not paying enough for its own defense.Deterrence DA1NCThe perception of backing away from Article 5 causes Russian aggression in Eastern EuropeLindsay Lloyd 19, Bradford M. Freeman Director of the Human Freedom Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute, Graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, “NATO: Still Relevant in a Dangerous World”, The Catalyst, Summer 2019, Issue 15, year, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization marks its 70th anniversary. In the world of international statecraft, such long-lasting alliances are exceedingly rare. NATO’s longevity is due in part to the fact that it combines national interest, which can be fleeting, with national values, which are hopefully more lasting. The initial alliance between the United States, Canada, and 10 European nations founded in 1949 has grown to encompass 29 countries. Once ratified by all current members, North Macedonia will join as NATO’s 30th member. Some, though, most notably the president of the United States, have questioned whether NATO membership is still in the U.S. national interest. While the White House avers that the U.S. commitment to NATO remains solid, even the perception of a breach between Europe and America would foster Russia’s longstanding desire to rupture the alliance.The Trump administration’s concern over burden sharing is by no means a new issue – it has been an off-and-on irritant over much of the alliance’s history. In the 1970s, Europe was spending approximately 45 percent of what the United States was spending on defense. The Center for Transatlantic Relations notes that three factors combined to address the disparity: Moscow was becoming more belligerent, America was preoccupied in a longstanding conflict in Vietnam, and Europe was enjoying a period of relative prosperity. By the end of the Cold War, Europe was spending approximately 78 percent of U.S. levels.Today’s situation is somewhat analogous: Moscow is becoming more belligerent, America is engaged in a 17-year war in Afghanistan (side-by-side with our NATO allies), and Europe is enjoying relative prosperity. And European defense spending is beginning to rise. As Daniel Fried, the assistant secretary of state for Europe from 2005 to 2009, put it, “By all means, America should push for greater allied defense spending. But today (and everyday) let’s also remember — and respect — the sacrifice that others have made for us.” Why NATO was createdThe values that bind the alliance have remained constant, but NATO has not been static. In fact, its durability is linked to its flexibility – changing and modernizing as threats have grown and receded. It’s important to recognize that NATO succeeded in its core historical mission – deterring an aggressive rival and keeping the West strong and free.It’s important to recognize that NATO succeeded in its core historical mission – deterring an aggressive rival and keeping the West strong and free.Established in the first phase of the Cold War, NATO was one response to the vacuum created after World War I, when America sought to disengage from Europe’s power struggles and conflicts. In contrast to the Senate’s refusal to approve the treaty establishing the League of Nations, America sought after World War II to fashion a new and lasting international architecture. That included the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the forerunner of the World Trade Organization), and a host of security agreements and alliances, most notably NATO. Beginning with President Harry S. Truman and continuing through the Cold War, presidents and Congresses of both parties embraced this American-made architecture that helped the United States realize historic prosperity, saw freedom expand across the globe, and prevented a devastating nuclear war with an aggressive and expansionist Soviet Union.While regional conflicts were frequent and often bloody, the theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD) contained the 50-year standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. The uneasy peace was costly and often tense – the Cuban Missile Crisis, conflict in the Middle East, Vietnam – but a cataclysmic third world war was avoided. Western resolve, expressed in the alliance, prevented Soviet aggression and victory.The reduced tensions of détente largely fell apart after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, awakening Americans and Europeans alike to the fact that the Soviets still posed an existential threat. The decision to deploy a new class of missiles in Europe spawned the nuclear freeze movement and severely strained the alliance. But the fact that NATO held together was a key moment in the Soviet Union’s defeat. Western resolve placed unsustainable pressure on the Soviets and their allies. The system collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s, as a new Soviet leader found it impossible to compete. The rise of the independent labor union Solidarity in Poland led to free elections, as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev refused to intervene. The fall of the Berlin Wall and a series of mostly bloodless revolutions rolled out across Central and Eastern Europe. And long suppressed nationalism within the Soviet Union – in Lithuania, Ukraine, and elsewhere – led to the dissolution of the USSR itself on December 26, 1991. The map of Europe was remade. Fifteen states emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Most of them, including Russia, sought a democratic and free market future. Many declared their ambition to join the European Union and NATO. Over the next two decades, 13 post-communist nations took their rightful places as full members of the North Atlantic Alliance.But the question arose – what was the purpose of NATO when its main foe was no longer a threat (or even existed)?After the Cold WarSince the fall of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, NATO has reinvented itself. The alliance built to face down the Soviets has taken on new challenges and missions, proving it remains the most important U.S. alliance.NATO’s current mission was laid out in 2010. The alliance remains a mutual defense pact – each member commits to defend the others against attack, including against “new threats to the safety of our citizens.”It also maps out the importance of conflict management – preventing and managing conflicts and stabilizing post-conflict situations. NATO is committed to working with partners around the globe, to working toward a world without nuclear weapons, and to allow European democracies that meet the standards for membership to join the alliance.One of the first major tests for the post-Soviet NATO occurred after Yugoslavia’s dissolution. NATO took the leading role in ending the fighting and bringing stability to Bosnia and Herzegovina. From 1999 on, NATO has played a similar role in Kosovo. Ending the bloodshed was a key U.S. political priority during the Clinton administration. While the United States could have addressed these crises alone, our NATO partners worked with us and carried some of the load.After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, NATO’s Article V was activated for the first and only time in the alliance’s history. Article V of the NATO Treaty commits each member to defend the others when under attack. For America’s NATO partners, the attacks on Washington and New York were just the same as an attack on Rome, Berlin, Toronto, or Oslo.After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, NATO’s Article V was activated for the first and only time in the alliance’s history. ... For America’s NATO partners, the attacks on Washington and New York were just the same as an attack on Rome, Berlin, Toronto, or Oslo.Invoking Article V was more than just a rhetorical expression of solidarity – our NATO allies, along with other partners like Australia, have fought with the United States in Afghanistan. More than 1,000 soldiers from NATO partners have been killed.While you may disagree on the merits of American involvement in Bosnia, Kosovo, or Afghanistan – they were national security priorities of the U.S. government. In each conflict, America’s NATO partners took up arms in American-led engagements. Having allied support lessened the burden and furthered the security priorities of the United States.Sadly, the original rationale for NATO has returned in new, insidious ways. The Russian experiment with democracy that begin in the late 1980s has been all but extinguished. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has moved away from liberalism and democracy toward a state now best characterized by authoritarianism, crony capitalism, and corruption. Most importantly, Putin has acted aggressively to restore power and land lost when the Soviet Empire imploded.In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, on the south of Ukraine.Moscow has sought to encourage separatist movements in several former Soviet republics. In 2014, Russia stepped up its longstanding military interference in Ukraine by annexing Crimea. And in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia has pursued aggressive policies, aimed at restoring its influence. Countries across the region have faced new kinds of threats, as Moscow works to manipulate and discredit democratic institutions.Moscow has also sought to silence critics and boost its influence in longstanding democracies. In 2006, former intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in the United Kingdom. Cyberattacks have been detected in Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and elsewhere. And in the United States, Russia undertook an unprecedented campaign to stoke divisions and influence the 2016 election campaign.While the immediate threat of military conflict between Russia and the United States is low, Russia and other states pose a serious and changing threat to America and its allies. NATO is an essential first line of defense.An alliance and a community of valuesNATO’s mission remains first as a military alliance, but from the earliest days, it was also a community of values. And while at times NATO has chosen to look the other way, promoting democracy among its members has always been a consideration.Article 10 of the NATO Charter states that by unanimous agreement, any other European state that can further the principles of the alliance and contribute to its security may be asked to join. Greece and Turkey joined the alliance in 1952, even though both countries underwent long periods of military rule. Even today, with rising concerns about democratic backsliding in countries like Hungary and Turkey, both countries remain active members of the alliance.But NATO’s commitment to values became much more explicit as the former communist nations began jockeying for inclusion. Would-be members must demonstrate they are market economies and stable democracies based on a respect for human rights and the rule of law. Aspirants must live in peace with their neighbors, peacefully resolving disputes. And joining NATO requires civilian and democratic control over the military.Meeting today’s challengesSeventy years on, NATO remains a vital partnership and resource for the United States. It has contributed blood and treasure to the two most recent major conflicts – Iraq and Afghanistan. It has adapted in response to the new threats emanating from Moscow, shoring up defenses in the Baltic region, partnering with states in Russia’s crosshairs like Ukraine and Georgia, and providing important communications and coordination to defend against the ongoing cyberwarfare.Baltic grabs escalate to full-scale nuclear warJosh Cohen 16, Former USAID Project Officer Involved in Managing Economic Reform Projects in the former Soviet Union, Columnist at Reuters, “Commentary: The Number One Reason To Fix U.S.-Russia Relations”, Reuters, 11/10/2016, danger from the erosion in nuclear arms control is exacerbated by the fact that the American and Russian militaries are no longer in regular contact. Without proper communication channels, even a small military incident in a place like the Baltic Sea or Syria could rapidly escalate into a full-scale conflict between the two sides – with the threat of a nuclear exchange lurking in the background. The possibility of accidental nuclear exchanges should not be discounted, either. Substantial numbers of American and Russian nuclear missiles remain on so-called "hair trigger alert," a security posture adopted by both sides during the Cold War to allow the launch of nuclear warheads within 15 minutes or less in order to show the other side that no advantage could be gained by a surprise first strike. The problem with a hair trigger alert policy is that it increases the risk of mistakes. Many incidents involving nuclear near-misses related to technical or human error occurred during the Cold War – and this threat still exists. In 1995 Russian radar operators interpreted the launch of a Norwegian science rocket as a possible nuclear strike on Russia from an American Trident submarine, and in response Russian President Boris Yeltsin actually activated the keys on his "nuclear briefcase.” Likewise, in 2010 an American launch control center in Wyoming lost contact with 50 Minuteman III ICBMs under its control for nearly an hour.Deterrence---U---Yes DeterrenceRussia’s avoiding grabs because NATO’s strongDr. Michael E. O’Hanlon 19, Senior Fellow and Director of Research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, Ph.D. degree in Public and International Affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, and Sean Zeigler, Fellow in the Washington Semester Program at Carnegie Mellon University, “No, We Aren’t On The Brink Of A New Cold War With Russia And China”, Brookings Institution Blog, 7/13/2019, , for all the debate about NATO’s lack of adequate seriousness when it comes to defense burden-sharing, the alliance remains impressive. Although only 7 countries meet the official goal of spending at least 2 percent of GDP on their armed forces, NATO collectively accounts for more than half of all world military spending. Most members have significantly increased their defense budgets since the Crimea crisis of 2014. NATO has also deployed enhanced forward presence battalions to the Baltic states and Poland. They do not constitute a robust defensive perimeter, but they at least represent a stronger tripwire than before. NATO would do well to make its reinforcement capabilities for this region more robust, but it is hard to see Mr. Putin really believing he could get away with an all-out invasion, even today. So far, he has cautiously avoided any military excursions into NATO countries.Deterrence---U---Yes ResolveThe U.S. position is firm---we’ve stopped appeasing Russia, but they’ll pocket the plan’s concession and increase aggressionBenjamin Haddad 18, Director, Future Europe Initiative - Atlantic Council. Alina Polyakova Director, Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe. Don’t rehabilitate Obama on Russia. 3/5/2018. ’s much-ballyhooed “Reset” with Russia, launched in 2009, was in keeping with optimistic attempts by every post-Cold War American administration to improve relations with Moscow out of the gate. Seizing on the supposed change of leadership in Russia, with Dmitry Medvedev temporarily taking over the presidency from Vladimir Putin, Obama’s team quickly turned a blind eye to Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia, which in retrospect was Putin’s opening move in destabilizing the European order. Like George W. Bush before him, Obama vastly overestimated the extent to which a personal relationship with a Russian leader could affect the bilateral relationship. U.S.-Russia disagreements were not the result of misunderstandings, but rather the product of long-festering grievances. Russia saw itself as a great power that deserved equal standing with the U.S. What Obama saw as gestures of good will—such as the 2009 decision to scrap missile defense plans for Poland and the Czech Republic—Russia interpreted as a U.S. retreat from the European continent. Moscow pocketed the concessions and increasingly inserted itself in European affairs. The Kremlin was both exploiting an easy opportunity and reasserting what it thought was its historic prerogative.Though Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the final nail in the coffin of the Reset, President Obama remained reluctant to view Moscow as anything more than a local spoiler, and thought the whole mess was best handled by Europeans. France and Germany spearheaded the Minsk ceasefire process in 2014-2015, with U.S. support but without Washington at the table. The Obama administration did coordinate a far-ranging sanctions policy with the European Union—an important diplomatic achievement, to be sure. But to date, the sanctions have only had a middling effect on the Russian economy as a whole (oil and gas prices have hurt much more). And given that sanctions cut both ways—potential value is destroyed on both sides when economic activity is systematically prohibited—most of the sacrifice was (and continues to be) born by European economies, which have longstanding ties to Russia. In contrast, the costs of a robust sanctions policy have been comparatively minor in the United States; Obama spent little political capital to push them through at home. The Obama administration also sought to shore up NATO’s eastern flank through the European Reassurance Initiative (ERI), which stationed rotating troops in Poland and the Baltics while increasing the budget for U.S. support. Nevertheless, the president resisted calls from Congress, foreign policy experts, and his own cabinet to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine that would have raised the costs on Russia and helped Kyiv defend itself against Russian military incursion into the Donbas. As Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, he viewed any deterrent moves by the United States as fundamentally not credible, because Russia’s interests clearly trumped our own; it was clear to him they would go to war much more readily that the United States ever would, and thus they had escalatory dominance. Doing more simply made no sense to Obama. This timid realpolitik was mixed up with a healthy dose of disdain. Obama dismissed Russia as a “regional power” that was acting out of weakness in Ukraine. “The fact that Russia felt it had to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicates less influence, not more,” Obama said at the G7 meeting in 2014. This line has not aged well. Obama’s attitudes on Russia reflected his administration’s broadly teleological, progressive outlook on history. Russia’s territorial conquest “belonged in the 19th century.” The advance of globalization, technological innovation, and trade rendered such aggression both self-defeating and anachronistic. The biggest mistake for America would be to overreact to such petty, parochial challenges. The 2015 National Security Strategy favored “strategic patience”. But was it patience… or passivity? As its actions in 2016 proved, Russia is very much a 21st century power that understands how to avail itself of the modern tools available to it, often much better than we do ourselves. The same intellectual tendencies that shaped Obama’s timid approach to Ukraine were reflected in his administration’s restrained response as evidence of Russian electoral interference began to emerge in the summer of 2016. Starting in