Strategic Insights on Taiwan: Drones, Military Space, and More
School
Harvard University**We aren't endorsed by this school
Course
COMP 285
Subject
Management
Date
Dec 11, 2024
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71
Uploaded by CoachSandpiperPerson1141
1DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateCON.............................................................................................................................................................2Drones Good............................................................................................................................................3Military Space Good................................................................................................................................5Proliferation Impact...............................................................................................................................13Allies Good/Extended Deterrence Good............................................................................................14Climate Solvency Answers.....................................................................................................................16AT: Free Trade Impacts..........................................................................................................................32AT: Pan K................................................................................................................................................38AT: Heg Bad...........................................................................................................................................40PRO............................................................................................................................................................42China Threat Answers............................................................................................................................43China War Won’t Go Nuclear................................................................................................................57Hegemony Good Answers.....................................................................................................................61South Korean Prolif Answers.................................................................................................................66
2DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateCON
3DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateDrones GoodDrone swarmsdeter escalation. Benjamin Jensen 24, professor of strategic studies at the School of Advanced Warfighting in the Marine Corps University and a senior fellow in the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2/13/2024, “Bringing the Swarm to Life: Roles, Missions, and Campaigns for the Replicator Initiative,” https://warontherocks.com/2024/02/bringing-the-swarm-to-life-roles-missions-and-campaigns-for-the-replicator-initiative/From debates about the viability of Project Replicator to the Ukrainian calls to build a million first person view drones in 2024, there isa rising tide of interest in low-cost, attritable battlefield effects. The swarmisnow a“new” theory of victory.Yet, what roles and missions will these swarmsmake possible? Tactical adaption and the unforgiving feedback loop of the battlefield are helping Ukraineanswer these questions. What is missing in the Replicator discussion in U.S. national security community is a tangible setof scenarios that support strategic analysis.To that end, I propose a series of ideal typical missions in support of capabilities development and refining continency and campaign plans. Specifically, three concepts of operations emerge: imposing costs, denying terrain, and buying time. Swarms offer viable options for imposing costslinked to the concept ofvirtual attritionand how much an adversary expects to gainfromaparticular course of action. They offer low-cost ways— similar to mines and obstacles — of denying terrain.Inan era of great-power competitionbetween nuclear adversaries, drone swarmsoffer anew rungon theescalation ladderthat buys timeand spaceforpolitical leaders to form prudent crisis responsestrategies.Roles and Missions for the SwarmPrevious workon mosaic warfare, swarming, and operational art highlights the ability of a swarm to generate asymmetriesby using low-cost systemsto hold an adversaries’ critical capabilities at risk.For example, ifthe People’s Liberation Army chooses to cross theTaiwan Strait, they need trooptransportsand destroyers. If small, unmanned speed boatscan damagebillion-dollar surface connectors whileair-launched drones create clutterand attack radars, blindingthe destroyers, it makesthe crossingmore precarious.The Chinese military has to either assume more risk or divert additional resources to protect its force, slowing or even halting the operation. The expected costs change relative tothe anticipated benefits, making certain courses of action less tenable. Thisrational logic is why swarmsarepotentially as important for deterrenceas they are for warfighting.Holding critical capabilities at risk requires the swarm to be networked, dynamically retaskable, and multi-mission capable. Clever tacticians need to be able to swap warheads for synthetic aperture radars and decoys for signals intelligence and electronic warfare payloads to create different combinations of effects based on the critical vulnerabilities that emerge from the chaos of the battlefield. That is, because war is a non-linear system, the swarm has to be able to sense and adapt to emerging advantages faster than its target. This requirement implies that swarmsneed a tremendous amount of intelligenceand logistics.Constant updates to targeting and moving the swarm into position while regenerating salvos (i.e., swarm-in-being as the next potential attack vector) require planning and good old fashion staff work even if new AI/machine learning co-pilots help along the wary. To achieve the right economy of scale, it also puts a premium on ensuring both hardware and software are interoperable with allies. This measure requires as much time and effort spent on defense policy as on force employment, development, and design.
4DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateBeing more adaptablethan the adversary puts the enemy off balanceand into constantly guessing the next move. Fearof the unknowncompounds to skew rational decision-making. Thiscompounding effect alters how an adversary arraystheir forces relative to expected decisive points leading toa misallocationof scarcebattlefield resourcesand addingtimeand frictionto an operation.Consider Ukraine’srecent success in the Black Sea.It is not the unmanned surface vessels alone that create the asymmetry. It is how large numbers ofthese unmannedsurface vesselsare combined with raids, cruise missile strikes, intelligence, deception, and electronic warfarethat keepthe Russiansconstantly guessingand wondering what will hit them next.The Black Sea fleet wasn’t defeated. Rather, the risk of suffering further loses to constant attacks without a clear counterattack option forced the Russian navy to retreat to safer areas further east. Anticipation and fear of the next attack matter as much as the current fight in swarming. The principles of surprise, maneuver, and objective are as important as mass. For Russia, the benefits of occupying maritime terrain west of Crimea proved less than the anticipated costs.Given this logic, three roles and missions emerge as purpose statements (i.e., the “why” of military action) for swarming formations: impose costs, deny terrain, and buy time. As the operational purpose for employing a tactical swarm, the logic of each mission speaks to different requirements and even unique task organizations. Put another way, visualizing and describing roles and missions for swarmssupports defenseplanningscenarios and analyzing the mix of forces and functions required formodern great-power competition.AND, solves adversary first strikes. *EDTs = emerging and disruptive technologiesJacek Durkalec 22, PhD in political science from Jagiellonian University, senior fellow at the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “Nuclear decisionmaking, complexity and emerging and disruptive technologies: A comprehensive Assessment”, https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/LLNL.pdfUnder certain circumstances, the combined interactions of EDTsby an adversary coulddeter statesfromattemptinga limited nuclear attack. For instance, by fieldinga high-densityintegrated air and missile defencenetwork that takes advantage ofAI-enabledISR data and swarmsof interceptors, an adversarycould convince an attackerthat avery limited nuclear attackwould fail. The attacker wouldthen have to consider whether to back downor conduct a largernuclear strike, risking further escalation. Both scenarios present difficult choices and could convince an attackerto favour restraint.
5DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateMilitary Space GoodSpace techsolves US space superiority. Charles S. Galbreath 24, Senior Fellow for Space Studies, the Mitchell Institute Spacepower AdvantageCenter of Excellence, July 2024, :Small Satellites: Answering the Call for Space Superiority,” https://mitchellaerospacepower.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Small-Satellites-Answering-the-Call-for-Space-Superiority-FINAL.pdfIntroductionRussian and Chineseoffensive spacepower ambitions are making headlinesand are intenton erasing thevital advantage the United States has in space. U.S. defense leadershipnowpublicly recognizes the need to gainand maintain space superiority—an essential change given thecurrent threat environment and theincredible pace at which our adversariesare advancing their space capabilities.To achieve the needed level of space superiority, theDepartment of Defense (DOD) and Congress mustempower the United States Space Force (USSF) with the resources and authorities necessary to realize the full potential of small satellites, or “SmallSats.” This meanslooking beyond proliferating large numbers of SmallSats to increase space architecture resilience to “deny a first-mover advantage.”While this objective remains valid, achieving space superiority requires harnessing the potentialof SmallSats in multiple ways.Building anew hybrid architecture with SmallSats, anchored in the tenets of Competitive Endurance, will increaseoperational flexibility, deliver enhanced capabilities, and increase mission capacityto ensurea continued space advantagefor theUnited States andour allies. SmallSats can improve domain awarenessto “avoid operational surprise” because they can rapidly launchandbroadly proliferatea variety of sensors.These sensors canbe positioned to monitor emerging situations. Thesesystems arealso ideal for “responsible counterspace campaigning,” giventhat SmallSatscan host a range of kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities to defendfriendly space assetsand denyan adversary the ability to use spaceto defeatour air, land, and maritime forces.SmallSats can create these desired effects in ways legacy systems cannot, which is whythe increased adoption of SmallSats will need to be a key element in our future architecture— one that empowers the Space Force to evolve at the pace, scale, and scope necessary to maintain space superiority and achieve the objectives of Competitive Endurance. With the understandingthat our adversaries are pressing hard to contest space, this is a “mustdo,” not a “nice-to-do.”A Necessary Response to the Growing ThreatThe United Statesnow findsitself inan era of sustained competitionfacingdetermined adversaries, especially Chinaand Russia.Theseadversaries are developing new weaponsto exploitthe vulnerability of the legacy U.S. space architecture The U.S. architecture wassimply not designed for warfightingin space, with satellitesand associated systems optimized for performanceand longevityin an uncontested domain.As former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General John Hyten famously articulated, theUnited States needs to stopbuying “big, fat, juicy targets.”1 More recently, the Chief of Space Operations (CSO), General Saltzman, compared legacy capabilities to unarmed merchant marine vessels now being asked to become battleships.2 The point is clear: the Space Force must field
6DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatedefensive capabilities to defend exquisite satellites and improve the overall architectural resilience. However, these changes take time, especially if the Space Force is constrained to old processes and has inadequate funding.Part of thisevolution demandsa modernizedset of capabilities thatdeliver essential mission effects, butthey mustalso be combat-readytobetter deterfuture conflicts, control escalation, and prevailifovert hostilities eruptin space. Therecent revelationthat Russiais pursuing a new antisatellite (ASAT)system isjustthe latestin an increasing list of weapons targetingU.S. space systems. The proliferation of these threatsin the past two decades highlightsthe efforts adversaries like Russiaand Chinaare taking to counter the U.S. advantage in space.3 The risk of the growing number of systemsextends to howthese nationscould use spaceto targetour fielded forcesin the air, at sea, andon the ground to disrupt joint and coalition operations.In the past two years, China has placed over 200 surveillance and reconnaissance satellites in orbit. As Maj Gen Gregory Gagnon, the lead Space Force intelligence officer stated, “the (PLAs) breakout pace in space is profound.”4TheUnited States mustnot only respond directly to these threats but also develop innovative technologiesand operating concepts to outpaceour adversaries.TheSpace Force’s theory of success, known as Competitive Endurance, achieves this by crystalizing a strategy to control escalationand, if needed, prevail in conflictin space. While space superiority and Competitive Endurance are not synonymous, the actions and capabilities needed to achieve each are similar—the key distinction between the two is whether the situation is considered competition or conflict. In either case, SmallSats must play an important role in the U.S. theory of victory. Deterring conflict, especially one extending to space, is central to the posture of the United States. Making clear to adversaries that the USSF can and will achieve space superiority is central to keeping competition from escalating.Space superioritysolves extinction. Steve Kwast 19, Master's degree in public policy, Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government, lieutenant general in the U.S. Air Force with extensive combat and command experience at every level, from squadron to major command, 19 August 2019, “THE REAL STAKES IN THE NEW SPACE RACE,” https://warontherocks.com/2019/08/the-real-stakes-in-the-new-space-race/ Why isspaceso critical to the future?Space is powerfulprecisely because it benefits from the attributes and principles of anetwork. A network can deliver power, information, and goods from one node, or all nodes, at a fraction of the increase in cost per customer compared to a linear system. The post office is an example of a linear model. If you send a letter to 100 different people, you have to pay for 100 stamps. The Internet is an example of a networked model. If you want to send an email to 100 people you can send it at a fraction of the cost. Most of our terrestrial economies are modeled on linear design, driving up cost for every delivery to a new customer. A networked space infrastructure will always win the cost war against a linear terrestrial infrastructure. Consequently, the firstcivilization to build a robust networked space infrastructure willdominate the global economy of the 21st century.Space will be amulti-trillion-dollar marketthat willdisproportionately benefit the first great powerthat builds a vibrant infrastructure there. Finishing secondin this race meansaccepting defeat. Why is this the case?Whoever movesinto a new marketplace first definesand sets the terms of that market. If America is firstto build the infrastructure of space, its rule of law and values, including every human’s inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, will underpin the marketplace. If China is first, its values will dominate. China continues to demonstrate a lack of regard for fair economic practices, the rule of law, human dignity, or liberty.Fromtransportation, toenergy, toinformation, tomanufacturinggoods and services,China’s strategy is to dominatethe key engines of economic growththat have historically changed world power and it views space as the place to seize and grow that advantage. It’s well-accepted that technological advantage drives
7DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updateeconomic prosperity, and economic prosperity is essential to sustainable national security. Today, China is applying this principlewith new technologies and a superior strategy in space. America, on the other hand, is so underinvested, it is relying on the Russians to launch its astronauts into space. Fortunately, there is a way out, but only if wewake up now.Most Americans are completely unaware that China has a plan to build manned labs both on the moon and on Mars. Nor are they aware that China has publicly announced its plans to build a nuclear powered space shuttle or its plan to begin mining asteroids by 2040. This isn’t science fiction. China isinvesting billionsand has achieved some notable firstsincluding putting the first quantum satellite in orbit, operating a rover on the far side of the moon, and its simulated Mars habitat in the Gobi Desert.If China stays on its current path, it will deploy a power station in space that could begin generating energy before 2040. China will claim that such stations are for peaceful means only— beaming clean energy via lasers or microwaves to anyone on earth — butthey could also be weapons. The same beams could be directed at nodes of the U.S. power grid or a military base with destructive effect. America has grown accustomed to holding its adversaries at risk anywhere in the world in hours. China is developing the capability to have a more sophisticated capability that canreach virtually any target in seconds.America has become complacent and mistakes its rapidly dissipating economic and military advantages as rights. TheUnited States is making the same mistakethat other fallen great powers have made. Namely, it is doubling down on the approach that made America successful in previous generations and discounting rising powers taking new approaches. While the U.S. government nibbles around the edges of game-changing technologies, the Chinese party-state is making huge investments in key areas to include: hypersonics, 5G, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, 3D-printing, quantum computing , and robotics. China is employing these and other leading-edge technologies in wholistic and new strategic ways that couldrender America a second-rate power.Most Americans, and many in Congress, have not had that broader picture painted. Congress is at a crossroads, but some of its members may not even know it. It is time to make a deliberate decision to compete with China or to surrender by default. While American companies are working on these new technologies (albeit in separate silos), real power lies in harnessing these technologies together from space in intentionaland innovative ways to achieve a dominant competitive advantage. China is actively pursuing a plan to use space as the ultimate “high ground” to dominate the global economy and transform economic, military, and political power in its image. While the United States has used terrestrial based strategies to contain its adversaries in the past, China is positioning itself tosurround the entire globe from space.The good news is that there is still a way to win. TheUnited States can build on key competitive advantages: namely, superior cultures ofcreativityandinnovation, rooted in an open society and a free market. The U.S. government should start with a vision that is both bigger than China’s and meaningful to America’s society and values.From there, it canwriteandimplement a strategythat can secure the American wayof life in this century and ensure the goods and promises offered by space are not dominated by a country disinterested in human freedom.The benefitsof such a course of action would appeal to most Americans, and indeed most people, to includeclean energy, ubiquitous and secure communications, protectionfromspace objects like the “city killing” meteor that hit Russia, deterrence capabilities thatwill render nuclear weapons obsolete, ensurethe survival of humanitythrough expansion, andeven modifyingthe Earth’s weather using satellites toslowthe effects of climate change.
8DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateMulti-domain warfare is complex---the best military innovations aren’t known in advance.Ben Zweibelson 24, Director, Strategic Innovation Group, USSPACECOM, 2024, “Why Do Militaries Stifle New Ideas?,” Contemporary Issues in Air and Space Power, 2(1), bp38138320, https://doi.org/10.58930/bp381383201. IntroductionMilitaries call for innovationmorenow thanperhaps in previous generations, if only due to theincreasingly complex social realitythatmodernity now features for conflicts.The call for innovation is due to the many overlapping efforts of disciplines studying how humans create, think and reflect on how they engage with a complex reality. However, many military expertsmight refute such an assumption, insisting ‘war has always been complex’. This is true, if we remain contextually centred on what people withinthat period knew as social reality. War has always been historically complex, and arguably chaotic in that organised violence remains the most volatile, dynamic, dangerous and destructive context that humans place themselves into. Wars in the antiquities, feudal ages, in western and eastern configurations, into the Napoleonic Era and European, Westphalian state-on-state conflict are all in their own context extraordinarily complex for those leaders attempting to fight and defeat enemies. Yet for most of human history, warfare has oriented around the regulation, standardisation, uniformity and predictive attempts of control, whether in strategic aims or tactical execution of organised violence. We desire prediction, control andsome certitudewhere organised violence results in our goalsthat must manifest in a shared social reality. Both we and our enemies are necessary collaborators on how conflicts unfold and resolve, and whether an innovative activity succeedsin changing the conditions for who gains advantage over whom.It is a controversial argument to state that contemporary warfare is well beyond the complexity of earlier terrestrial or otherwise socially or technologically limited conflict. Often, the reason we stipulate war today is consistent with earlier war periods is to reinforce our ontological position that war itself has an enduring, unchanging nature. We in the western, scientifically rational world believe that the modern scientific ordering and natural laws become a ‘paradigm shift’ that destroys earlier non-scientific natural orderings (Kuhn, 1996). Scientific paradigms progressively replace outdated or irrelevant ones in a strict Kuhnian sense, but Kuhn’s definition of scientific paradigms addressed the progress of science, not war. War has scientific aspects, but war is a social phenomenon where the application of social paradigms is more representative versus attempts to use Kuhnian scientific ones (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). Social paradigm theory, developed in the 1970s, is the sociological and organisational expansion of earlier Kuhnian theory with the significant difference in how paradigms interact. Kuhn’s scientific paradigms replace and destroy inferior ones, while social paradigms are sustained by populations that operate competing and often incommensurate belief systems on social reality, including what war is and how it is waged.[1] When change occurs, we react and think differently not just due to the emergence of novelty and disruption itself, but how our social paradigms shape and channel us to think differently about that change depending on what paradigm one subscribes to.Today’s military forcesand political leadershipnow have theadditional context of violent conflict manifesting not just inthe earlier terrestrial domains(air, land, sea), withvastly sophisticated technological abilities and effects, butalsointopreviously unreachable or unrealised domains of cyberspaceand space.There is no such objective scale for complexity and conflict, as the subjectivity of human existence is far too difficult to associate universal metrics to such a thing. Yet if ‘more’ is a factor, modern war fighters must deal with the potential of multi-domain warfareacross more domains, in fasterand more dynamic manifestationsthan any previous context.War today extends intoa digital planeof human existence, where artificial intelligence and cyberexistences formentirely new directionsfor organised violenceto mutate.Our ability to change what we are as carbon-based life forms at a genetic level is an emerging capability no other species has experienced, nor has any species gained the ability to become multi-planetary. These are game-changing, profound developmentsequivalent to the development of organic life, thesudden cognitive revolution for early humans, or the emergence of theGutenberg printing press. That wartoday offersfar more non-linearand emergent pathsto unfold ina deeper interplay of terrestrial, non-terrestrial, physical and abstract planes of human experienceis a
9DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatemesmerising statement suggesting that complex warfare today might not be limited by historicaldefinitionsandbeliefs.Potentially, a multi-paradigmatic war frame would examine beyond any natural ordering, to include the interplay of a range of incommensurate war paradigms that may be employed by a host of conflicting stakeholders. We need to be cognitively flexibleto realise theestablished limits of our own paradigmconcerningsocial realityand war, and venturefurther into other belief systems. In these grey spacesbetween institutionalisedand indoctrinated war frames, we find the fertile ground for innovation.I have previously explored how and why militaries stifle new ideas and consider the pattern of outright rejection of novelty and punishment of unorthodox thinking in war (Zweibelson, 2023a, 2023c, pp. 74–92, 2024). Here, I will discuss innovation through the lens of military forces and war paradigms to understand how militaries are mostly inhibitive of innovation especially in new and emerging warfighting domains.2. Innovation in emerging operating domainsInroughly a century, humans unlocked how to reach the skies in powered flight, and then extended thatreach to the stars, landing humans on the moonand flinging unmanned systemsto beyondthe edge of our solar system.We are boldly exploring not just the celestial space our ancestors could only look upwards at, but wehave established a virtualdomainthat is equally as infiniteyetentirely of ourown human design. Cyberspace is unique in that it must exist through a scaffolding that starts in the physical world where time and space are explicit and tangible. However, the human experience of cyberspace extends our consciousness beyond the limits of our bodies and the physical planes we exist within normally. There is no ‘space’ in cyberspace, at least not in how humans previously conceptualised the geographical certainty of the time-space continuum that is the real world. Cyberspace in terms of warfare is additionally unique in that in the physical domains (air, land, sea and space) adversaries must operate within the physically defined limits imposed by reality. Cyberspace occupies a strange hybrid status where physical laws establish certain parameters, yet the virtual world rejects other laws found in these tangible domains and permits greater cognitive and social interface with users in ways that require entirely dissimilar methods and theories, to include that of war.[2]Cyberspace if anything acts as an extension of the abstract plane of human conceptualisation that previously could only function in our imaginations, where we might dream of fantastic, impossible things that break the laws of physics, or otherwise could never occur chemically, biologically or in any possible material form. Cyberspace provides a new plane of human experience that exists atop the physical reality that humans themselves exist within. Cyberspace is also distinct in that it extends into realms where humans intentionally can explore ideas and conduct activities that are impossible in the real world yet produce direct effects that extend back into that same reality. We can innovatein extraordinary wayswithin virtual realities of our own design, including how war itselfis understood across a multi-domain conflictwhere human belief systems and meaning manifest in physicaland virtual contexts.Humanshistorically have a tight relationship between creationand destruction, and how new ways of thinkingand problem-solvingoften are driven byor are adapted byhow our species seeks to resolve conflict.War andthe progress of civilisation aredeeply intertwined, whether we like it or not. Innovationproduced human achievements in unlocking the airdomain, andlater the spacedomain, followed quickly by the cyberdomain. These advancements present opportunities for the entire species, which included the extension of war into these new areas. Previously, these areas were unreachable, unrealised, or otherwise impossible and irrelevant to military strategists and tactical practitioners.However, the western fixation on artificially separating theory and practice has also contributed to a discrepancy between innovation and adaptation, in that modern militaries tend toseek pragmatic, evolutionary, predictable change.Our preferencefor using one social paradigm in western, industrialised society becomesan advantage in some respects, and a straitjacketin other ways (Paparone, 2013, pp. 28–41; Weaver & Gioia, 1994). This confusion over adaptation and innovation breeds a particular contempt in military theorists over how change ought to occur in war paradigms and military organisations. This confusion also leads to a scorn over how innovationrequires fantastical, iterative patterns of ideation, experimentationand
10DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updateincreased risksothat, as it is unfolding, innovators are improvising and reflecting without clear goals orrigidplans.3. Innovation versus adaptationStarting with innovation and adaptation, the terms are not interchangeable despite this occurring frequently in military debate, doctrine and practice. Adaptation is when the system is changed either by a competitor or systemically, such as if a lake experienced a landslide that introduced significant different chemical changes into the water. The ecosystem of that lake would then experience various species declining, and others improving, depending on how the changes in the water impacted the flora and fauna. Suppose one species of fish had a genetic latent ability to thrive in water that was more acidic, while a competitor did not. The change in the water would cause one species to flourish and the other to perish, and the predatory species would need to adapt to the changes or also perish.Adaptation is a reactive behaviour when confronted with a systemic change that causes pain or damage. In the 1930s, the economic depressionand drought drove farmers in the American and Canadian prairies to use inappropriate land for farming and poor topsoil management. The natural and manmade causes combined and created a devastating effect of severe dust storms that cascaded in scope, destroying the ecology and agriculture. Settlers and farmers adapted to poor economic and weather conditions in their environment by increasing the deep ploughing of farmland, displacing the natural deep-rooted prairie grasses that had retained soil and moisture during drought and high winds before human settlers arrived. In this example, the settlers experienced a change in their ecosystem and adapted poorly by reinforcing behaviours thatcaused further acceleration of the very changes that were forcing them to adapt. Adaptationis reactionary, and poor adaptation carries the risk of further damageand destruction, particularly if adaptive behaviours or actions further remove the adaptor from competing in the new, changed system. Onthe concept of disruption, the western, modern war paradigm associates one opponent being disruptedor confused(and vulnerable) based on the transformative actions of an innovator.The innovator does disrupt an opponentifthe act of innovation creates system-wide transformation, as designer and complexity theorist Russell Ackoff explains (Ackoff, 1981).Ackoff (1981) offered that humans approach reality and their notion of a problem in four specific ways. Problems are within our heads: reality does not have problems, but humans encountering an emerging reality that conflicts with their goals or expectations do. Militaries prefer Ackoff’s first example of ‘problem-solution’ where if reality provides a best option within a simplistic or closed system, we can validate this analytically, develop universal principles and best practices, and pair future problems with our historical and optimised list of known solutions. We also, when encountering complicated systems that reject singular ‘best solution’ logic, shift to ‘problem resolution’ where we skilfully determine a ‘good enough’ option to accomplish goals. Ackoff also offered the familiar ‘problem absolution’ where we ignore a problem and hope it fades away. His last construct is most valuable here in discussing systemic disruption and innovation versus adaptation. Ackoff stated that designers seek to perform ‘problem dissolution’, whereby ushering in an innovative activity that dynamically transforms the entire system, what we thought was a problem earlier is ‘dissolved’ through the arrival of a new system that we have advantages over our opponents in, at least initially. Opponents must adapt, while experiencing the effects of being disrupted or damaged in this system transformation, and the new system almost always is more dynamic than the previous one. Both the innovator and the adaptor must deal with a new system and engage with new, emergent properties and conditions that offer novel, unanticipated opportunities, and risks (Zweibelson, 2023b). Here, when the innovator is successful, all other stakeholders become vulnerable adaptors, experiencing disruption until they realise the new system conditionsand respond productively.Transformative, disruptive ideas are a double-edged sword in military contexts. The innovator is at great risk when choosing to shift away from ‘problem-solution’ or ‘problem-resolution’ to ‘problem-dissolution’ in that when one follows institutionally sanctioned modes of behaviour, if this results in failure, the actor can defend themselves by stating ‘the enemy gets a vote’. Essentially, when we follow the rules set by our organisations on how to go about engaging in organised violence and conflict, whether through doctrine, best practices, military education and/or institutionalised norms, failure is rationalised either as gross error by the user or the broader acknowledgement that no process is foolproof for application in all dynamic contexts. Our institution either fires or retrains the operator if it is assumed the failure was unique and specific to some decision-making defect, or the organisation attempts once more while still adherent to all existing practices and doctrinally approved methods. This is where problem-solution or problem-resolution (and sometimes, problem-absolution) occurs cyclically, and little to no innovation is possible except activities that otherwise are indistinguishable from accepted and normalised patterns of behaviour. When the operator dares to venture outside the boundaries of the institutionalised paradigm, they can design through experiment and prototype, often experiencing a much higher degree of failure due to how design differs from planning (Zweibelson, 2023c, pp. 12–62) Innovation is far riskier than conforming through institutionalised and thus non-innovative forms of decision-making in war. Innovators face steep odds of discovering something both novel and useful, and the institution is predisposed to rejecting anything innovative due to how emergence prevents anything novel from matching with historical and legacy frameworks on what is useful or not. When innovation does happen, those competitors experiencing the system transformation now must adapt under duress and some form of disruption. Both institutions will move quickly to institutionalise the novel and move designed innovation into established planning processes. This is a perpetual phenomenon in war, yet our institutions are vastly more comfortable with adaptation and assimilation of innovative activities versus the difficult and uncomfortable investment in curating innovative activities.
11DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateInnovation could be conceptualised as the logical paradox of adaptation in that innovative actions are implemented to create systemic change, whether wittingly or unwittingly.Unwitting innovation can be found inexamples such as how several engineers fromthe industrial company 3Mwere asked to create an airplane ‘super glue’, andin experimentation stumbled uponthe recipe for a somewhat sticky, perpetually adhesive gluethat couldbe used toattach paper to objects in an enduring fashion(History Timeline: Post-It® Notes, 2023). The management for 3M toldthe engineers to stop wasting time with the failed glue, butseveral engineers continuedto experiment on their own as they felt the glue somehow was useful in a yet-to-be-imagined way. Thiseventually led to the Post-it Note®, and 40 years later more than 50 billion Post-it Notes® are produced each year (Glass & Hume, 2013). The original glue formula was a failure in that it was not the airplane superglue original goal. Unwittingly, the innovators knew they had an interesting glue, but they did not yet know what purpose it mightserve. Spencer Silver, the scientist innovating with the glue, called it ‘the solution in search of a problem’, (Warner, 2015) and he would not realise what the problem was until Art Fry, another 3M scientist, realised the sticky glue on paper could serve as unmoving bookmarks in his church hymns during choir practice. The innovators went from unwitting to witting, andfrom the fantastic and unrealised, or unrecognised by top management wanting super glues, to an entirely new product that would unlock billions in new revenue.Innovationbegins not in the known, pragmaticorthe orthodox. In other words, military doctrineis theabsolute last place to discover anything remotely innovative, as the military activityof renderingnew knowledge into set practices and methodologiesonly occurs well after any innovation disrupts the systemand challenges existing doctrine as vulnerable or obsolete. Innovation occursin the peripheryof the institution,oozing through our own cognitive straitjacket through the seams. Certainly, adaptation finds its primary breeding ground in such contexts where an organisation experiences surprise, confusion or pain due to tomorrow not being as yesterday suggested. Innovative actsare cognitive leapsin conceptualising the fantastic sothat opportunities are grasped in novel, perhaps unimaginedor ignored ways.This is where the term ‘eureka moment’ occurs, and the innovator refines an ideation in a waythat all others do not possess. Innovationchanges the system, in that a successful act of innovation creates systemic transformationwherethose other competitorsnow must operate in the emergent systemthat the innovationushered into reality.Innovators cause systemic change, and those impacted by that change must adapt in a reactive, secondary and often costly fashion. Innovation cannot be predicted, nor can it be programmed into set patterns of behaviour or indoctrinated. Unlike adaptation, where the institution often understands and encourages the changes as they are implemented, innovationisconducted outside the mainstream.Innovation is frequently conducted in such a way that the institutional defenders resist innovation until such time as the innovation is over, and the system is clearly transforming so that ignoring the innovation will only cause further damage and disruption. There are myriadmilitary examplesof innovation, fromthe rise of air power, the development of the tank,the creation of the aircraftcarrier, or the restoration of mounted animals for reconnaissance and special operations in Afghanistanafter the September 11, 2001 attacks.[3] In many historical examples (if not all), the institution resisted innovation quite fiercely.Additionally, one must not associate innovation exclusively with technological superiority, supposedly sophisticated societies, or formalised education and professionalisation in war. James Mrazek argues throughout his publications on military creativity that ‘good fighters have not always been the most extensively trained, but rather the most ingenious in intellectual quality’ (Mrazek, 1968, p. 141). Mrazek goes on to quote Chinese revolutionary Lin Biao[4] who, in reflecting on the Russian and subsequent Chinese civil wars, observed that amateurs ‘never trained at any military school [yet] have eventually defeated professional graduates from military academies’ (Mrazek, 1968, p. 141). This pattern extends from Lenin’s communist revolution in the early 20th century into the 21st century, with the Taliban in 2021 rapidly claiming Kabul and demonstrating once more that innovation is available to everyone in war to wage effectively, particularly where low-technology or unorthodox militaries defeat highly professionalised, well-resourced ones.[5]4. The innovation paradox: military forces inhibit innovationWhy do military forces fight innovation despite paradoxically proclaiming that innovation is a priority requirement? Much of this has to do with the modern war paradigm, and how militaries prioritise a pragmatic, incremental, stable process of assimilating new ideas only as long as they do not disrupt or challenge core beliefs and values. An example of this can be found in one of the selected essays in the National Defense University’s Toward a Theory of Spacepower 2011 publication. Sheldon and Gray (2011) posit:A theory of spacepower must also guard against flights of fancy and overactive imaginations that make theory useless as a guide to practice … Spacepower is not science fiction, and its intellectual guardians, the theorists … must take care to protect it from the ignorance of some and the worst excesses of others. (pp. 14–15)The authors go on to argue that military strategy overall is ‘nothing if not pragmatic’ and that ‘strategic theory is a theory for action’, (Sheldon & Gray, 2011, p. 15) citing earlier similar pragmatism from renowned strategist Bernard Brodie (Brodie, 1973, p. 452; Sheldon & Gray, 2011, p. 15). Mrazek (1968, pp. 2–5, 7–11) warns of this systemic belief that in war, creativity is ignored and warfare is viewed as an aesthetic exercise dependent upon analytical thinking, established rules and norms, and some institutionalised mindset of ‘this is the right and only way to do such things’ that chokes out divergent thinking.Sheldon and Gray are hardly alone in championing this pragmatic, institutionally self-serving form of demanding all novelty and change ought to be objectively tested, proven and integrated into the legacy framework before any real risks are taken in battle. Naval War College Professor Milan Vego, in authoring his extensive time on Joint Operational Warfare, argues that one should:avoid making assertions without any proof or on slim empirical evidence, as is so often the case with the proponents of the so-called new theories of war or new ways of warfare. These theories are largely based on new, and in many cases, unproven technologies (Vego, 2009).Vego goes on to advocate that modern military theories, models and ideas are based upon 3,500 years of history and experience, and thus cannot be dismissed or modified without serious due cause. Yet Vego makes claims that existing war theories are ‘well-documented and proven’ (Vego, 2009, p. I-3) despite such arguments being grounded not on any scientific frameworks, rather in the ideological and socially constructed stances that Berger and Luckmann (1966) demonstrate as a confusion of the subjective with an illusion of objective concreteness. Berger and Luckmann explain that:[S]ocial order is a human product, or, more precisely, an ongoing human production. It is produced by man in the course of his ongoing externalization. Social order is not biologically given or derived from any biological data in its empirical manifestations … Social order is not part of the ‘nature of things’, and it cannot be derived from the ‘laws of nature’. Social order exists only as a product of human activity [emphasis in original] (p. 52).War is both a tangible, physical manifestation of organised violence waged by our species against one another, but simultaneously a socially constructed process that only humans understand and engage in. Animals do not wage war. Yet most of modern society extend a particular belief system concerning what war is, and how warfare ought to be understood and consequently waged properly. The belief system is entirely socially constructed and granted some objective concreteness that then provides a firm foundation for ‘natural laws’ and illusions of ‘proven, scientific rationalisation’ for principles and rules concerning war. Berger and Luckmann (1966) posit:An institutional world, then, is experienced as an objective reality. It has a history that antedates the individual’s birth and is not accessible to his biographical recollection. It was there before he was born, and will be there after his death (p. 60).
12DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateThis is where most military theorists and strategists confuse empirical verification of one’s socially constructed reality with that of any actual scientific methods. War is dynamic, complex, and emergent in that each activity of organised violence is a ‘one time only’ non-repeatable event. We simply cannot claim to test or prove anything except some qualitative and largely abstract constructs that are highly contextual and often temporary. What this means for modern militaries is that we must confront the illusion that innovation should be processed so that our contemporary war beliefs are unchallenged because our theories, models and doctrines are objectively proven in some imagined manner.Thinking creatively and attempting innovation will not necessarily coincide with previously established beliefs, theories, models or historical patterns. Indeed, Mrazek cites creativity researchers Parloff and Handlon that posit ‘creativity may require the temporary suspension of logic’ (Mrazek, 1968, p. 142). Berger and Luckmann (1966) provide a deeper explanation of this tension in modern military theorists and practitioners assuming that the objective world extends right into their socially constructed beliefs about warfare and war itself. They provide the example of hunting that can be extended into organised violence:As the institution of hunting is crystallized and persists in time, the same body of knowledge serves as an objective (and, incidentally, empirically verifiable) description of it. A whole segment of the social world is objectified by this knowledge. There will be an objective ‘science’ of hunting, corresponding to the objective reality of the hunting economy. The point need not be belaboured that here ‘empirical verification’ and ‘science’ are not understood in the sense of modern scientific canons, but rather in the sense of knowledge that may be borne out in experience and that can subsequently become systematically organized as a body of knowledge (pp. 66–67).5. ConclusionWe go aboutour lives assumingmany things arefar more objectiveor concretethan they are, including war.This leads to military theoristsdemandingthat new ideas subscribe to old frameworksor be tested scientificallysothat they can then be shuffledintothe existing stacks of ‘proven’ ideasand models.Thismentality directly inhibits innovationin war because any creative thinker that dares suggest a new idea without clear evidence, that also must reinforce the larger war paradigm, is rejected. Old thinking retainsan automatic ‘home court advantage’. Unfamiliaror emerging war contexts that create unanticipated impacts on oursocially construct reality, such as cyberspace, cislunar space, artificial intelligence, quantumor other exotic technology. The home court advantage means convergent thinking is promoted by institutional self-relevance at the expense of transformative, disruptive ideasstill under development.Essentially, we do notyet understand the space domain or how it may change war as we know it, but any innovative thinking needs to remain weddedto the realist frames currently endorsedby the military institution.This is when one puts the institutional cartahead of the emerging, ill-defined space warfare horse.The next (third) paper in this four-part series will talk about a shift in military culture that values imagin
13DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateProliferation ImpactProliferation causes nuke war. Stephen J. Cimbala andAdam B. Lowther 23, Cimbala is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State University and Lowther is Director of Strategic Deterrence Programs at the National Strategic Research Institute at the University of Nebraska, 2023, “Nuclear Danger in Asia: Arms Races or Stability?” in Politics Between Nations, Springer, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-24896-2ConclusionsThe spread of nuclear weaponsin Asia posestwo kinds of threatstointernational peace and security.The first isthat of a deliberate decisiontaken fornuclear first strike, either inmistaken fear of imminent attack, or asa preventive warto disable a risingand presumably threatening opponent. The secondnuclear danger in Asia isthat of inadvertent escalationgrowing out ofa conventional war, andrelated to this, the possibility of accidentalor inadvertent useof nuclear forces due tomilitary usurpation of civil authority or technical malfunction.20 However, there is no reliable metric for relating the numbers of nuclear weapons states to the probability of nuclear first use. States’ internal decision-making processes will drive these decisions, for better or worse. Although the international system imposes certain constraints on the behaviors of current and aspiring nuclear weapons states, the system is also the derivative of their respective national priorities and threat perceptions.In addition, the possibility of regional arms races In Asia and elsewhere increases the significance of the nuclear paradox in American defense planning. From one perspective, the US nuclear modernization is required, not only to deter nuclear attack or blackmail against the USA, but also to prevent coercion or war against its regional non-nuclear allies. Withdrawal of the American nuclear umbrella and the extended deterrence provided by superior US nuclear forces could increase the risk of war in strategic Asia. On the other hand, the USA must also pursue with Russia (and perhaps others) nuclear arms limitation and reduction agreements: otherwise, the spread of nuclear weapons to new state and possibly non-state actors will be encouraged.Can either a balance of power model or a balance of terror model reliably predict the amount of arms race or crisis stability in Asia? It is unlikelythat either models of power balancing or risk assessment can do much more than to help define contexts for decisions and outcomes. Even iffewer than eight statesin Asia become nuclearweapons states,the problems of crisis managementand escalation control, growing out of clashesbetween conventionalarmed forces, become harder to manage. As well, nuclear weaponshave psychological effectson their owners, and not always predictable ones. Some statescould become more sober and realistic once they have acquired nuclear arsenals. Others might swagger and reachmore quickly for coercive diplomacyand brinkmanship.
14DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateAllies Good/Extended Deterrence GoodGlobal nuke war. Jesse C. Johnson 19, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of Peace Studies at the University of Kentucky; and Stephen Joiner, graduate student at the University of Kentucky in the area ofInternational Relations and Comparative Politics, 3/7/19, “Power changes, alliance credibility, and extended deterrence,” Conflict Management and Peace Science, doi:10.1177/0738894218824735World leadersoften rely on military alliancesto facilitate extended deterrence and preserve peace. However,alliances do not always deter and states with allies committed to their defense find themselves challenged militarily. When alliances failto deter, peace is disrupted and a heightened probability ofcostly warfare among multiple states emerges. Moreover, the advent of nuclear weaponsmakesthe failure of extended deterrence particularly concerning. Our study seeks to explain why some alliances are better able to deter these potentially deadly disputes.To explain why some alliances are more effective at deterrence than others, we focus on variation in the credibility of alliances. In order for an alliance to detera potential challenger, thepotential challenger must believethat the alliance is likely to be honoredand that it will face a multilateral effort in the event of war. Therefore, one reason why some alliances may fail is that they are not viewed as credible by potential challengers. This explanation implies that there is something observable to potential challengers that allows them to differentiate between alliances that will be honored and ones that will be violated.We draw on insights from research on alliance reliability to identify a factor that is observable to potential challengers and is associated with higher rates of alliance violation. Previous research finds that significant changes in power by alliance members since the time of alliance formation has the biggest effect on whether a member will violate the alliance (Leeds, 2003a). We argue that adversaries can observe these changes in power which will cause them to question the reliability of the alliance. As a result, an alliance that experiences changesin power will be less likely to deterthe initiation of interstate disputes than alliances that have not experienced these changes. An appealing feature of this explanation is that it does not imply that states pay costs to form alliances that are not credible and will fail to deter. According to this perspective, states form alliances that are credible but over time the members’ power changes, the alliance becomes less credible, and other states become more willing to challenge them.Thishypothesis is tested withan empirical analysisofmilitarized dispute initiationagainst states with allies committed to defend them. To construct the analysis we identify the power of each ally, compare their power with when theyentered into the alliance, and then generate a variety of measures that capture whether there was a significant power change since alliance formation. Allof the measures provideconsistent support for our hypothesis. Potential challengers are more likely to initiate militarized interstate disputes against states with allies that have experienced significant changes in power since alliance formation thanstates with allies that have not experienced significant power changes since alliance formation. The result even holds for asymmetric alliances but only in instances of significant power decreases by the dominant power.Our analysis contributes to the study of extended general deterrence by moving research beyond the initial question of whether alliances deter and towards an understanding of when alliances deter. Alliances sometimes succeed at deterrence and sometimes fail. Identifying factors that undermine the deterrence effect of alliances can alert policymakers of potentially faulty extended deterrence relationships. Additionally, it provides scholars with a better understanding of the process that results in alliance commitments being invoked by war. Influential models of alliances and conflict suggest that challengers’ incentives to target unreliable alliances drive this process but there is little evidence to suggest that this occurs (Smith, 1995, 1996, 1998). Our findings provide empirical supportfor the notionthat challengers target states with less reliable partnersand identify a key factor they use to discern the reliability of commitments. We explore potential implications of this for research on alliance reliability in the conclusion of the paper.The study proceeds as follows. In the next section, we explain the logic by which military alliances deter interstate disputes focusing on the importance of credibility. This discussion leads to the hypothesis previewed above. In the third section, we describe the research design we use to test the hypothesis. When constructing the research design we face a notable challenge in measuring our key independent variable and we
15DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatediscuss our solution in this third section. In the fourth section, we present the results of the empirical analysis and develop several robustness tests. The final section is used to draw out the implications of our findings and suggest directions for future research.Alliance credibility and extended deterrenceMilitary alliances are a foreign policy tool that can help leaders protect their state and other states from being the target of aggression. While alliances vary in the actions they require of member states, a subset of alliances with defensive obligations require members to assistone another with military force in the event of attackon the sovereignty or territorial integrity of a member. By entering into alliance agreements with defensive commitments, states are able to improve their chances of victory against any challenging state that attempts to impose its demands through the use of force. As a result, the outside option of war becomes less attractive for any potential challengers(e.g. Fearon, 1995; Powell, 2002). This basic logic suggests that defensepacts should have a deterrence effect.A large body of empirical research evaluates the extended general deterrence effect of defensive alliances and finds that members of defense pacts are less likely to be the target of militarized disputes(e.g. Johnson and Leeds, 2011; Leeds, 2003b; Wright and Rider, 2014).1 However, alliances do not always deter states from initiating disputes. Evidence only suggests that having defensive allies makes it less likely that states will be the target of disputes. Moreover, recent research questions whether defense pacts, on average, deter disputes (Kenwick et al., 2015). Our study seeks to move research beyond its focus on whetherdefense pacts deter and toward an understanding of whenalliances will deter. Deterrence theory suggests two general reasons for why alliances may fail to deter.In some instances an alliance may fail to deter because it was not strong enough. Whether a potential challenger is deterred by an alliance depends on the alliance having enough military strength to sufficiently reduce the challenger’s chances of winning in a potential war. Thus, an alliance may fail to deter if the challenger believed that its probability of success against the alliance was high enough to warrant making a demand. More specifically, deterrence will fail when the challenger’s expected outcome of fighting the target and its allies is better than the status quo. This is likely to be a rare occurrence, however, because states will be reluctant to pay the costs of forming and designing alliances that are not strong enough to deter their challengers.2Theother keycomponentfor an alliance’s deterrence potential, and the focus of our research, isits credibility– that is, whetherpotential challengers believethe members will fulfilltheir commitmentsif called upon. The success of any alliance hinges on its credibility. If an alliance member were to be attacked and its partner(s) did not provide military assistance, the member would not have a higher probability of success. Moreover, if the member planned on assistance from its partner(s), it may even have a lower probability of success. As a result, an alliance that has lostits credibility will not decreasethe attractiveness of warfor potential challengers and will fail to deter them.Thus, in many cases of failed deterrence, the alliance may have been strong enoughto deterthe challenger butit may not have been perceivedto be credible. The challenger may have concludedthat if they attempted to change the status quo through the use of force, the target’s allies would not honor their alliance commitmentand support the target militarily. In this case, deterrence did not fail owing to the alliance members being unable to make war less attractive to the challenger through a multilateral effort but because the challenger did not believe that the members were willing to honor the alliance commitment and fight the challenger together.
16DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateClimate Solvency Answers
17DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateAchieving 1.5 C targets would require exponentially more drastic action than the aff – if they hit the tipping point even temporarily the effects of climate change become irreversible based on the most updated and comprehensive science Boehm and Schumer 23 –Sophie Boehm is a Senior Research Associate for WRI's Climate Program, where she leads research on food and agriculture systems, as well as terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems, for Systems Change Lab. Her analysis focuses on setting targets across these systems to help limit warming to 1.5°C, halt biodiversity loss and secure a more just, equitable future for all, as well as on assessing global progress made toward these benchmarks. Clea Schumer is an Associate with WRI’s Climate Program, where she supports the research, analysis, and outreach efforts of WRI projects focused on raising national ambition in accordance with the Paris Agreement. Specifically, Clea’s work helps to improve understanding of national and global ambition for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and uses data and analysis to inform and influence a diverse set of international climate policy stakeholders contributing to nationally determined contributions (NDCs), long-term strategies, and net-zero targets. Clea also supports the Systems Change Lab’s research on transformational change requiredto achieve net-zero emissions, 3-20-2023, "10 Big Findings from the 2023 IPCC Report on Climate Change", World Resources Institute, https://www.wri.org/insights/2023-ipcc-ar6-synthesis-report-climate-change-findings-8000-page report by nearly 800 scientists-Already at 1.1 degrees C and will hit 1.5 degrees by 2050-Hitting 1.5 c temporarily is irreversible -It is stoppable if: 2025 peak emissions globally, global emissions cut by half in 2030, $127 billion in adaption by 2030, systematic transformation that leads to global net-zero in all sectors by 2050 and even then we still need CCSMarch 20 marked the release of the final installment of theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report(AR6), an eight-year long undertaking from the world’s most authoritative scientific body on climate change. Drawing on the findings of 234 scientists on the physical science of climate change, 270 scientists on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to climate change, and278 scientists on climate change mitigation, this IPCC synthesis report providesthe most comprehensive, best available scientific assessment of climate change.It also makes for grim reading. Across nearly 8,000 pages, the AR6 details the devastating consequences of rising greenhouse gas (GHG)emissions around the world — the destruction of homes, the loss of livelihoods and the fragmentation of communities, for example — as well as the increasingly dangerous and irreversible risks should we failto change course. But the IPCC also offers hope, highlighting pathways to avoid these intensifying risks. It identifies readily available, and in some cases, highly cost-effective actions that can be undertaken now to reduce GHG emissions, scale up carbon removal and build resilience. While the window to address the climate crisis is rapidly closing, the IPCC affirms that we can still secure a safe, livable future. Here are 10 key findings you need to know: 1.Human-induced global warming of 1.1 degrees C has spurredchangesto the Earth’s climate that are unprecedentedinrecent human history. Already, with 1.1 degrees C (2 degrees F) of global temperaturerise, changes to the climate system that are unparalleled over centuries to millennia are now occurring in every region of the world, from rising sea levels to more extreme weather events to rapidly disappearing sea ice. Additional warming will increase the magnitude of these changes. Every 0.5 degree C (0.9 degrees F) of global temperature rise, for example, will cause clearly discernible increases in the frequency and severity of heat extremes, heavy rainfall events and regional droughts. Similarly, heatwavesthat, on average, arose once every 10 years in a climate with little human influence will likely occur 4.1 times more frequently with 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) of
18DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatewarming, 5.6 times with 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) and 9.4 times with 4 degrees C (7.2 degrees F) — and the intensity of these heatwaves will also increase by 1.9 degrees C (3.4 degrees F), 2.6 degrees C (4.7 degrees F) and 5.1 degrees C (9.2 degrees F) respectively. Rising global temperatures also heighten the probability of reaching dangerous tipping points in the climate system that, once crossed, can trigger self-amplifying feedbacks that further increase global warming, such as thawing permafrost or massive forest dieback. Setting such reinforcing feedbacks in motion can also lead to other substantial, abrupt and irreversible changes to theclimate system. Should warming reach between 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) and 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F), for example, the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets could melt almost completely and irreversibly over many thousands of years, causing sea levels to rise by several meters. 2. Climate impactson people and ecosystems are more widespreadand severe than expected, and future riskswill escalaterapidlywith every fraction of a degree of warming.Described as an “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership” by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, one of AR6’s most alarming conclusions is that adverse climate impacts are already morefar-reaching and extreme than anticipated. About half of the global population currently contends with severe water scarcity for at least one month per year, while higher temperatures are enabling the spread of vector-borne diseases, such as malaria, West Nile virus and Lyme disease. Climate change has also slowed improvements in agricultural productivity in middle and low latitudes, with crop productivity growth shrinking by a third in Africa since 1961. And since 2008, extreme floods and storms have forced over 20 million people from their homes every year. Every fraction of a degree of warming will intensify these threats, and even limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degree C is not safe for all. At this level of warming, for example, 950 million people across the world’s drylands will experience water stress, heat stress and desertification, while the share of the global population exposed to flooding will rise by 24%. Similarly, overshooting 1.5 degrees C(2.7 degrees F), even temporarily, will lead tomuch more severe, oftentimes irreversible impacts, from local species extinctions to the complete drowning of salt marshes to loss of human lives from increased heat stress. Limiting the magnitude and duration of overshooting 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F), then, will prove critical in ensuring a safe, livable future, as will holding warming to as close to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) or below as possible. Even if this temperature limit is exceeded by the end of the century, the imperative to rapidly curb GHG emissions to avoid higher levels of warming and associated impacts remains unchanged. 3. Adaptation measures can effectively build resilience, but more finance is needed to scale solutions. Climate policies in at least 170 countries now consider adaptation, but in many nations, these efforts have yet to progress from planning to implementation. Measures to build resilience are still largely small-scale, reactive and incremental, with most focusing on immediate impacts or near-term risks. This disparity between today’s levels of adaptation and those required persists in large part due to limited finance. According to the IPCC, developing countries alone willneed $127 billion per year by 2030and $295 billion per year by 2050 to adapt to climate change. But fundsfor adaptation reachedjust $23 billion to $46 billionfrom 2017 to 2018, accountingforonly 4%to 8% oftracked climate finance. The good news is that the IPCC finds that, with sufficient support, proven and readily available adaptation solutions can build resilience to climate risks and, in many cases, simultaneously deliver broader sustainable development benefits. Ecosystem-based adaptation, for example, can help communities adapt to impacts that are already devastating their lives and livelihoods, while also safeguarding biodiversity, improving health outcomes, bolstering food security, delivering economic benefits and enhancing carbon sequestration. Many ecosystem-based adaptation measures — including the protection, restoration and sustainable management of ecosystems, as well as more sustainable agricultural practices like integrating trees into farmlands and increasing crop diversity — can be implemented at relatively low costs today. Meaningful collaboration with Indigenous Peoples and local communities is critical to the success of this approach, as is ensuring that ecosystem-based adaptation strategies are designed to account for how future global temperature rise will impact ecosystems. 4. Someclimate impactsare already so severe they cannot be adaptedto, leading to losses and damages. Around the world, highly vulnerable people and ecosystems are already struggling to adapt to climate change impacts. For some, these limits are “soft” — effective adaptation measures exist, but economic, political and social obstacles constrain implementation, such as lack of technical support or inadequate funding that does not reach the communities where it’s needed most. But in other regions, people and ecosystems already face or are fast approaching “hard” limits to adaptation, where climate impacts from 1.1 degrees C (2 degrees F) of global warming are becoming so frequent and severe that no existing adaptation strategies can fully avoid lossesand damages. Coastal communities in the tropics, for example, have seen entire coral reef systems that oncesupported their livelihoods and food security experience widespread mortality, while rising sea levels have forced other low-lying neighborhoods to move to higher ground and abandon cultural sites. Whether grappling with soft or hard limits to adaptation, the result for vulnerable communities is oftentimes irreversible and devastating. Such losses and damages will only escalate as the world warms. Beyond 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) of global temperature rise, for example, regions reliant on snow and glacial melt will likely experience water shortages to which they cannot adapt. At 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), the risk of concurrent maize production failures across important growing regions will rise dramatically. And above 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F), dangerously high summertime heat will threaten the health of communities in parts of southern Europe. Urgent action is needed to avert, minimize and address these losses and damages. At COP27, countries took a critical step forward by agreeing to establish funding arrangements for loss and damage, including a dedicated fund. While this represents a historic breakthrough in the climate negotiations, countriesmust now figure out the details of what these funding arrangements, as well as the new fund, will look like in practice — and it’s these details that will ultimately determine the adequacy, accessibility, additionality and predictability of these financial flows to those experiencing loss and damage. 5. Global GHG emissions peak before 2025 in 1.5 degrees C-aligned pathways. The IPCC finds that there is a more than 50% chance that global temperature rise willreach or surpass 1.5 degrees C(2.7 degrees F) between 2021 and 2040across studied scenarios, and under a high-emissions pathway, specifically, the world may hit this threshold even sooner — between 2018 and 2037. Global temperature rise in such a carbon-intensive
19DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatescenario could also increase to 3.3 degrees C to 5.7 degrees C (5.9 degrees F to 10.3 degrees F) by 2100. To put this projected amount of warming into perspective, the last time global temperatures exceeded 2.5 degrees C (4.5 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels was more than 3 million years ago. Changingcoursetolimit global warming to 1.5 degrees C(2.7 degrees F) — with no or limited overshoot— willinstead requiredeep GHG emissions reductions in the near-term. In modelled pathways that limit global warming to this goal, GHG emissions peak immediately and before 2025 at the latest. They then drop rapidly, declining 43% by 2030 and 60% by 2035, relative to 2019 levels. While there are some bright spots — the annual growth rate of GHG emissions slowed from an average of 2.1% per year between 2000 and 2009 to 1.3% per year between 2010 and 2019, for example — global progress in mitigating climate change remains woefully off track. GHG emissions have climbed steadily over the past decade, reaching 59 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) in 2019 — approximately 12% higher than in 2010 and 54% greater than in 1990. Even if countries achieved their climate pledges(also known as nationally determined contributions or NDCs), WRI research finds thatthey would reduceGHG emissions byjust 7%from 2019 levels by 2030,in contrast tothe 43% associated with limitingtemperature rise to 1.5 degreesC(2.7 degrees F).And while handful of countries have submitted new or enhanced NDCs since the IPCC’s cut-off date, more recent analysis that takes these submissions into account finds that these commitments collectively still fall short of closing this emissions gap. 6. The world must rapidly shift away from burning fossil fuels — the number one cause of the climate crisis. In pathways limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) with no or limited overshoot just a net 510 GtCO2 can be emitted before carbon dioxide emissions reach net zero in the early 2050s. Yet future carbon dioxide emissions from existing and planned fossil fuel infrastructure alone could surpass that limit by 340 GtCO2, reaching 850 GtCO2. A mix of strategies can help avoid locking in these emissions, including retiring existing fossil fuel infrastructure, canceling new projects, retrofitting fossil-fueled power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies and scaling up renewable energy sources like solar and wind (which are now cheaper than fossil fuels in many regions). In pathways that limit warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) — with no or limited overshoot — for example, global use of coal falls by 95% by 2050, oil declines by about 60% and gas by about 45%. These figures assume significant use of abatement technologies like CCS, and without them, these same pathways show much steeper declines by mid-century. Global use of coal without CCS, for example, is virtually phased out by 2050. Although coal-fired power plants are starting to be retired across Europe and the United States, some multilateral development banks continue to invest in new coal capacity. Failure to change course risks stranding assets worth trillions of dollars. 7. Wealso needurgent, systemwide transformations tosecure a net-zero, climate-resilient future.While fossil fuels are the number one source of GHG emissions, deep emission cuts are necessary across all of societyto combat the climate crisis. Power generation, buildings, industry, and transport are responsible for close to 80%of global emissionswhile agriculture, forestry and other land uses account for the remainder. Take the transport system, for instance. Drastically cutting emissions will require urban planning that minimizes the need for travel, as well as the build-out of shared, public and nonmotorized transport, such as rapid transit and bicycling in cities. Such a transformation will also entail increasing the supply of electric passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles and buses, coupled with wide-scale installation of rapid-charging infrastructure, investments in zero-carbon fuels for shipping and aviation and more. Policy measures that make these changes less disruptive can help accelerate needed transitions, such as subsidizingzero-carbon technologies and taxing high-emissions technologies like fossil-fueled cars. Infrastructure design — like reallocating street space for sidewalks or bike lanes — can help people transition to lower-emissions lifestyles. It is important to note there are many co-benefits that accompany these transformations, too. Minimizing the number of passenger vehicles on the road, in this example, reduces harmful local air pollution and cuts traffic-related crashes and deaths. Transformative adaptation measures, too, are critical for securing a more prosperous future. The IPCC emphasizes the importance of ensuring that adaptation measures drive systemic change, cut across sectors and are distributed equitably across at-risk regions. The good news is that there are oftentimes strong synergies between transformational mitigation and adaptation. For example, in the global food system, climate-smartagriculture practices like shifting to agroforestry can improve resilience to climate impacts, while simultaneously advancing mitigation. 8. Carbon removalisnow essentialto limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C. Deep decarbonization across all systemswhile building resilience won’t be enoughto achieve global climate goals, though. The IPCC finds that all pathways that limit warmingto 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) — with no or limited overshoot — depend on some quantity of carbon removal.These approaches encompass both natural solutions, such as sequestering and storing carbon in trees and soil, as well as more nascent technologies that pull carbon dioxide directly from the air. The amount of carbon removal required depends on how quickly we reduce GHG emissions across other systems and the extent to which climate targets are overshot, with estimates ranging from between 5 GtCO2 to 16 GtCO2 per year needed by mid-century.All carbon removal approaches have merits and drawbacks. Reforestation, for instance, represents a readily available, relatively low-cost strategy that, when implemented appropriately, can deliver a wide range of benefits to communities. Yet the carbon stored within these ecosystems is also vulnerable to disturbances like wildfires, which may increase in frequency and severity with additional warming. And, while technologies like bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) may offer a more permanent solution, such approaches also risk displacing croplands, and in doing so, threatening food security. Responsibly researching, developing and deploying emerging carbon removal technologies, alongside existing natural approaches, will therefore require careful understanding of each solution’s unique benefits, costs and risks. 9. Climate finance for both mitigation and adaptation must increase dramatically this decade. The IPCC finds that public and private finance flows for fossil fuels today far surpass those directed toward
20DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updateclimate mitigation and adaptation. Thus, while annual public and private climate finance has risen by upwards of 60% since the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, much more is still required to achieve global climate change goals. For instance, climate finance will need to increase between 3 and 6 times by 2030 to achieve mitigation goals, alone. This gap is widest in developing countries, particularly those already struggling with debt, poor credit ratings and economic burdens from the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent mitigation investments, for example, need to increase by at least sixfold in Southeast Asia and developing countries in the Pacific, fivefold in Africa and fourteenfold in the Middle East by 2030 to hold warming below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). And across sectors, this shortfall is most pronounced for agriculture, forestry and other land use, where recent financial flows are 10 to 31 times below what is required to achieve the Paris Agreement’s goals. Finance for adaptation, as well as loss and damage, will also need to rise dramatically. Developing countries, for example, will need $127 billion per year by 2030 and $295 billion per year by 2050. WhileAR6 does not assess countries’ needs for finance to avert, minimize and address losses and damages, recent estimates suggest that they will be substantial in the coming decades. Currentfundsfor both fall well below estimated needs,with the highest estimatesof adaptation finance totaling under $50 billion per year.10. Climate change — as well as our collective efforts to adapt to and mitigate it — will exacerbate inequity should we fail to ensure a just transition. Households with incomes in the top 10%, including a relatively large share in developed countries, emit upwards of 45% of the world's GHGs, while those families earning in the bottom 50% account for 15% at most. Yet the effects of climate change already — and will continue to — hit poorer, historically marginalized communities the hardest. Today, between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people live in countries that are highly vulnerable to climate impacts, with global hotspots concentrated in the Arctic, Central and South America, Small Island Developing states, South Asia and much of sub-Saharan Africa. Across many countries in these regions, conflict, existing inequalities and development challenges (e.g., poverty and limited access to basic services like clean water) not only heighten sensitivity to climate hazards, but also limit communities’ capacity to adapt. Mortality from storms, floods and droughts, for instance, was 15 times higher in countries with high vulnerability to climate change than in those with very low vulnerability from 2010 to 2020. At the same time, efforts to mitigate climate change also risk disruptive changes and exacerbating inequity. Retiring coal-fired power plants, for instance, may displace workers, harm local economies and reconfigure the social fabric of communities, while inappropriately implemented efforts to halt deforestation could heighten poverty and intensify food insecurity. And certain climate policies, such as carbon taxes that raise the cost of emissions-intensive goods like gasoline, can also prove to be regressive, absent of efforts to recycle the revenues raised from these taxes back into programs that benefit low-income communities. Fortunately, the IPCC identifies a range of measures that can support a just transition and help ensure that no one is left behind as the world moves toward a net-zero-emissions, climate-resilient future. Reconfiguring social protection programs (e.g., cash transfers, public works programs and social safety nets) to include adaptation, for example, can reduce communities’ vulnerability to a wide range of future climate impacts, while strengthening justice and equity. Such programs are particularly effective when paired with efforts to expand access to infrastructure and basic services. Similarly, policymakers can design mitigation strategies to better distribute the costs and benefits of reducing GHG emissions. Governments can pair efforts to phase out coal-fired electricity generation, for instance, with subsidized job retraining programs that support workers in developing the skills needed to secure new, high-quality jobs. Or, in another example, officials can couple policy interventions dedicated to expanding access to public transit with interventions to improve access to nearby, affordable housing. Across both mitigation and adaptation measures, inclusive, transparent and participatory decision-making processes will play a central role in ensuring a just transition. More specifically, these forums can help cultivate public trust, deepen public support for transformative climate action and avoid unintended consequences. Looking Ahead The IPCC’s AR6 makes clear that risks of inaction on climate are immense and the way ahead requires change at a scale not seen before. However, this report also serves as a reminder that we have never had more information about the gravity of the climate emergency and its cascading impacts — or about what needs to be done to reduce intensifying risks. Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) is still possible, but only if we act immediately. As the IPCC makes clear, the world needs to peak GHG emissions before 2025 at the very latest, nearly halve GHG emissions by 2030 and reach net-zero CO2 emissions around mid-century, while also ensuring a just and equitable transition. We’ll also need an all-hands-on-deck approach to guarantee that communities experiencing increasingly harmful impacts of the climate crisis have the resources they need to adapt to this new world. Governments, the private sector, civil society and individuals must all step up to keep the future we desire in sight. A narrow window of opportunity is still open, but there’s not one second to waste.Current renewables are balanced, but adding too much breaks the gridPaul Bonifas and Timothy Considine2023, MS, Principal of Bonifas Consulting; PhD, SER Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Wyoming, "The Limits toGreen Energy," Cato Institute, Winter 2022-2023, https://www.cato.org/regulation/winter-2022-2023/limits-green-energy, accessed 10-22-24, HMc It is unknown whatlevel of VRE can be added to the grid before it breaksor becomes unaffordable. However, it isall but certainthat at someunknown pointthe grid will become unreliableand costs will skyrocket. And yet, more VREs are built every year.The costs to upgrade the grid are significant and unknown.Dispatchable low‐carbon energy sources like nuclear or coal/natural gas with carbon capture technology can play a significant role in maintaining grid stability because they can act as a de facto battery.
21DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateDespite these problems, the mantra does not change: Renewables are getting cheaper every year. We must transition to a renewable future.The Main Obstacles to a 100% Renewable GridSome things people consume, like food and water, do not require immediate consumption. If one were to buy too much bread, it can be stored in the pantry or frozen for later use. Electricity is fundamentally different. Electricity is only generatedfrom an energy sourcewhen it has someplace to be consumed. When a single electron enters the “grid,” it must be consumed somewhere instantaneously. In other words, when a light is switched on, a generation unit somewhere on the grid is ramping up to generate the power needed to keep the light on.Electricity consumption and generation must always be balanced. If it isn’t, thepower grid could collapse.Thankfully, the immense size and interconnectedness of electricity grids make the balance issue easier to handle; billions of electrical loads across the country are constantly being added and removed, averaging out at any given moment.Understanding this, one can appreciate the problem with VREs: they don’t have the ability to “decide” when to increase their power production. Instead, they are at the mercy of the weatherand the day and depend on the dispatchable power plants on the grid to function as a de facto battery, kicking in or going idle to keep electricity supply in balance with demand. Therefore, as VRE penetration rises, its value to the system declines.This can be broken down into three basic “balance” problems:Short‐term variability problem: Short‐term fluctuations of VREs rely on the grid for stability.Diurnal mismatch problem: Peak solargeneration during the day occursfour to six hoursbefore peak demand, and peak windgeneration typically occurs at night, when demand is low.Seasonal problem: There is significant seasonal mismatchamong wind, solar, and demand patterns.Short‐term variability problem / As previously noted, the United States had 20% VRE generation in 2021. Despite these sources’ significant variability, the power grid has not failed system‐wide. Utilities have been able to cost‐effectively integrate VREs using a combination of institutional changes such as shorter scheduling intervals, improved forecasts in system operations, and larger balancing areas to smooth resource variability. “Larger balancing areas” refers to the fact that, because the grid is so vast, inconsistencies in VRE generation are “smoothed” by ramping dispatchable energy sources up or down to keep the grid from collapsing. As more VREs are added to the grid, it becomes exponentially more difficult to use the rest of the dispatchable grid as a “smoothing” system. Therefore, as VRE penetration levels rise,their value to the grid declines.Low‐LCOE power generation, such as wind and solar, reduce wholesale electricity prices. At first glance, this may seem like a positive: electricityis cheaper thanks to renewables. The problem is that having dispatchable powerplants on the grid is of the utmost importanceto balanceor “smooth” the grid. Utilitieswill continue to build new non‐renewable capacityand extend the life of existing non‐renewable plants, and the money for these new facilities must come from somewhere. So, electricity rates will increase and Americans will pay more for power even though VREs are “cheaper” when producing.As the NREL and DOE researchers put it in the first of their two reports:Overall, the balance challenge factors that have been identified at current levels of deployment have strong implications for the ability of [photovoltaic solar] or wind to serve the load in higher RE penetrations—particularly before considering energy storage, demand response, or other enabling technologies.Diurnal mismatch problem / Diurnal mismatch, as it relates to VREs, describes the problem that solar generation peak occurs four to six hours before demand peak and wind generates more at night, when demand is low. In other words, VREs producetoo much power when not neededand not enoughwhenpower is needed.Grid experts, scientists, and studies agree that there may be a “breaking point” where the ratio of VREs to dispatchable generation is so highthat the dispatch portionof the grid can no longersufficiently smoothelectricity supplyand demand. This point has not been reached yet. Studies mostly conclude that a 50%+ VRE penetration is technically feasible while maintaining supply–demand balance and adequate operating reserves. This would be significantly expensive, albeit “well‐understood changes to grid operations, many of which have already occurred or are underway both in the United Statesand internationally, including incorporating wind and solar forecasting, new reserve products, and wide‐area cooperation,” in the words of the
22DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateNREL and DOE researchers’ first report. Once again, reading between the lines, “wide‐area cooperation” entails using dispatchable power plants on the grid to offset the variability of wind and solar.Grid collapse causes extinction---economy, military, critical infrastructureDavid Denkenberger et al 2021, Professor of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Canterbury, PhD in Civil Engineering from University of Colorado at Boulder, M.S.E. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University; Anders Sandberg, Senior Research Fellow at the Futures of Humanity Institute, PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Stockholm University; Ross John Tieman, PhD Candidate in the Fenner School of Environment and Society and M.A. in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University; and Joshua M. Pearce, Professor of Electrical and Civil Engineering at the University of Western Ontario, PhD in Materials Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, “Long-term cost-effectiveness of interventions for loss of electricity/industry compared to artificial general intelligence safety,” European Journal of Futures Research, 9-20, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8451736/, accessed 10-22-24, HMcExtreme solar storms, high-altitude electromagnetic pulses, and coordinated cyber attacks could disrupt regional/global electricity. Since electricitybasically drives industry, industrialcivilization could collapse without it. This could causeanthropological civilization(cities) to collapse, from which humanity might not recover, having long-term consequences. Previous work analyzed technical solutions to save nearly everyone despite industrial loss globally, including transition to animals powering farming and transportation. The present work estimates cost-effectiveness for the long-term future with a Monte Carlo (probabilistic) model. Model 1, partly based on a poll of Effective Altruism conference participants, finds a confidence that industrial loss preparation is more cost-effective than artificial general intelligence safety of ~ 88% and ~ 99+% for the 30 millionth dollar spent on industrial loss interventions and the margin now, respectively. Model 2 populated by one of the authors produces ~ 50% and ~ 99% confidence, respectively. These confidences are likely to be reduced by model and theory uncertainty, but the conclusion of industrial loss interventions being more cost-effective was robust to changing the most important 4–7 variables simultaneously to their pessimistic ends. Both cause areas save expected lives cheaply in the present generation and funding to preparation for industrial loss is particularly urgent.Civilization relies ona network of highly interdependentcritical infrastructure(CI) to providebasic necessities(water, food, shelter, basic goods), as well as complex items(computers, cars, spaceshuttles) and services(the internet, cloud computing, global supply chains), henceforth referred to as industry. Electricity and the electrical infrastructure that distributes it plays an important role within industry, providing a convenient means to distribute energy able to be converted into various forms of useful work. Electricityis one component of industry albeit a critical one. Industry provides the means to sustain advanced civilization structures and the citizens that inhabit them. These structures play a critical role in realizing various futures by allowing humanity to discover and utilize new resources, adapt to various environments, and resist natural stressors.Though industry is capable of resisting small stressors, a sufficiently large event can precipitate cascading failure of CIsystems, resulting ina collapse of industry. If one does nottemporally discountthe value of future people, the long-term future(thousands, millions, or even billions of years) could containan astronomically large amount of value[18]. Events capable of curtailing the potential of civilization(existential risks, such as human extinctionoran unrecoverable collapse) would prevent such futuresfrom being achieved, implying reducingthe likelihoodof such events is ofthe utmost importance[100]. Reducing the prevalence of existential risks factors; events, systemic structures, or biases which increase the likelihood of extinction but do not cause extinction by themselves is also highly valuable. Complete collapseor degraded function of industry would drastically reducehumanity’s capacity tocoordinateanddeploy technology to prevent existential risks, representing anexistentialriskfactor. Consequently, interventions preventing lossof industry, reducing the magnitude of impacts, or increasing speed of recoverycould be extremely valuable.
23DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateDecarbonization triggers instabilityand civil warsin oil-dependent fragile states. Alex De Waal24, Aditya Sarkar is a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Benjamin Spatz is a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. Alex de Waal is aprofessor at the Fletcher School and executive director of the World Peace Foundation, Jared Miller and Tarun Gopalakrishnan are PhD candidates at the Fletcher School, et. al, “Traumatic Decarbonization in Fragile States”, United States Institute of Peace, No. 196, May 2024, DOA: 8-28-24, JA, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/2024-05/pw-196_traumatic-decarbonization-fragile-states.pdfIn these states, hydrocarbon revenues are centralnot only to national economiesbut also to the functioning of politics. Many hydrocarbon-dependent developing countries are fragilein the sense that they lack well-developed institutional political systems. In such countries, politics operates very differently than in developed, institutionalized states. Instead of functioning according to the rule of law, politics is organized around transactional bargains among rival members of the elite. For those elites who hold the levers of state power, hydrocarbon revenue providesthe discretionary funds needed to distribute patronage, secure loyalty, and retain power—indeed, this revenueis a necessary, if not primary, means ofpolitical control. Eliminating thisessential meansof political finance risks upsettingthe elite deals underpinned by oil money— and, in turn, unleashing violenceandincreased cycles of corruptionand causing widespread human suffering. Even if crises are difficult to detectfrom the outside, they lurk behind a facade of stability.The stakesof inaction are highand not at all theoretical, as examples ranging from IraqtoVenezuelato Nigeriamake vivid. South Sudanhighlights the risks most starkly: From 2005 to 2012, the South Sudanese government used oil money to buy the loyalty of rivalrous armed groups, anda tenuous peace held among them. The collapse ofthose rentsin 2012 and 2013 was a factor in triggering civil war. Worse, when oil revenues did not rebound, the competing factions shiftedthe financial basis of South Sudan’s patronage system from division of oil revenues to predation;armed groups taxed and raided populations under their control. This changehas only intensified elite dominance and exacerbated inequalityand misery, even causing starvationamong many South Sudanese.Confronting this reality requires a new research and policy agenda, one that applies a theory of politics to discussions of the transition to a post-oil future. The research described in this report meets this need by systematically analyzing the effects of loss of oil revenues on elite politics, war, and peace in oil-producing fragile states, more precisely called “political marketplaces.” It combines knowledge of how these states actually function with an examination of the role oil rents play in elite bargaining. This approach provides researchers and policymakers with a framework to assess both how processes of decarbonization will be understood by the leaders of those systems—that is, as threats to key sources of political finance used to maintain power—and what the implications are of a move away from hydrocarbon-based economies.Since there has not yet been a global transition away from hydrocarbons, this report uses two strategies to apply lessons from the recent past to an uncertain future. First, the report analyzes cross-national research on the impact of oil shocks on peacemaking by combining data from the University of Edinburgh’s Peace Agreements Database, a comprehensive set of coded peace agreements dating back to 1990, and data on oil price fluctuations in conflict-affected oil producing states. This strategy allows for insights into how a green energy transition might affect the type and scope of peacemaking.Second, the report identifies six illustrative instances of loss of oil revenues, including cases of de facto decarbonization over the past decade, that serve as indicators for future decarbonization: Ecuador, Iraq, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, and Venezuela.3 These countries’ recent experiences provide insights into what is likely to happen in other hydrocarbon-dependent political systems in the future.In all cases except Ecuador, the loss of revenues was traumatic: it wasunplannedand socially destabilizingand sparked intense elite political jockeying as access to political finance plummeted.The unexpected and extreme nature of the oil shocks thrust normally hidden processes of elite bargaining into plain view, revealing how leaders behaved with reduced discretionary hydrocarbon rents and providing a unique opportunity for analysis.De facto decarbonization has followed different dynamics in each case. These range from transient dramatic price and production fluctuations, including global price drops from 2014 to 2016 and in 2020 (as economic activity and travel fell dramatically due to the COVID-19 pandemic), to
24DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updateirreversible production and revenue drops due to losses in productive capacity or mismanagement. In Iraqand Nigeria, oil revenue collapses have been dramaticthoughstill reversible when prices rebound, at least in the short term. In Sudan, mostoil revenue was permanently lost after South Sudan gained independence in 2011, because most of the oil fields were located in the south.4 The next year, South Sudan’s leaders deliberately shut down the country’s entire domestic production in what they expected to be a temporarymeasure—a move that had dire financial impacts on a country that funded over 95 percent of its national budget through oil sales. (The shutdown was a way to avoid sharing revenue with Sudan, which received a cut based on the transshipment of oil through Sudan to Port Sudan for export.5) A more gradual process took place in Venezuela, where President Hugo Chávez’s years of mismanagement led the oil industry to crisis prior to the 2014 fall in oil prices.6Regardless of the particulars of why and when hydrocarbon revenues contracted, looking across the cases allows for preliminary conclusions about (1) the general political impacts of rapid and unplanned decarbonization, and (2) the mechanisms through which these impacts are channeled. Figure 1 illustrates the dynamics of oil rents in comparison to global oil prices in each of the cases.The research shows that decarbonization reshapesthese states’ political economies, creating winners and losers and reconfiguring elite political incentives along the way. But tellingly, even as the specifics vary (different dominant elite players, available sources of income, and formal regime types), the underlying character of these systems does not. They remain elite-dominated, transactional, rent-seeking, and often violent systems, and—regardless of ideological leaning or formal regime type—the logic of power in them is remarkably resilient.Far-reaching implications follow for the prospects of these countries and their citizens. The case studies show that when faced with a cash crunch,leaders fell back ontried-and-true strategies: they sought replacement sources of political finance, typically through rent seeking, corruption, and exploitation, and also resorted to repression. Populations suffered. Patterns of peacemaking, too, shifted on the basis of availability of discretionary oil rents. Increased oil revenuemade possiblemore inclusive and robust peacemakingprocesses, whereas austeritymadesuch processes unviable. None of the countriesdiscussed transitioned toward a productive, development-focused economy or a democratic system—a sobering finding for those aspiring to link an energy transition with a broader sociopolitical transition. Even when populations responded to increased repression and rent seeking with demands for democracy and accountability through protests and civic engagement, any short-term gainsthey made were easily reversed.The collapseof fragile states facilitates WMD proliferationand pandemics---extinction. Ryszard Ficek 22, Doctor of Philosophy at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, “The Fragile States as a Challenge to the Contemporary International Security”, 2022, Vol. 16, DOA: 8-29-24, JA, https://doi.org/10.34862/rbm.2022.1.3There are serious concerns that fragile statesmay not only harborvarious types of networks related to international terrorism but also, intentionally or otherwise, facilitatethe spread of weapons of mass destructionor their components, as well as dangerous military technologies aimed at application for the invention and production of weapons of mass destruction. According to data from the British government, in addition to five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, 13 out of 17 countries implementingor temporarily suspending programs aimed at the production of weapons of mass destruction are “countries at risk of instability” (Abadie, 2006, p. 55; Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2022, pp. 6–17). However, a nightmarish specter straight from catastrophic science fiction films seems to be the prospect that fragile states armedwith nuclear weapons, such as Pakistan or North Korea, may lose controlof their arsenalof weapons of mass destruction, which may become intercepted by the politically unpredictablesuccessorof the autocratic regime, orcaught byunstable non-state actorsof the political scene, who will have no qualms about using it. After all, the direct transfer of weapons of mass destruction in arsenals is not the only problem. Revelations about Abdul Qadeer Khan’s international secret technology transfer activities suggest that fragile states’ weak and unstable governments may be a weak link in global WMD non-proliferation efforts (Langewiesche, 2005).
25DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateTherefore, it is worth paying attention to the issues of identifying and evaluating potential “proliferation paths” through which unstable and fragile states may pose serious threats related to the possible proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. First, fragile states could decide to buy, stealoreven developweaponsof mass destruction orknowingly assist other states or non-state actorsin such a performance. Second, stateor non-state actors of a destabilized political scene can seizeeither the weaponsof mass destruction themselves or the materialsfor the production of weapons of mass destruction located in fragile states’ arsenalswithout the knowledge and consent of the country where these weapons are stored. Third, weapons of mass destruction traffickers couldknowingly use fragile states as intermediariesor transit sitesin their criminal activities. Fourth, fragile states could provide shelter to non-state actors seeking to develop their own weapons of mass destruction (North Korea is a good example here). Finally, thecomplete destabilization and collapse of thefragile statearmed with weapons of mass destruction may result inthe unauthorizedtransferof weapons of mass destruction into the wrong hands, i.e., to non-state actors (Koch & Cranmer, 2007, pp. 311–326; Carlson & Kosal, 2017).Nevertheless, both studies of the international situation, as well as concrete and single case studies, show that not all of the above scenarios are likely. However, fragile states have significant shortcomingsand defects that - possibly - enable various types of weapons ofmass destruction traders to act. Theyconcern, among others, the lackof adequate administrative controlover large territoriesbelonging to fragile states, high corruption, poor law enforcement, and consent to this type of activity. However, the link between the fragile state’s weakness and the proliferation of dangerous weapons of mass destruction is more limited than you often think. Importantly, it currently has few destabilized fragile states in its arsenals or is conducting advanced research on acquiring nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons (The National Security Strategy, 2002, pp. 18–24).Thus, most politically unstable countries do not raise serious concerns about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Nevertheless, there are two strong exceptions: North Koreaand Pakistan. Both countries have nuclear potentialas well as the technology to produce it (Carlson & Kosal, 2017, pp. 9–15). However, fragile states pose a less severe risk of WMD proliferation than many other countries with higher political stability, development, administrative efficiency, and effectiveness. These include, among others, Russia, whose massive and poorly secured nuclear arsenals have long been considered the main risk in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as Syria, Iran, and numerous other countries in the Middle East.The Health Security IssueThe currentCovid-19 pandemic and other diseases, especially infectious diseases, can kill tens of millionsof people worldwide. It is no wonder these diseases, and above all, the matter of their spread, have also become a significant problem for international security (OECD, 2020a). In general, the relationship between theweakness and fragility of the state andthe threat of a pandemic seemsto be quite closely related. In an era of mass travel and global trade, the administrative structures of fragile statesthat appear unable, or even reluctant, to respond to the epidemiological problem pose a severepotential threat to many people worldwide(Patrick, 2011, pp. 207–241; Fragile States Index, 2021, pp. 9–12).Many of the epidemics that have appearedin the world in recent decades(including HIV/AIDS, various forms of “bird flu,” Ebola, and the West Nile virus) come from developing countriesin the Third World. In this context, national security and public health experts conclude that fragile statesthat invest too little inepidemiological surveillance, statistics, health information, andreporting systems to support primary health carelack realistic detection and containment capabilities for this kind of epidemic. Moreover, countries in the two lowest levels of the fragile states index are also among the primary victims of the world’s seven deadliest infectious diseases: respiratory infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhea, measles, and hepatitis B (The Fund for Peace, 2011, pp. 11–12; Fragile States Index, 2021, pp. 12–13). Some of these diseasesare related to drug abuse. Others are characterized by highly resistant strains of viruses, which pose a dire threatand challenge to health security on a global scale(Quinn et al., 2014, pp. 15–19).Energy demand is inelastic, so consumers won’t shift. Leah C. Stokes &Matto Mildenberger 20, Stokes is an assistant professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, the author of Short-Circuiting Policy, Mildenberger is an assistant professor at
26DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatethe University of California Santa Barbara, “The Trouble with Carbon Pricing”, Boston Review, 9-24-20, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/trouble-carbon-pricing/Nor are the handful of high carbon prices unambiguous successes. In Norway, which hasone of the highest carbon pricesin the world, emissions inthe oilsector roseby 78 percentbetween 1990 and 2017. One reason emissions didn’t fallis because ofa problem economists call “demand inelasticity”: if an economic activity is extremely profitable,or if there are no easy alternatives, peopleand companies may not demand less even as prices increase. Economists Geoffrey Heal and Wolfram Schlenker argue that highcarbon taxes won’teffectively reduce pollutionunless cheap substitute technologiesare available.The evidence is mixed, however, on whether carbon prices can drive innovation and provide more of these cheaper substitutes we need. In her study of the national U.S. cap-and-trade program for sulfur dioxide, Margaret Taylor found that innovation actually declined after the system went into effect. As Tobias Schmidt has shown, cap-and-trade systems tend to produce incremental improvements in polluting technologies rather than driving new, clean alternatives.Other research suggests limited innovation. In their study of the EU’s carbon market, economists Raphael Calel and Antoine Dechezleprêtre estimate that patenting increased by 9 percent for regulated firms. However, given how few companies fell under the carbon price, overall low carbon technology patenting increased by less than 1 percent. Carbon price-induced patenting in the UK may have been considerably higher. Still, we lack strong evidence that carbon pricinghas rapidly inducedthe innovation we need in new, cleaner technologies. By focusing on the low-hanging fruit—the “cheapest” ways to cut carbon pollution—we fail to build the ladder necessary to curbthe more difficult emissionsto reduce.And that shouldn’t surprise us. Consider this scenario: if the United States managed to implement a $50 per tonne carbon price, gasoline prices would increase by $0.44per gallon. That means Americans’ monthly driving costs would increase by about $25, enough to put a dent in many families’ budgets. Some people might drive a bit less; a few might set up a carpool. But corporations will not innovatenew technology because of minor tweaksin the price of energy. The prices of oil alreadyfluctuategreatly year to year, and that hasn’t exactly produced the climate technology we need. Fossil fuel companies spend next to nothing on clean energy innovation and deployment.If it hasn’t driven the necessary innovation, perhaps carbon pricing has delivered emission cuts? That’s a tough question to answer, given pollution’s tight link to GDP. During the financial crisis, global carbon pollution levels declined by 1.4 percent between 2008 and 2009 before rebounding. This was not the result of government policy, but that of an economic downturn. We see a similar trend now during the COVID-19 pandemic. Global carbon pollution is estimated to fall by a record 4–7 percent in 2020 as a result of the economic slowdown. But these reductions will be temporary in the absence of ambitious climate reforms.Evaluations of carbon pricing require models that make assumptions about the way the world would have unfolded if the policy hadn’t passed—what we call “business as usual” scenarios. One model suggests Norway’s carbon tax reduced carbon pollution by about 2 percentin its first decade. Similarly the EUcap-and-trade system likely reduced emissions byabout4 percentbetween 2008 and 2016. In British Columbia, Canada, the carbon tax may have been more successful: reducing emissions by 5–15 percent between 2008 and 2015. But these reductions, while laudable, are nothing compared to what needs to be done—we need annual cuts of almost 8 percent a yearuntil 2030to limit warming to 1.5 degreesCelsius.Evidence suggests carbon pricingwon’t drive emissions reductions quickly enough. It is like bringing a stickto a knife fight. The policy might helpfor a little while, but it’s unlikely to secure a victorywithout other weapons to attack the problem. Economists have tried to sharpen the stick, pushing for better policy design, higher prices, and broader coverage. But their efforts have largely failed. To understand why, we need to dig deeper into the politics of carbon pricing.
27DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateWarming is non-anthropocentric, will be gradual, is cushioned, AND contrary models fail. Andy May andMarcel Crok 24, Former Petrophysicist and Developmental Geologist with 46 Years of Field Experience after Graduating the University of Kansas with a Degree in Geology, Physical Chemist and Director of the Clintel Foundation, “Carbon Dioxide and a Warming Climate are Not Problems”, 5/29/24, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12579The idea that human-caused climate change ispotentially harmful requiresdemonstrating twothings. Firstly, we need evidence that humans are a significant contributorto climate change and global warming and secondly, the resulting climate change must be shown to be dangerous.Mostof the evidence presented to show humans are causing climate change is from climate models, butthe models have been shown to run hot relativeto observations.5 The most citedobservational evidencethat humans are contributing to climate change isthe “atmospheric fingerprint” proposed inthe second IPCCreport6 based on work by Benjamin Santer and others.7 David Karoly 8 and others have pointed out that if solar variability were causing climate change, both the stratosphere and the troposphere would be warming, but this is not what we observe. The stratosphere is cooling, and the lower troposphere and Earth's surface are warming. The middle troposphere warms along with the lower troposphere, but at a slower rate. This pattern of stratospheric cooling and tropospheric warming is called the fingerprint of human-caused warming.The idea makes some sense. In the troposphere where water vapor and clouds are abundant, additional CO2 should cause some warming since the additional radiation emitted by CO2 is less likely to make it to space, and more likely to be absorbed by water vapor molecules or clouds. But there is almost no water vapor in the stratosphere and few clouds, so there additional CO2 emissions mostly go straight to space and have an overall cooling effect.However, the idea that this pattern “points towards a discernible human influence on global climate”9 is very controversial. There are alternative explanationsforthe observed stratospheric cooling, David Karoly suggested that “decreases in ozoneamount in the stratosphere”10 may account for the cooling. A short article in Nature, in 1996, provides a fair summary of the whole “atmospheric fingerprint” controversy, that is still accurate today. Following is a quote from the paper, written by Neville Nicholls:The study of Santer et al., and those reported in the IPCC Second Assessment, show that an anthropogenic component of global climate change—the ‘anthropogenic fingerprint’—may be appearing in the observed data. It must be pointed out, however, that this signal is the complicated patternof change resulting fromthe combinedeffects of stratospheric ozonedepletionand increased concentrations of greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols. It does not mean that the effect of any one of these factors has been detected.Many uncertainties remain in this work and are acknowledged by Santer et al. and in the IPCC Second Assessment.11More recently the statistical methodology used to justify the “anthropogenic fingerprint” has been questioned by Ross McKitrick. It appears that the statistical underpinningsofthe anthropogenic fingerprint are seriously flawed.12There is also the problem of the middle troposphere, especially in the tropics. Climate models show it warming morethan observations.13 It has been well established by Ross McKitrick and John Christy14 that most CMIP/IPCCclimate modelsand the model average overestimatewarming inthe tropical middle tropospherebya statistically significantamount. The IPCC AR5 report showed that if the anthropogenic CO2 effect is not included in the model, the model results in the tropical middle troposphere move closer to the observations.15Chapter 3 of AR6 WGI lists the evidence that humans influence Earth's climate, but the “atmospheric fingerprint” just described is the only observational evidence and it is controversial. The rest of the evidence presented is from comparing geographical patternsof weather components, such as warming, cooling, or precipitation, to climate models. This is a problematic procedurewhen McKitrick and Christy, and AR6 itself, have shown that the models are not validin the tropics, andprobably globally, when compared to observations. The work of McKitrick and Christy is acknowledged in AR6, and they admit their overestimationof surfaceand ocean temperatures remains inthe currentAR6 models.16
28DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateAlltheir examples, such as higher humidityin the upper troposphere, Arctic ice loss, spring snow cover, or temperature extremescould have natural causesandmay not exceed natural variability. The full range of natural variability is not known.Since general circulation climate modelsand the modern CO2 and greenhouse gas warming hypothesis were developedin the 1960s and 70s 17 many natural climate oscillationshave been discovered. These long-term climatic oscillations andthe resulting “climate regime shifts”18 strongly suggestthat natural forces, possibly driven by cyclic changesinthe Sun, 19 are causingsome of the recent global warmingobserved since 1920, or even earlier.20 It is beyond the scope of this paper to detail all the natural ocean oscillations discovered and described in the past few decades, but one of the major, and most important, oscillations is the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation(AMO), first named by Richard Kerr in 2000 21 but formally described by Stephen Gray and colleagues in 2004.22 The AMO has a very strong climatic signaland has been around sinceat least 1567 AD, so it clearlydoes not have a human cause.23 The AMO, which is based on North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures is plotted in Figure 2. The upper plot shows the raw AMO data (the North Atlantic sea surface temperatures) and the lower shows the AMO detrended (linear fit subtracted from the temperatures to produce the standard AMO“index”).FIGURE 2The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) plotted in its raw form (top) and as a detrended index (bottom plot). The HadCRUT4 global temperature average record has also been detrended and overlain, as a gray dashed line, on the detrended AMO. Data from NOAA.There are several key features displayed in Figure 2. First, we observe that the secular trend in the AMO of .3°C is about 30% of the warming observed globally in the 20th century.24 Next we observe that the warming period from 1980 to 2005 coincides with an upturn in the AMO index. The AMO index has been traced to 1567 AD, thus it is a natural oscillation. These observations cast some doubt on the AR6 claim that all 20th century warming is due to human influence and there is no net natural impact.25 The second feature we will point out in Figure 2 is that the full AMO climate cycle is 60–70 years, and it matches the estimated global temperature changes in the 20th century. To make this comparison easier, the HadCRUT4 record from Figure 1 is also detrended and overlain as a gray dashed line in the lower plot of Figure 2. What if the so-called human-caused warming from 1976 to the present day was boosted by a natural cycle? It would mean that the IPCC calculation of the impact of human greenhouse gases was too high,26 just as their calculation of tropical tropospheric warming is too high, something they admit in AR6.27WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE OF CURRENT DAMAGE DUE TO CO2 OR GLOBAL WARMING?Currently it is very hardto findany unusual weather or weather-related disasterthat can be blamedon climate change, whether natural or human-caused, despiteconstant news media claims to the contrary. AR6 can only point to an increase in heat waves.28 Weather-related disasters occur every year. But the trendsin the cost, as a fraction of GDP, or human suffering and deathdue to them are, respectively, flator rapidly decliningas explained by Roger Pielke Jr.29 and Bjorn Lomborg.30
29DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateGlobally, most damage (around 90%) from extreme weather by far is due to flooding and severe storms, such as tropical cyclones.31 The most damagingextremes, hurricanes, floods, and (weather-related) droughts have not changedgloballyon climatic time scales(>30 years).32 The earth has warmed by slightly more than one degree Celsius, and the CO2 concentration has gone up, but the most dramatic, destructive, and deadly extreme weather events have not changed significantly or have declined.33 Further, 52 of 53 studiesof disaster losses due to extreme weather were unableto attributethe events to human causes, and the one study34 that did claim human attribution was flawed.35While there are places in AR6 where they claim the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased and they try (using models and weather pattern analysis) to show these are related to human greenhouse gas emissions, they do acknowledge that there is “low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale … [and] there is low confidence in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence …”36In the same section of AR6, they write: “… it remains uncertain whether past changes in Atlantic [tropical cyclone] activity are outside the rangeof natural variability.”37 A plot of US landfalling major hurricanes is shown in Figure 3.<<FIGURE 3 OMITTED>>As Figure 3 shows, the number of major U.S. hurricanes is declining. The total number of hurricanes striking the U.S. is also declining.38 In fact, the global weather losses, due to all extreme weather, are declining as a percentage of global GDP.39Bjorn Lomborg has shown that climate and weather-related deathshave declinedan astonishing 99%since 1920.40 This is very significant since non-climate and non-weather related deaths due to other natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanos, etc.) have only seen a modest decline over the same period.41 In other words, even though the world populationhas risenmore than four timessince 1920, there are many fewerextreme weather deaths todaythan then. This suggests (perhaps proves?) that humanity has adapted wellto climate changes since 1920.ADDITIONAL CO2 AND GLOBAL WARMING BENEFITS AND COSTSIt seems that trends (if trends can be found at all) in the most severe and damaging weather events (tropical cyclones and flooding) cannot be definitively attributed to human greenhouse gas emissions, and in any case may be declining in frequency over the industrialized period.42 There is no doubt that climate change, whether natural or human-caused, will have adverse effects for some people in some locations. However, this overlooks the fact that climate change will benefitother people in different locations. As with any analysis, both the benefits and the costs must be examined; and AR6 clearly only examines the downside risks of climate change.43 The lackofan analysisof the benefitsof climate change damagestheir credibilityas an unbiased observerof thescience of climate change.
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32DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateAT: Free Trade ImpactsTrump makes deglobalization inevitable.Navamya Acharya 11/8, journalist writing for Investing.com, 8 November 2024, “Trump’s win accelerates deglobalization and global economic fragmentation,” Investing.com, https://www.investing.com/news/politics/trumps-win-accelerates-deglobalization-and-global-economic-fragmentation-3710757.The re-electionofDonald Trumpis set to further acceleratedeglobalizationand economic fragmentation globally, asanalyzed by economistsat Wells Fargo(NYSE:WFC). This shift centers on Trump's commitment to heightened tariffsandan increasingly unilateralapproachto U.S.tradepolicy, which could drive other countriesto reevaluateand redirect their economic alliances. As a result of recent financial crises, Wells Fargo points out that global trade cohesion had already deteriorated. A newroundofU.S. tariffsis expected to aggravatethe global economic fracturescaused byCOVID-19.A Trump-led Americacould see the U.S. becoming moreeconomically insular, raising barriersthat hinderthe flow of international trade. Such protectionism signals to other nationsa need to reconsidertheir economic dependencieson the U.S. and possibly align more closely with China. In fact, during Trump’s first term, multiple nations began expanding their trade relations with China, both through economic partnerships and in their voting behaviors at international bodies like the United Nations. A neweraof increased tariffsunder Trump mayonly serve to push more countriestoward China's orbit, reshapingglobal tradenetworksand political alliances in the process.Trump will start a trade war.Desmond Lachman 24, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 30 May 2024, “A Dangerous Slide to Deglobalization,” American Enterprise Institute, https://www.aei.org/op-eds/a-dangerous-slide-to-deglobalization/.The Trump presidency was characterized byan antipathyto trade, which it blamed for the hollowing out of the industrial heartland. Trumpproudly labeledhimself “Tariff Man.”In efforts to reduce the country’s trade deficit and support its manufacturing sector, the Trump administration showed contemptfor the World Trade Organizationand unilaterally imposed tariffson its trade partners. Among other things, it increased tariffs on all foreign steel and aluminum imports and on around $360 billion in Chinese manufactured goods.After chastising the Trump administration’s protectionist tendencies during the 2020 election campaign, President Biden seems to have gone down a similar path. He did not roll backthe steep Trump tariffs, and in the lead-up to this November’s presidential election Biden has increasedChinese trade restrictions. In addition to a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electrical vehicles, Biden announced that the U.S. will triple tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum and double tariffs on Chinese semiconductors and solarcells.Not to be outdone, Trumpis indicatingthat if he is elected again as president, he will increase tariffson Chinese electrical vehicles to 200 percentand impose a 10 percent tariffon all U.S. imports. He is also chastising the
33DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateBiden administration for having been too soft on China’s unfair trade practices. All of this seems to be invitingour trade partners to retaliatewith tariffs of their own. That could lead us tothe beggar-my-neighbor trade policiesof the1930s.Even beyondTrump, free trade is political toxic.Peter E. Harrell 24, nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May2024, “Time to Reset the U.S. Trade Agenda,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pp. 5-6, https://carnegie-production-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/files/Harrell_US-Trade-Agenda.pdf.Obama signed the TPP in January 2016. But even as he pushed for congressional ratification of the deal, it was becoming clear that the trade paradigm that had dominated Washington policy discussions since the early 1990s was falling out of favor. Bylate 2015, keycongressional leadershad begun to express skepticismof theemerging TPPprovisions, and ultimately they never scheduled a vote on the deal.19 Both of the major presidential candidates in 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton (who had supported the early development of the TPP while serving as Obama’s secretary of state) and Republican Donald Trump, opposed the deal on the campaign trail, and Trump withdrew the United States from the deal shortly after his inauguration in 2017. (The other members of the deal, led by Japan, moved forward and completed the deal, rebranded as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, in 2018.)As president, Trump generally eschewed traditional trade deals in favor of a tariff-heavy approach to trade, intended to put pressure on China while protecting U.S. industries, like steel, that he deemed important. Nevertheless, he did successfully enact the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), an overhaul of the NAFTA agreement from twenty-five years earlier. And while some in the trade policy and national security communities hoped that Biden would launch negotiations to reenter the TPP, Bidenhasinstead launched trade initiativeslike the IPEFthatare intended promote cooperation on trade and standards but do not provide access to the U.S. marketas traditional FTAs would. And even withoutU.S. market access, such initiatives have proved politically controversial. In November 2023, for instance, Biden indefinitely postponedfinalization of the trade-related aspectsof IPEF owing to concernsby Democratsin Congress that the deal would be politically harmfulanddue to oppositionby American labor unions.20 Bidenalso quietly postponednascent trade talkswith the United Kingdom and Kenyathat began in the last months of the Trump administration, and late last year his trade representative, Katherine Tai, withdrew long-standingU.S. support forproposed digital trade rulesat the WTO. Trump, in his campaign to regain the presidency this year, has doubled down on his commitment to tariffs and other protectionist measures rather than deals, floating theidea of imposing a 60 percent tariff on goods imported from China and a 10 percent tariff on products imported from everywhere else.21Of course, trade has long been a hot-button political issue. Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot made his opposition to NAFTA a signature issue in his 1992 independent presidential campaign against Bill Clinton and incumbent George H. W. Bush, and trade deal approvals have always been hard fought in Congress. But for the twenty-five-year period between 1990 and the mid-2010s, geopolitical and economic logic were able to overcome that political opposition to see deals to fruition. Today, there is scant evidencethat new trade dealscould getthrough Congress, and a dwindlingnumberof elected political leaders are willingto arguein favorof them. There are several reasons for this change in political support.
34DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateA bipartisan consensushas emerged against trade.Peter E. Harrell 24, nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May2024, “Time to Reset the U.S. Trade Agenda,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pp. 6-7, https://carnegie-production-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/files/Harrell_US-Trade-Agenda.pdf.The first is the shifting U.S. relationship with China. Although economic research from the 1990s and early 2000s generally found that expanding U.S. trade flows had at most a limited impact on U.S. manufacturing employment, with other factors such as automation playing a larger role, research from the mid- and late 2010s found that the “China shock” of growing U.S.-China trade in the 2000s had substantially moredisruptive impacts on jobs.22 Moreover, communities adversely impacted by the China shock have seen little recovery over the past decade.23 Adverse employment impactsfrom tradewith China, combined with China’s rise as a geopolitical competitor, have led to bipartisan supportfor “derisking” U.S. supply chainsfrom China, fueledthe arguments of trade skeptics, and renewed a focus on U.S. domestic manufacturing. The second reason is shifts in domestic political preferences. It is true that some pollingshows that the majority of Americans are supportiveof trade: a 2023 poll commissioned by the Chicago Council for Global Affairs, for example, found that 74 percent of Americans say “trade is good for the U.S. economy.”24 Butas prominent economist Alan Blinder pointed out several years ago in Foreign Affairs, “most Americans’belief infree trade isa mile wide but an inch deep,” with polling responses varying widelydepending on which questionsare being askedand whether Americans are asked only about trade in the abstractor alsoabout American manufacturing and jobs.25Trade policy is a classic exampleof an issue where a constituency that is invested deeplyin and affectedby an issue, such as specific U.S. industriesand workerswho facethe risk of losses from trade, exert more influencethana majority of voterswhomay benefitfrom lower pricesbut who do not see their well-being as being deeply connectedto trade issues. Recent polling by American Compass, a conservative organization that is skeptical of trade deals, has also shown that while a plurality of Americans thinks they personally benefit from globalization, a similar plurality thinks the United States as a whole has been harmed.26 Other recent pollingsuggeststhat on trade, more Americans trust Trump, with his zeal for tariffs, than trust Biden.27 Academic research, meanwhile, indicatesthat while Trump’s tariffswere an economic mixed bag, they wonRepublicans votesat the ballot box.28 A third reason is that the raw economic benefits of trade deals have become less compelling. Take the TPP as an example: even the Obama administration’s own official estimate found that the TPP would add just 0.15 percent to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) after a decade, hardly a compelling economic justification for the deal.29 And in the years since Trump abandoned the deal, actual U.S. trade flows have still moved in a beneficial direction: China’s share of U.S. goods imports declined from a high of over 20 percent in the late 2010s to approximately 15 percent last year, while the absolute value of U.S. goods imports from China fell last year to the lowest level in a decade.30 Trade with allies and partners also has grown: since 2017, U.S imports of goods from India are up 37 percent, up 80 percent from Indonesia, up 61 percent from the Philippines, and up a whopping 200 percent from Vietnam—the last of these now exports goods valued at a quarter of its entire GDP to the United States. The United States became India’s largest trading partner in 2023, while U.S. exports to the European Union and European imports from the United States are both up more than 25 percent over the past few years.31 Overall U.S. exports today substantially exceed prepandemic levels, reflecting growing global demand for U.S. energy, agriculture, and manufactured goods, as well as U.S. services. Meanwhile, Americans traditionally thought to be adversely impacted by trade are doing well. Real wages for lower-income Americans grew strongly in 2023, and, in a reversal of the trend that has prevailed for most of the past two decades, the real wage growth for lower-income Americans over the past two years has been higher than the rate of wage growth for higher-income Americans.32 Women and Black Americans also saw historic gains in the labor market.33 A situation where both U.S. companies and U.S. workers are doing well creates little incentive to open U.S. markets to more competition. Numbers like these reinforce skepticism about the benefits of new FTAs. But perhaps the most important reason for declining U.S. political support for new trade deals is that the economic theory of the case that underpinned the deals of the 1990s to the mid-2010s has fallen out of favor in Washington. At a fundamental level, a bipartisan consensushas emergedin Washington that the United States should rebuildits manufacturingindustrial baseand focus more on the economic well-being of American workers. Irrespective of whether prioritizing manufacturing optimizes American economic growth, there is strong political support for doing so.No trade impact. Dr. Bradley Martin 24, PhD, Senior Policy Researcher, RAND Corporation. Director, RAND National Security Supply Chain Institute, "Interdependence and Its Discontents: Why Would Nations with Incentives to Avoid It Go to War?" RAND, 02/23/2024, https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/02/interdependence-and-its-discontents-why-would-nations.html.
35DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateIt's tempting to thinkthat such interdependencehas reached a level in whicharmed conflictbetweenthese two rivals has grown to besomethingbeyond irrational, into the realm of theunthinkable. Wouldn't the terrible costs of war cause both nations to seek every other means before resorting to armed action? Unfortunately, historygivesus little reason to be confidentthat peace isinevitable simply becausethedegree of interdependenceis strong. Trading partnersin fact sometimes do go to war(PDF) with one another. Indeed, by the logic of interdependence, World War Ishould never have occurred. Interdependencedid notalways prevent war in the past, and it is safe to say that itprobably willnot assurea peaceful future.Why, then, would nations with incentives to avoid war go to war anyway? Sometimes, wars occurred due tomisperceptionandirrationality. In othercases, actors viewedwar asat least inevitableandpossiblydesirable. But, to a degree, thepropensityto arrive at armed conflict, evenwhen doing so would seem to beagainst national interests, is aninherent featurewithin an international system in which nations are constantly bargaining over outcomes—are in fact in any number of ongoing forms of unarmed conflict.No trade impact.Clare ’22[Stephen; February 15; Research Fellow at the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research, B.A., McMaster University, Sustainability Studies, M.A., McGill University, Natural Resources Management and Policy; Effective Altruism Forum, “How likely is World War III?” https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aSzxoj7irC5jNHceB/how-likely-is-world-war-iii]You can’t tradewith someone you’re at war with. So, the more two countries trade, the more costly a war between them will be, and the lesslikely they should be to fight. This argument is appealingfor a few reasons. First, it makes intuitive sense. Second, it looks like it fits the data well, at least for the post-war period. Since WWII, international trade has grown dramatically while the rate of international conflict has fallen.This theory also benefits from some seemingly-strong empirical support. Two prominent proponents, Bruce Russett and John Oneal, have produced a number of books and papers that show increased economic interdependence, usually measured as the value of bilateral trade between two countries divided by a country’s GDP, reduces the chance of war between two countries. More specifically, in a 2003 paper they report that “increasing economic interdependence from the 10th to the 90th percentile reduces the risk of a fatal dispute by 32 percent.”[17] At that time, the volume of US-China trade was just below the 90th percentile for their data, and the authors conclude that the growth of US-China trade reduced the chance of conflict by 27%.[18]That said, while a 27% reduction in the chance of war is nice, it’s nota big enougheffect tofully explainthe Long Peace. Other reasons to think that the pacifying effectof global trade is smaller than is sometimes claimed include:1. The economic benefitsof tradewith any one country areusually notthatlarge.[19] [FN 19] In2003, the US-Chinatrade as a proportion of the US economy was around the 90th percentilefortrade interdependence, but wasjust 1.2%ofUS GDP(“Causes of Peace”, p. 383) [END FN 19]2. Long-term gainsfromsuccess in warcan be largerthantemporary disruptionsin trade.[20] [FN 20] “A disputenormally affectstrade for only oneor twoyears” (“Causes of Peace”, pp. 388-9), so the costs are typically bounded. Butthe benefits ofconquering territory, stymyingthe riseof rivals, orgaining influenceoverinternational rulesand institutionscould flowfor a long time. [END FN 20]3. As the world getsmore interconnected, trade with anygiven countryA will become a smaller proportionof a countryB’s economy.4. Some scholars have noted that negotiating trade dealsalso gives one country more leverageover the other, and potentially raises more issuesover which countries can disagree.[21] [FN 21] For example, Europe’s
36DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatereliance on Russian natural gashas been a sourceof tensionbetween European countries, and betweencountries like Russiaand France. [END FN 21]5. Global trade was at historic highsjust prior to WWIFinally, disentanglingthecausal relationshipsamong thehighly-correlated variables of tradeinterdependence,GDPlevel, strength of democracy, andparticipation in international organizationsis difficult. Russett, Oneal, and collaborators try things like measuring lagged effects to try and improve their causal inference, but I’m not sure howsuccessfully this isolates causalrelationships. I think these studiesprovidestrong evidence of thedirection of the effect, but mybest guess would bethat they overestimateits size.[22] [FN 22] To quantify: I think there’s an 80% chancethat doublingthe amount of tradebetween two countries reduces theannual chance they go to warby between 0%and 35%.[END FN 22]If they are right the plan trades off with other, less pressing priorities. If a full NDAA passes, it’s because of backroom negotiationsthat nominationsprove other fights don’t thump.Hickey ‘11-13[Jennifer; November 13; Digital Content Manager for the National Guard Association of the United States; National Guard Association of the United States, “Congress Has Short Window for Defense Policy, FY25 Spending Bills,” https://www.ngaus.org/newsroom/congress-has-short-window-defense-policy-fy25-spending-bills]With Senate Democratslosing controlof the chamber in the next Congress, leadership is focused on judicial nominationsand finalizing the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act.The NDAA is the nation's annual defense policy bill and has been passed for 63 consecutive years, a streak neither political party wants broken.Yet the bill has not followednormallegislative procedureduring the last two years, and haslargely been shaped inclosed-door negotiations.Trade induced resource competitionsparks quick nuclear warsbetween economically dependentregional powers.Howe ’22— Brendan Howe, Dean and Professor at Ewha Woman’s University GSIS; 2022; “Non-traditional Security Leadership and Cooperation in the Face of Great Power Conflict: The Rise of New Actors”; Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Vol. 28, Issue 1; University of Kansas LibrariesUnder such conditions, it is perhaps not surprising that great power rivalrybetweenthe US and Chinahas intensified, almost to the extent of the struggle forglobal supremacybetween the USand the USSR, albeit withmore of a regional focus. Hence, David Shambaugh (2018, 85) has pointed out that despitetheir deep interdependenceand elements of cooperation, the world’s two major powersare increasingly locked in a“comprehensive competitive relationship,” made explicit by the labeling of China and Russia as “strategic competitors” and “revisionist powers.” Nuclear weaponscan be seen as the ultimate expressionof power politics, and regional actors are prominent proponents. Russiaand the UShave the largest nuclear arsenalsin the world, China’scomplement ranks third, and North Koreahas becomeonly the ninth nuclear deterrent-enabledstatein the world (Arms Control Association 2021). Japan, South Korea, and Taiwancouldgo nuclearvirtually overnight, only refraining from doing so because of the shelter of the US nuclear umbrella.In addition, so dramatic have been the impacts of controversies surrounding the administration of US President Donald Trump and its aftermath, that the American democratic polity can be viewed as being in crisis rather than a shining city on the hill, and therefore American
37DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatesoft power contributes less in terms of leadership resources in the region. President Trump’s attacks on international organizations (IOs), institutions, and multilateral treaties, revealed their limitations, raising the specter of the US walking away from any treaty, agreement, or institution that it considers not to be in the interests of US citizens. This turning away by the US has been particularly acute in the East Asian region, where only bilateral diplomacy could hold the attention of the previous president, and even then, only sporadically.Even withthe incoming administration of President Joe Bidenthere is noguaranteeofa return of US leadership and contributions to peaceand securityin the region. At least initially, the Biden administration has signaled an intent to continue the tough line with China, while returning to something akin to the strategic patience of effectively doing nothing about North Korea. Furthermore, despite the much-vaunted“pivot to Asia” under President Barack Obama, the US neglected engagementwith the region (beyond hedging over China). A revitalizationof such policies, therefore, also bodes ill for regional leadership, especially given that President Biden has inherited so many other diplomatic challenges. In what may only be a one term presidency (even if he is succeeded by another Democrat), it is likely that, with the exception of the need to address China, Asiawillonce again be put on theback burner.Neorealist-inspired coercive tactics have been prevalent in the international relations between the great powers and among other states as they attempt to structure the decision-making of the other, whether it be saber-rattling, namecalling, overt threats, or political and economic sanctions. Facing diverse challenges, successive governments in regional states have adopted state-centric national security policies with an emphasis on national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national unity. The most extreme manifestation of this state centricity can be found on the Korean Peninsula where the two regimes, North and South, view each other as existential threats; across the Taiwan Strait, between the similarly mutually exclusive regimes of Beijing and Taipei; and in the state-centric security tensions very much in evidence in the East China Sea and South China Sea (Taylor 2018). Yet even between democratic allies of the US, such as South Korea and Japan, diplomatic relations can be strained at best, and take on power-political overtones.Meanwhile, from a neoliberal perspective, throughout East Asia a premium hasbeen placed on economic development, with rapidsuccess in this field combined with high levels of industrialization, urbanization, and modernizationacross the region. Regional developmentalism has been labeled “econophoria,” whereby the solution to allgovernance challenges, whether domestic or international, is sought throughthe prioritization of economic growth(Buzan and Segal 1998,107). In East Asia, state-centric macroeconomic developmenthas beendescribed as assuming “cult-like status” (Christie and Roy 2001, 5).Economic development itself, however, does notautomatically lead to aninterdependence induced peacebetween states. Competition forlimited pools of resourcesnecessary for development raisesthe perspective of resource wars. Already tensionsare high inthe Mekong region of Southeast Asiadue to hydroelectric dam construction along the river dramatically impacting the security of those living downstream. Tensions in theSouth China Seaareas much aboutmarine resourcesand traderoutesas they are about geopolitics. Recent tensions betweenJapanandSouth Korea, between the great powers Chinaandthe US, and betweenRussiaandthe European Unionhave been amplifiedbyresource competition, tradewars, and economic sanctions.Competition for marketsamong the export-orientated economies of East Asia canseverely undermineincentives for cooperationbetween them. It can also impacton strategic policymaking, with lesser powersbeing caught betweena dependenceonthe US-led Washingtoneconomic consensusand San Francisco hub-and-spokes security system, anda dependenceon the Chinesemarket(Kim and Cha 2016). Finally, in thecompetitive rushto attractforeigndirect investment(FDI) to rise up the development status ladder, countriesin the region have mortgagedtheir autonomy, and thusa significant element of theirtraditional national security, first to the US, then after the 1997 Asian financialcrisis, to the International Monetary Fund, and most recently, to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative as manifested in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). There are concerns that AIIB activities could leadtoas much insecurityas security promotionwithin the region (Uhlin 2019,
38DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Update
39DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateAT: Pan KAnti-China isn’t anti-Asian. The K is a rhetorical trickto shield the CCP from criticism.Tenzin Dorjee 21, senior researcher at Tibet Action Institute and a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University, 6 April 2021, “Anti-China is not anti-Asian,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/06/anti-china-is-not-anti-asian/.However, some commentatorsare arguingthat the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s criticismof the Chinese governmentis to blame forthe domestic problemof anti-Asian violence. This specious claim,which China’s state-run media quickly exploited, has beenmost prominently advancedin the mainstream Western mediaby distinguished novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and political scientist Janelle Wong, who claim that “bipartisan political rhetoric about Asia” and successive administrations’ “critical takes” on China fuel anti-Asian violence. This narrative, which weaponizesAsian American vulnerability to shield Beijingfrominternational criticism, is as dangerous as it is fraudulent.First of all, let’s be clear that there is no bipartisan political rhetoric targeting Asia, a continent of nearly 50 nations. Conflating Asia with China is the geopolitical equivalent of assuming all Asians are Chinese, precisely the kind of racial lumping that the writers themselves sensibly caution against.To be sure, criticism of the Chinese government by policymakers in Washington has escalated in recent years. But the overwhelming volume of the rhetorictargeting Beijing has been promptednot by abstractgeopolitical competition but bytangible grievances, including China’s genocidein Xinjiang, intensifying repressionin Tibet, dismantlingof democracyin Hong Kong and sweeping crackdownonChinese civil society. Some of Beijing’s harshest criticsare Asian Americans. Uyghur refugees, Hong Kong democrats, Chinese dissidentsand Tibetan exilessuch as myself, whose communitiesback home reel under Beijing’s boot, are urgingCongress to censure Chinafor its crimes. Asking lawmakersof conscience to hold their tongueon Beijing’s genocide to supposedly prevent racial violence hereis to set up a false trade-offbetween Asian American safetyandUyghur lives, both of which should be treated as nonnegotiable.Moreover, there is noresearch-based evidence that American lawmakers’ legitimate criticismof Beijinghas a causal effecton violence against Asians. In fact, Washington’s political rhetorichas been risingsteadilyover the past half decade, during whichBeijing built the Uyghur internment camps, demolished Hong Kong’s democracy and chipped away at the liberal international order. Anti-Asian attacks remained rareduring this whole period, soaring onlywhen the pandemic hit. If China had contained covid-19 within its borders, or if the United States had succeeded in keeping it out, no amount of congressional criticism against Beijing would have made us afraid to ride the subway at night.While racism is always an ingredient in hate crimes, it seems that thecentral causeof the current epidemicof anti-Asian violence isresentmentat the pandemic’s staggering toll. Perpetrators’ combustible anger— at losing their jobs, homes and family members to the plague — is being unleashed on a scapegoatpartly because China has not been held to account. To date, Beijing has not apologized for its mishandling of the outbreak that turned a local disaster into a global catastrophe. An apology from the Chinese government will bring some closure to the millions of people ruined by the pandemic and reduce their collective ragefar more quickly than a muzzling of U.S. foreign policy discourse.But while we wait for that apology — which might never come — we all have to speak up. Last week, when a Tibetan friend of mine was riding the subway to Manhattan, he was verbally attacked and physically threatened by a young man. An older woman sitting nearby intervened and admonished the would-be assailant, who promptly backed down. In another part of the city the same week, an Asian man was brutalized in a fairly crowded subway car where no one came to his aid. Sometimes all it takes is for one bystander to intervene.
40DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateInstead of allowing one tragedy to silence another, we should pledgenever tobe silent bystanders, neither to hate crimesin this country nor to crimes against humanityabroad. If we are serious about ending this epidemic of racial violence, we should invest in a culture of intervention rather than a conspiracy of silence.
41DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateAT: Heg BadHeg solves nuke wars. Charles E. Ziegler 24, professor of political science and university scholar at the University of Louisville,Fall 2024, “Filling the Void Left by Great-Power Retrenchment: Russia, Central Asia, and the U.S. Withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Texas National Security Review, 7(4), https://tnsr.org/2024/08/filling-the-void-left-by-great-power-retrenchment-russia-central-asia-and-the-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistanRetrenchment involves freeing up resources so that states may concentrate their efforts on regions perceived more vital to key national security interests. Yet, retrenchmentcarries considerable risks. Proximate great powerscould try to take advantageof retrenching adversariesto expandtheirown powerand influence. Feeling abandoned, local alliesmight desertafaraway retrenching power.That powerful state couldalso suffer a loss of international prestige.4 Retrenchmentmay triggerconventionalor nuclear arms racesamong states no longer constrained by the hegemon, causingregionalor global instability.A retrenching power might be less capable of promoting economic integrationwiththe smaller powers in the region.5 While much of the scholarly literature on retrenchment is global in orientation, and focused on the consequences for the retrenching great power, less attention has been given to the responses of competing great powers to regional retrenchment, other than to reiterate the axiom that nature abhors a vacuum.6Heg is sustainable. The U.S. has structural advantagesover other countries. C. Raja Mohan 24, Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, 3 January 2024, “No, the US-led global order is not collapsing,” The Indian Express, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/c-raja-mohan-writes-no-the-us-led-global-order-is-not-collapsing-9092490/.The Westhas survivedfrequent and often intense crisesof capitalism and endured the loss of colonial empires. It fought back geopolitical challengesto its hegemony from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. It is now locked in a new confrontation with China. And the oddsare tilting in favourof the West. Untilvery recently, it waswidely assumedthat China would overtakethe USas the world’s largest economy, prise Europe out of American dominance and emergeas the dominant powerin Asia.Some of those dreamshave crashedagainst reality. Slow down in growthand demographic declinesuggest Chinais unlikelyto overtakethe USeconomy any time soon, if ever. Yet, it is possible to argue that the Sino-Russian alliance unveiled by Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin presents a formidable challenge to Western primacy. Yet, both Russia and China are eager for an accommodation with the West. Despite his tough rhetoric against the “collective West”, Putin needs a deal with the US to secure a new European compact in which Moscow can play a major role. President Xi, whose soaring imagination about a post-Western order in Asia was making waves a few years ago, is now promising President Joe Biden that he is not seeking to overthrow the US-led order but seeking a dignified coexistence.In both Russia and China, there is a long lineage of political forces that seek Westernisation and integration with the US-led order. They have had to battle the Russian “Slavophiles” and Chinese nationalists who seek to define their national path in non-Western if not anti-Western terms. The Westernisers in Russia and China might be on the defensive now but have not disappeared from the political scene. For both Putin and Xi, the question is not about fighting a forever war with the West, negotiating favourable terms of accommodation. Meanwhile, their aggressive actionsin Europe and Asia are compellingtheir neighbours to move closerto the USand
42DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updateenhancethe powerof the West. For many in Europe and Asia, America, the distant power, is very welcomein the effort to limitthe power of the regional hegemons.The story is not different in the Middle East. Iranmay be rocking the US-led order in the region, but it is not strong enoughto promote an alternative. Many Arab regimessee Iranand its proxies like Hamas as abigger threatto their existencethan Israel. For many Arab states, the distant Americaremainsa valuable and the only balanceragainst Tehran.What about the potential role of BRICSas a bulwark against the West? Well, Argentina has just declined to join the forum — the invitation was extended at the BRICS summit in South Africa last year. Earlier, Indonesia had said it was not ready to join the forum when the expansion was being discussed. In any case, the deepening contradictionsbetween Indiaand Chinahave cast a shadowoverthe BRICSand other non-Western institutionslike the SCO, where both Delhi and Beijing are members. The contradictionswithin the rest are deepand must always be factored in assessing the real and serious tensions between the West and the rest.What about the declinein the economic weightof the G7in the global economy? To be sure, the share of G7’s GDP has been on a continuous declinein the 21st century. Much of that decline, though, has come fromEurope. The US retainsnearly 24 per centof the global GDP. The relative economic declineof Europevis-a-vis the US and China and its security vulnerability vis-a-vis Russia will only help consolidatethe West under Americanleadership.Although the rise of the restis real, the West continues to leadinthe production of new scientific knowledgeand technological innovation. Resilienteconomic and political institutions cushionWestern societies from internal turbulenceand external challenges. Western academia, think tanks, artsand culturecontinue to exercise powerful influence worldwide. The broader attraction of Western societies is reflected in the fact that millionsof people worldwide, including from India, are eagerto find a way into Europe and North America, either legally or illegally. No amount of political posturing by their elites is going to diminish the Western pull for Indian professionals, Chinese computer geeks, Russian dissidents, and talented people from everywhere in the world.
43DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdatePRO
44DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateChina Threat AnswersMetrics are wrong. A careful assessmentof Chinese activities disprovesrevision.Dr. Matthew D. Stephen 24, PhD, Senior Researcher, WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Member, Heisenberg Programme of the German Research Foundation, "China and the Limits of Hypothetical Hegemony," Security Studies, Vol. 33, Issue 1, pg. 157-159, 02/29/2024, T&F.What Lim and Ikenberry offer is an exercise in estimating China’s ideal preferences regarding international order, although it is somewhat limited by its lack of engagement with Chinese sources.22 Yet even if the goal is purely theoretical, themethodological approachisdifficultto parse. They combine variousmethodological strategies, statingthat their model “is derivedboth fromour assumptionsaboutBeijing’s preferences, the intentionsmanifest inthe statementsof China’s leaders, andobserved practicesof China’s existing order-building activitythat, we argue, stem from China’s own domestic model.”23 This combination ofinductiveanddeductiveapproaches to identifying preferences makes ithard to discernwhether they are developingtheoreticalstatementsthat can be tested, or presentingempiricalfindings that testsuch statements. The result isaheavily stylized pictureof Chinese illiberal hegemony that relies ona high level of extrapolation and speculation.An alternativeapproach would be toexaminemore closely the observable practicesof China’s order-building activity, either to test competing theories of order-building, or as an inductive empirical step towards theory development. Chinahas alreadyparticipated inthe creation of numerousinternational institutionsand initiatives, whereChina’s preferencesand capabilities haveconfrontedthepractical realitiesof order-buildingin collaboration with other international actors. These initiatives vary widely in terms of their geographic scope, issue area, level of institutional formality, as well as the extent of Chinese leadership in institutional creation.24 It is evident thatnot allof them can be painted with the same brush. They range from informal and largely Chinese initiatives such as the various China-led regional forums,25 through to new formal intergovernmental organizations, such as the AIIB.26 Some, such as the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO) or the ASEAN +3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) hardlyfit the picture of Chinese hegemony painted by Lim and Ikenberry, but consist ofclassical intergovernmental organizationsthatlargely reproducethe social purposes of existing governancemechanisms. Others, such as the World Internet Conference and the South-South Human Rights Forum, aremuch looserarrangements andmore closely reflectChina’s normative and policy preferences. They may therefore come closer to Lim and Ikenberry’s characterization of Chinese hegemony. But thevariousnessof China’s order-building activities should not be ignored.It is surprising that Lim and Ikenberry devote so little attention to such institutions, especially in light of their previous analysis of “China’s institutional statecraft” through the AIIB.27 Despite the apparent success of such an initiative, Lim and Ikenberry maintain that“in
45DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updateobserved practice Chinaconsistentlyseeks to sideline multilateral mechanisms and elevate bilateral approachesover issues affecting core national interests”.28 They cite China’s position in maritime sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea in support of this statement.29 They claim that China favors “a model of loose, informal, and primarily bilateral mechanisms of conflict resolution” which inherently privileges powerful states and confers “a baseline illiberal character on the emerging order.”30 Incontrastto these claims, theChineseandAmericanapproachesto multilateralismactually have alot in common. WhileChinahas indeed rejected the findings ofthe international arbitral tribunal constituted under the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in relation to territorial claims in the South China Sea, theUnited States is not even a party to the convention.31 Meanwhile, theUnited States itself has become the greatest threat tothe viability of theWTO, arguably the keystone multilateral institution of liberal international order. Frustration with the WTO has led the US to impose wide-ranging tariffs and to scuttle the WTO dispute settlement mechanism by blocking the appointment of Appellate Body judges.32 In a clear challenge to Lim and Ikenberry’s claims, China hasparticipatedin theEuropean Union’s initiativeto establish avoluntary and temporary initiative to keep the WTO’s own mechanism of conflict resolution afloat.33It remains too early to tell if this initiative can save the WTO from the fallout of the China-US trade rivalry and the widespread securitization of international trade and investment that has occurred in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet, it issimply misleadingto claimthat China’sinstrumental approachto multilateralism woulddistinguishits“illiberal” hegemonyfrom the“liberal” hegemony of theUnited States. There hasalways beensome wiggle roomin the “loosely” rule-based nature of America’s liberal international order. While there clearly are differences in the purposes and ideologies of the two powers, a selective and strategic approach to multilateral rules is common to both. Moreover, the institutions that China has actually created exist alongside, overlap with, and layer onto the institutions associated with liberal international order. This gives rise to novel inter-order dynamics. Whilesomeforces may tend towardsdrivingthe orders apartand encouraging a bifurcation of the global system, other forces—such asinter-institutional emulation, socialization, andcompetition—may encouragethe orders to converge.34 The resultmight be amore liberalChinese orderand a less liberal American one. Thinking in terms of rival hegemonic orders requires us to take the similarities as well as differences of Chinese and American approaches to international order-building into account, and to acknowledge the mutual overlaps and interactions that characterize the contemporary power shift.China won’trisk war.Dr. James H. Nolt 24, PhD, Adjunct Professor at New York University, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute, 1-29-2024, "Geography Limits China’s Possibilities as a Sea Power," China-US Focus, https://www.chinausfocus.com/peace-security/geography-limits-chinas-possibilities-as-a-sea-powerDespite some easing of U.S.-China tensions, there remains a steady drumbeat of punditand politician warningsabout the supposed dire military threatfrom China. I have been publishing articles on the military balance inEast Asiafor nearly three decades, each one refuting the notion that the threat of Chinese aggression is imminent; peace prevails, as I predicted.
46DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateThe reasons areseveral: nuclear deterrence, the vastly greatermilitary spending of the U.S.and its allies, a balance of forcesthat favors US hegemony in the air and on the sea, the lack ofserious Chinese intentto launcha career of aggression, which is illustratedmore byactions—asteady and fairly low percentage ofits GDP spent on militarypreparations—than by sometimes muscular rhetoric, etc. However, thereis one major consideration seldom acknowledged that makes China’s capacity to project powerforcefully far weakerandless sensitive to marginal changes in the balance of power that is largely ignored: geography. Like Russia, Germany and the former Austria-Hungary, China is largely landlocked. No matter how big a navy Germany tried to build, Britain stood as an unassailable fortress astride its sea lines of communication, easily able to intercept its warships and interdict its trade. Even during World War Two, when Germany gained the ports of France, its ability to operate submarines across the Atlantic improved, but its trade outside the Baltic remained severed. Most of its large warships were lost during futile attempts to operate past Britain. The USSR was similarly constrained geographically by the US and its many allies during the Cold War. Its fleet was divided into four geographically isolated parts, none of which had free access to open ocean without passing dangerously near U.S. allies and bases. Overseas trade for the USSR during wartime would have been hopeless. Even against a much smaller power, Japan, during their 1904-05 war, Russia could not concentrate its much larger fleet. Its Pacific bases were easily blockaded by Japanese naval forces. These powers were all constrained from being sea powers, not just by the unfavorable balance of forces, but even more by geographical barriers. Military propagandists largely neglect these geographical realities. It is long been said that China is building a “blue water navy” capable of traversing the world’s oceans as a great power. Yes, but only in peace time. The daythat anymajor war breaks out, China’s overseas trade stops. Its ports, but notthose of its adversaries, are instantly blockaded. Any warships outside its home waters would be tracked down and sunk. This geographical fact is insensitive to the balance of forces. China’s navy could be five timesas big; it stillwould notbe a true blue water navy because during ashooting war its fleet would be vulnerable even in its owncoastal waters, yet also unable to venture into the open seas without catastrophic losses. This is similar to Germany’s situation in both world wars. There is a very important reason geography is even more constrainingtodaythan it would have been a century ago: air power trumpssea power. World War Two proved that surface navies cannot operate safely outside the cover of friendly air power. Only three navies then, the American, British, and Japanese, operated enough aircraft carriers to venture near enemy land-based air control. During 1943, with irreplaceable losses of aircraft carriers and veteran pilots, plus the American completion of large classes of new carriers, the far-flung Japanese Empire lost the capacity to defend its own internal shipping lanes, island bases, and surface navy. Its defeat became inevitable. The lessons of naval combat since World War Two have only further amplified air power dominance. New forms of land-based air power, including drones and anti-shipping missiles (ASMs), are ever more cost-effective additions to the arsenals of land-powers geographically able to interdict sea trade and naval operations. Most pundits have missed this as well, or even gotten it backwards. Most recently, the Houthi attacks on shippingthrough the vital Red Sea have been used to exaggerate the potential Chinese threat to shippingin the event of a war in East Asia. Once again, geography is ignored. The Houthi forces are astride a very narrow part of the shortest route from Europe to Asia. Shipping can divert around Africa, but the route is much longer and thus more expensive. China does have ASMs and dronesin abundance, but most can only reach itsown coastal waters, which are critical for its ownshipping—and Taiwan’s—but not anybody else’s. Ships from Japanor South Korea that now pass through the East China
47DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateSea could easilydivert east of the Philippines, out of range of air power based in China. China’s geographical situation lacks the Houthi advantage. Even Chinese submarineswould be vulnerable to air poweroutside the protection of their land-based fighter aircraft, which reach only about 500 kilometers from its land bases. China’s fewaircraft carrierswith small fighter forces embarked would have a hard time defending themselvesfrom land-based air attacks—let alone from any of the larger and far more numerous U.S. aircraft carriers—to be of much use, except perhaps against an especially weak regional power. The effectiveness of the Houthi—andalso of Ukraineagainst the Russian Black Sea fleet—underlines China’sown greater vulnerabilityto the new generation of naval weapons, drones and ASMs, in additionto conventional air power. Chinese warships, not to mention transports carrying troops for any seaborne invasion, such as against Taiwan, are vulnerable even within its owncoastal waters. Such aerial weapons are relatively inexpensive, highly accurate, easy to hide, and notso easy to intercept. This was demonstrated by the handful of Ukrainian missilesthat destroyedmostof the major Russian warshipsin the Black Sea, which were defended as well as Chinese ships would be. Even a power controlling the air has considerable difficulty finding and suppressing ASMs and drones before they can be launched. Taiwan has a vastly larger arsenal of ASMs than does Ukraine. Furthermore, in the event of a crisis in the Taiwan Straits, the U.S. could rapidly airlift additional supplies to Taiwan, largely neutralizing any Chinese invasion threat. In any case, China’samphibious liftcapability istoo smallto transportand supplya force anywhere near large enough to overcome Taiwan’sground forces. Effectively, China is constrained by geography. Given this, the balance of forces and capabilities is not sensitive to incremental developments.No China-ledorder. They aren’t revisionist, BUT are constrainedregardless.Dr. Matthew D. Stephen 24, PhD, Senior Researcher, WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Member, Heisenberg Programme of the German Research Foundation, "China and the Limits of Hypothetical Hegemony," Security Studies, Vol. 33, Issue 1, pg. 153-156, 02/29/2024, T&F.Other aspects of Lim and Ikenberry’s analysis should be approached more critically. First, thinking in terms ofrivalinternational hegemonic orders—oneAmerican-led andliberal, oneChinese-led and illiberal—obscuresthe commonalitiesthat both powers share and makes itdifficultto account for theinstitutional complexityof the contemporary power shift. Neither theUnited States norChinais aconsistentupholder of thecurrent international order, and both powers displaydissatisfactionwith the structures, practices, and social purposes ofmany of its established institutions. An alternative approach is to think about China’sorder-building activitieslessas an alternativehegemonic systemthan as a layered order on top of an already institutionalized, butincreasinglycontested, status quo. This would also highlight the deep overlaps and interactions between US-led and China-led orders. Second, Lim and Ikenberry’s ideal-typical approach to theorizingChineseinternational order-buildinglargely ignores the role that China hasalreadyplayed in buildingactually existing institutionsof international order. While their ideal-typical model offers an interesting thought experiment into the nature of a hypothetical Chinese hegemony, amore empiricalapproach revealsa moredifferentiatedpicture of Chinese order-building characterized byinstitutional overlap, interaction, andforces of convergenceas well as divergence. This highlights the limits of Lim and Ikenberry’s hypothetical approach to hegemony.
48DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateThe Institutional Complexity of the Contemporary Power ShiftThe traditional approach to international hegemonic order-building assumes a largely clear space upon which hegemonic orders can be constructed.3 The key mechanism behind the creation of such clear spaces is hegemonic war. Scholars view such wars as loosening constraints on action and creating new distributions of power which facilitate “the rebuilding of order after major wars.”4 Yet, thecurrent shiftin international powerhas not(praise be) given risetoa hegemonic war, and any effort at hegemonic order-building needs to depart from an already institutionalized international order.Lim and Ikenberry acknowledge this reality when they note that “[t]he absence of agreat-power warand the continuingglobal presenceof theUnited States makes aclean breakand a fresh start impossible.”5 But they regard the absence of a clean slate primarily as a methodological challenge to divining what a Chinese-led international order would look like under ideal conditions. They largely set aside the issue of how well their ideal type describes themessy empirical reality, which isan outcome not onlyofChina’s preferencesbutof theconstraintsofexisting structures andthe actions and reactions ofother statesand actors.6 This is a missed opportunity for exploring the institutional complexity of the contemporary power shift. First, while there is much truth to the claim that Chinahas emerged in a global order thatembodiesa liberal social purpose deriving from prolongedWestern dominance,7 it would be a gross oversimplification to assumethat the United States is the upholder of liberal international order while Chinais seeking toreviseor replace it.8 Lim and Ikenberry acknowledge this complexity but neither engage with it nor integrate it into their theorizing. Putting aside conceptual objections that the very notion of a singular liberal international order obscures more than it reveals,9 numerous scholars have shown how both theUnited States andChinareject some aspects ofestablished institutions and norms while supporting others.10 For example, while China rejects traditional liberal interpretations of human rights, itconsistently signalssupport forthe authority of theUnited Nations Security Council.11 Likewise, while the United States largely supports institutions where it enjoys institutional privileges, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, it frequently challenges other rules and institutions associatedwith liberal international order, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations Human Rights Council.12 At times it has even challenged some of the most basic norms of international society, such as the peaceful settlement of disputes.13 The partial and selective support ofboth major powers forexistinginternational institutionssignificantly complicatesthepicture of anilliberal great powerrising up in a liberal order dominated by a liberal hegemon. Both China and the United States can act as challengers to or defenders of established order, depending on the issue at stake.Second, the existence of apre-existinginstitutional orderchanges theincentivestructurefor a rising China to engage inalternativeorder-building. Lim and Ikenberry make an important point when they state that the Chinesestate seeks to make the international environmentmore amenableto itsdomestic governance arrangements. Yet thisdoes notnecessarily requirethe construction of an alternative international order. Rather, the promotion ofnewnormsand institutions takes placealongsideattempts to bring establishedpractices and institutionsmore closely into linewith China’s preferences. The case of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) highlights that rather than institutional “creation” being an alternative choice to institutional “change”,14 both strategies can be pursued simultaneously. The different strategies areoften complementary, as both the threat and actual creation of additional institutions can increase leverage over existing ones. The fact that China confrontsanalready stronglyinstitutionalized international orderlimitsboth theincentivesandthe capacityfor China to construct an alternative order. Under conditions of uncertainty, resource scarcity, and satisficing rather than maximizing, the promotion of an alternative Chinese order seemsless likelythanthe piecemeallayering of additional institutions onto existing ones.15
49DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateThird, conceptualizing analternativeChinese orderin ideal-typical terms downplaysthe extent to which different orders overlap and interact. Institutional overlap exists when two or more institutions share both policy tasks and membership.16 Hegemonic orders canoverlapin a similar manner. Lim and Ikenberry are probably correct to argue that authoritarian governments will find China’s approach to international cooperation attractive as it neutralizes challenges to their political legitimacy and offers pragmatic benefits. Yet, there isalso significant evidencethat Chinese order-building attracts followersregardlessof regime type. For example, more than half of the membership of the (China-led) AIIB are also members of the (US- and Japan-led) Asian Development Bank, and both institutions are nested within the broader membership of the World Bank Group. Fewcountries seethese institutions asmutually exclusive, even as eachinstitution exhibitsdifferentnormative and policy priorities.17 Although the United States government has made some effort to propagate a democratic/authoritarian divide as a new ideological cleavage in international order, one study foundno evidencethat regime type or domestic human rights practices played a role inshapingstates’ participation inChina’s Belt and Road Forumfor International Cooperation.18 Several countries typically seen as key members of the American hegemonic order, such as Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, are already more economically dependent on China than with any other country.19 India, a major emerging power, insists on its strategic autonomy and combines membership of the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with membership in the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). The existence of a large degree of overlapcomplicatesthe idea of analternativeChina-led orderstrengthening illiberalism, and highlights the degree of integration and overlapbetween different orders, each of which can reflect different social purposes and varying degrees of American or Chinese leadership.China won’trisk conflict.Dr. Jinghao Zhou 23, PhD, Associate Professor, Asian Studies, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, "War Is Not Imminent During the Great Power Competition," in Great Power Competition as the New Normal of China–US Relations, Chapter 8, 2023, pg. 215-225.Even if China is willing to fulfill its mission by launching a war with the U.S., can Chinaafford it? First, the top Chinese leader isnot ready for warwith U.S. China willnotbe able to take a riskwithoutinternal coordination and support.The voice of China’s foreign policy comes from different departments. They arenotwell coordinatedand lackastrategywith a long-term vision. China does not have asystemformaking consistent and workable foreign policy, and the top leader has not gained sufficient power to manage foreign relations. China is facing amountain of domestic problems, includingcorruptionin the military. The Chinese governmenthas learned the lessonthat a combination of internal violence and external conflict can contribute to thecollapseof the regime. Now XiJinping ismore likely to focus onChina’sdomesticissues especially thepandemicandits consequences ineconomicandfinancialareas. Xi’s top prioritybefore the 20th Congress of the CCP is tocarefully manage thepower balanceamong factions in the party, attempting to ensure his third term of presidency. After the 20th Congress, Xi will take some time to reorganize the system and put new policies in place. It is not wise for the CCP to takemilitary risksin dealing with territorial disputes with various countries at the same time as it tries to maintaindomesticsocial stability. China cannot afford to fight against multiple countries at the same time because the U.S. hasmilitary treatieswith several allies in the region. Taking military actions couldpossibly destroyXi’s China Dream, his lifelong presidency, his domestic agenda andChina’s global ambitionseventually. Considering all these challenges, Chinese leadersmay continuetheir efforts torebalancethe relationship between China and the U.S. while boostingthe economic growthand preparing the unification with Taiwan after the 20th National Congress of the CCP in 2022.Second, Chinahas understoodthat any conflictbetween China and the U.S. would be aglobaldisaster, especially between the two nuclear powers.78 A war between the two giants is unthinkable.79 It could be a Third World War if the U.S. had a war with
50DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateChina.80 China now has 260 nuclear weapons in its stockpile, while the U.S. has 4670 or more. Chinapromised that it would implement a“No first use” nuclear policy, implying that the country possesses nuclear weapons only to deter other states from a nuclear attack and expresses the purely self-defensive nature of China’s nuclear strategy. More fundamentally, it has demonstrated aviable path towardinternational nuclear disarmament.81 Many China experts “appear not to be worried by China’s rapidly growing nuclear capabilities, because Beijing’s official policy promisesthat China will not be thefirstto employ nuclear weapons in a conflict. Beijing promises that its nuclear forces are for deterrence and retaliation only, not for aggression.”82 However, China continues to develop its nuclear weapons. China is likely to double the size of its nuclear stockpile in a few years.83 U.S. militaryleaders are not as naïve as academics about China’s “no first use” pledge. Charles Richard, chief of U.S. Strategic Command, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that he could “drive a truck through China’s ‘no first use’ policy, because China’s unprecedented rapid expansion of its nuclear and missile capabilities is not consistent with a belief in ‘minimum deterrence’ and ‘no first use.’”84 In January 2022, five global nuclear powers who are the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the U.S., the UK, Russia, China, and France, signed a joint statement and agreed to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading and to ensure a nuclear war would not happen. The agreement itself is a positive sign, indicating that nuclear deterrence is working and there will be no massive war between China and the U.S.85 Practically, it is hard to trust a dictator’s words. In March 2022, Putin already put nuclear deterrent forces on high alert and attacked Europe’s largest nuclear plant just a month after Russia signed the joint statement.Third, the Chinese economy and militaryarenot strong enoughto support warwith the U.S. China will unlikely enter to war if it cannot win because the CCPcannotafford a loss. China will wage war when it sees itself winning at least cost. Chinais the fastest-growing economy in the world but there are manymore statistics thatcome to the front of arguments, which question thesize of the Chineseeconomy and its actual economicsituation. The economic and social consequences ofzero-casetolerance policy areclearly serious and far-reaching. China is still a developing country. China doesnotrank among the 100 richestnationsbased on per capita. Among 1.4 billion people, about 50% of Chinese people live in rural areas, 400 million people live on less than $2 a day, and 200 million people live on less than a dollar per day. Even if China will continue its economic growth for years, it mayneversurpass the U.S. because it facesmany obstacles.86 U.S. military spending growsaspolicy shiftsto“prioritize China” with$813.3 billionin 2022 while China’smilitary spending has reached$230billionin 2022. China’s military budget is only about 28% of the U.S. The PLA has approximately 975,000 active-duty personnel, the largest navy in the world with an overall battle force of approximately 355 ships and submarines, the largestaviation force in the region and the third largest in the world, with over 2800 total aircraft of which approximately 2250 are combat aircraft. China develops new intercontinental ballistic missiles, continues to increase its inventory of road-mobile DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM), and has its first operational hypersonic weapons system, the DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), and medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM). China is determined to build a “world-class” military by the end of 2049.87 However, thecomprehensivepowerof the PLAstill lags far behindthe U.S.If China learned a lesson fromRussia’s failures in the invasion of Ukraine, it should never take on the U.S. head even when fully modernized. Although China’s navy, ground troop, and air forces have developed rapidly in the past two decades, consideringthequalityandoverall strengthof the military, as well asthe strength of military alliances, China wouldlosethe war if it launched a war with the U.S.Any war withthe U.S. will be near its shores where the U.S. will have adecisivewinning advantage.88Fourth, China will feeldifficultto justify a warwith U.S. Military strength is the basis for consideration if China goes to war. If China’s military power is at anabsolute advantage, itstill lacks thepre-conditionsfor war with the U.S.If China’s military power evenly matches with the U.S., it should be cautious about starting a war. China has not arrived at the stage to initiate a war. Military power is not simply about military budget and weapons. Realwar experiencemust be taken into consideration. China does not have realmilitary experience to win amodernwarwith the U.S. After the establishment of the PRC, China went to conventional war several times, including the Korean War, the war with India (1967), and the Vietnam War (1979). It cannot rule out that China will follow the same pattern to go to war in the future. However, the Iraq war and the 2022 War between Russia and Ukraine indicate that contemporary war is completely different from traditional war. Chinese military power is untested in the contemporary military war. Moreover, the CCP has not faced an immediate military threat from the U.S. Military experts’ research projects on when and why Beijinguses forcehave reached asimilarconclusion: China attacks not whenit
51DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatefeelsconfidentabout the future, but when itworriesits enemies are closing in. Thomas Christensen, the director of the China and the World Program at Columbia University, points out that the Chinese Communist Party wages war when it perceives an opening window of vulnerability regarding its territory and immediate periphery, or a closing window of opportunity to consolidate control over disputed areas. This pattern holdsregardlessof the strength of China’s opponent.89 The BidenAdministration has made it clearthat the U.S. does not intend to change the Chinese regimewhile competing with China on various fronts. When China does not face a direct military threat from the U.S., the CCP does not havereasonto take risk of going to war.Fifth, it could be asuicidemissionif China decided to go to warwith the U.S. before improving its military quality. Thequality ofmilitary commandersis the keyto win or defeat in wars. The quality of fighters and the wisdom of commanders are inseparable. Wise commanders should be capable of planning and deploying a variety of plans before the war starts. Even if Chinese military power cannot match the U.S. as long as they can carry out military strikes at a right time and at a favorable location, China can still win. Overall, Chinese military commandersdo notpossesssuch a quality. Soldier qualities include military skills and knowledge, actual combat and decision-making capabilities, physical endurance, and psychological qualities. Since the war between China and Vietnam in 1979, China has been no war with other countries for more than 40 years. China’s active military personnel grew up in peacetime and enlisted in a peaceful environment. During the forty years of reform and opening-up period, the military is inevitably influenced by the peaceful lifestyle. Although Chinahas dramaticallyincreased military expenditures and speeded upits military modernization, the PLA obviously lackssufficient actualcombat exercises, involving the integration of sea,land, and air battles. In recent years, China has tried to improve its military combat effectiveness, but the Chinese military has along way to catch upwiththe U.S.’ experienceof real war. The one-child policy seriously affects the quality of the military. China’s active military personnel have grown up in a relatively superior environment, and men will be particularly favored regardless ofwhether they come from the city or the countryside, so they lack self-care ability, communication skills, patience, and endurance. Their personal character is very fragile and is likely to collapse on the battlefield.Sixth, the morale of the Chinese army is low. The morale of the army is thespiritual pillarin the war; morale makes the war invincible under certain conditions; and the army would be a mess without morale. Morale is not an empty political slogan, but it is courage anddetermination when they face the enemy. Morale is not injected by propaganda but is nurtured by faith and the example of officers and actual interests. Under the one-party system and the rigid censorship system, Chinese soldierslike all Chinese citizens have beenbrainwashedby communist ideas. The injectedso-called communist beliefwithout faith could besuddenlycollapsed during a real war in a real world. In addition, China’s corruption issystematic, and the military isno exceptionfrom the top to the bottomof the military system. By January 2015, sixteen senior military officers were under investigation for accusations of corruption. These officers are at the corps level or above. They include one general, four lieutenant generals, nine major generals, and one senior colonel. After Xu Caihou, former vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, was caught in 2014, theCPC began to investigate Guo Boxiong in 2015, the second former top military officer on suspicion of corruption. Fang Fenghui, China’s military chief of staff was jailed for life for corruption in 2019. Military corruption deadly threatens China’s security and degrades China’s military capability in protecting its nation. One of the causes of the Nationalist government’s defeat was corruption, which destroyed the morale of the military. Chinese soldiershave witnessedsystematic corruptionin the post-Mao era, so they will notbe willing tosacrificeforcorrupted Chinesemilitary leaders. To regain morale, China must reform its political system, clean up corrupted military officials, change the compulsory military service system, and improve Chinese soldiers’ salaries and benefits.Seventh, peaceful resolution toresolve territorial disputesremains the first choiceforbothsides. The goal of diplomacy is to persuade your enemy to surrender without a fight. A weak country does not have diplomacy. National comprehensive power determines diplomatic confidence; and military power and popular support provide the precondition for winning war. If a country’s comprehensive power is insufficient, it can only deal with territory disputer through unequal diplomacy. If the military is powerful and the people’s aspirations are strong, military force deterrence should cooperate with diplomatic means. If a country is not ready, it must not advocate war. Otherwise, the government would lose its credibility at home and abroad. China andthe U.S.still havesufficienttime to takediplomatic measuresto fulfill their missionwithoutany cost. In addition, a possible war over theSouth China Sea andthe TaiwanStrait is not a conventional land war but sea-air warfare. If war occurs
52DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updateover the region, the U.S.superiorityin theASBis still absolute and China’s military attempts wouldfailalthough China has massive ground troops and the largest size of navy force in the world.Eighth, Russiacould be a negative equity for China on the global stage and willnot help Chinawin war with the U.S. afterRussian invasion of Ukraine. China hasvery few allieswhereas American allies in the Pacific includeJapan, Australia, andSouth Korea. While China is losing its neighboring friends, the U.S. has beenstrengtheningits alliance with China’s neighboring countries, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Afghanistan, and India. Other countries, such asVietnam, Malaysia, andMyanmarare drawing closerto the U.S. The Chinese government views the regional tension as the outcome of Washington’s “returning to Asia” policy. Under this circumstance, China needshelpfrom Russia to avoid escalating confrontationswith multiple neighboring countries. In a global context, Russia has played a considerable role in China–U.S. relations since the Cold War. The recent development of China–Russia relations has once again raised American concerns about the implications of Beijing–Moscow relations. Many experts believe that China’s motive for deepening its relations with Russia is anti-America. According to the joint statement between Russia and China released before the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games, the two countries’ relationship has no limits and there are no forbidden areas. Now there are two parallel geopolitical conflicts—the Ukraine–Russia war and China–U.S. tension over the Taiwan Strait. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reaffirmed that the China–Russia partnership is solid as stone and the Sino-Russian partnership continues, no matter how serious the international situation is. China’s current stance seems that China has fully thrown itself into a de facto alliance with Russia.China and Russia are almost impossible to form a solid partnership. Superficially, the top leaders of the two countries can get along but their personal relationship cannot be automatically translated into foreign policy and military alliances. The restoration of the friendship between Beijing and Moscow is mainly driven by their domestic pressures and security concerns. A stable relationship between the two countries will relieve the financial burdens in support of the hostility along the sizeable border. Beijing and Moscow also have common interests to work together. Beijing demands more oil and natural gas from Russia and needs more advanced military weapons supplies, including submarines, warships, and aircraft. Russia wants more investments from China to speed up the development of the Russian economy. Arguably, China does not really need military technologies from Russia. For example, the Chinese J-20 fighter is more advanced than Su-35, equivalent to Russia’s T50 and the U.S. F-22. The purpose of China to purchase 24 Su-35 is not to bridge the gap between Chinese and U.S. military power, but to show its sincerity to consolidate its ties with Russia by offering economic incentives. Strategically, they believe that the two nations face similar strategic challenge posed by the U.S. and its allies: NATO expansion for Russia and the U.S. conflicts with China over the Taiwan Strait. On the global stage, they stand against American hegemony with sovereignty and non-intervention astheir core values.90China’s quick move closer to Russia has not convinced the Russian people to believe that China is trustworthy in part because of the inconsistency of Chinese foreign policy. China aligned with Russia in the 1950s and with the U.S. in the 1970s but implemented a nonaligned policy in the 1980s. In recent years, the Russian protests against the Chinese economic invasion have taken place from time to time. The most recent Russian protests took place in March 2019, which were triggered by a China-funded project to bottle water from Russia’s Lake Baikal that has caused environmental problems and made Russian people very angry. The Russian protests indicate that the China–Russia tie is fragile.91 China’s move closer to Russia has received a lukewarm response from public opinion in China. The Chinese people also have reasons to doubt Moscow’s sincerity. China is not happy that Russia has maintained close military ties with and sold advanced weapons to India and Vietnam, both are locked in territorial disputes with China.92 From a historical perspective, Russia occupied China’s territories totaling more than four million square kilometers from 1689 to 1898, forced China to sign the Yalta Agreement for recognizing Outer Mongolia as an independent country in the 1940s, and stopped all financial and technological aid during the Chinese economic crisis in the 1960s. Finally, Zhen Bao Island military conflict in Heilongjiang Province broke out in 1969. Although in 1991 Russia acknowledged that the island belonged to China, the tension between the two countries along the 2500 miles long border remained high until the Chinese military troops retreated 500 km in 2008. In addition, China cannot forget that Russia took the territories in northeast China more than 100 years ago. On 2 July 2020, the Russian embassy in Beijing posted a video of a party celebrating the 160th anniversary of the founding of Vladivostok, which means “ruler of the east” in Russian and was annexed from China by the Tsarist empire in 1860. The video reminded the Chinese emotions over historic wounds and prompted an online backlash with the posts such as “Today we can only endure, but the Chinese people will remember!” “This ancestral land will return home in the future!”93 In comparison with China–U.S. relations, the U.S. never had a single territory dispute with China, so the Chinese people have not had a similar historical complex towardthe U.S. The mutual distrust between China and Russia partially explains why Chinese students do not enthusiastically choose to study in Russia. According to Russian media, in 2020, only about 48,000 Chinese students studied in Russian universities while 20,000 Russian students were in Chinese universities.94 By contrast, more than 317,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. institutions in 2020/21 regardless of Covid-19 spread across the country. The list of other favorite destinations for Chinese students does not include Russia, but Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, and South Korea. As a result, Russian culture has little impact on Chinese society and intellectual circle while American culture is very popular in China. The future of Sino-Russia relations will be tested by public opinion in both countries. It is expected that it would be difficult for both countries to continue drawing closer without the support of the public opinion.For now, the status of Sino-Russia relations is not a full-fledged alliance, but a quasi-alliance. It seems that China and Russia are closer than ever. Although a close relationship between China and Russia could help China to get more advantage in bargaining with the U.S. to smoothly solve its territorial disputes with neighboring countries, in the long run, China willgainless but lose morein thegreat power competitionwhen China movescloser to Russia. Moscow and Beijing are on their honeymoon now, but it may not last long. On the one hand, China’s initial move closer to Russia reflects that Chinese leaders lack confidence in dealing with potential regional crises alone. Beijing does not necessarily have the intention to save Russia, but it must save the Putin’s regime in order to retain Xi Jinping’s power and the one-party system. On the other hand, Russia will not satisfy with its lower position under Xi’s umbrella after Russia becomes significantly weaker because of the failures of Putin’s war with Ukraine. Russian ambassador already made it clear that Russia does not seek an alliance with China. If China unilaterally pursued the goal, the result would be poor. Therefore, it is un-matured to predict that China and Russia will become alliances in a decade. According to Schell-Shirk China Task Force, “China’s alignment is not set in stone. There are significant ways in which China’s long-term national interests are not, in fact, aligned with Russia’s, and deft U.S. diplomacy might still be able to find ways to temper Beijing’s alliance with Moscow.”95 In the long term, Beijing and Moscow might have more potential conflicts than cooperation and could become main competitors or rivals down the road. It isnot wisefor Chinese leaders todistancethemselves from the
53DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateU.S. byoverplayingthe “Russian card.”Essentially, China–U.S. relationswill continue to be thetop priorityof China’s foreign policy, when the CCP carefully balances the triangle relations between China and the U.S. and Russia.China won’trisk conflict.Dr. Jinghao Zhou 23, PhD, Associate Professor, Asian Studies, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, "War Is Not Imminent During the Great Power Competition," in Great Power Competition as the New Normal of China–US Relations, Chapter 8, 2023, pg. 215-225.Even if China is willing to fulfill its mission by launching a war with the U.S., can Chinaafford it? First, the top Chinese leader isnot ready for warwith U.S. China willnotbe able to take a riskwithoutinternal coordination and support.The voice of China’s foreign policy comes from different departments. They arenotwell coordinatedand lackastrategywith a long-term vision. China does not have asystemformaking consistent and workable foreign policy, and the top leader has not gained sufficient power to manage foreign relations. China is facing amountain of domestic problems, includingcorruptionin the military. The Chinese governmenthas learned the lessonthat a combination of internal violence and external conflict can contribute to thecollapseof the regime. Now XiJinping ismore likely to focus onChina’sdomesticissues especially thepandemicandits consequences ineconomicandfinancialareas. Xi’s top prioritybefore the 20th Congress of the CCP is tocarefully manage thepower balanceamong factions in the party, attempting to ensure his third term of presidency. After the 20th Congress, Xi will take some time to reorganize the system and put new policies in place. It is not wise for the CCP to takemilitary risksin dealing with territorial disputes with various countries at the same time as it tries to maintaindomesticsocial stability. China cannot afford to fight against multiple countries at the same time because the U.S. hasmilitary treatieswith several allies in the region. Taking military actions couldpossibly destroyXi’s China Dream, his lifelong presidency, his domestic agenda andChina’s global ambitionseventually. Considering all these challenges, Chinese leadersmay continuetheir efforts torebalancethe relationship between China and the U.S. while boostingthe economic growthand preparing the unification with Taiwan after the 20th National Congress of the CCP in 2022.Second, Chinahas understoodthat any conflictbetween China and the U.S. would be aglobaldisaster, especially between the two nuclear powers.78 A war between the two giants is unthinkable.79 It could be a Third World War if the U.S. had a war with China.80 China now has 260 nuclear weapons in its stockpile, while the U.S. has 4670 or more. Chinapromised that it would implement a“No first use” nuclear policy, implying that the country possesses nuclear weapons only to deter other states from a nuclear attack and expresses the purely self-defensive nature of China’s nuclear strategy. More fundamentally, it has demonstrated aviable path towardinternational nuclear disarmament.81 Many China experts “appear not to be worried by China’s rapidly growing nuclear capabilities, because Beijing’s official policy promisesthat China will not be thefirstto employ nuclear weapons in a conflict. Beijing promises that its nuclear forces are for deterrence and retaliation only, not for aggression.”82 However, China continues to develop its nuclear weapons. China is likely to double the size of its nuclear stockpile in a few years.83 U.S. militaryleaders are not as naïve as academics about China’s “no first use” pledge. Charles Richard, chief of U.S. Strategic Command, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that he could “drive a truck through China’s ‘no first use’ policy, because China’s unprecedented rapid expansion of its nuclear and missile capabilities is not consistent with a belief in ‘minimum deterrence’ and ‘no first use.’”84 In January 2022, five global nuclear powers who are the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the U.S., the UK, Russia, China, and France, signed a joint statement and agreed to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading and to ensure a nuclear war would not happen. The agreement itself is a positive sign, indicating that nuclear deterrence is working and there will be no massive war between China and the U.S.85 Practically, it is hard to trust a dictator’s words. In March 2022, Putin already put nuclear deterrent forces on high alert and attacked Europe’s largest nuclear plant just a month after Russia signed the joint statement.
54DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateThird, the Chinese economy and militaryarenot strong enoughto support warwith the U.S. China will unlikely enter to war if it cannot win because the CCPcannotafford a loss. China will wage war when it sees itself winning at least cost. Chinais the fastest-growing economy in the world but there are manymore statistics thatcome to the front of arguments, which question thesize of the Chineseeconomy and its actual economicsituation. The economic and social consequences ofzero-casetolerance policy areclearly serious and far-reaching. China is still a developing country. China doesnotrank among the 100 richestnationsbased on per capita. Among 1.4 billion people, about 50% of Chinese people live in rural areas, 400 million people live on less than $2 a day, and 200 million people live on less than a dollar per day. Even if China will continue its economic growth for years, it mayneversurpass the U.S. because it facesmany obstacles.86 U.S. military spending growsaspolicy shiftsto“prioritize China” with$813.3 billionin 2022 while China’smilitary spending has reached$230billionin 2022. China’s military budget is only about 28% of the U.S. The PLA has approximately 975,000 active-duty personnel, the largest navy in the world with an overall battle force of approximately 355 ships and submarines, the largestaviation force in the region and the third largest in the world, with over 2800 total aircraft of which approximately 2250 are combat aircraft. China develops new intercontinental ballistic missiles, continues to increase its inventory of road-mobile DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM), and has its first operational hypersonic weapons system, the DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), and medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM). China is determined to build a “world-class” military by the end of 2049.87 However, thecomprehensivepowerof the PLAstill lags far behindthe U.S.If China learned a lesson fromRussia’s failures in the invasion of Ukraine, it should never take on the U.S. head even when fully modernized. Although China’s navy, ground troop, and air forces have developed rapidly in the past two decades, consideringthequalityandoverall strengthof the military, as well asthe strength of military alliances, China wouldlosethe war if it launched a war with the U.S.Any war withthe U.S. will be near its shores where the U.S. will have adecisivewinning advantage.88Fourth, China will feeldifficultto justify a warwith U.S. Military strength is the basis for consideration if China goes to war. If China’s military power is at anabsolute advantage, itstill lacks thepre-conditionsfor war with the U.S.If China’s military power evenly matches with the U.S., it should be cautious about starting a war. China has not arrived at the stage to initiate a war. Military power is not simply about military budget and weapons. Realwar experiencemust be taken into consideration. China does not have realmilitary experience to win amodernwarwith the U.S. After the establishment of the PRC, China went to conventional war several times, including the Korean War, the war with India (1967), and the Vietnam War (1979). It cannot rule out that China will follow the same pattern to go to war in the future. However, the Iraq war and the 2022 War between Russia and Ukraine indicate that contemporary war is completely different from traditional war. Chinese military power is untested in the contemporary military war. Moreover, the CCP has not faced an immediate military threat from the U.S. Military experts’ research projects on when and why Beijinguses forcehave reached asimilarconclusion: China attacks not whenit feelsconfidentabout the future, but when itworriesits enemies are closing in. Thomas Christensen, the director of the China and the World Program at Columbia University, points out that the Chinese Communist Party wages war when it perceives an opening window of vulnerability regarding its territory and immediate periphery, or a closing window of opportunity to consolidate control over disputed areas. This pattern holdsregardlessof the strength of China’s opponent.89 The BidenAdministration has made it clearthat the U.S. does not intend to change the Chinese regimewhile competing with China on various fronts. When China does not face a direct military threat from the U.S., the CCP does not havereasonto take risk of going to war.Fifth, it could be asuicidemissionif China decided to go to warwith the U.S. before improving its military quality. Thequality ofmilitary commandersis the keyto win or defeat in wars. The quality of fighters and the wisdom of commanders are inseparable. Wise commanders should be capable of planning and deploying a variety of plans before the war starts. Even if Chinese military power cannot match the U.S. as long as they can carry out military strikes at a right time and at a favorable location, China can still win. Overall, Chinese military commandersdo notpossesssuch a quality. Soldier qualities include military skills and knowledge, actual combat and decision-making capabilities, physical endurance, and psychological qualities. Since the war between China and Vietnam in 1979,
55DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateChina has been no war with other countries for more than 40 years. China’s active military personnel grew up in peacetime and enlisted in a peaceful environment. During the forty years of reform and opening-up period, the military is inevitably influenced by the peaceful lifestyle. Although Chinahas dramaticallyincreased military expenditures and speeded upits military modernization, the PLA obviously lackssufficient actualcombat exercises, involving the integration of sea,land, and air battles. In recent years, China has tried to improve its military combat effectiveness, but the Chinese military has along way to catch upwiththe U.S.’ experienceof real war. The one-child policy seriously affects the quality of the military. China’s active military personnel have grown up in a relatively superior environment, and men will be particularly favored regardless ofwhether they come from the city or the countryside, so they lack self-care ability, communication skills, patience, and endurance. Their personal character is very fragile and is likely to collapse on the battlefield.Sixth, the morale of the Chinese army is low. The morale of the army is thespiritual pillarin the war; morale makes the war invincible under certain conditions; and the army would be a mess without morale. Morale is not an empty political slogan, but it is courage anddetermination when they face the enemy. Morale is not injected by propaganda but is nurtured by faith and the example of officers and actual interests. Under the one-party system and the rigid censorship system, Chinese soldierslike all Chinese citizens have beenbrainwashedby communist ideas. The injectedso-called communist beliefwithout faith could besuddenlycollapsed during a real war in a real world. In addition, China’s corruption issystematic, and the military isno exceptionfrom the top to the bottomof the military system. By January 2015, sixteen senior military officers were under investigation for accusations of corruption. These officers are at the corps level or above. They include one general, four lieutenant generals, nine major generals, and one senior colonel. After Xu Caihou, former vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission, was caught in 2014, theCPC began to investigate Guo Boxiong in 2015, the second former top military officer on suspicion of corruption. Fang Fenghui, China’s military chief of staff was jailed for life for corruption in 2019. Military corruption deadly threatens China’s security and degrades China’s military capability in protecting its nation. One of the causes of the Nationalist government’s defeat was corruption, which destroyed the morale of the military. Chinese soldiershave witnessedsystematic corruptionin the post-Mao era, so they will notbe willing tosacrificeforcorrupted Chinesemilitary leaders. To regain morale, China must reform its political system, clean up corrupted military officials, change the compulsory military service system, and improve Chinese soldiers’ salaries and benefits.Seventh, peaceful resolution toresolve territorial disputesremains the first choiceforbothsides. The goal of diplomacy is to persuade your enemy to surrender without a fight. A weak country does not have diplomacy. National comprehensive power determines diplomatic confidence; and military power and popular support provide the precondition for winning war. If a country’s comprehensive power is insufficient, it can only deal with territory disputer through unequal diplomacy. If the military is powerful and the people’s aspirations are strong, military force deterrence should cooperate with diplomatic means. If a country is not ready, it must not advocate war. Otherwise, the government would lose its credibility at home and abroad. China andthe U.S.still havesufficienttime to takediplomatic measuresto fulfill their missionwithoutany cost. In addition, a possible war over theSouth China Sea andthe TaiwanStrait is not a conventional land war but sea-air warfare. If war occursover the region, the U.S.superiorityin theASBis still absolute and China’s military attempts wouldfailalthough China has massive ground troops and the largest size of navy force in the world.Eighth, Russiacould be a negative equity for China on the global stage and willnot help Chinawin war with the U.S. afterRussian invasion of Ukraine. China hasvery few allieswhereas American allies in the Pacific includeJapan, Australia, andSouth Korea. While China is losing its neighboring friends, the U.S. has beenstrengtheningits alliance with China’s neighboring countries, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Afghanistan, and India. Other countries, such asVietnam, Malaysia, andMyanmarare drawing closerto the U.S. The Chinese government views the regional tension as the outcome of Washington’s “returning to Asia” policy. Under this circumstance, China needshelpfrom Russia to avoid escalating confrontationswith multiple neighboring countries. In a global context, Russia has played a considerable role in China–U.S. relations since the Cold War. The recent development of China–Russia relations has once again raised American concerns about the implications of Beijing–Moscow relations. Many experts believe that China’s motive for deepening its relations with Russia is anti-America. According to the joint statement between Russia and China released before the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games, the two countries’ relationship has no limits and there are no forbidden areas. Now there are two parallel geopolitical conflicts—the Ukraine–Russia war and China–U.S. tension over the Taiwan Strait. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reaffirmed that the China–Russia
56DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatepartnership is solid as stone and the Sino-Russian partnership continues, no matter how serious the international situation is. China’s current stance seems that China has fully thrown itself into a de facto alliance with Russia.China and Russia are almost impossible to form a solid partnership. Superficially, the top leaders of the two countries can get along but their personal relationship cannot be automatically translated into foreign policy and military alliances. The restoration of the friendship between Beijing and Moscow is mainly driven by their domestic pressures and security concerns. A stable relationship between the two countries will relieve the financial burdens in support of the hostility along the sizeable border. Beijing and Moscow also have common interests to work together. Beijing demands more oil and natural gas from Russia and needs more advanced military weapons supplies, including submarines, warships, and aircraft. Russia wants more investments from China to speed up the development of the Russian economy. Arguably, China does not really need military technologies from Russia. For example, the Chinese J-20 fighter is more advanced than Su-35, equivalent to Russia’s T50 and the U.S. F-22. The purpose of China to purchase 24 Su-35 is not to bridge the gap between Chinese and U.S. military power, but to show its sincerity to consolidate its ties with Russia by offering economic incentives. Strategically, they believe that the two nations face similar strategic challenge posed by the U.S. and its allies: NATO expansion for Russia and the U.S. conflicts with China over the Taiwan Strait. On the global stage, they stand against American hegemony with sovereignty and non-intervention astheir core values.90China’s quick move closer to Russia has not convinced the Russian people to believe that China is trustworthy in part because of the inconsistency of Chinese foreign policy. China aligned with Russia in the 1950s and with the U.S. in the 1970s but implemented a nonaligned policy in the 1980s. In recent years, the Russian protests against the Chinese economic invasion have taken place from time to time. The most recent Russian protests took place in March 2019, which were triggered by a China-funded project to bottle water from Russia’s Lake Baikal that has caused environmental problems and made Russian people very angry. The Russian protests indicate that the China–Russia tie is fragile.91 China’s move closer to Russia has received a lukewarm response from public opinion in China. The Chinese people also have reasons to doubt Moscow’s sincerity. China is not happy that Russia has maintained close military ties with and sold advanced weapons to India and Vietnam, both are locked in territorial disputes with China.92 From a historical perspective, Russia occupied China’s territories totaling more than four million square kilometers from 1689 to 1898, forced China to sign the Yalta Agreement for recognizing Outer Mongolia as an independent country in the 1940s, and stopped all financial and technological aid during the Chinese economic crisis in the 1960s. Finally, Zhen Bao Island military conflict in Heilongjiang Province broke out in 1969. Although in 1991 Russia acknowledged that the island belonged to China, the tension between the two countries along the 2500 miles long border remained high until the Chinese military troops retreated 500 km in 2008. In addition, China cannot forget that Russia took the territories in northeast China more than 100 years ago. On 2 July 2020, the Russian embassy in Beijing posted a video of a party celebrating the 160th anniversary of the founding of Vladivostok, which means “ruler of the east” in Russian and was annexed from China by the Tsarist empire in 1860. The video reminded the Chinese emotions over historic wounds and prompted an online backlash with the posts such as “Today we can only endure, but the Chinese people will remember!” “This ancestral land will return home in the future!”93 In comparison with China–U.S. relations, the U.S. never had a single territory dispute with China, so the Chinese people have not had a similar historical complex towardthe U.S. The mutual distrust between China and Russia partially explains why Chinese students do not enthusiastically choose to study in Russia. According to Russian media, in 2020, only about 48,000 Chinese students studied in Russian universities while 20,000 Russian students were in Chinese universities.94 By contrast, more than 317,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. institutions in 2020/21 regardless of Covid-19 spread across the country. The list of other favorite destinations for Chinese students does not include Russia, but Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, and South Korea. As a result, Russian culture has little impact on Chinese society and intellectual circle while American culture is very popular in China. The future of Sino-Russia relations will be tested by public opinion in both countries. It is expected that it would be difficult for both countries to continue drawing closer without the support of the public opinion.For now, the status of Sino-Russia relations is not a full-fledged alliance, but a quasi-alliance. It seems that China and Russia are closer than ever. Although a close relationship between China and Russia could help China to get more advantage in bargaining with the U.S. to smoothly solve its territorial disputes with neighboring countries, in the long run, China willgainless but lose morein thegreat power competitionwhen China movescloser to Russia. Moscow and Beijing are on their honeymoon now, but it may not last long. On the one hand, China’s initial move closer to Russia reflects that Chinese leaders lack confidence in dealing with potential regional crises alone. Beijing does not necessarily have the intention to save Russia, but it must save the Putin’s regime in order to retain Xi Jinping’s power and the one-party system. On the other hand, Russia will not satisfy with its lower position under Xi’s umbrella after Russia becomes significantly weaker because of the failures of Putin’s war with Ukraine. Russian ambassador already made it clear that Russia does not seek an alliance with China. If China unilaterally pursued the goal, the result would be poor. Therefore, it is un-matured to predict that China and Russia will become alliances in a decade. According to Schell-Shirk China Task Force, “China’s alignment is not set in stone. There are significant ways in which China’s long-term national interests are not, in fact, aligned with Russia’s, and deft U.S. diplomacy might still be able to find ways to temper Beijing’s alliance with Moscow.”95 In the long term, Beijing and Moscow might have more potential conflicts than cooperation and could become main competitors or rivals down the road. It isnot wisefor Chinese leaders todistancethemselves from theU.S. byoverplayingthe “Russian card.”Essentially, China–U.S. relationswill continue to be thetop priorityof China’s foreign policy, when the CCP carefully balances the triangle relations between China and the U.S. and Russia.
57DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Update
58DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateChina War Won’t Go NuclearEven ifthere is war, it won’tgo nuclear.AshleyTellis 22, Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specializing in international security and U.S. foreign and defense policy with a special focus on Asia and the Indian subcontinent, 7/18/2022 “STRIKING ASYMMETRIES NUCLEAR TRANSITIONS IN SOUTHERN ASIA,” https://carnegieendowment.org/files/202207-Tellis_Striking_Asymmetries-final.pdf, p. 26-29China’s No-First-Use Policy All three elements of China’s traditional nuclear doctrine became subject to extensive discussion after the Cold War ended. The no-first-use pledge in particular—the singularly distinctive component of China’s declaratory doctrine—proved especially controversial as several PLA officers, serving and retired, as well as senior Chinese diplomats and academics raised questions about the viability of this commitment when the United States was no longer checked by Soviet power,when U.S. conventional precision strike capabilities were demonstrably displayed in major conflicts in the Middle East, when Washington remained adamantly willing to use nuclear weapons first if pressed in a crisis, and when the broader U.S. threat to China—especially in the context of Washington’s possible intervention in a Taiwan crisis—persisted indefinitely. Throughout the 1990s and in the following decade, there were extensive discussions in the Chinese strategic community about the wisdom of retaining the no-first-use pledge in circumstances where China was now the direct targetof an unconstrained superpower rival. Consequently, there appeared sporadic insinuations that the no-first-use pledge was not as unconditional as it originally appeared, thus opening the door, for example, to speculation that China could threaten the first use of nuclear weapons either on its own territory or in disputed areas that China claims as its own.82 In a similar vein, The Science of Second Artillery Campaigns mentions “reducing [or lowering] the nuclear deterrence threshold” (emphasis added)—which is not synonymous with “lowering the nuclear employment threshold”—when it discusses qualifying China’s no-first-use policy in cases where an enemy threatens conventional strikes against important nuclear facilities; attacks against major strategic targets such as big dams, critical hydroelectric plants, and major political, population, or economic centers; or when China faces the threat of major defeat in a high-stakes conventional conflict.83 These deliberations did not arise from any new policies articulated by the Chinese leadership but rather from the newly empowered Chinese strategic community that, benefiting from the broader liberalization in the country, began to discuss previously closed matters more openly.84 The availability of classified Chinese military writings in the West complicated things further, even though these texts reflect the concerns of a professional military whose job is to prepare for unpalatable contingencies. All told, none of the discussions conclusively repudiated the no-first-use commitment, yet their conjectures acquired resonance because China’s no-first-use pledge is inherently unverifiable. Moreover, these speculations also materialized at a time when the Chinese nuclear force was being steadily modernized, smaller-yield Chinese nuclear weapon test explosions were occurring, and prominent Western scholars of China began to declare that China was moving away from its traditional minimum deterrence doctrine to something resembling “limited deterrence,”85 which was read as conveying a willingness to use nuclear weapons discretely to achieve specific operational effects in times of war. Whenever Chinese leadersat the highest levels spoketo the issue of nofirstuse, however, they repudiatedall the revisionist speculationsoccurring in the Chinese strategic community. They emphasized over and over again that theno-first-use pledge was robust, a commitmentthat was reiterated repeatedly inChina’s defense white papersissued by the State Council Information Office, including in its most recent 2019 iteration.86 Even though these unconditional commitments are a priori unverifiable, there is good reasonto believe that China has not altered its no-first-use policy after the Cold War despite the growing difficulties with the United States. The viability of this pledge ultimately derives from whether it comports with China’s strategic interests and given the Chinese leadership’s perception about the enduring transformation of the nuclear revolution (which appears to have survived to this day), there are few scenarios where Chinese aims would be well served by the first use of nuclear weaponseven in intense conventional conflicts with a superior military power such as the United States. As Rong Yu and Peng Guangqian summarized it,“The questions facing a unilateral NFU [no-first-use] policy are tough ones and are hard to resolve satisfactorily, at least for the time being. First-use policy, however, is also at least equally, if not more unrealistic. . . . It is eminently foreseeablethat usingnuclear weapons
59DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatefirstwill havegrave consequences, whose cost will far outweigh its benefits.”87 Although it is possible to imagine contingencies where Chinese nuclear first use—either for symbolicpurposes, orfor securing limited operational effects, or in response to “use it or lose it”dilemmas—might be plausible, there is little evidence thus farsuggesting that the Chinese leadership is preparing to exercise such options, although there is considerable discussion of such possibilitieswithin the Chinese military and Western academic communities.88 Several Western scholars have pointed out that Chinese interlocutors (including officials in private exchanges) in recent years as well as Chinese publications have flagged circumstances where Beijing’s no-first-use commitments might be stressed: these center particularly on concerted conventional attacks or “non-contact” warfare waged against China’s nuclear deterrent with the aim of neutralizing it in the context of some larger military conflict.89 While such dangers constitute plausible provocations that might stimulate Chinese nuclear first use in principle, two mitigating factors must be considered. First, both civilian and military leaders in Beijing recognize the gravity of these challenges, especially as Chinaand the United States evolve intothe principal geopolitical antagonistsin the international system. But—at least at the Chinese civilian leadership level, the apex decisionmaking authority within the state—nothing has changed on the fundamentals: the chasm between conventional and nuclear warfare is still viewed as absoluteand the imperative of preventing China from becoming a victim of either nuclear attack or nuclear coercion remains enduring—for which a no-first-use policy arguably suffices.90 Second, precisely becauseChina’snuclear deterrent might be threatenedby new non-nuclear instruments of war, civilian and military leadersin Beijing are unified bythe conviction that enhanced investments in the survivabilityof their nuclear forces are indispensable.91 Whether this insurance materializes in the form of an “Underground Great Wall” designed to protect China’s land-based missiles from nuclear attack, or the expansion of China’s sea-based nuclear deterrent in order to preserve a residual strike capability, or the modernization of China’s command-and-control systems to ensure leadership survival and its persistent connectivity with the dispersed nuclear forces, these programs have been pursued precisely becauseBeijingexpectsthat its nuclear deterrent could be attackedeither inadvertently or deliberately in any major war—especially with the United States—yet seeks to avoid finding itself in a positionwhere it must employ nuclear weaponsnot because they advance any affirmative aims of policy but merely to stave off ending up defenseless against future nuclear attacks or nuclear coercion.92 These calculations are reflectedmost clearlyinthe PLARF’s preparationsfor nuclear operations, whichstill overwhelmingly emphasizeforce survivabilityandthe ability to respondeffectively afterabsorbing anadversary’s nuclear attack.93 One comprehensive Western analysis has, accordingly, concluded that China’s no-first-use commitment is conceived as holding even in case its nuclear systems were to be attacked by conventional ordnance in the course of a conflict, again, an assessment that is consistent with the Chinese leadership’s broader perception of the utility of nuclear weapons.94 Yet on this issue—China’s threat to use nuclear weapons in response to conventional attacks on its nuclear deterrent—more than any other, it is likely that the messages coming out of Beijing will be mixed, with many voices, especially those of the PLA, insinuating that China could resile from its no-first-use pledge if its strategic reverses were to be attacked by non-nuclear means. The fact that no Chinese civilian leader has ever uttered such threats, however, is significant and suggestsreasons to remain confident thatthe no-first-use commitment isstill a priori meaningful.But the reasons for the professional military and other voices
60DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updateintroducing ambiguity over the robustness of the no-first-use pledge are also understandable. They are intended to strengthen deterrence by signaling that even non-nuclear attacks against China’s nuclear capabilities carry inherent risks and as such should be eschewed even by superior adversaries in any conflicts with China. The colocation of conventional and nuclear missiles in the mixed brigades (primarily involving DF-26/CSS-18 systems) that have appeared in recent years could also be aimed at reinforcing the same objective: preventing any attacks on China’s rocket forces that might have the effect of deliberately or inadvertently undermining its nuclear deterrent.95 When all is said and done, however, any Chinese decision to use nuclear weapons first will be determined more by the logic of circumstances than by the strength of any prewar commitments. The demands of deterrence in this instance will be the overarching driver and the evidence suggests that the Chinese leadership’s continuing obsession with appearing rectitudinous coupled with the investments Beijing is making to ensure the survivability of its growing nuclear forces combine to give its no-first-use pledge a certain viability, at least for a while longer.There are multiple constraintson conflict.Charles C. Krulak &Alex Friedman 21, former President of Birmingham-Southern College, former Commandant of the US Marine Corps, M.S. from George Washington University; former Chief Financial Officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, J.D. from Columbia University, “The US and China Are Not Destined for War,” Project Syndicate, 08-17-2021, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-china-not-destined-for-war-by-charles-c-krulak-and-alex-friedman-1-2021-08True, throughout history, when a rising power has challenged a ruling one, war has often been the result. But there are notable exceptions. A war between the US and Chinatoday is no more inevitable thanwas war between therising US andthe declining United Kingdom a century ago. And in today’s context, there are four compelling reasons to believe that war between the US and China can be avoided.First and foremost, any military conflictbetween the two would quickly turn nuclear. The US thus finds itself in the same situation that it was in vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Taiwan could easily become this century’s tripwire, just as the “Fulda Gap” in Germany was during the Cold War. But the same dynamic of “mutualassured destruction” that limited US-Soviet conflict applies to the US and China. And the international communitywould do everythingin its power to ensurethat a potential nuclear conflict did not materialize,giventhat the consequenceswould be fundamentally transnational and – unlike climate change – immediate.A US-China conflictwouldalmost certainly take the form of a proxy war, rather than a major-power confrontation. Eachsuperpower might take a different side in a domestic conflictin a country such as Pakistan, Venezuela, Iran, or North Korea, and deploysome combination of economic, cyber, and diplomatic instruments. We have seen this type of conflict many times before: from Vietnam to Bosnia, the US faced surrogates rather than its principal foe.Second, it is important to remember that, historically, China plays a long game. Although Chinese military power has grown dramatically, itstill lags behind the US onalmost every measurethat matters. And while China is investing heavily in asymmetric equalizers(long-range anti-ship and hypersonic missiles, military applications of cyber, and more), it will not matchthe USin conventional meanssuch as aircraft and large ships for decades, if ever.
61DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateA head-to-head conflictwith the US wouldthus be too dangerous for Chinato countenance at its current stage of development. If such a conflict did occur, China would have few options but to let the nuclear genie out of the bottle. In thinking about baseline scenarios, therefore, we should give less weight to any scenario in which the Chinese consciously precipitate amilitary confrontation with America. The US military, however, tends to plan for worst-case scenarios and is currently focused on a potential direct conflict with China – a fixation with overtones of the US-Soviet dynamic.This raises the risk of being blindsided by other threats. Time and again since the Korean War, asymmetric threats have proven the most problematic to national security. Building a force that can handle the worst-case scenario does not guarantee success across the spectrum of warfare.The third reason to think that a Sino-American conflict can be avoided is that China is already chalking up victories intheglobal soft-powerwar. Notwithstanding accusations that COVID-19 escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, Chinahas emerged from the pandemic lookingmuch better than the US. And withits Belt and Road Initiativeto finance infrastructure development around the world, ithas aggressively stepped into the void left by US retrenchmentduring Donald Trump’s four-year presidency. China’s leadersmay very well look at the current status quoand concludethat they are on the rightstrategic path.Finally, China and the US are deeply intertwinedeconomically. Despite Trump’s trade war, Sino-American bilateral trade in 2020 was around $650 billion, and China was America’s largesttrade partner. The two countries’ supply-chain linkages are vast, and China holds morethan $1 trillion in US Treasuries, most of which it cannoteasily unload, lest it reduce their value and incur massive losses.To be sure, logic can be undermined by a single act and its unintended consequences. Something as simple as a miscommunication can escalatea proxy war into an interstate conflagration. And as the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq show, America’s track record in war-torn countries is not encouraging. China, meanwhile, has dramatically stepped up its foreign interventions. Between its expansionist mentality, its growing foreign-aid program, and rising nationalism at home, China could all too easily launch a foreign intervention that might threaten US interests.Cyber mischief, in particular, could undercut conventional military command-and-control systems, forcing leaders into bad decisions if more traditional options are no longer on the table. And Sino-American economic ties may come to matter less than they used to, especially as China moves from an export-led growth model to one based on domestic consumption, and as two-way investment flows decline amid escalating bilateral tensions.A “mistake” on the part of either country isalways possible. That is why diplomacy is essential. Each country needsto determine its vital national interests vis-à-vis the other, and both need to consider the same question from the other’s perspective. For example, it may be hard to accept (and unpopular to say), but civil rights within China might not be a vital US national interest. By the same token, China should understand that the US does indeed have vital interests in Taiwan.The US and China are destined to clash in many ways.But a direct, interstate war need not be oneof them.
62DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateHegemony Good AnswersHegemony is unsustainable. Overstretch makes challenges inevitable, decline nowavoids Chinese status denial which causes war.Bello ’24[Walden; July 15, 2024; Former member of the Philippine House of Representatives, Walden Bello is currently co-chair of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South and honorary research fellow at the sociology department at the State University of New York at Binghamton; Foreign Policy In Focus, “Crisis of the West, Opportunity for the Rest?,” https://fpif.org/crisis-of-the-west-opportunity-for-the-rest/]The downspin of theU.S. empirehas had a number of causes, but key among them are military overextension, neoliberal globalization, and the crisis of the liberal political and ideological order. Let us discuss each in turn.OverextensionandOsamaOverextension refers to the gapbetweenthe ambitionsof ahegemon anditscapacityto achieve those ambitions. It is almost synonymous with the concept of overreachas used by the historian Paul Kennedy, the slight difference being that overextension as I use it is principally a military phenomenon. The struggling empire the United States is today is a far cry from the unipolar power it was a quarter of a century ago, in 2000. If we ask ourselves what led to this situation, it inevitably comes down to one individual: Osama bin Laden.The aim of bin Laden’s attackon the Twin Towerson September 11, 2001 wasprecisely to provokethe overextensionof the empire by forcing it to fight on several frontsin the Muslim world that would be inspiredto revolt by his dramatic action. But instead of igniting revolt, Osama’s act ignited revulsion and disapproval among most Muslims. September 11 would have been a big failure hadnot George W. Bush seenit as an opportunity to use American power to reshape the world to reflect the Washington’s unipolar status. He took Osama’s bait and launched the United States into two unwinnable warsin Afghanistan and Iraq. The results have been devastatingforAmerica’s power and prestige.During the June 7, 2024, debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Trump referred to the defeat in Afghanistan as the worst humiliation ever inflicted on the United States. Now Trump, as we all know, is prone to exaggeration, but there was strong element of truth in his statement.According to CIA analyst Nelly Lahoud, “Though the 9/11 attacks turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory for a-Qaeda, bin Laden still changed the world and continued to influence global politics of nearly a decade after.” If the United States is the confused and groping global power it is today—one that has been, moreover, reduced to a dog being wagged by the Zionist tail—that is to a not-insignificant degree due to bin Laden.To acknowledge the significance of 9/11 is not, of course, to endorse it. Indeed, for most of us, the attack on civilians was morally repelling. But one must give the devil his due, as they say, that is, point out the objective, world-historic impact of the deed of an individual, be this person a saint or a villain.Trading PlacesLet us turn to the second major cause of the unravelling of the hegemonic U.S. status: neoliberal globalization. Thirty years ago,U.S. corporate capital, along with the Clinton administration, envisioned globalization, achieved through trade, investment, and financial liberalization, as the spearhead of its greater domination of the global economy. Wall Street and Washington were wrong. It wasChinathat was thebiggest beneficiaryof globalization and the UnitedStatesone of itsmain victims.
63DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateInvestment liberalizationmeant billionsof dollarsworth of U.S. corporate capital flowed to Chinato take advantage of labor that could be paid at fraction of the wages paid labor in the United Statesin exchange for technology transfer, voluntary or forced, that helped China comprehensively develop its economy. Trade liberalization made China the manufacturerof the world supplying mainly the U.S. market with cheap products. Both investment and trade liberalization contributed to the deindustrialization of the US and the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs, which declined from 17.3 million jobs in 2000 to around 13 million today. Compounding the deleterious effects of deindustrialization have been the financialization of the U.S. economy, that is, making the super-profitable financial sector the leading edge of the economy, and regressive taxation, which led to an extremely inequitable distribution of income and wealth.Chinahas traded places with the United Statesin the global economy. China is now thecenterof global capital accumulationor, in the popular image, the “locomotive of theworld economy.” According to IMF calculations, China accounted for 28 percent of all growth worldwidefrom 2013 to 2018, which is more than twice the share of the United States. What must be underlined is that while the United States followed neoliberal policies of giving full play to market forces, China selectively liberalized, with the powerful Chinese state guiding the process, protecting strategic sectors from foreign control, and aggressively demanding advanced technology from Western corporations in exchange for cheap labor.Although in dollar terms, the United States is still the biggest economy, by someother measures, likethe World Bank’s Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), China is now the world’s largest. In the United States, 11.5 percent of people now live in poverty, whereas, according to the World Bank, only 2 percent of China’s population is poor.Of course, China has faced challenges in its rise to the world’s economic summit, but development, as the economist Albert Hirschman point out, is a necessarily unbalanced process. China’s crises are crises of growth, compared to the U.S. crises, which are crises of decline.From De Facto to Armed Civil War?Military overextension and the effects of neoliberal economics have contributed not simply to political disaffection but to political turmoil in theUnited States, with one of the two major parties, theRepublican Party, becoming the spearheadof far-right or fascist politicsfueled by racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, fear, and decline in economic statusamong white people. Politics has becomeseverely polarized, and some warn that there is now a state of de facto civil war. In short, the political and ideological regime of liberal democracy is now in grave danger, with many liberals and progressives warning that Trump’s Plan 2025 will amount to the establishment of a fascist dictatorship. They are not wrong.Here is what Steve Bannon, the ideological chief of the U.S. far right, says,The historical left is in full meltdown. They always focus on noise, never on signal. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump… We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.A second Trump presidency is now a certainty, with the strong possibility that the de facto civil war could turn into an armed civil war. Indeed, the assassination attempt on Trump on July 13, whoever carried it out, may well be a major step towards the unrestrained violence depicted in Alex Garland’s “Civil War.”Crisis of the Liberal International OrderWashington has been the guardian of the international order, and with the economic and political crisis of the United States, that order has also entered into a deep crisis. What are the key aspects of what hasbeen characterizedas the liberal international order? First, of all, global leadership of the United States and the West underpinned by U.S. military power.Second, a multilateral order that serves as a political canopyfor Western capital, whose mainstays are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Third, an ideology that promotes Western-style democracy as the only legitimate politicalregime.
64DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateThis liberal order is now in trouble on two fronts: on the international front, it has lost legitimacy among the global South, which sees the multilateral system as designed mainly to keep it down; internally, the liberal democracythat is its guiding ideologyis under assault from the far right. If the far right comes to power in the United States and in key statesin Europe—and it may come to power soon in France andsoon after that, in Germany—the international order they would favor would probably continue to assert Western economic supremacybut adopta much more unilateralist approach, more protectionist approachof securing it instead of using the IMF-World Bank-WTO complex. Certainly, the far right will abandon thehypocritical appeal to liberal democracy as a model for the rest of the world.Headed for War?China says it is not out to displace the United States as global hegemon. To the U.S. elite, however, China is a revisionist power determined to dislodge it as the global hegemon. Especially in the Biden years, the UnitedStateshas becomemore and more determined to usethat dimension of hegemonywhere it enjoys absolute superiority over China, military power, to protectits statusas number one.This is why the danger of warbetween the United States and China is not to be underestimated, and this is the reason the Western Pacific is such a powder keg, far more than Ukraine. In Ukraine, the United States and China confront each other through proxies, Russia and NATO, while in the Pacific they confront eachother directly.The United States has scores of bases surrounding ChinafromJapan to the Philippines, including the massive floating base that is the Seventh Fleet. The South China Sea is now filled with rival warships performing naval “exercises.” Among the latest visitors are vessels from France and Germany, U.S. allies that have been dragooned far from NATO’s traditional area of coverage to contain China. U.S. and Chinese warships have been known to play games of chicken—heading at each other and then swerving at the last minute. A miscalculation of a few feet could result in a collision, with unpredictable consequences. Fears that the South China Sea will be the next site of armed conflict are not alarmist.In the absence of any rules of conflict resolution, the only thing preventing conflict is the balance of power. But balance-of-power regimesare prone to breakdown, often with catastrophic results—as was the case in 1914, when the collapse of the European balance of power led to World War I. With Washington aggressively marshaling Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, five carrier task forces of the U.S. Navy, NATO, and the newly created AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) alliance into a confrontational stance against China, the chances of a rupture in the East Asian balance of power are becoming more and more likely—perhaps just a collisionor away.Extinction---deterrence theory and revisionism are false.Foster ’23[John Bellamy; December; sociology professor at the University of Oregon, editor of the Monthly Review; “Monthly Review,” Vol. 75, No. 7, https://monthlyreview.org/2023/12/01/mr-075-07-2023-11_0/]Fearful of losingitsimperial hegemonyover theworld economydue tothe rise of Chinaas a major economic power, the United States is seekingto translate its military ascendancy into renewedeconomic domination, resulting inunparalleled dangers for humanityas a whole. In truth, it would be difficult to exaggeratethe enormous perilsto the world at large associated with Washington’s New Cold Warprojection ofmilitary and financial poweraimed at stopping China’s economic rise.
65DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateU.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken recently declared that the post-Cold War era was now over, to be replaced with a new cold rivalry, with China as the principal threat to U.S. world dominance. A classical “containment” strategy, it is argued, will not workagainst China.Instead, Blinken advocates what he calls a “variable geometry” in which Beijing is to be pinned down at every point through a complexfunctional network of military and economic alliances, alongside technological restrictions. Here the key is finding ways for Washington to use its unrivaled military power to enhance its relative economic position (Antony J. Blinken, “Remarks to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies,” Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, September 13, 2023, state.gov).Kurt M. Campbell, principal architect of the Barack Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” and now the China czar of the Joe Biden administration (in his role as deputy assistant to the president and coordinator for the Indo-Pacific), is playing a key part in thedevelopment of the newU.S. imperialgrand strategy. Campbell, who also strongly backed the hardening of the U.S. position toward China under the Donald Trump administration, is the founder, along with Michèle Flournoy (a board member of military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton), of the Center for a New American Security, which is funded by Northrup Grumman and dozens of other military contractors. He insists that “the ticket to the big game” in the contest with China is the projectionofU.S. military power in Asia, allowing the United States to maintain and extend its control of the economic “operating system” in the Indo-Pacific and the world as a whole, while blocking therival Chinese operating systemand preventingBeijing from gaining access to critical technologies.Employing the language of empire, Campbell speaks of the new “Pax Americana of supporting the operating system of Asia.” In line with this, his efforts in the Bidenadministration have centeredprincipally onthe development of the Quad and AUKUSmilitary alliances andthe expansion of NATO’s role in the Asian theater in order to constrain, through a convergence of military and economic means, Chineseeconomic development, thus “deterring” Beijing from taking on a larger world-economic role that would compromise Washington’s hegemony (“Biden Advisor Sees Asia Trade Focus as a ‘Wake-Up Call,’” Deccan Herald, December 2, 2020, deccanherald.com; “Obama-Era Veteran Kurt Campbell to Lead Biden’s Asia Policy,” New Delhi Television, January 13, 2021, ndtv.com; Kurt Campbell, “U.S. and China Should Be Able to Compete Stably,” Caixin Global, January 23, 2021, caixinglobal.com).A good indication of where U.S. grand strategy is headed and the accelerating dangers that this new direction entails can be seen in an article by Mangesh Sawant titled “Why China Cannot Challengethe U.S. Military Primacy,” published in December 2021 by the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs (Air University Press), known as the “Air Forces’ professional journal for America’s Priority Theater.” Sawant argues that the United States has anoverwhelmingmilitary advantageover China, providing the leverage for enhancingU.S. economic dominance. He points out that, quite apart from technological superiority, the missileson U.S. naval warships outnumberthose of the Chinese navy five to one. Washington spends“$156 billion a yearon [its] 800 foreign military bases”inforeign countries around the globe (some four hundred of which surround China), an amount nearly equal to China’s total defense budget, while Chinaitself lacks any global force projection. China’s nuclear arsenalof 410 nuclear warheads is minisculecompared to the“4,000 superior nuclear warheads” (in reality, 5,244) of the United States. Inthe case of alimited nuclear war, we are told, the United States would carry out the “total annihilationof China’s military and economic centers of gravity.” The U.S. Navy’s “Maritime Strike Tomahawk Cruise Missile Block V [would] destroy coastal cities like Shanghai, obliterating China’s hi-tech industries in a matter of hours,” thereby eliminating Chinaas a world economic power. This is referred to by Sawant as the use of the “U.S. military as an economic deterrent,” capable at any moment (although this is carefully couched in terms of defense/retaliation) of bringing to an end China’s economic advance and reasserting absolute U.S. dominanceover the world economy (Mangesh Sawant, “Why China Cannot Challenge the US Military Primacy,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, December 13, 2021; Hans Kristensen et al., “Status of World Nuclear Forces,” Federation of American Scientists, March 31, 2023, fas.org).Where Sawant drives his argument home, both in terms of Western military power and the economic advantages to be obtained from its utilization, is in reference to the nineteenth-century Opium Wars carried out by Britain and France against China, which led to a century of unequal treaties imposed on China. In this respect, the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs declares that in relation to the “Opium War: Then and Now—Nothing Much Has Changed,” both with respect to overwhelming Western military power and its ability to imposeits totaleconomic dominanceon Chinaby force if necessary. In a glorified version of the First Opium War of 1839–42, Sawant states that China’s “800,000 strong military force” was defeated by a British invasion force of “20,000 troops and three dozen modern Royal Navy warships.” “The Opium Wars,” he underscores:
66DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateThe wars led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the decimation of China’s military. The outcome of a contemporary war with the United States will be nearly identical to the political dimensions of the Opium Wars. The Tianjin Treatyof 1858, imposed by foreign powers, [economically] devastated China.… The consequences of the Opium Wars led to the Boxer Rebellion in 1899. About 80 years later, the Japanese invasion of 1937 demonstrated how vulnerable and weak China was to external naval powers.In referring to the Opium Wars in this way, the Air Force’s Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs suggests that what is regarded as a coming war between the United States and China will eventuate in a “new American century” for the United States and a new century of humiliation and unequal treaties for China.To understand the full significance of all of this, it is useful to refer to Xi Jinping’s speech on the one hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party of China in July 2021, six months prior to the publication of the article in the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, in which Xi stated, “After the Opium War of 1840, China…was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and went through a period of suffering greater than ithad ever previously known. The country endured intense humiliation, the people were subjected to great pain, and the Chinese civilization was plunged into darkness. Since that time, national rejuvenation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.” No doubt with this in mind, the U.S. Air Force responded only a few months later, in Sawant’s article in the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, that the West was militarily capable of doing this to China all over again, with the United States standing in for Britain, and with the same economic devastation and humiliation for China (Xi Jinping, “Speech at the Ceremony Marking the Centenary of the Communist Party of China,” The Governance of China [Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2022], 3–4).Karl Marx, the greatest Western opponent of the Second Opium War of 1856–60, in which France joined Britain in invading China, remarked that “the piratical war” had resulted in “fresh humiliations heaped” on the Qing dynasty, which was forced to accept an opium trade of “colossal dimensions,” with devastating effects to its society. As Marx explained at the time, “while openly preaching free trade in poison [opium]” and using this as its justification for its war on the Chinese government, which had attempted to restrict the trade, Britain nonetheless“secretly defends the monopoly of its manufacture” in India under British colonial rule. “Whenever we look closely into the nature of British free trade, monopoly is pretty generally found to lie at the bottom of its freedom”—a monopoly normally put in place by force (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Colonialism [New York: International Publishers, 1972], 220, 225).For U.S. China czar Campbell, economic or “operating system” monopolies, to be leveraged by military means, are the name of the game. He dismisses China’s rejuvenation in the face of a century of humiliation, beginning with the Opium Wars and associated with repeated invasions bythe Western powersand the imposition of unequal treaties, as a particularly distorted Chinese nationalist view of history. Nevertheless, the “Pivot to Asia” that Campbell first articulated during the Obama administration has now evolved into a concerted attempt to use a combination of military-economic means to dominate the Indo-Pacific, backed by accelerated preparations for warwith China, in which the Opium Wars are repeatedly referred to as a backdrop. This fits hand-in-glove with the U.S. Air Force’s notion, as expressed in the Sawant article, of using the “U.S. military as an economic deterrent” to China’s rise as a world power, pointing tonothing less than a Third World War(Kurt M. Campbell, The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia [New York: Hachette Group, 2016], 117–18, 258).Nothing is more importantin these circumstances thanthe creation of a world peacemovement, which, in our age, willalso have to bea world ecologymovement aimed at sustainablehuman development.
67DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateSouth Korean Prolif Answers
68DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateNo proliferation, even if they doubt our commitment entirely. Robert Einhorn 23. Senior fellow in the Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative and the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, both housed within the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. Master’s in public affairs and international relations from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. “Will Putin’s invasion spur nuclear proliferation?” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/will-putins-invasion-spur-nuclear-proliferation/. Public opinion polls consistently indicate strong support among South Koreans for acquiring their own nuclear deterrent. But South Korea’s leadersare well aware ofthe major costsand risks of going nuclear. It could seriously erodethe U.S.-South Korean alliance, increasetensionson the Korean Peninsula, trigger strong penaltiesby China, damageSeoul’s international standing, and terminatecivil nuclear cooperationwith other states, which would end South Korea’s relianceon nuclear power for30% of its electricity. For now at least, the Yoonadministration would prefer to rely on U.S. security guarantees rather than pursue its own nuclear deterrent. But it believes the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent needs to be strengthened— including by giving South Korea a greater voice in its planning and execution. If current U.S.-Republic of Korea efforts succeed in boosting South Korean confidence in the reliability of U.S. security guarantees, the appeal of an independent nuclear capability will be significantly diminished. Japan is also considering its nuclear options. While it shares Seoul’s concerns about the North Korean threat, it is also worried about China. And unlike South Korea, Japan already has uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing capabilities that would allow it to move toward nuclear weapons relatively quickly. But Japan is even less likelythan South Korea to acquire nuclear weapons. Its public remains strongly opposed, reflecting its history as the only victim of nuclear attack. Tokyo is giving high priority to conventional meansof deterringand responding to aggressionby China or North Korea— planning to dramatically increase its military expenditures, pursuing long-range missile strike capabilities, and joining with Seoul and Washington to promote trilateral defense cooperation. Like South Korea, Japan is working with theNo South Korea prolif. Sieffried S. Hecker 23. Distinguished Professor of Practice at James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Professor of Practice of NuclearEngineering at Texas A&M University. “The Disastrous Downsides of South Korea Building Nuclear Weapons.” 1/20/23. https://www.38north.org/2023/01/the-disastrous-downsides-of-south-korea-building-nuclear-weapons/Whereas President Yoon’s comment, “…we can have our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly, given our scientific and technological capabilities” is true, it doesn’t come close to capturing the national redirection, expense, and immense burdenthat Seoul would have to shoulder to field not just one bomb, but a nuclear arsenal to counter Pyongyang’s. It is true that with its advanced technological capabilities, South Korea could probably build the bomb quickly. But a few bombs don’t make anuclear deterrent, particularly if Seoul will have to go it alone. And let’s be clear, if Seoul were to go down this path, Washington could, and likely would, withdraw its nuclear umbrella. Buildinga nuclear arsenalto counter Pyongyang’s would requirea major national redirectionof its economy and diplomacy that would negatively affect nearly all facets of South Korean lifefor decades. For nearly fifty years, South Korea has pursued a civilian nuclear energy program. It wisely focused on the middle of the fuel cycle—that is, reactor fuel fabrication, reactor construction and operation, and electricity production. It has built neither enrichment nor reprocessing facilities. Consequently, South Korea has no inventoryofbomb-grade plutonium or uraniumcurrently stockpiled. To build nuclear weapons, it would have to repurpose some of its civilian reactors to produce the plutonium bomb fuel(combined with using its laboratory-scale pyroprocessing
69DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatefacilities to extract plutonium) or construct a centrifuge facility to make highly enriched uranium. Either path would take at least two yearsto produce enough bomb fuel foreven a few bombs. In the longer term, an effectivenuclear deterrent would require new, dedicated nuclear weapons facilities, requiring substantial time and financial commitments. The next step in building a bomb is weaponization—that is, designing, building and testing the nuclear devices. South Korea could surely master all scientific and engineering challenges of building a bomb—as it has demonstrated so convincingly in mastering civilian nuclear power generation. Some of the purely military aspects could be accomplished in concert with its conventional military technical complex. But to prove the design and fabrication, there would need to be nuclear testing, but where?Neighboring countries—China and Japan—wouldcertainly object strongly, and there wouldundoubtedly be strongdomestic oppositionto tests from every South Korean province. The nuclear warheads will also have to be integrated into delivery vehicles—such as ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, submarine-launched missiles or bombers. South Korea has all the basic building blocks, but it would still have substantial work to do tointegrate the nuclear warheads into the delivery systems. Moreover, these requirements will continue to evolveas North Korea upgrades its offensive and defensive capabilities. The assembly, disassembly and fielding of nuclear devices pose serious safety and security risks and would have to be learned without helpor advice from current nuclear powers. Seoul will also have to develop a command-and-control structure that is more stringent than anything it has done so far for its conventional military. Another consequence of building a nuclear arsenalis that it will compete for resources—financial, personnel, and technical—with the South’s conventional military. As with other industries, such as electronics, automotive and consumer goods that depend on South Korean engineering and manufacturing, its military industry has risen to be among the best in the world. South Korea has become one of the top international suppliers of military hardware. Seoul’s sales pitch is that it can deliver NATO-attuned military hardware faster and at lower prices than the United States. Changing directions to focus ona nuclear arsenal will derailmost of its conventional military export business.US moved troops to SoKo—no way they get scared.McGrath 23[Ben McGrath, 4-27-2023, "US, South Korean presidents agree to greater nuclear cooperation in further move towards war with China," https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/28/xcfr-a28.html]//the-loraxLast November, during a meeting between US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and South Korean Defense Minister Lee Jong-seop, the latter stated that the US would deploy “strategic assets to the level equivalent to constant deployment through increasing the frequency and intensity of strategic asset deployment in and around the Korean peninsula.” The deployment of the SSBN submarineas well asregularly dispatching other strategic assets including nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and B-52 bombers means Washington is followingthrough on plans forthis de facto deployment.While Washington and Seoul couch these measures as a response to the so-called North Korean “threat,” they are meant to integrate war planning more efficiently between the two allies. While attempting to avoid mentioning China, the joint statement made thinly-veiled references to this real target of US imperialism, declaring that Biden and Yoon “recognized the importance of maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific.” Washington and its allies regularly accuse Beijing of unilaterally challenging the “free and open” navigation of the region. What the US really means is that it reserves to itself the right to send its naval and air forces anywhere it pleases to intimidate opponents and stoke military tensions. At the same time, the US accuses Beijing of violating the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a convention which Washington itself refuses to sign.The joint statement also declared, “The Presidents reiterated the importance of preserving peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait as an indispensable element of security and prosperity in the region.” This reference to Taiwan occurs as the US continues to chip away at the “One China” policy, which states that the island is part of China. Since 1979, the US has recognized Beijing as the legitimate government of all of China by having no formal diplomatic relations with Taipei.Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province and has regularly made clear that it considers a declaration of or recognition of Taipei’s independence as a red line for military action. Under the previous Trump administration and continued by the Biden government, Washington has attacked the “One China” policy by holding high-level talks with Taipei officials, including a recent trip to the US by Taiwanese President TsaiIng-wen. The US also provides Taiwan with massive amounts of military hardware while announcing in
70DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan UpdateFebruary that it would quadruple the number of US troops on the island. The end goal is to goad Beijing into invading Taiwan, similar to the US/NATO-stoked war against Russia in Ukraine, while also turning Taiwan into a US base for future military operations in the region. As in Ukraine, this would have nothing to do with the defence of “democracy” or “human rights.” Instead, it would be aimed at inflicting a defeat on China, viewed as the chief economic threat to American imperialism, and securing direct control over the strategically decisive Eurasian landmass.Trump literally TOLD SoKo and Japan to develop nukes and they still didn’t.Fuchs '20[Michael; Senior Fellow; Haneul Lee; Former Research Assistant; 8-13-2020; Center for American Progress; "Bridging the Divide in the U.S.-South Korea Alliance," https://www.americanprogress.org/article/bridging-divide-u-s-south-korea-alliance/; Accessed 7-13-2023]Over the past four years, U.S. President Donald Trump’sdisdainfor theU.S.-South Koreaalliance hasunderminedthepartnership, causing awide gapin trust between the two sides. During his time in office, Trumphas made clear that he does not understand the value of U.S. alliances. He has suggestedthatallies such asSouth Korea andJapanprotect themselves by developing theirown nuclear weapons.3 Furthermore, heessentially tried toextortU.S. allies—most notably South Korea—by threatening towithdrawU.S. troopsfrom the country unless Seoul began paying “a lot more” for U.S. defense.4 This position ignores the fact that America, not just its allies, benefits from its military presence in Asia.The Trump administration continued its transactional approach to alliances during cost-sharing negotiations with Seoul. In 2018, upon the expiration of the Special Measures Agreement (SMA), the administration demanded a150 percent increase—$1.2 billion annually—to sustain the U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula.5 Seoul fended off such demands by offering an 8.2 percent increase and a shorter expiration date for the SMA, and the allies agreed to renegotiate the agreement annually with incremental increases.6 But when the agreement expired againat the end of 2019, the Trump administration demanded a whopping500 percent increase in contributions.7 Negotiations dragged on for months, causing thousands of United States Forces Korea (USFK) workers to be placed on unpaid leave.8 Ignoring the fact that South Korea paid 90 percent of the $11 billion construction cost for Camp Humphreys—the largest U.S. overseas military base—and is a major customer of U.S. defense companies,9 the Trump administration shot down Seoul’s best offer of 13 percent and has yet to define what a “fair and equitable” cost-sharing agreement would look like.10Trumphas treated South Korea like alesser partnerand hasbullied Seoulon awide range ofeconomic, security, and military issues. Searching for a political win in 2017, he inaccurately claimed that the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement(KORUS FTA) was responsible for lost U.S. jobs; and he essentially forced Seoul to renegotiate by threatening to withdraw from the agreement.11 Convinced that a trade deficit between the two countries was detrimental to U.S. interests, Trump continued to penalize Seoul by levying tariffs on major South Korean exports.12 Furthermore, Trump’s destructive trade war with China caused South Korean exports to China, its biggest trading partner, to fall by 21.3 percent in 2019.13The Trump administration’s shoddy treatment of South Korea has damaged America’s standing with South Koreans. While92 percentof theSouth Korean public remainssupportiveof the alliance,14 public perception of the United States has fallen to an almost historic lowof 45 percent.15 Only 4 percent of South Koreans supported paying billions of dollars more in cost-sharing negotiations, and a recent poll measured South Koreans’ confidence in President Trump at an abysmal 17 percent.16Alliance credibility is shot.Bandow '23[Doug; a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties.He worked as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry; 1-26-2023; Cato Institute; "America's Allies Should Consider Going Nuclear,"
71DebateUS! November 20 Taiwan Updatehttps://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-allies-should-consider-going-nuclear; Accessed 7-12-2023]**edited for language**With North Korea’s relentless nuclear buildup and China’s evident intention to turn the U.S.–Russian nuclear duo into a threesome, South KoreaandJapanare growingincreasingly uncomfortablerelying onWashington through“extended deterrence,” by which American officials promise to tradeLos Angeles and New York forSeouland Tokyo. HenceSouth KoreanPresident YoonSuk‐yeol’sdramatic expression of interest in acquiring anindependent nuclear deterrenta half century after Seoul abandoned its nuclear program only under extreme pressure from the Nixon administration.The American Spectator’s Francis P. Sempa attributes Yoon’s interest in nukes, as well as similar political currents in Japan, to the Biden administration’s failings. The latter are many, of course, but allies’diminishing faithin America’s willingness to commit[to nuclear destruction] suicideoverless‐than‐vital interestsgoesfar deeperthan thefollies of one president. (Indeed, though President Joe Biden’s exit from Afghanistan was botched, staying would have been a far greater blow to American credibility, wasting even more lives and money in trying to implant democracy in Central Asia.)The fundamental problem is that extended deterrenceitself looksincreasingly dubious. Observed Foreign Policy’s Stephen M. Walt:[C]onvincing people you might use nuclear weapons to defend an allyisn’t easy. One might imagine a U.S. president using nuclear weapons to retaliate against a direct attack on U.S. territory or to deter the extremely unlikely prospect of a conventional invasion that threatened U.S. independence. This is the one thing nuclear weapons are good for: deterring existential threats to their possessors’ independence or autonomy.… Because the balance of resolve favors the defender, even muchweaker nuclear powers can deter enemies from attacking them directly. If you don’t find this argument persuasive, remember the U.S. attacked non‐nuclear