June, intelligence agencies began reporting that Russian-linked groups hacked into DNC servers, gained access to emails from senior Clinton campaign operatives, and were working in coordination with WikiLeaks and a front site called DCLeaks to strategically release this information throughout the campaign cycle. By August, Obama had received a highly classified file from the CIA detailing Putin’s personal involvement in covert influence operations to discredit the Clinton campaign and disrupt the U.S. presidential elections in favor of her opponent, Donald Trump. That fall through to his departure from the White House, the president and his key advisers struggled to find an appropriate response to the crime of the century. But out of all the possible options, which included a cyber offensive on Russia and ratcheted up sanctions, the policy that was adopted in the final months of Obama’s term was, characteristically, cautious. Obama approved additional narrow sanctions against Russian targets, expelled 35 Russian diplomats, and shut down two Russian government compounds. It’s true that Obama faced a difficult political environment that constrained his ability to take tougher measures. Republican opponents would have surely decried any loud protests as a form of election meddling on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. Donald Trump was already flogging the narrative that the elections were rigged against him. And anyway, Clinton seemed destined to win; she would tend to the Russians in her own time, the thinking went. But just as with the decision to not provide weapons to Ukraine, the Obama administration also fretted about provoking Russia into taking even more drastic steps, such as hacking the voting systems or a cyber attack on critical infrastructure. In the end, the administration’s worries proved to be paralyzing. “I feel like we sort of choked,” one Obama administration official told the Washington Post. Much ink has been spilled over President Trump’s effusive praise for Putin and his brutal regime. “You think our country’s so innocent?” candidate Trump famously replied to an interviewer listing the many human rights abuses of Putin’s Russia, including the harassment and murder of journalists. Obama, on the other hand, never had any ideological or psychological sympathy for Putin or Putinism. By the end of his second term, the two men were barely on speaking terms, the iciness of their encounters in full public view. For most of Obama’s two terms, however, this personal animosity did not translate into tougher policies. Has the Trump administration been tougher on Russia than Obama, as the president claims? Trump’s own boasting feels like a stretch, especially given how he seems to have gone out of his way to both disparage NATO and praise Putin during the course of his first year in office. Still, many of his administration’s good policies have been obscured by the politics of the Mueller investigation and the incessant furor kicked up by the president’s tweets. As Tom Wright has noted, the Trump administration seems to pursue two policy tracks at the same time: the narrow nationalism of the president’s inflammatory rhetoric openly clashing with the seriousness of his administration’s official policy decisions.These tensions are real, but all too often they become the story. Glossed over is the fact that President Trump has appointed a string of competent and widely respected figures to manage Russia policy—from National Security Council Senior Director Fiona Hill to Assistant Secretary of State for European affairs Wess Mitchell to the Special Envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker. The Trump administration is, in fact, pursuing concrete policies pushing back on Russian aggression that the Obama administration had fervently opposed. The National Security Strategy of 2017, bringing a much-needed dose of realism to a conversation too often dominated by abstractions like the “liberal world order”, singles out both China and Russia as key geopolitical rivals. During Trump’s first year, the administration approved the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine, shut down Russia’s consulate in San Francisco as well as two additional diplomatic annexes, and rather than rolling back sanctions, Trump signed into law additional sanctions on Russia, expanded LNG sales to a Europe dependent in Russian gas imports, and increased the Pentagon’s European Reassurance Initiative budget by 40 percent. (A president who berated U.S. investments for European defense has actually dramatically increased American military presence on Europe’s threatened borders.) While many of these policies may have been implemented despite rather than because of the president—on the expansion of sanctions in particular, Trump faced a veto-proof majority in Congress—credit should be given where credit is due.The Trump administration’s sober policy decisions should not excuse the president’s praise for Vladimir Putin, nor his reckless undermining of America’s stated commitment to enforcing Article 5 during his first speech in front of NATO. But the fact remains that the U.S. is taking concrete steps to strengthen Europe against Russian aggression. And let’s not be coy about it: if the president’s strident complaining about unequal burden-sharing in NATO finally snaps European allies out of their complacency and helps spur military investment on the continent, this won’t be good news for Russia either. Indeed, he will have succeeded in moving the needle on an issue that has frustrated every one of his predecessors since 1989. Has Trump’s bluster, especially on Article 5, been cost-free? Hardly. Nevertheless, talking to diplomats around town suggests that after initial months of uneasiness, most Europeans have learned to deal with the Trump administration in a dispassionate and pragmatic manner that stands in stark relief with much of the hysteria that passes for commentary in the U.S.Each administration should be judged on what it has achieved. At the end of the Obama’s two terms, Putin had elevated Russia to a credible revisionist power on the international stage. Russia annexed Crimea and occupied much of Eastern Ukraine; by successfully propping up the degenerate Assad regime, the Kremlin gained a veto on any possible political solution to Syria, and got a meaningful foothold in the broader region for the first time since Sadat threw Soviet advisors out; and its populist allies and fellow-travelers were on the rise in Europe, fueling both anti-Americanism and illiberalism; and most damning of all, it managed to meddle, almost unopposed, in U.S. politics—all on Obama’s watch.There is plenty left to criticize in how the Trump administration has done things in its first year. The Trump administration’s apparent unwillingness to take steps to deter hostile foreign powers from meddling in American politics is inexcusably irresponsible. And in the Middle East, the Trump administration seems hell-bent on following Obama’s myopic policy of retreat and narrow preoccupation with fighting ISIS to the exclusion of all else. But despite the president’s campaign promises, his administration has been the first in the post-Cold War era to not try for a “Reset” with Moscow. If Vladimir Putin wanted to sow chaos and confusion in Washington, he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. If he wanted a pliant ally in America, he has abjectly failed.Trump is holding a tough line on RussiaAndy Keiser 19, Former Senior Advisor to the House Intelligence Committee, Principal at Navigators Global, Senior Advisor to the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, “The New Space Race Is On, and Russia Is Winning”, National Interest, 11/2/2019, the Arctic to Afghanistan, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a clear threat to U.S. national-security interests. At every turn, Russia enjoys being a foil to the United States. In recent years, the list of Moscow’s aggressive actions that counter U.S. interests have included: invading and occupying portions of Georgia and Ukraine; meddling in U.S., German, French, British and other elections; shooting down Malaysian Air Flight 17; poisoning dissidents on UK soil; conducting dangerous and threatening military maneuvers at sea and in the skies; and bolstering dictators Bashar al Assad in Syria and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, to name a few.The current political mood aside, Washington has consistently taken significant actions and enacted policies to squeeze the Russian government. To give the Trump administration credit where it is due, its policy responses to Russian actions have been strong—putting us in arguably the most aggressive policy posture towards Russia since the end of the Cold War.Deterrence---Link---U.S. WithdrawalRussia will be emboldened and unrestrained in response to U.S. retrenchmentTomá? Valá?ek 18, Director of Think Tank Carnegie Europe and Former Ambassador of Slovakia to NATO, “How Trump and Putin Could Kill NATO”, Politico, 7/11/2018, course, none of this is guaranteed to make a difference to the White House. Trump brings two new uncertainties into NATO politics. He doesn’t appear to share Europe’s sense of urgency on keeping Russia in check through a significant allied military presence. And even if he did, it’s unlikely that he would consider it to be America’s problem.The president has said on a number of occasions that he considers all alliances a burden on the United States — it’s a position he’s held unaltered for decades. That raises the possibility that the debate on defense spending is a red herring. In the end, it may not matter whether the allies carry their weight in NATO or not. That would put Europe in somewhat of a lose-lose situation.The Polish government, probably suspecting as much, has floated an interesting proposal: In addition to spending 2 percent on defense, which it already does, it has offered to pay as much as $2 billion to cover the cost of stationing U.S. forces there. In effect, they have turned the tables on the U.S. president, taking the thorny issue of money out of the equation and testing Trump’s commitment to European stability itself.The Polish proposal, and all NATO policies, assume that the U.S. president considers military presence of any kind, whether American or not, as a key to maintaining peace in Europe. The summit with Putin will test that theory, and it may very well turn out that he does not.Trump will want to strike a deal of some kind when he meets Putin in Finland next week. It is safe to assume that’s the whole point of the meeting — to show the U.S. president breaking through where others have tried and failed. European capitals are understandably worried about the possibility of the U.S. reducing military activities — and possibly troop numbers — in Europe, in a move similar to what Trump did on the Korean peninsula following his summit with Kim Jong Un.If so, we enter uncharted territory. Such a move would reduce the fear in Russia — whether irrational or not — that NATO is planning an offensive. But its positive effects would be limited. European countries would continue their military exercises because they remain concerned, for good reason, about Russia’s expansionist agenda and do not want to be caught unprepared. NATO’s eastern border will remain tense. Without the backstop of U.S. firepower, it would likely become a more dangerous place, as Russia would be emboldened by its heightened odds of prevailing in a conflict, and thus less likely to exercise restraint.Even if it doesn’t swing material capabilities, it signals U.S. disengagement---that risks warDr. Daniel Drezner 16, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, B.A. in Political Economy from Williams College and M.A. in Economics and Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University, “The Curious Case of Offshore Balancing”, Washington Post, 6/15/2016, overlap is not perfect, however, which leads to the second puzzle: How is offshore balancing supposed to deal with Russia? That is clearly the country where offshore balancing deviates the most from the status quo. And although I share Mearsheimer and Walt’s skepticism about Russia augmenting its great power status any further, I’m far less sanguine about choosing this particular moment to signal U.S. disengagement from Europe. Russia might not actually be a potential hegemon for all of Europe, but Moscow is sure acting like it thinks it could be.Offshore balancers tend to think that states that exaggerate their own great power capabilities eventually burn out. That is true in the long run. In the short run, however, matters tend to be far messier, as residents in Ukraine and the Baltics would note. I’m way more comfortable with the role that U.S. deterrence plays in Europe right now than Mearsheimer and Walt. Ideas such as “turning NATO over to Europe” are the kind of moves that lead to severe critiques of academic realism:Realism today is unrecognizable from its antecedents. It proposes to voluntarily dissolve an order that is quite popular in Europe and Asia on the basis of an untested theory. To disband or greatly weaken America’s traditional alliances, either tacitly or formally, would be a revolutionary act. It would surely shake the equilibrium. Classical realists would have recoiled at such an experiment. Modern-day realists embrace the prospect of chaos and uncertainty.Deterrence---Impact---2NC---Russia War OutweighsRussia war outweighs---it’s the only scenario for extinctionOwen Cotton-Barratt 17, et al., PhD in Pure Mathematics, Oxford, Lecturer in Mathematics at Oxford, Research Associate at the Future of Humanity Institute, 2/3/2017, Existential Risk: Diplomacy and Governance, bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the unprecedented destructive power of nuclear weapons. However, even in an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia, despite horrific casualties, neither country’s population is likely to be completely destroyed by the direct effects of the blast, fire, and radiation.8 The aftermath could be much worse: the burning of flammable materials could send massive amounts of smoke into the atmosphere, which would absorb sunlight and cause sustained global cooling, severe ozone loss, and agricultural disruption – a nuclear winter. According to one model 9 , an all-out exchange of 4,000 weapons10 could lead to a drop in global temperatures of around 8°C, making it impossible to grow food for 4 to 5 years. This could leave some survivors in parts of Australia and New Zealand, but they would be in a very precarious situation and the threat of extinction from other sources would be great. An exchange on this scale is only possible between the US and Russia who have more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, with stockpiles of around 4,500 warheads each, although many are not operationally deployed.11 Some models suggest that even a small regional nuclear war involving 100 nuclear weapons would produce a nuclear winter serious enough to put two billion people at risk of starvation,12 though this estimate might be pessimistic.13 Wars on this scale are unlikely to lead to outright human extinction, but this does suggest that conflicts which are around an order of magnitude larger may be likely to threaten civilisation. It should be emphasised that there is very large uncertainty about the effects of a large nuclear war on global climate. This remains an area where increased academic research work, including more detailed climate modelling and a better understanding of how survivors might be able to cope and adapt, would have high returns. It is very difficult to precisely estimate the probability of existential risk from nuclear war over the next century, and existing attempts leave very large confidence intervals. According to many experts, the most likely nuclear war at present is between India and Pakistan.14 However, given the relatively modest size of their arsenals, the risk of human extinction is plausibly greater from a conflict between the United States and Russia. Tensions between these countries have increased in recent years and it seems unreasonable to rule out the possibility of them rising further in the future. Deterrence---Impact---2NC---TimeframeTimeframe---perception of the plan triggers Russian aggressionDr. Keith B. Payne 17. Served in the Department of Defense as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Forces Policy “Russian strategy Expansion, crisis and conflict,” Comparative Strategy, 2017. of war itself, the international political and strategic relations between Russia and the United States are about as bad as they can be. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the simultaneous conduct of two air independent campaigns over Syria could evolve all too suddenly into a war triggered by accident or by miscalculation. There is little, if any, mystery about the broad political purpose fueling Vladimir Putin’s conduct of international relations. Subtlety is not a characteristic of Russian statecraft; cunning and intended trickery, though, are another matter. Stated directly, Putin is striving to recover and restore that of which he is able from the late USSR. There is no ideological theme in his governance. Instead, there is an historically unremarkable striving after more power and influence. The challenge for the Western World, as demonstrated in this National Institute study in meticulous and troubling detail, is to decide where and when this latest episode in Russian expansionism will be stopped. What we do know, for certain, is that it must and will be halted. It is more likely than not that Putin himself does not have entirely fixed political-strategic objectives. His behavior of recent years has given a credible impression of opportunistic adaptability. In other words, he will take what he is able, where he can, and when he can. However, there is ample evidence to support this study’s proposition that Russian state policy today is driven by a clear vision of Russia as a recovering and somewhat restored superpower, very much on the high road back to a renewed hegemony over Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Putin’s international political objectives appear largely open today: he will have Russia take whatever turns out to be available to take, preferably if the taking allows for some humiliation of the principal enemy, the United States. A practical political and strategic problem for Putin is to guess just how far he dares to push NATO in general and the United States in particular, before he finds himself, almost certainly unexpectedly, in a situation analogous to 1939. Just how dangerous would it be for Russia to press forcefully the Baltic members of NATO? Vladimir Putin would not be the first statesman to trust his luck once too often, based upon unrealistic confidence in his own political genius and power. There is danger not only that Putin could miscalculate the military worth of Russia’s hand, but that he also will misunderstand the practical political and strategic strength of NATO ‘red lines.’ In particular, Putin may well discover, despite some current appearances, that not all of NATO’s political leaders are expediently impressionable and very readily deterrable. Putin’s military instrument is heavily dependent, indeed probably over-dependent, upon the bolstering value of a whole inventory of nuclear weapons. It is unlikely to have evaded Putin’s strategic grasp to recognize that these are not simply weapons like any others. A single political or strategic guess in error could well place us, Russians included, in a world horrifically new to all. This National Institute study, Russian Strategy: Expansion, Crisis and Conflict, makes unmistakably clear Putin’s elevation of strategic intimidation to be the leading element in Russian grand strategy today. Putin is behaving in militarily dangerous ways and ‘talking the talk’ that goes with such rough behavior. Obviously, he is calculating, perhaps just hoping, that American lawyers in the White House will continue to place highest priority on avoiding direct confrontation with Russia. This study presents an abundantly clear record of the Russian lack of regard for international law, which they violate with apparent impunity and without ill consequence to themselves, including virtually every arms control treaty and agreement they have entered into with the United States since 1972 (SALT I). The challenge for the United States today and tomorrow is the need urgently to decide what can and must be done to stop Putin’s campaign in its tracks before it wreaks lethal damage to the vital concept and physical structure of international order in much of the world, and particularly in Europe.Deterrence---Impact---AT: No Russia WarTensions are high, post-COVID---deterrence failure causes extinctionDr. Mehmet Perin?ek 20, Professor at Istanbul University, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Ataturk, “Is The Next World War Coming? The Importance Of Post-Coronavirus Military Deterrence”, UWI Data, 5/10/2020, controversies in the West as a result of the pandemicOn the other hand, the Coronavirus pandemic has deepened the crisis within the Western camp. In fact, the possibility of serious breaks are being discussed. It is certain that some important problems will pop up in the EU structure. Some even speak of a possibility of a total disintegration. The question of leaving the EU has already been raised in Italy. Germany ranks first on the list of most hated countries.With this, Western solidarity has turned out to be little more than a fairy tale. Even beyond that, the whole world has witnessed the Western countries shamelessly stealing other countries’ medical supplies. NATO has failed to respond to requests for help from member countries.In contrast to this, China and Russia have gained reputation for their aid to countries within the Western camp. In Italy, a NATO country, the Russian army has arrived as a medical group. Sympathies for Russia and China have increased in Italy and other countries.While the West steals from each other in a panic, Eurasia has shared, not only among itself, but even with the West. It has been recorded in the pages of history that a Russian military transport plane landed to bring aid to New York, despite being on Washginton’s sanctions list.The US will play an away gameThe United States is losing its collaborators within Eurasia, and even its allies in the West. It should be noted that the arena of a possible future world war will take place as an away game for the United States. Whether it would be West Asia, the Middle East or Central Asia, the United States would need military bases to settle in the region. As a result, Washington is likely to hit a wall.Different trends have begun to emerge within the historical allies of the United States in the region. Qatar is caught up with one trend, while Saudi Arabia has to take different equations into account etc. and this is without even mentioning Turkey, since it has already turned its course towards Eurasia. The United States is unlikely to find bases to wage a war in the region.The destroyed reputation of the US and the multipolar worldIn addition, the US, which has fallen into a decline with the coronavirus pandemic, has lost its international reputation as well. The hegemonic belief that the US is a country capable of everything has been destroyed. The number of dead from the pandemic in the US has surpassed even the numbers of the Vietnam War. The number of dead in socialist Vietnam today, on the other hand, is zero. Even American health care organizations themselves say that this data is far from being exaggerated. The US is losing against Vietnam once more. Moreover, the reaction towards the United States’ policies indicates that Washington has suffered a serious loss of reputation and is likely to suffer even more in the future.On a related note, the ultimatums of the US no longer work the way they used to. It is agreed upon that globalization, US hegemony and the unipolar world order, are coming to an end. At the same time, the forces of the coming multipolar world order are settling in more than ever before. These are important factors in debates around the possibility of a future world war.Weapons which will be pulled out in the United States itselfMoreover, the United States is also on the edge of some important problems internally. Apart from the failure in the fight against Coronavirus, the United States is experiencing an intense loss of credibility. The increase in individual armament in the country in the face of the pandemic is worth noting. Arguments over wearing masks have already led people to begin shooting each other, while physical fights are ongoing in stores where toilet paper has run out… imagine what it will be like if food becomes scarce. In contrast to this, the biggest weapon of the Eurasian front is the social solidarity and the rise of national awareness.The pandemic had also deepened the conflict between the states themselves. The US is becoming more divided instead of uniting against the pandemic.This division peaked when President Trump came into power. Vulnerabilities are appearing within the public, between the states and in the relation between states and the federal government. We have been watching government institutions infight with increasing frequency over the past few years.Can Washington engage in a World War while it suffers contradictions domestically? In fact, Trump’s idea “to stop dealing with the outside world, and channel the energy and the power to solve the internal problems” was the most logical thing for the United States, but his program has proven difficult to implement.Experience of the World warsAnother point is, when we look at the breaking point of previous world wars, we clearly see how many countries have been left behind or exploited by the imperialist system, while imperial powers desperately attempt to maintain this relationship. Germany’s role in both world wars was predicated on such motivations. Today, the US is the one on the decline, it is trying to maintain its order at any cost rather than allowing a new order to arise where it might not be on top. Its interests are more in favor of war than peace given what they have to lose.It is clear that the United States will not accept this decline, but the balance of power also prevents it from waging a world war. Regional wars and provocations will continue into the upcoming era, but a full-fledged war does not seem very likely.Is a nuclear war possible?In addition to all this, there is also the probability of a nuclear war. Let us evaluate it frankly. The US used the atomic bomb on Japan when it discovered this technology. However, back then, this technology was only in the hands of the United States, there was no other power to balance it out. That is where the US got its courage from. But when the USSR had developed its own atomic bomb in 1949, the likelihood of the use of the nuclear weapons was significantly reduced.Now the fact that this technology exists in many other countries has created a balance. The long-lasting destructive effects of the nuclear weapons and the fact that retaliation would be swift takes the nuclear option off the agenda. A well-balanced distribution of the nuclear weapons, or the abundance of some sort, ironically guarantee that they will not be used.Deterrence is essentialThere is little danger of a world war, but this should not lead to relaxation by Turkey or any other Eurasian countries in terms of military matters. Quite the opposite actually… Aside from the regional conflicts, power is not only a means of winning a war, it is also one of the most important necessities to prevent a possible war. It is necessary to maintain a deterrent force. This is what actually prevents a rival from engaging in risky adventures that may lead the world to a disaster.Hybrid warfare and a lowered nuclear threshold make miscalc and escalation likelyMalcolm Davis 17. Senior Analyst, ASPI; PhD in Military Strategic Studies, University of Hull, “Russia, Military Modernisation and Lowering the Nuclear Threshold.” Australian Strategic Policy Institute. January. . Three developments suggest a willingness by Russia to use nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear attacks in a manner that lowers the threshold of nuclear war. First, the concept of preventative de-escalation is important. A recent IISS analysis explained de-escalation in which limited nuclear war could be used to:‘…de-escalate and terminate combat actions on terms acceptable to Russia through the threat of inflicting unacceptable damage upon the enemy. Such limited nuclear use may deter both nuclear and conventional aggression.’Second, the integration of conventional pre-nuclear and nuclear forces reinforces Russia’s coercive power against NATO in the pre-war ‘Phase Zero’ in a future regional crisis—for example, in the Baltics. And third, the Russians are clearly conscious of that coercive power given their recent nuclear signaling that suggests Russia continues to see such weapons as a means of national strength. Russia has undertaken sabre rattling through simulated nuclear strikes in large-scale exercises and aggressive probing of NATO airspace with nuclear-capable bombers. It has demonstrated the dual-role Kalibr NK sea-launched cruise missile in deadly strikes against Syria, and deployed dual-role Iskander short-range ballistic missiles into Kaliningrad in a manner that was highly threatening to NATO. That has been backed by public statements which reinforce Russia’s nuclear weapons capability and even explicit nuclear threats to NATO states, notably Denmark.Russian nuclear forces are being swiftly upgraded with the focus on ICBM modernisation, based on introducing the SS-27 ‘Yars’ road-mobile missile, and from 2018 the silo-based RS-28 ‘Sarmat’ heavy ICBM. Yars and Sarmat replace much of Russia’s aging Soviet strategic rocket forces with significantly more capable delivery systems. Russia’s Navy is transitioning to modern Sineva and Bulava sea-launched ballistic missiles, on the modern Borei class SSBNs, while the Russian Air Force is restarting the Tu-160 Blackjack production line to produce the updated Tu-160M2 bomber that eventually will be complemented by the ‘PAK-DA’ advanced bomber sometime in the 2020s.The strategic nuclear force modernisation is important but it’s the integration of Russia’s conventional pre-nuclear forces with its large ‘non-strategic nuclear forces’ that’s of greatest significance. That’s shaping Russian thinking on the use of nuclear weapons, particularly during Hybrid Warfare, in a way that makes the risk of a crisis with Russia much more dangerous. Russia is increasingly focusing on the use of its nuclear forces to enhance its ability to undertake military adventurism at the conventional level in a manner that’s highly threatening to NATO. However the reliance on nuclear signaling, the changing operational posture of dual-role forces and concepts like ’preventative de-escalation’, increases the risk of miscalculation in a crisis that could lead to an escalation through the nuclear threshold.Russia conflict is likely and escalates---no defenseMax Fisher 15, Foreign Coverage Director at Vox and Editor at The Atlantic, “How World War III Became Possible”, Vox, 6/29/2015, Russian warnings that it would go to war to defend its perceived interests in Ukraine, potentially even nuclear war, are dismissed in most Western capitals as bluffing, mere rhetoric. Western leaders view these threats through Western eyes, in which impoverished Ukraine would never be worth risking a major war. In Russian eyes, Ukraine looks much more important: an extension of Russian heritage that is sacrosanct and, as the final remaining component of the empire, a strategic loss that would unacceptably weaken Russian strength and thus Russian security.Both side are gambling and guessing in the absence of a clear understanding of what the other side truly intends, how it will act, what will and will not trigger the invisible triplines that would send us careening into war.Today's tensions bear far more similarity to the period before World War IDuring the Cold War, the comparably matched Western and Soviet blocs prepared for war but also made sure that war never came. They locked Europe in a tense but stable balance of power; that balance is gone. They set clear red lines and vowed to defend them at all costs. Today, those red lines are murky and ill-defined. Neither side is sure where they lie or what really happens if they are crossed. No one can say for sure what would trigger war.That is why, analysts will tell you, today's tensions bear far more similarity to the period before World War I: an unstable power balance, belligerence over peripheral conflicts, entangling military commitments, disputes over the future of the European order, and dangerous uncertainty about what actions will and will not force the other party into conflict.Today's Russia, once more the strongest nation in Europe and yet weaker than its collective enemies, calls to mind the turn-of-the-century German Empire, which Henry Kissinger described as "too big for Europe, but too small for the world." Now, as then, a rising power, propelled by nationalism, is seeking to revise the European order. Now, as then, it believes that through superior cunning, and perhaps even by proving its might, it can force a larger role for itself. Now, as then, the drift toward war is gradual and easy to miss — which is exactly what makes it so dangerous.But there is one way in which today's dangers are less like those before World War I, and more similar to those of the Cold War: the apocalyptic logic of nuclear weapons. Mutual suspicion, fear of an existential threat, armies parked across borders from one another, and hair-trigger nuclear weapons all make any small skirmish a potential armageddon.In some ways, that logic has grown even more dangerous. Russia, hoping to compensate for its conventional military forces' relative weakness, has dramatically relaxed its rules for using nuclear weapons. Whereas Soviet leaders saw their nuclear weapons as pure deterrents, something that existed precisely so they would never be used, Putin's view appears to be radically different.Russia's official nuclear doctrine calls on the country to launch a battlefield nuclear strike in case of a conventional war that could pose an existential threat. These are more than just words: Moscow has repeatedly signaled its willingness and preparations to use nuclear weapons even in a more limited war.This is a terrifyingly low bar for nuclear weapons use, particularly given that any war would likely occur along Russia's borders and thus not far from Moscow. And it suggests Putin has adopted an idea that Cold War leaders considered unthinkable: that a "limited" nuclear war, of small warheads dropped on the battlefield, could be not only survivable but winnable."It’s not just a difference in rhetoric. It’s a whole different world," Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear weapons scholar at Princeton, told the Wall Street Journal. He called Putin's decisions more dangerous than those of any Soviet leader since 1962. "There’s a low nuclear threshold now that didn’t exist during the Cold War."Nuclear theory is complex and disputable; maybe Putin is right. But many theorists would say he is wrong, that the logic of nuclear warfare means a "limited" nuclear strike is in fact likely to trigger a larger nuclear war — a doomsday scenario in which major American, Russian, and European cities would be targets for attacks many times more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Even if a nuclear war did somehow remain limited and contained, recent studies suggest that environmental and atmospheric damage would cause a "decade of winter" and mass crop die-outs that could kill up to 1 billion people in a global famine.Deterrence---Impact---AT: No Russian RevisionismRussia is an offensive realistJoaquín Ferro Rodríguez 15, Strategic Studies and International Security Masters from the University of Granada. Realism vs Realism. The Change of Approach in The Eastern Border, 6/30/2015, begin with, I will explain why Russia can be considered as an offensive realist actor. It is not the aim of this paper to focus excessively on theoretical classifications or philosophical debates. However, due to its explicative power and its usefulness to better comprehend the Russian behaviour, it is worth mentioning three points belonging to the offensive realist theory: 1) great powers are rational actors whose main goal is to survive[1]; 2) all great powers are revisionist until the moment they become hegemonic[2]; and 3) for a great power, the only way to guarantee its security is to accumulate a bigger power quota than the rest[3]. Bearing in mind these characteristics, Russian position finds a coherent explanation. As Pierre Hassner puts it, “Russia’s foreign policy cannot be fully understood without taking into account the postimperial humiliation and resentment of the Russian people and the neoimperial ambition of its leaders”[4]. When the Cold War came to an end, Russian leaders regarded the presence of the United States (U.S.) and NATO in Europe positively as a way to keep a reunified Germany pacified. Nevertheless, they did not expect the subsequent NATO and EU enlargement, which included the ex-soviet Baltic countries in 2004[5]. This fact, added to the ‘colour revolutions’ taking place at the same time in Ukraine and Georgia, triggered a feeling of dissatisfaction within Russia and the desire of recovering its position as a great power[6]. The result is that, since 2004, Russia switched its - until that date - collaborative approach towards the West for a tougher one. Behaving as the offensive realist great power it wanted to become, Russia considers NATO/EU enlargements and their further relations with countries belonging to its ‘backyard’, especially Ukraine and Georgia, as a threat[7] to its survival. In order to face this threat, Moscow needs to accumulate more power and influence, above all in its direct neighbourhood, which explains why “Putin’s highest priority is to oppose ‘colour revolutions’”[8] as well as to avoid the promotion of the EU’s normative power in those countries. Consequently, he did not hesitate to show the Russian revisionist nature when he felt that national interests were at stake in Georgia and Ukraine. In the summer of 2008, after President Mikheil Saakashvili’s attempt to bring the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia back under Georgia’s control, Putin decided to send the army to maintain the Russian influence in those regions[9]. However, his goal was not uniquely to preserve the status quo, but rather to revise it. In that conflict, Putin showed for the first time his true intentions to seize any opportunity at his disposal to broaden his influence and to keep his neighbour countries weak and out of the West’s reach. In order to do so, Putin chose direct means, namely military intervention and war, to tackle the problem. On the other hand, indirect means have been used in the Ukraine crisis for the same purpose. After Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia and a new pro-European government reached the power in Kiev in February 2014, Russia has promoted uprisings, funded separatist groups and militias in the eastern part of the country, annexed Crimea and sent arms and unidentified military staff to support the pro-Russian groups. These two different responses - direct and indirect - are the Russian tools to achieve its revisionist goals and not merely to defend the status quo, as demonstrated with the annexation of Crimea. These revisionist movements have not only benefited Putin abroad, but also within Russia, as his popularity has soared. This is a consequence of the powerful propaganda machinery of the Kremlin, which has been able to convince citizens of why Russia should be considered as a great power and, thus, to justify its international behaviour. The following points summarise Putin’s foreign policy and account for the theoretical base of the interventions in Georgia and Ukraine: Russia is a great power which shall preserve the sovereignty of the nation by all means. This has been translated into an increase of the military budget by 100% in the last 10 years, as well as in the presence of Russia in the most important international forums to enable them to participate in the decisions regarding other zones of the world[10]. “Russia and the Russian world constitute a ‘singular civilization’, neither Occidental nor Asian, which rests on the Christian values and a ‘historical mission’: to defend the traditional values against a materialist and decadent Occident”[11] (author’s translation). The Russian Diaspora, meaning that “the Russian people have become the largest people disperse worldwide”[12] (author’s translation). This situation implies an obligation for Russia to protect and defend Russian minorities wherever they are[13]. EmpiricsDr. Mark N. Katz 15, Government and Politics Professor at George Mason University, “Putin Ignoring China Threat”, Moscow Times, 8/16/2015, there is one international relations theory that best describes President Vladimir Putin's overall foreign policy approach, it is surely the offensive realist theory articulated by John J. Mearsheimer in his "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics." Mearsheimer argues that all great powers behave offensively toward one another. Even if their leaders would prefer not to, they will either end up doing so in response to other great powers' offensive actions, or their nation's great power status will suffer as a result of others taking advantage of their misguided attempts to build a better, more peaceful world order. Whether the leaders of all great powers actually behave like offensive realists or end up doing so despite themselves can be debated. There is no doubt, however, that Putin has been acting like an offensive realist toward the West, the former Soviet republics, and elsewhere. His interventions in Georgia and Ukraine, support for far-right political parties in Europe, sending Russian military aircraft to fly over numerous countries and increased naval activity all demonstrate Putin's adherence to offensive realism.No interest in stabilityDr. Keith Payne 17, Defense and Strategic Studies Professor at Missouri State University, Washington insider during multiple administrations, even wrote the latest Nuclear Posture Review. John Stuart Foster Jr, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Director of American Defense Research and Engineering under four Secretaries of Defense and two Presidents. Russian Strategy: Expansion, Crisis and Conflict, Comparative Strategy, 36(1), Taylor & FrancisIn addition, Russia encourages instability and economic weakness among neighboring countries in the belief that such conditions tend to increase Russian influence.34 Other scholars have found this pattern in Central Asia and the Caucasus. With regard to Central Asia, Alexey Malashenko of the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has confirmed this point. While listing the goals of Russian policy in Central Asia, Malashenko writes: This list does not mention stability since that is not one of Russia’s unwavering strategic demands for the region. Although the Kremlin has repeatedly stressed its commitment to stability, Russia nevertheless finds shaky situations more in its interests, as the inherent potential for local or regional conflict creates a highly convenient excuse for persuading the governments of the region to seek help from Russia in order to survive.35 (Italics in original).Deterrence---Impact---Arctic---2NCPutin will exploit any gap in the alliance---incursions result in Arctic grabsJerry Hendrix 18, Vice President with the Telemus Group, a National-Security Consultancy, Retired U.S. Navy Captain, “Anticipating Putin’s Next Gamble”, The National Review, 9/6/2018, [language modified]A unified U.S.–NATO alliance holds a winning hand, but only if it plays together and prepares for its competitor.Vladimir Putin is a heck of a gambler. Never has a card shark gotten more out of a low pair. He presides over a nation that has a far smaller economy than does the U.S., a shrinking military, declining life expectancy, and rising alcoholism. Yet somehow, he bluffs the world into thinking he is a strong leader. What must be admitted after his meeting with President Trump in Helsinki, with all of the consternation and negative commentary that followed, is that the former KGB colonel — whose domestic political opponents keep dying with amazing rapidity — takes a clear-eyed realist approach to the world and goes after his goals with alacrity. Resenting Russia’s eclipse after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin seeks to reestablish the country as a strong regional power in Europe. To do so, he need not necessarily raise his own country up so much as fragment and degrade the nations of Europe and, at all costs, destroy their links to and comity with the United States. Along the way, he also seeks to erode the little things such as the concepts of freedom and democracy, which seem to bring about a sense of untidiness to his autocratic-czarist mind.Putin seeks weakness that he can exploit. It need not even be real weakness, but rather just the perception. Historically, any gap in an opponent’s armor, any “tell” at the card table, has triggered a future test from Putin or his Russian countrymen. Stalin perceived Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s mental and physical decline at Yalta and set about locking Eastern Europe behind an Iron Curtain. Khrushchev perceived John F. Kennedy to be an irresolute, inexperienced leader at Vienna in 1961, and the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Bush’s strategic distraction in Iraq led to Russian incursions into Georgia. President Obama’s sotto voce comment to Dmitri Medvedev, “I will have more flexibility,” after his reelection in 2012, invited Putin’s illegal occupation of Crimea and portions of Ukraine in 2014. It is a Russian truism about testing an enemy: When you meet mush, keep pressing; when you meet steel, you stop. So the question now, after the circular finger-pointing among the NATO alliance after Helsinki, is: Where will Vladimir Putin test the United States and its allies next?He will be guided in his decision by three principles. First, whatever he does must strengthen Russian interests. Superfluous actions are not worth the risk to him. Second, any action must undermine a key European interest and to degrade Western unity. Third, it must have an ambiguous-enough effect on American interests to allow the United States to remain away from the card table, for Putin knows that he lacks the hand to call the United States. As Putin’s luck would have it, there are actually a range of scenarios that could satisfy these requirements.1) Putin could double down on his military operations in Ukraine. Perhaps he would launch an overt (as opposed to using “little green men”) military operation based upon some perceived slight to ethnic Russians living there, expanding his geographical holdings beyond the Donbass region. Western responses to the 2014 invasion have been largely muted, even after Russia shot down a civilian airliner flying in Ukrainian airspace. Ukraine itself remains outside of NATO and is generally not considered part of the West, and the sense is growing that NATO will no longer expand, that Ukraine’s window of opportunity has closed. Expansion of Russian activities in the region could both strengthen Putin’s political position at home — so long as he continues to suppress coverage of dead Russian soldiers — and encourage more voices to call for the inevitable reimposition of “the natural order” in Eastern Europe.2) Putin could choose to execute a combined operation, seizing territory in the Baltic Sea. There are several islands there that are historically contested among several nations, including Russia and Sweden. Gotland, for instance, is currently under the control of Sweden, which is not a member of the NATO alliance but is a member of the European Union. A Russian seizure of this island would pose a military challenge to the European Union without necessarily triggering a response from the United States. Under these conditions, Russia would almost certainly prevail from a military standpoint. The installation of advanced anti-access/area-denial weapons, such as those installed at the exclave at Kaliningrad, would provide Russia with air and sea dominance over the entire Baltic Sea and hence the maritime approaches to Poland and the three Baltic states. Under such circumstances, it is not difficult to imagine these nations seeking to make a deal with Russia to secure their political futures.3) Putin could lure away a current member of the NATO alliance. The current tensions among Turkey, the United States, and the entire NATO alliance, as well as Turkey’s opening of a dialogue with Russia and Iran with regard to the security situation in Syria, have opened a window for Turkey’s departure from the NATO alliance. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s new “strong presidency” in Turkey, his entreaty to Russia to buy S-400 advanced anti-air missiles, and his decision to capture and hold hostage an American pastor, all have brought American relations with Turkey to a breaking point. It is not hard to imagine either the current government collapsing or tipping towards Russia in an effort by Erdogan to preserve his hold on power. Whether voluntarily or by force, the departure of a NATO ally from the alliance would open the door for others to follow.Other scenarios are possible. “Land grabs” in the Arctic, actions that seek to [destroy] blind key EU surveillance satellites in space, cyberattacks, and economic coercion via Russia’s energy supplies, could all challenge Europe and create strains within the NATO alliance — especially if NATO as a whole continues to fail to meet the 2-percent-of-GDP commitment first discussed by its member states at the Prague Summit in 2002. But whatever happens, if history holds, will happen soon: sometime within the next six to 18 months.Arctic grabs go nuclearJayantha Dhanapala 13, Member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors and President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, “The Arctic As A Bridge”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2/4/2013, , as someone who has devoted most of his working life to the cause of disarmament, and especially nuclear disarmament, I am deeply concerned that two nuclear weapon states — the United States and the Russian Federation, which together own 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world — face one another across the Arctic and have competing claims. These claims — not to mention those that could be made by North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states Canada, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway — may lead to conflict that has the potential to escalate into the use of nuclear weapons. Thus the Arctic is ripe for conversion into a nuclear weapon free zone.I discussed a fourth reason the international community should focus on the Arctic with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (who has in fact visited the Arctic on an icebreaker) when I met him in New York last fall. The Arctic, I told him, is the one region in the world where the environment (and climate change in particular), the threat of nuclear weapons, the human rights of indigenous people, and the need to advance the rule of law converge as international issues. The Arctic, therefore, offers a unique opportunity to make international diplomacy work for the benefit of the entire international community.Security and interdependence. Security today is a concept that is much broader than military security alone. It encompasses international peace and security, human rights, and development. Twenty-first century security is also a cooperative and common security, in which one region’s insecurity inevitably and negatively affects the security of other regions of the world. And so Arctic security is inextricably interwoven with global security, giving us all a role as stakeholders in the north.Assurance DA1NCWithdrawal from NATO causes a wave of allied proliferation in Europe that destroys the NPT and spills over globallyDavid Axe 18, Editor-in-Chief of War is Boring, MFA from the University of South Carolina, Military Correspondent, Writer, and Editor, Regular Contributor to The Diplomat and Wired, “The Risk to the World: Massive Nuclear Proliferation”, The Daily Beast, 7/16/2018, Trump actually did withdraw, Europe would become right away much more vulnerable to Russian nuclear attack or, more likely, intimidation. But immediate nuclear fire isn't the only danger.More realistically, the Americans leaving NATO would force European countries that currently lack nuclear arms to toss aside the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty and rush to acquire them, all in order to deter the Russians without the Americans' help.The treaty's disintegration could then lead to countries all over the world pursuing their own nukes. "Trump is increasing the chances of the bomb spreading and the key treaty keeping the lid on such proliferation collapsing," says Blair.Unconstrained nuclearization is one nightmare scenario that is becoming increasingly plausible as Trump escalates his criticism of the 69-year-old North Atlantic alliance. For three quarters of a century, American nukes have made it unnecessary for many European countries to possess nukes of their own.Because of that, these countries could safely sign on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, bolstering international efforts to limit nuclearization all over the world. "Among the benefits of NATO, a key one is that it has helped to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons," Kingston Reif, an analyst with the Arms Control Association, told The Daily Beast.But that was long before Trump’s rise as a political force. In 2017, the former reality-T.V. star declared NATO "obsolete." In Brussels on July 11, Trump again questioned the organization's usefulness. "What good is NATO?" he asked. The next day at a meeting of NATO leaders, Trump threatened that he might "do his own thing" if alliance members didn't immediately increase their military spending.Trump's words sent a chill through European capitals. The United States is by far the biggest military spender in NATO and, according to Mark Simakovsky, a fellow with the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, the "glue" that holds the alliance together. "Don't forget, there are huge divisions in Europe," Simakovsky said.NATO's 29 member states range from illiberal Turkey, Hungary and Poland on the alliance's eastern flank to stalwarts France and Germany at the heart of the continent and the restive United Kingdom in the west.At present just two non-U.S. NATO states – the U.K. and France – possess nuclear weapons. France fields around 300 nukes. The U.K., around 215. By contrast, the United States maintains an arsenal of no fewer than 3,800 atomic warheads, only slightly fewer than Russia possesses. The U.S. military keeps 180 warheads in Europe for use by its own forces and the forces of certain NATO members, most notably Germany.Practically speaking, America is Europe's nuclear shield.Under Article V of the NATO charter, an attack on any NATO state represents an attack on every other state – and the alliance is obligated to respond. That applies to a nuclear strike as well as conventional attack. If Russia nuked, say, Lithuania or Poland, the United States would be obligated to nuke Russia right back.That mutual nuclear threat has helped to keep the peace in Europe since the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in a test in 1949, the same year as NATO's founding.But with France and the U.K. possessing so few atomic warheads compared to Russia, deterrence in Europe could begin to collapse without American nukes. And that risk could drive European countries to create their own, more powerful deterrents – either collectively or individually."The loss of U.S. reliability to deter aggression against NATO Europe would prompt France and the U.K. to expand their nuclear capabilities and Germany and other non-nuclear countries to consider building their own nuclear arsenals despite strong public opposition," Blair said.Some European officials are already thinking in those terms. In 2017, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, chairman of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party, called for Europe to build up a combined nuclear arsenal as powerful as Russia's own arsenal. Conservative German parliamentarian Roderich Kiesewetter endorsed the idea.If the United States were to leave NATO, Europe could build its own deterrent under the umbrella of a diminished NATO structure, or opt for a new structure based on the European Union. In the last decade or so, the E.U. has begun to establish a rudimentary military organization, but has deployed troops only rarely – and then mostly in Africa on peacekeeping duties.The realignment could get complicated. Albania, Canada, Iceland, Norway and Turkey are in NATO, but aren't in the E.U. Austria, Finland, Ireland, Malta and Sweden are in the E.U., but aren't in NATO. Ireland, for one, is strictly opposed to nuclear weapons. "There are European Union members with nuclear capabilities, but how those capabilities would be employed outside of a NATO context – it's never been fleshed out," Simakovsky said.For Trump to even threaten to pull back America's atomic umbrella is dangerous, Simakovsky said. "What it encourages is instability."And that instability – and the resulting mistrust between former allies – plays into the hands of Russian president Vladimir Putin. It could even, in the most extreme scenario, tempt Putin to launch his own limited nuclear strike in the context of a wider war in Europe.In the last decade Russia has invaded two of its European neighbors – Ukraine in 2014 and the Republic of Georgia in 2008. Neither Georgia nor Ukraine is a full member of NATO, although both countries have signalled their desire to join the alliance.The Eastern European states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – all former Soviet republics – and Poland, formerly a Soviet satellite, are NATO members and view themselves as the main targets of Russia's aggression. This year, Russia deployed nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.The Trump administration criticized the Russian deployment as "destabilizing." But the greater threat of destabilization comes from the administration itself as it continues to dismantle rhetorically a security structure that has preserved the peace – and deterred nuclear war – in Europe since 1949."If Putin somehow decides to cross the nuclear threshold, it won’t be because he thinks we don’t have enough nuclear weapons," Reif said. "It will be based on a political calculation that he has a greater stake in the conflict and we and our allies won’t be willing to run the risk of escalation."The alternative is only less awful. That, in the absence of America's nuclear guarantee as part of a transatlantic alliance, Europe might build up a large nuclear arsenal of its own and supercharge global atomic proliferation. "Nothing would do more to cause nuclear anarchy than wrecking NATO," Blair said.NPT collapse causes nuclear war in every region---extinctionRamesh Thakur 18. Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. 01/02/2018. “Nuclear Turbulence in the Age of Trump.” Diplomacy & Statecraft, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 105–128.There are multiple alarm bells of growing risks of war and economic crisis, with institutional arrangements no longer fit for the purpose to mute conflict and promote co-operation. Geopolitical tensions have surged in Europe producing a risk of confrontation between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] and Russia,5 the Middle East where distinct conflict theatres and dynamics have begun to fuse together, South Asia, the Korean Peninsula, East Asia, and the South China Sea. American generals dropped the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in their arsenal on Afghanistan, seemingly because they could. They shot down an Iranian drone and a government jet in Syria. Describing this as an act of aggression, Russia cancelled the de-confliction arrangements and warned that it would target any coalition planes flying west of the Euphrates River. Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet Russian leader jointly responsible for the peaceful end of the Cold War, thinks, “the world is preparing for war.” 6 World order—especially its post-1945 normative, security, trade, and immigration architectures—is at an inflection point. The United States president with the least previous foreign policy interest and experience could well have the biggest impact on global affairs in a century. There is considerable scepticism about Trump’s commitment to uphold the post-1945 liberal international order crafted under and underwritten by American leadership. Trump, “determined not to be beaten in [the global] competition of political incompetence,” 7 has picked quarrels with allies, friends, and foes without discrimination. His Administration seems determined to keep even career diplomats at a distance, dismissing many with a curtness that slights their decades of professional service in favour of a “know nothing approach” to foreign policy.8 Trump’s transactional approach has alienated America’s neighbours, allies, and friends with little concern for the importance of diffuse reciprocity as the diplomatic glue that holds international relationships together.9 Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel declared on 28 May 2017, “The times in which we could rely fully on others—they are somewhat over.” Europe should pay more attention to its own interests “and really take our fate into our own hands.” 10 Within months of taking office, Trump saw his own popularity and the global United States reputation decline steeply. In a 37-country survey of 40,448 people, only 22 percent had confidence that Trump would do the right thing in international affairs, down from 64 percent during the final years in office of President Barack Obama [2009–2017].11 The fall in confidence was especially pronounced amongst close allies in Asia—including a 55 point fall amongst Australians—and Europe and immediate neighbours Canada (?61) and Mexico (?44). Global publics dislike, distrust, and disrespect Trump. They judged both his policies and character harshly: he “is arrogant [75%], intolerant [65%] and even dangerous [62%].” Only 26 percent believe he is qualified to be the American president. Favourable views of the United States fell from 64 to 49 percent. In December 2016, the United States Defence Science Board urged president-elect Trump to consider acquiring a greater number of lower-yield weapons that could provide a “tailored nuclear option for limited use.” 12 In a tweet on 22 December, Trump promised to “greatly strengthen and expand [U.S.] nuclear capability.” 13 In February 2017, now president, Trump insisted that the United States would stay at the “top of the [nuclear] pack.” 14 The same day the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, also spoke of the need to do the same with Russia’s deterrent.15 A day later Trump said, “Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.” 16 On 2 August, General Paul Selva, vice-chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the future of nuclear deterrence lies in smaller, low-yield nuclear weapons that can be used to attack an adversary without ending the world or causing massive indiscriminate casualties.17 In August, Trump exchanged an escalating series of bellicose threats with Kim Jong-un using words like “fire and fury” and military “solutions” that are “fully in place, locked and loaded.” He left many world leaders uneasy and earned an exhortation from Beijing to avoid words and deeds that can exacerbate the situation.18 The strategically challenged Trump seemed to suggest that Japan and South Korea could obtain their own nuclear arsenals.19 His unpredictability, unreliability, and scepticism about the value of NATO awakened interest in an independent European nuclear deterrent. Roderich Kiesewetter, a parliamentarian and spokesman for Germany’s ruling party, raised the possibility shortly after Trump’s election in 2016, and Poland’s former prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, repeated it in February 2017.20 A review commissioned by Bundestag concluded that Germany could legally finance British or French nuclear weapon programmes in return for their protection.21 All such developments are greatly worrying. They also imply a rejection of the NPT as the globally legitimate framework for regulating nuclear policy. Against this volatile backdrop, the fact that Trump has his fingers on the buttons of the world’s most lethal nuclear arsenal stokes the sum of all nuclear fears worldwide.22 At the time of his impeachment hearings in 1973, President Richard Nixon told a group of Congressmen: “I could leave this room and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead.” 23 Towards the end of the George W. Bush Administration, Vice President Dick Cheney similarly remarked in a television interview that the American president has the authority to launch a “devastating” nuclear attack without having “to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.” 24 That is the authority and power now vested in Trump: he “cannot remove a local school board member, but if the impulse should strike him … [nuclear] weapons would be in the air within minutes.” 25 The NPT has kept the nuclear nightmare at bay for five decades whilst underpinning and facilitating the global trade in nuclear material for peaceful purposes. At the heart of the NPT lay three bargains involving nuclear energy, non-proliferation, and disarmament. It permitted five countries—Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States—to keep nuclear weapons but work to eliminate them through negotiations and prohibited their acquisition by anyone else. Its significant and enduring successes notwithstanding, over the years the NPT has built up many anomalies, shortcomings, flaws, and gaps between promise and performance.26 A global retreat from nuclear power has occurred since Japan’s 2011 Fukushima accident; four Nuclear Security Summits held between 2010 and 2016 assumed the lead on nuclear security; nonproliferation obligations have been successfully universalised to all countries that do not possess nuclear weapons; and no nuclear arms control negotiations are currently taking place between any NWS. The NPT’s normative potential appeared exhausted on all relevant dimensions. Most importantly, with the refusal of the NWS to accept and implement the 1996 International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion that Article VI obliges them to engage in and bring to a conclusion good faith negotiations to eliminate nuclear arsenals,27 the NPT was transformed from a prohibition into a non-proliferation regime. Because the commitment to disarm was neither timetabled, precise, nor binding,28 the NPT has failed to function as the primary normative framework for de-legitimising the possession and deployment of nuclear weapons and reducing nuclear warheads as steps to their complete elimination. Global numbers of nuclear warheads have fallen dramatically since the 1980s, but this has occurred chiefly because of bilateral measures between Moscow and Washington. All nuclear-armed states pay lip service to the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. Yet in 50 years since the NPT’s adoption, no multilateral agreement has eliminated a single nuclear warhead. In addition, the bilateral Russo–American process had also stalled and seemed in serious risk of reversal. On the one hand negotiations on nuclear arms reductions and non-proliferation remain stuck. On the other, non-proliferation norms are softening, “existing treaty regimes are eroding and … may collapse in the near future.” With “the total disintegration of the existing framework of treaties and regimes,” Alexei Arbatov, a Russian expert, warns, the risks of and plans for the use of nuclear weapons in combat will return to prominence.29 The hubris of the nuclear-armed states leaves the world exposed to the risk of sleepwalking into a nuclear disaster. Even a limited regional nuclear war, in which India and Pakistan might use 50 Hiroshima-size—15 kiloton— bombs each, could cause a famine through nuclear winter effects that could kill up to two billion people over a decade.30 A deliberate, calculated use of nuclear weapons by either government is not likely. But no one can be confident that another 2008 Mumbai style terrorist attack on a major Indian city, with links to jihadists based in Pakistan, will not take place; that India will not retaliate militarily; and that this will not escalate to another war which then crosses the nuclear threshold. Northeast Asia is another dangerous cockpit for a war that could directly involve four nucleararmed states, plus South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. The world could survive on the edge of disaster with one erratic and volatile leader, like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, with his finger on the nuclear button; but the presence of two such leaders in Pyongyang and Washington dramatically increases the risk of nuclear disaster. Specialists’ concerns that nuclear peace is dangerously dependent on rational decision-makers in office in all nuclear-armed states have become a global public nightmare.31 The pathways to a war that neither side wants include a fatal miscalculation in the instrumental recourse to brinksmanship by both sides. The anxiety level increases with growing revelations of the number of times that the world has come frighteningly close to nuclear holocaust.32 In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, American strategy found basis on the best available intelligence, which indicated that there were no nuclear warheads in Cuba. In fact, there were 162 warheads already stationed there, and the local Soviet commander had taken them out of storage to deployed positions for use against an American invasion.33 The approved protocol required the decision by a submarine’s three ranking officers to launch nuclear-tipped torpedoes to be unanimous. On 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov cast the nuclear war-avoiding dissenting vote in a 2–1 decision in favour of a nuclear launch; 55 years later, he received the inaugural Future of Life prize for his action.34 In addition, on 28 October 1962, a missile launch base in Okinawa received a coded order to launch missiles and carried out the required three-level confirmation process. However, not all missiles targeted Russia, which made the crew suspicious, and further clarifications confirmed that the order was a mistake.35 In November 1983, in response to a NATO war games exercise Able Archer, which Moscow mistook to be real, the Soviets came close to launching a full-scale nuclear attack against the West.36 On 25 January 1995, Norway launched a scientific research rocket in its northern latitude. Because of the speed and trajectory of the powerful rocket, whose stage three mimicked a Trident sea launched ballistic missile, the Russian early warning radar system near Murmansk tagged it within seconds of launch as a possible American nuclear missile attack. Fortunately, the rocket did not mistakenly stray into Russian airspace.37 On 29 August 2007, an American B-52 bomber carrying six air-launched cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads made an unauthorised 2,200-kilometre flight from North Dakota to Louisiana and was effectively absent without leave for 36 hours.38 Following the Ukraine crisis, in the one-year period March 2014 to March 2015, one study documented several serious and high-risk incidents.39 A 2016 Global Zero study similarly documented dangerous encounters in the South China Sea and South Asia.40 As for near misses in an accident, in January 1961, a four megaton bomb—that is, 260 times more powerful than that used at Hiroshima—was just one ordinary switch away from detonating over North Carolina when a B-52 bomber on a routine flight went into an uncontrolled spin.41 This selective catalogue of misperceptions, miscalculations, near misses, and accidents underscores the message of successive international commissions that as long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will want them. As long as they exist, they will be used again someday, if not by design and intent, then through miscalculation, accident, rogue launch, or system malfunction. Any such use anywhere could spell catastrophe for the planet. The only guarantee of zero nuclear weapons risk is to move to zero nuclear weapons possession by a carefully managed process. Proponents of nuclear weapons are the real “nuclear romantics” who exaggerate the bombs’ significance, downplay their substantial risks, and imbue them with “quasi-magical powers” also known as nuclear deterrence.42 The claim that nuclear weapons could not proliferate if they did not exist is both an empirical and a logical truth. The very fact of their existence in the arsenals of nine countries is sufficient guarantee of their proliferation to others and, some day again, use. Conversely, nuclear disarmament is a necessary condition of nuclear nonproliferation.Allied Prolif---U—No Iran NPT pullout Iran is bluffing about withdrawing from the NPT---didn’t follow through on past threats and this one is to deter snapback of sanctionsBrewer, 2020, <Deputy Director and Senior Fellow, Project on Nuclear Issues, International Security Program, CSIS, Eric>, Will U.S. Sanctions Snapback Force Iran Out of the NPT?, May 15, p. , JPK accessed, 6-7-20> JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****First is the question of likelihood: Would Iran actually leave the NPT? Iranian politicians have periodically made this threat going back many years. The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council?floated?this possibility in 2018 prior to the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Yet the United States left the nuclear deal, and Iran remained in the NPT. There is also a certain degree of political theater at work in these statements: Iranian foreign minister Zarif made his threats in January of this year in front of Iranian lawmakers. The current threats are likely primarily intended to deter the snapback of sanctions. Snapback sanctions won’t cause Iran to withdraw if other states don’t complyBrewer, 2020, <Deputy Director and Senior Fellow, Project on Nuclear Issues, International Security Program, CSIS, Eric>, Will U.S. Sanctions Snapback Force Iran Out of the NPT?, May 15, p. , JPK accessed, 6-7-20> JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****But that doesn’t mean we should treat these as empty threats. While it is hard to know exactly how much sway?advocates of NPT withdrawal?have within Iran, Tehran probably hasn’t decided whether it would take this step, and it likely won’t do so until after a snapback is triggered. Moreover, Iran wouldn’t need to make this decision immediately: It can wait. No doubt, Russian, Chinese, and European reactions to the snapback will matter. If Tehran believes the United States is diplomatically isolated and that other parties have no intent to actually honor the snapback, Tehran could easily choose to maintain the diplomatic high ground and remain in the treaty.Allied Prolf—U—No Japan/SKorea NPT pulloutUS ties with Japan and South Korea are strong—Trump will not abandon or alienate themCarafano, 2-29-20, <Heritage Foundation, James>, The Daily Caller, Five Myths About Trump’s Foreign Policy, p. , accessed, 2-20-20> JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****As for the charge that Trump will alienate or abandon our allies, the fact is that most of these relationships are in better shape now than when Trump came into office. NATO is demonstrably stronger. The U.S. partnership with India is far tighter, as are our bonds with Australia and the UK. Relations with Japan and South Korea remain strong. The U.S. has forged better ties in Latin America. Meanwhile, the administration wants to do more in Africa and is looking for new friends in Central Asia. Clearly, the White House is far more interested in building bridges for mutual benefit than it is in burning them.US won’t withdraw troops from Asia and US military commitment is perceived to be strong by Japan and South KoreaLee Jeong-ho, 11-21-19, South China Morning Post, Donald Trump is threatening South Korea, but US military commitments to long-time allies are considered safe, p. , <accessed, 5-3-20>, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Timothy Heath, a senior international defence researcher at the RAND Corporation, also predicted that the US would not significantly reduce its commitments in Europe and Asia. “The inconsistencies in the statements by top US officials understandably have caused concern,” he said. “However, a closer look at US national security and defence documents make clear the US commitment to Europe and Asia. The US has important security and economic interests in those regions and cannot afford to withdraw its commitment.” Heath also said the strategic needs run both ways, noting that there is no substitute for US power in Europe and Asia. “Those countries – [especially] Europe and Japan – cannot replace the US military power needed to protect those supplies,” he said. “The US will continue to play an important role in that region to ensure stable global energy supplies and safe shipping, both of which are vital to the global and US economies.” “Although building self-defence capacity and taking on more responsibility for security affairs is a reasonable response to evidence of US constraints on operating abroad, European countries, Japan and South Korea will continue to look to the United States to play a critical stabilising and deterrent role in their regions,” he added. “An Asia that features a weaker US presence, and nuclear-armed South and North Koreas, China and Japan, is not one that is likely to be stable and peaceful.” Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi, a visiting professor at Pusan National University in South Korea, agreed, saying that “the core of the US military commitment still remains strong”. “So at this moment we're seeing more of a refinement of US forces in Europe and East Asia, rather than a simple reduction,” Hinata-Yamaguchi said.Allied Prolif---U---No European ProliferationThere’s no European prolif now because the NATO guarantee is strongDr. Bruno Tertrais 19, Master’s Degree in Public Law of the University of Paris, Doctorate in Political Science of the Institut d'études Politiques de Paris, Senior Research Fellow at the Fondation Pour La Recherche Stratégique (FRS), Member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Editorial Board of the Washington Quarterly, Associate Editor of Survival, Recipient of the Vauban Prize, Knight of the Legion of Honor, “Will Europe Get Its Own Bomb?”, Washington Quarterly, Volume 42, Number 2, Summer 2019, p. 56Still, as a study conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) indicates, there is a continued general nuclear apathy in Europe as well as an unwillingness “to face up to the renewed relevance that nuclear deterrence ought to have in their strategic thinking.”43 The time is thus not ripe for grand initiatives that would entail the creation ex abrupto of a common deterrent, especially as long as NATO mechanisms are intact. As an EU scholar put it in a recent overview of the concept of “strategic autonomy:” “[T]here appears to be no Europe-wide willingness for a ‘European nuclear deterrent’ at present. In many European countries such a level of autonomy would symbolize the end of the transatlantic relationship as we know it today, pose a strategic liability for their national security, and, for many states, violate their neutrality or constitutions.”44Allied Prolif---U---No European Proliferation---GermanyThere’s no German prolif now, but continued NATO commitment’s keyDr. Ulrich Kühn 17, PhD in Political Science from Hamburg University and Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Dr. Tristan Volpe, Assistant Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, Ph.D. in Political Science from the George Washington University, Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Keine Atombombe, Bitte: Why Germany Should Not Go Nuclear”, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2017, now, those calling for a German bomb are a fringe minority. For decades, Germany has stood as one of the world’s staunchest supporters of nuclear nonproliferation and global disarmament. In February, a spokesperson for Merkel told the press, “There are no plans for nuclear armament in Europe involving the federal government.” She and others evidently recognize that such plans are a bad idea: a German arsenal would destabilize EU-Russian relations and heighten the risk that other countries would attempt to go nuclear.But even though Germany’s current nuclear flirtation may reflect nothing more than a passing reaction to Trump’s presidency, it reveals a deeper problem: insecurity in Berlin, caused by years of meandering U.S. policy toward Russia and Europe. To solve this problem, Germany and the United States must work together. Merkel’s government should encourage the EU to coordinate more effectively on defense. The Trump administration, meanwhile, should double down on the U.S. commitment to the success of the EU and NATO while also pushing for broader negotiations with Russia over the future of European security. Allied Prolif---LinksWithdrawing the U.S. security guarantee causes Germany to proliferateHans Kundnani 17, Senior Research Fellow in the Europe Programme at Chatham House and Author of The Paradox of German Power, “President Trump and the New Parameters of German Foreign Policy”, Aspen Review, Issue 1, 2017, is uniquely vulnerable to such a shift in US foreign policy— even if Trump does not go as far as many fear. Over the last few years since the beginning of the euro crisis, there has been renewed discussion about German “hegemony” in Europe. The election of Trump dramatically weakens Germany and creates uncertainty about the conditions upon which German power (which I have characterized as “geo-economic”) is based. It is not just that Germany, like other EU member states, depends on liberal international order, but also that its power in recent years, especially in the context of the EU, has been based on two aspects of US hegemony from which it was able to benefit—or according to critics, on which it was able to “free ride.”In particular, Germany has depended on two public goods provided by the United States. First, the United States bore disproportionate costs for European security, while German defense spending remained low—even compared to that of many other EU member states. Thus Germany was accused of “free riding” in security terms—in other words of consuming rather than providing security. Second, the United States acted as a consumer of last resort while aggregate demand in Germany remained low—again, even compared to other EU member states. Thus Germany was accused of “free riding” in economic as well as security terms. During the last decade the United States has become gradually less willing to provide each of these two public goods and may now cease to do so altogether.If this were to happen, it would dramatically weaken Germany. The withdrawal of the US security guarantee would force Germany to rethink its security policy and perhaps even its attitude to nuclear weapons—with huge consequences. Meanwhile a shift towards a more mercantilist approach in US trade policy could undermine the basis of the success of German economy, which has boomed on the back of demand from the United States even as demand from the eurozone “periphery” has slowed. Even if President Trump does not go as far as some fear on alliances or trade, the consequences of his election could undermine the basis of German power. In particular, the new uncertainty about the US security guarantee could transform relations between the EU member states.Removing the Article 5 commitment causes allied prolif that goes nuclear through intentional or accidental warDr. Heidi Hardt 18, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva and MSc in European Studies from the London School of Economics, “Leaving NATO Would Make The U.S. And The World Less Safe”, Huffington Post, 7/16/2018, put, withdrawing from NATO would make the world less safe. It would likely increase the risk of attacks on allies and reopen the possibility of conflict among them.As part of the original North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s critical Article 5 binds together the security of 29 member states; an attack on one state is considered an attack on all of them. The article was intended to act as a deterrent to the Soviet Union, and recent history suggests that it still serves this purpose against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For example, Estonia, Lithuania and other former Soviet states that are now NATO allies have so far found themselves to be immune to a Russian incursion of ground troops. However, Russia did intervene in Georgia and in Ukraine ― two states seeking NATO membership. These actions suggest that Putin perceives Article 5 as a credible commitment by allies to defend its eastern border. In addition to providing collective defense for its member states, NATO has two other core tasks: crisis management and cooperative security. The organization intervenes in crises around the globe on a scale that no one state has preferred to handle alone. The alliance is engaged in military operations around the world, from Kosovo to Afghanistan, with a renewed commitment to extend the latter operation till 2024. In addition to training Afghan security forces, NATO has committed to a new training mission in Iraq. The alliance also provides a forum for states to work together and teach one another in domains of common interest, such as arms control, counterterrorism and cybersecurity. After Russia’s internationally disputed annexation of Crimea, NATO reprioritized collective defense. The declaration that came out of this year’s NATO summit labels Russia as an aggressor that has undermined the “rules-based world order.”The alliance also disincentivizes conflict among its member states. Wars begin for many reasons, from leaders’ misperceptions to miscommunications and information gaps about capabilities and intentions. By regularly engaging in dialogue, NATO diplomats and military leaders ensure that disagreements among allies do not become conflicts ― all while working together to address common security problems. Importantly, the organization provides infrastructure, in the form of political and military headquarters in Belgium, where representatives of the member states communicate every day about security issues. Past studies in international relations have shown that providing such institutionalized cooperation can be an effective means of preventing conflicts. For the U.S. to leave NATO, or for the organization to disband, would bring significant risks to the internal and external security of its member states ― including the U.S. Although the U.S. spends significantly more of its gross domestic product on defense than any other country, it is not exempt from threats to its national security. After the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time. The alliance has been key in supporting reductions in nuclear stockpiles. Without the security of NATO’s nuclear umbrella, European states without nuclear weapons might be more likely to consider acquiring them, increasing the risk of an intentional or accidental nuclear attack. Collapse of NATO causes German rearm and wildfire prolif---nuclear warZack Beauchamp 18, Senior Reporter at Vox, where he covers global politics and ideology, and a host of Worldly, Vox's podcast on covering foreign policy and international relations, “How Trump is Killing America’s Alliances”, Vox, 6/12/2018, , 2018How the weakening of American alliances could lead to a massive war. There has never, in human history, been an era as peaceful as our own. This is a hard truth to appreciate, given the horrible violence ongoing in places like Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar, yet the evidence is quite clear. Take a look at this chart from the University of Oxford’s Max Roser. It tracks the number of years in a given time period in which “great powers” — meaning the militarily and economically powerful countries at that time — were at war with each other over the course of the past 500 years. The decline is unmistakable: [[TABLE OMITTED]] This data should give you some appreciation for how unique, and potentially precarious, our historical moment is. For more than 200 years, from 1500 to about 1750, major European powers like Britain and France and Spain were warring constantly. The frequency of conflict declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, but the wars that did break out — the Napoleonic conflicts, both world wars — were particularly devastating. The past 70 years without great power war, a period scholars term “the Long Peace,” is one of history’s most wonderful anomalies. The question then becomes: Why did it happen? And could Trump mucking around with a pillar of the global order, American alliances, put it in jeopardy? The answer to the second question, ominously, appears to be yes. There is significant evidence that strong American alliances — most notably the NATO alliance and US agreements to defend Japan and South Korea — have been instrumental in putting an end to great power war. “As this alliance system spreads and expands, it correlates with this dramatic decline, this unprecedented drop, in warfare,” says Michael Beckley, a professor of international relations at Tufts University. “It’s a really, really strong correlation.” A 2010 study by Rice’s Leeds and the University of Kentucky’s Jesse C. Johnson surveyed a large data set on alliances between 1816 and 2000. They found that countries in defensive alliances were 20 percent less likely to be involved in a conflict, on average, than countries that weren’t. This holds true even after you control for other factors that would affect the likelihood of war, like whether a country is a democracy or whether it has an ongoing dispute with a powerful neighbor. In a follow-up paper, Leeds and Johnson looked at the same data set to see whether certain kinds of alliances were more effective at protecting its members than others. Their conclusion is that alliances deter war best when their members are militarily powerful and when enemies take seriously the allies’ promise to fight together in the event of an attack. The core US alliances — NATO, Japan, and South Korea — fit these descriptors neatly. A third study finds evidence that alliances allow allies to restrain each other from going to war. Let’s say Canada wants to get involved in a conflict somewhere. Typically, it would discuss its plans with the United States first — and if America thinks it’s a bad idea, Canada might well listen to them. There’s strong statistical evidence that countries don’t even try to start some conflicts out of fear that an ally would disapprove. These three findings all suggest that NATO and America’s East Asian alliances very likely are playing a major role in preserving the Long Peace — which is why Trump’s habit of messing around with alliances is so dangerous. According to many Russia experts, Vladimir Putin’s deepest geostrategic goal is “breaking” NATO. The member states where anyone would expect him to test NATO’s commitment would be the Baltics — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — small former Soviet republics that recently became NATO members. We can’t predict if and when a rival like Putin would conclude that America’s alliances seemed weak enough to try testing them. Hopefully, it never happens. But the more Trump attacks the foundations of America’s allies, the more likely things are to change. The absolute risk of a Russian invasion of a NATO state or a North Korean attack on the South is relatively low, but the consequences are so potentially catastrophic — nuclear war! — that it’s worth taking anything that increases the odds of such a conflict seriously. The crack-up of the West? The world order is a little like a game of Jenga. In the game, there are lots of small blocks that interlock to form a stable tower. Each player has to remove a block without toppling the tower. But each time you take out a block, the whole thing gets a bit less stable. Take out enough blocks and it will collapse. The international order works in kind of the same way. There are lots of different interlocking parts — the spread of democracy, American alliances, nuclear deterrence, and the like — that work together to keep the global peace. But take out one block and the other ones might not be strong enough to keep things together on their own. At the end of the Cold War, British and French leaders worried that the passing of the old order might prove destabilizing. In a January 1990 meeting, French President Fran?ois Mitterrand told British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that he feared a united Germany could seize control of even more territory than Hitler. Some experts feared that in the absence of the external Soviet threat, Western European powers might go back to waging war with each other. Thankfully, those predictions turned out to be wrong. There are multiple reasons for that, but one big one — one that also helped keep relations between other historical enemies, like South Korea and Japan, peaceful — is a shared participation in US alliance networks. The US serves as the ultimate security blanket, preventing these countries from having to build up their own armaments and thus risk a replay of World War I. But if American alliance commitments become and remain less credible, it’s possible this order could crack up. America’s partners aren’t stupid. They understand that Trump is the product of deep forces in American politics, and that his victory might not be a one-off. If they think that this won’t be the last “America First” president in modern history, depending on America the way that they have in the past could quickly become a nightmare. The worst-case scenarios for a collapse in the US alliance system are terrible. Imagine full Japanese and German rearmament, alongside rapid-fire proliferation of nuclear weapons. Imagine a crack-up of NATO, with European powers at loggerheads while Russia gobbles up the Baltic states and the rest of Ukraine. Imagine South Korea’s historical tensions with Japan reigniting, and a war between those two countries or any combination of them and China. Allied Prolf—AT: public opposition blocksUS withdrawing from NATO mobilizes German public support for acquiring nuclear weapons Ashley, 2018, <holds a Master of International Policy degree from the University of Georgia, John>, Charged Affairs: YPFP Foreign Policy Journal, “Mein Gott! Would Germany Build a Bomb?”, September 3, p. , <accessed, 6-4-20> JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****The idea of Germany acquiring nuclear weapons is considered by many Germans to be a “phoney debate.” The German people are strongly?opposed?to increases in defense spending, let alone pursuing nuclear weapons. It would take something as drastic, if not more, as the United States actually leaving NATO to turn the German nuclear weapons debate from a so-called “phoney debate” into reality. The majority of Germans value their nonproliferation requirements and support the decision to abandon nuclear power to make turning Germany into a nuclear power an easy task. With all this in mind, the United States should remember that leaving NATO could have major consequences, even if the likelihood of Germany going nuclear is quite slim. North Korea withdrawing from the NPT to go nuclear did not have a great deal of impact on the treaty due to the “rogue” status of the Pyongyang government. But if Germany, one of the leading voices for?disarmament, left the NPT to develop nuclear weapons, the treaty would be dealt a body blow that it may not recover from. The United States leaving NATO would significantly increase the possibility of this happening.Allied Prolf—AT: Government opposition blocksMerkel’s successor will pursue nuclear weapons if the US withdraws from NATOThe Frontier Centre for Public Policy, 2019, A Nuclear Germany?, October 14, p. , <accessed, 6-4-20>, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Which brings us to Germany. In a world bristling with nuclear arms – perhaps some will even have found their way to terrorist groups by that time – will Germany be prepared to be a sitting duck in a nuclear world? The Trump administration has made it clear to Europe that it no longer wants to be Europe’s protector. What they don’t seem to understand is that this may well force Angela Merkel’s successor to decide that a much more militarized Germany, with nuclear weapons, would be necessary for the country to be able to defend itself in a world made more dangerous by American withdrawal from Europe’s defence.Security fears due to US withdrawal will galvanize political support for Germany to go nuclearVolpe & 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, p. 21Unfortunately, the debate has created a real risk that mainstream political groups in Germany come to view nuclear weapons as a panacea for solving whatever security woes come to the fore in the years ahead. For German Liberals and Greens, nuclear weapons might at some point be attractive to fend off Russian and Turkish authoritarianism. For left-leaning Germans, a nuclear deterrent could finally bring independence from Washington. For conservatives, nuclear weapons could be a powerful symbol of German prestige and return to the world leadership. The educational effort could end up transforming nuclear weapons from an anathema into a position supported by crosscutting segments. Unfortunately as Harald Müller and Thomas Risse predicted back in 1987, “if the present conditions persist—a strong Soviet threat and relentless U.S. pressures for confrontationist policies and provocation strategies—it is not inconceivable that some antinuclear protesters may, within a decade or so, end up supporting a German nuclear deterrent.” Although they probably did not foresee it, thirty years later, albeit under totally different circumstances, their prediction might become reality.Allied Prolif—AT: French nuclear sharing France won’t support nuclear sharing with Germany—Tertais is wrongMeier, 2020, <Senior Researcher at the Berlin office of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Oliver>, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Why Germany won’t build its own nuclear weapons and remains skeptical of a Eurodeterrent, vol. 76, #2, p. 79 JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Bruno Tertrais suggested that in case of a dramatic shift in transatlantic security, France might be willing to consider “legal and security arrangements (host nation support, etc.) but also, possibly, a common nuclear planning mechanism, based on a common conception of nuclear deployment, which could coexist with national ones” (Tertrais 2018, 9–10). Yet, for the time being it is unclear to what degree Paris might be willing to give up the separateness of its nuclear forces, should there be a stronger nuclear dimension to the EU’s foreign and security policy. Officially, there are no indications that such an opening of the French nuclear policy process might be possible. French President Emmanuel Macron’s February 7, 2020 keynote speech on nuclear policies and deterrence did not change that assessment. The president restated that France’s vital interests now have a European dimension. He tried to square the nuclear policy consultation circle by arguing that France’s “independent decision making is fully compatible with our unwavering solidarity with our European partners” (Macron 2020). Macron invited Europeans to participate in a strategic dialogue and in nuclear exercises but stopped short of suggesting any joint decision making (Meier 2020). Thus, it still seems as if “for France, the future of nuclear deterrence seems quite predictable, as it is hard to imagine how Paris could turn its back on its independent nuclear deterrent, at least in the near future” (Maitre 2019, 22).Germany will never agree to nuclear sharing with FranceMeier, 2020, <Senior Researcher at the Berlin office of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Oliver>, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Why Germany won’t build its own nuclear weapons and remains skeptical of a Eurodeterrent, vol. 76, #2, p. 80, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****The different nuclear cultures in France and Germany, French aversion to nuclear consultations, and inter- European divisions on the role of nuclear weapons are three factors that make it unlikely that Germany will seriously work toward a Eurodeterrent anytime soon. That is largely why the three-year ideological drumfire (and some believe concerted campaign; see Volpe and Kühn 2017) from conservative German pundits, think-tankers, and analysts arguing that Europe needs to go nuclear has so far fallen on deaf decision maker ears in Berlin. This analysis was confirmed when in early February the deputy chairperson of the ruling conservative party in the German Parliament again tested the Eurodeterrent waters. A few days ahead of Macron’s long-awaited nuclear deterrence speech, Johann Wadephul suggested that Germany and France could cooperate on nuclear deterrence and that Berlin should contribute its “own capabilities” to such an undertaking, while France should be ready to place its force de frappe under NATO or European command (Wadephul 2020). The uniform reaction from across the political spectrum was a strong pushback, including from his own party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Roderich Kiesewetter, a senior member of the CDU on the defense committee, argued that the force de frappe is “too small” to defend Europe and maintained that Paris has a track record of pursuing its own security interests against others, including Germany (Vates and K?pke 2020). Defense minister and CDU chairwoman Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer rejected Wadephul’s argument by stating that “Germany relies and will continue to rely on the NATO nuclear umbrella and not on protection based on individual, bilateral agreements” (Ismar and Meier 2020). No major decision maker in Berlin came out to defend Wadephul’s vision of greater German- French nuclear cooperation.France nuclear sharing is not a realistic alt—France won’t move nucs to Germany and its deterrent is not credibleJoffe, 2020, <serves on the editorial council of the German weekly?Die Zeit. He is also a fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a member of the executive committee of?The American Interest, Josef>, The American Interest, The German Left’s New Nuclear Freak-Out, May 11, p. , <accessed, 6-7-20> JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****So what if America is sidelined? Why not entrust security to Germany’s French friends? This is soufflé in the sky. “Extended deterrence”—protecting non-nuclear allies—doesn’t just grow out of missile silos in the far-away Dakotas. It requires forward-deployment to signal to Russia: If you attack Germany, you attack us. So, the French would have to move nuclear assets eastward. That is as likely as selling the Eiffel Tower to Disneyland. But even if the French did, their nuclear weapons would still not substitute for the American panoply. Even in the age of overkill, numbers matter. A Russian planner is a lot more impressed by thousands of U.S. warheads than by the puny 280 the French can muster. There is safety in redundancy. To boot, peace-minded Social Democrats would have to explain to their flock why French nukes are any less “inhuman” than the American kind.France lacks sufficient forces to backstop deterrence and disputes would arise with Germany over command and controlVolpe & 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. 16-17 JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Second, even if French nuclear strategy undergoes a major revolution, France may not have the operational capabilities in place to credibly backstop extended deterrence promises. Kiesewetter seems to understand that deterring Russia with its enormous nuclear arsenal would be no easy feat. The Russian strategic triad currently consists of 1,550 deployed warheads on strategic delivery vehicles (over 5,500 km). Of the total Russian inventory of over 7,000 warheads, Russia is estimated to have roughly 2,000 non-strategic nuclear warheads for weapons ranges below 500 km. Moscow is also engaged in an ongoing effort to significantly modernize its arsenal and acquire new conventional precision-guided capabilities. In comparison, France currently fields fewer than 300 nuclear warheads on a dyad consisting of submarine-launched ballistic missiles with strategic ranges of up to 8,000 km and aircraft-delivered cruise missiles with sub-strategic ranges between 300 and 400 km. As an astute security analyst, Kiesewetter gets around this quantitative asymmetry by claiming that France still retains sufficient forces to deter threats from Russia. “It’s not a question of numbers,” he claims, since the “reassurance and deterrence comes from the existence of the weapons and their deployability.” This is correct so long as France aims to protect its own territory and national interests. The configuration of French sub-strategic and strategic nuclear forces, along with deliberate ambiguity about nuclear employment, provides a strong existential deterrent. But this kind of posture would run into credibility problems if France were to extend its security guarantees to the EU’s eastern members to deter Russian aggression. One key problem is that French officials have long rejected a calibrated warfighting role for nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, Paris relied on the concept of the final warning (l’ultime avertissement), which still seems to be the central element of the French version of a flexible response. But in the event that l’ultime avertissement failed to deter Russia from a land grab in, say, Latvia, France would be left with few options except rapid escalation to threats at the strategic nuclear level, thereby risking the loss of Paris for Riga. The onus would be on Paris to demonstrate how it would resolve this classic problem of making deterrent commitments to other nations credible. Of course, the French principles of maintaining exclusive control and deliberate ambiguity over nuclear forces make this a heavy lift. Paris would have to clarify to its allies who exactly it wants to deter from doing what with the threat of nuclear punishment. But consensus would be hard to come by—European nations disagree about the main inputs to this basic deterrence equation, with some taking a more sanguine view of Russia or dismissing the utility of nuclear weapons altogether. (As Oliver Thr?nert, one of Germany’s leading strategists, pointed out, EU member states are deeply divided on nuclear matters.) Any exclusion of critical EU nations such as Poland or Italy could be perceived as a Franco–German attempt at establishing an exclusive nuclear club. If decision makers in Berlin (or other European capitals) insist on exerting positive and negative control over the use of French nuclear weapons—something that Kiesewetter explicitly demands--this would mean a complete reconstruction of the French command-and-control infrastructure.EU nuclear sharing will erode support for the NPTMeier, 2020, <Senior Researcher at the Berlin office of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Oliver>, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Why Germany won’t build its own nuclear weapons and remains skeptical of a Eurodeterrent, vol. 76, #2, p. 81, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Should the EU begin to develop its own nuclear deterrent, a difficult and contentious debate among NPT members about the legal and political implications of such proliferation would be certain. Leaving aside the question of whether arguments used to justify NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements under the NPT can also be invoked to legalize a Eurodeterrent, Europeans would be rightly accused of double standards, preaching nuclear abstinence to countries like Iran while they themselves increase the role of nuclear weapons in their security policies.France won’t share its nuclear deterrent with GermanyVolpe & 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. 15-16 JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****At face value, the Franco–Eurodeterrent appears to be the most plausible option in the German nuclear debate for the simple fact that France already has a nuclear force. Yet, there are two core reasons to believe that France will prove unwilling and unable to provide extended deterrence guarantees to Berlin and perhaps other European capitals. First, nuclear weapons have long been perceived in Paris as guaranteeing strategic autonomy and thus should not be shared. This is precisely why France does not participate in NATO’s nuclear sharing and consultation mechanisms. The prime decision to use nuclear weapons remains exclusively in the hands of the French president. In the past, public contemplations by Presidents Chirac (in 2006), Sarkozy (in 2008), and Hollande (in 2015) about expanding the purpose of the French strategic deterrent to include other European allies were left intentionally ambiguous. All three of them had referred to the context of European security and defense, and underscored the vital national interests that derive from France’s deep integration in the European Union. When Prime Minister Juppé back in 1995 invited Germany to discuss the role of the force de frappe in a European context, he used the term dissuasion concertée (‘concerted deterrence’). ‘Concerted deterrence,’ as discussed by the French following the end of the Cold War, basically meant that France would consult with its European partners on nuclear issues. While this proposal went quite far theoretically, it never came into being, partly because the French saw the idea of a joint command and thus the full Europeanization of the force de frappe as too far down the line. Whether the current conditions in Europe have made full Europeanization more plausible and realistic is a matter of debate. But if the chasm between the French desire for strategic autonomy and external calls for a joint command remains, the Kiesewetter proposal is dead on arrival. However, the force de frappe is currently undergoing a very costly modernization at a time when Paris is already facing enormous fiscal pressure on its defense budget. Proponents such as Stefan Fr?hlich or the doyen of German foreign grand strategy Karl Kaiser seem to assume that a German bid to finance parts of the French deterrent might change some of the more traditional thinking in Paris. French strategist Fran?ois Heisbourg already sees “room for French– German talks” in that regard. Benner recommended that Germany “should seek talks on nuclear cooperation with the new French president in May” and reiterated his calls once Emmanuel Macron was elected.Allied Prolif---Impact---Turns RussiaIt causes Russian threat perception AND countermeasuresWolfgang Ischinger 18, Professor of Security Policy and Diplomatic Practice at the Hertie School and Founding Director of the Centre for International Security, Chair of the Munich Security Conference, Studied at the Universities of Bonn and Geneva, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and Harvard Law School, “Germany’s Dangerous Nuclear Flirtation”, 8/10/2018, , a German nuclear bomb would damage the strategic environment in Europe – to Germany’s disadvantage. Russia would interpret German steps toward a nuclear arsenal as a direct threat to its own national security and would likely adopt military countermeasures. That, in turn, would make it even harder to pursue the vision of a pan-European order of peace and security, a core foreign-policy goal of all German governments since that of Konrad Adenauer. Moreover, a German nuclear ambition might jeopardize the delicate balance of power in Europe – including between Germany and France, for example – with incalculable consequences for the long-term cohesion of the European Union.Allied Prolif---Impact---Turns EU UnityIt splinters the continentDr. Ulrich Kühn 17, PhD in Political Science from Hamburg University and Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Dr. Tristan Volpe, Assistant Professor of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, Ph.D. in Political Science from the George Washington University, Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Keine Atombombe, Bitte: Why Germany Should Not Go Nuclear”, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2017, DANGEROUS IDEAShould Europe find itself caught between a hostile Russia and an indifferent United States, Berlin would feel pressure to defend Europe militarily rather than just politically. But then it would face the problem of how to guarantee European security without reviving fears of German hegemony. And if Germany boosted its military power without integrating it into the European project, that might well lead to German isolation and the breakup of the EU. Nuclear weapons seem to offer Germany a way out of this impasse. In the eyes of their proponents, they would deter existential threats and reduce European dependence on the United States without raising fears of German dominance. “Nuclear power projection on the part of Berlin would be accepted as legitimate,” Terhalle wrote, because “World War II has no real political weight in today’s relations.” Instead, it is the “perception of threat from Russia” that determines policy in central and eastern European countries. This claim rests on a shaky foundation. Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine may be driving European nations together, but the fear of a German resurgence has not gone away entirely. If Germany built nuclear weapons, the EU’s current unity would quickly fracture.Allied Prolif---Impact---German Prolif Collapses NPTThe cascade effect puts the NPT in the graveWolfgang Ischinger 18, Professor of Security Policy and Diplomatic Practice at the Hertie School and Founding Director of the Centre for International Security, Chair of the Munich Security Conference, Studied at the Universities of Bonn and Geneva, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and Harvard Law School, “Germany’s Dangerous Nuclear Flirtation”, 8/10/2018, doubt on these commitments would severely damage Germany’s reputation and reliability worldwide. Germany would call into question the credibility of NATO’s nuclear deterrence, and thus the alliance itself, along with the entire nuclear non-proliferation regime.It is worth noting that since its creation in 1949, NATO has been one of the world’s most successful instruments of proliferation prevention. Not a single NATO member state – apart from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – has found it necessary to acquire nuclear weapons of its own.If Germany were now to break out of its non-nuclear power status, what would keep Turkey or Poland, for instance, from following suit? Germany as a gravedigger of the international non-proliferation regime – who could want that?Allied Prolif---Impact---NPT Collapse BadNPT collapse causes nuclear warCooper 15 – Cooper, Fellow with the Truman National Security Project, 15 (Christian H. is a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, “The Pride of the Diplomats: Why the NPT Works” Global Policy Journal 5-19-15, ) The review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) this month is a once every five years chance to reaffirm and strengthen one of the strongest international norms: that against the proliferation and use of nuclear technology for military means. Representatives of 190 countries are gathered to examine the treaty itself and discuss new ways to increase global buy-in against nuclear dangers. This time, they might do so in a critical new way. Israel will be at the table for the first time in 20 years as an observer only (having not signed the NPT), and according to a senior Obama administration official, has agreed to begin working with Arabs on an agenda for a conference to discuss a weapons of mass destruction free zone in the Middle East. This is a dramatic change from 2010, when Israel refused to even consider the idea. Incremental diplomatic wins like this one lie at the core of the truly transnational strategic interest on the path to complete nuclear weapons disarmament. This is precisely why ensuring the peaceful use of nuclear technology must remain a key component of all nations’ foreign policy doctrines. Perhaps one reason the NPT, and its review every five years, is often overlooked by the general public is because at face value, everyone agrees more nukes are a bad thing. However, the NPT, and the corresponding diplomatic collaboration surrounding nuclear weapons, go much deeper than simply halting the proliferation of such dangerous technology. It is through this nearly universal treaty the next generation of world leaders will likely see nuclear disarmament, avoid an open war with Iran over its nuclear program, and stop a Middle East nuclear arms race in its tracks. However, it wasn't always clear the NPT would be the resounding success it is. In 1961 when Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion told U.S. President John F. Kennedy that Israel's nuclear program at Dimona was for peaceful purposes only, Kennedy’s National Security Council was simultaneously warning that by the 1970s there could be 40 nuclear weapon armed states (including Israel). If an America in the future faced rampant nuclear threats and could not believe a face-to-face conversation with a reliable ally, what could anyone trust? There had to be a better way, and the NPT was the answer: Never trust, always verify. In Israel's defense, the only NPT signatories who have violated the treaty since adoption— Iran, Iraq and Syria—have sworn to destroy the Jewish state. Remaining a non-signatory to the NPT and maintaining an opaque nuclear first strike nuclear capability was strategically the right choice for Israel (regional de-stabilization be damned), and one that could be revisited given their 2015 decision to consider an agenda for a nuclear weapons free Middle East. Israel's gambit to wait for the NPT to become as ironclad as it has paid dividends that we can all reap both in June with a comprehensive agreement between the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (including Germany, a group colloquially referred to as the P5+1) and Iran and well into the future. The defining trait of the NPT is reframing the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a state from an act of national pride circa 1960 to an act contrary to international law by 1970. Thankfully, today we operate in a world that accepts nuclear power as a scientific pursuit but abhors its use for violence. This is also why Iran's right to domestically enrich as a signatory to the NPT will be a cornerstone of the P5+1 agreement that will be announced soon and likely ratified by the first of July. This comprehensive agreement will also implicitly underscore one of the pillars of the NPT: The gradual demilitarization of nuclear technology. And lest critics make the argument that the NPT can only be used to coerce pariah states like Iran, consider the actions of the major powers. Since the NPT entered into force, the United States has drastically reduced the number of nuclear weapons in its stockpile by 80 percent and completely removed multiple entry warheads from its nuclear strike capacity. In some respects just as importantly, Washington is currently targeting the open ocean; there is no longer a single ICBM aimed at the Russian Federation and nuclear-armed, long-range strategic bombers have been removed from daily nuclear alert. Russia has made similar progress, with both commitments and demonstrated progress in reducing deployed warheads as well as deployed and undeployed delivery vehicles. Moscow has also taken the lead in other areas where the United States has lagged behind, singing and ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. To be sure, complications—including Russia’s tendency to view their remaining weapons as a counterweight to all NATO stockpiles rather than simply that of the United States—still exist, but the fact remains that the norm created by NPT has reduced the potential for nuclear disaster across the globe. And where has all that potential destruction gone? Fully 10% of electric power in the United States over the last two decades came from down-blended, highly enriched uranium earmarked for Russian megaton nuclear bombs. Over 20,000 warheads (and their associated risk of accidental launches) were removed from service all thanks the spirit of the NPT. The spirit of bilateral cooperation remains strong; despite the tensions in Ukraine, both the United States and the Russian Federation are fully implementing the terms of the New START treaty, wherein each shares data on the movement of strategic forces and both engage in reciprocal inspections of military facilities. The NPT is not just about non-proliferation; it is a shift in mindset that nuclear technology will be shared with those who want it for peaceful purposes in return for de-arming those who have militarized it. It has been a resounding victory for the idea of internationalism and the fundamental idea that a community of nations can come together and, through mutually-reinforcing and verifying behavior, make strategic choices that defy the self-serving nature of states in an anarchic system. Moreover, it has been the bedrock of a norm that spawned a range of bi- and multilateral measures to protect the world against the terrible risk of nuclear conflict. Collective continued nuclear demilitarization is a win for the diplomats of the world. Progress on the biggest issues comes in small breaks, such as the Israeli decision to if not pull a seat up to the table, at least pay close attention on the sidelines. Through extraordinary burdens of verification and disclosure, the NPT will continue to make the world a safer place.Allied Prolif---Impact---Proliferation BadProlif causes multiple scenarios for nuclear warMatthew Kroenig 16, Associate Professor in the Department of Government and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow in the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council, “Approaching Critical Mass: Asia’s Multipolar Nuclear Future,” National Bureau of Asian Research Special Report #58, June 2016The most important reason to be concerned about nuclear weapons in Asia, of course, is the threat that nuclear weapons might be used. To be sure, the use of nuclear weapons remains remote, but the probability is not zero and the consequences could be catastrophic. The subject, therefore, deserves careful scrutiny. Nuclear use would overturn a 70-year tradition of nonuse, could result in large-scale death and destruction, and might set a precedent that shapes how nuclear weapons are viewed, proliferated, and postured decades hence. The dangers of escalation may be magnified in a multipolar nuclear order in which small skirmishes present the potential to quickly draw in multiple powers, each with a finger on the nuclear trigger. The following discussion will explore the logic of crisis escalation and strategic stability in a multipolar nuclear order.14 First and foremost, the existence of multipolar nuclear powers means that crises may pit multiple nuclear-armed states against one another. This may be the result of formal planning if a state’s strategy calls for fighting multiple nuclear-armed adversaries simultaneously. A state may choose such a strategy if it believes that a war with one of these states would inevitably mean war with both. Alternatively, in a war between state A and state B, state A may decide to conduct a preventive strike on state C for fear that it would otherwise seek to exploit the aftermath of the war between states A and B. Given U.S. nuclear strategy in the early Cold War, for example, it is likely that a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union would have also resulted in U.S. nuclear attacks against China, even if China had not been a direct participant in the precipitating dispute. In addition, conflicts of interest between nuclear powers may inadvertently impinge on the interests of other nuclear-armed states, drawing them into conflict. There is always a danger that one nuclear power could take action against a nuclear rival and that this action would unintentionally cross a red line for a third nuclear power, triggering a tripartite nuclear crisis. Linton Brooks and Mira Rapp-Hooper have dubbed this category of phenomena the “security trilemma.”15 For example, if the United States were to engage in a show of force in an effort to signal resolve to Russia, such as the flushing of nuclear submarines, this action could inadvertently trigger a crisis for China. There is also the issue of “catalytic” war. This may be the first mechanism by which Cold War strategists feared that multiple nuclear players could increase the motivations for a nuclear exchange. They worried that a third nuclear power, such as China, might conduct a nuclear strike on one of the superpowers, leading the wounded superpower to conclude wrongly that the other superpower was responsible and thereby retaliate against an innocent state presumed to be the aggressor. This outcome was seen as potentially attractive to the third state as a way of destroying the superpowers and promoting itself within the global power hierarchy. Fortunately, this scenario never came to pass during the Cold War. With modern intelligence, reconnaissance, and early warning capabilities among the major powers, it is more difficult to imagine such a scenario today, although this risk is still conceivable among less technologically developed states. In addition to acting directly against one another, nuclear powers could be drawn into smaller conflicts between their allies and brought face to face in peak crises. International relations theorists discuss the concept of “chain ganging” within alliance relationships, the dangers of which are more severe when the possibility of nuclear escalation is present.16 Although this was a potential problem even in a bipolar nuclear order, the more nuclear weapons states present, the greater the likelihood of multiple nuclear powers entering a crisis. A similar logic suggests that the more fingers on the nuclear trigger, the more likely it is that nuclear weapons will be used. Multipolar nuclear crises are not without historical precedent.17 Several Cold War crises featured the Soviet Union against the United States and its European nuclear-armed allies, Britain and later France. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War involved the United States, the Soviet Union, and a nuclear-armed Israel. The United States has been an interested party in regional nuclear disputes, including the Sino-Soviet border war of 1969 and several crises in the past two decades on the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, many of these crises stand out as among the most dangerous of the nuclear era.Allied Prolif—AT: prolif doesn’t increase risk of conflictProlif increases risk of nuclear war due to higher levels of nuclear incidents, preemptive strikes, and collapse of alliancesSokolski, 2018, <executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, Washington, DC. and previously served in the Senate as a nuclear and military legislative aide, in the Pentagon as Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy, Henry>, UNDERESTIMATED: OUR NOT SO PEACEFUL NUCLEAR FUTURE, 2nd edition, August, p. 26, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Finally, academic skeptics tend to ignore or gloss over the risks “upward” nuclear transitions present. These dangers are three-fold. First, as the number of nuclear weapons players increases, the gravity, complexity, and likelihood of ruinous nuclear incidents may increase within states (e.g., unauthorized or accidental use, terrorist theft, irredentist seizure, etc.) and between them (e.g., catalytic wars, misread nuclear signaling, etc.). Second, and closely related, are the numerous technical and managerial challenges each nuclear state faces to make their nuclear forces robust and survivable enough to have any hope of effectively deterring attacks. These challenges are most severe for new nuclear weapons forces but are hardly inconsequential for large, mature forces. Last, as the number of states possessing nuclear forces increases to include nations covered by nuclear security alliance guarantees, the continued viability and coherence of these alliance systems are likely to be tested in the extreme, increasing the prospects for war.Consensus of national security experts reject the theory that more nuclear weapons promote stability Carus, 2016, <Distinguished Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction at the National Defense University, W. Seth>, Chapter 2: Why U.S. Policymakers Who Love the Bomb Don’t Think “More is Better” in Should We Let the Bomb Spread, ed. by H. Sokolsky, pp. 28-29, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Disconnects between the academic and the policy worlds are not unusual. Nevertheless, it still is striking when an academic debate, supposedly about a topic of vital national security concern, rages for decades but is totally ignored by those responsible for policymaking in that arena. This is certainly true for the argument offered by some academics that nuclear proliferation contributes to the stability of the international system, arguing that “more is better.” Yet, it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to find any Washington policymaker accepting such a position. Indeed, during the past 50 years there has been a widespread consensus amongst U.S. policymakers, across the political and ideological spectrum, that “more is NOT better” and that nonproliferation efforts are an essential element of U.S. national security policy. The pages that follow will start by first examining the views of the academics who espouse the “more is better” argument, followed by a review of some of the perspectives that explain why almost all U.S. national security policymakers have ignored it. Who are the policymakers in question? They include executive branch officials, starting with the last 12 presidents and continuing with their immediate advisors—national security advisors, secretaries of defense and state, and other senior officials (deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, and assistant secretaries of various departments), as well as many members of Congress. This discussion is focused exclusively on Washington and the men and women responsible for creating and executing U.S. national security policies. It does not address the potentially different perspectives of officials in other countries, who may operate using different rules and perceive the world in different ways.Allied Prolf—AT—No capability to buildGermany has latent nuclear capabilities that could make bombs within a few monthsSteff, 2013, <Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, Reuben>, Strategic Thinking, Deterrence and the US Ballistic Missile Defense Project, p. google booksFirstly, nine states have nuclear weapons and apparently 49 countries have the know how to construct them. Secondly, to reduce greenhouse gases, many states may soon judge it prudent to construct nuclear power plants. Thirdly, states like Japan, Germany and South Korea have latent nuclear weapons potential and could apparently militarize their program in the space of a few months. JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Germany has HEU that can be converted to making weaponsNTI, 2019, Civilian HEU: Germany, July 1, p. , accessed, 6-7-20<As of its 2018 declaration, Germany had 1270 kg of HEU, of which approximately 940 kg was?irradiated, 320 kg was held in?research reactors, and 10 kg was stored in several locations: Germany’s Federal Storage Site in Hanau; Cadarache,?France; Dounreay, Scotland; and at German and European research centers and universities. All German HEU is the property of the European Union. The majority of Germany’s HEU is?weapons-grade, and if chemically processed further would be directly usable for a nuclear weapon. JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Keeping civil nuclear reactors provides Germany with materials to build nuclear weaponsFella, 2018, <policy advisor for German and European foreign, security and defense policy at the International Policy Analysis Department at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) in Berlin, Tobias>, The National Interest, A Nuclear Armed Germany Would Be a Mistake, August 18, p. , accessed, 6-4-20, JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****Nuclear Take-Off. A world, worse off than in 1957? Hasn’t the international system reached a ‘point of no return’ requiring nuclear weapons for state survival? How should Germany protect itself in this ‘New World Order’ if it can’t rely on anyone else? Aren’t tactical atomic weapons, as?Adenauer emphasized back then, ‘basically nothing but the further development of artillery,’ anyway? This time it’s for real—German needs to go nuclear, alone! This is what Christian Hacke, a well-known German political scientist, and realist advocated for in ‘Die Welt/EN.' But then what? First, Germany’s plan to shut all its nuclear reactors by 2022, a decision taken after the Fukushima accident in 2011, has to be revoked. Thereafter, nuclear bombs could be technically built:?URENCO?has already made Germany one of the world's leaders in uranium enrichment. Germany has the capability to build nuclear weapons if it had the political willRIA Novosti, 2009, Anniversary of the Chinese Bomb: The Road to the Nuclear Club, October 20, p. , <accessed, 6-7-20> JPK****NCC’20 Novice Packet****China was the last member of the "big nuclear club" to acquire nuclear weapons before July 12, 1968, when the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was opened for signature. The treaty was nevertheless unable to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Other countries that currently have nuclear weapons are Israel (which does not officially confirm or deny nuclear status), India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Moreover, South Africa, which is thought to have developed nuclear weapons jointly with Israel, used to have a nuclear arsenal. Nevertheless, the South African nuclear weapons program was scrapped by the early 1990s and the weapons were dismantled. There are also a number of countries, such as Argentina, Brazil and Iran, that do not have nuclear weapons but have worked or are working on developing them. Still other countries have the capability to acquire nuclear weapons quickly given enough political will. These include Germany, Japan and a number of other industrially developed nations. ................
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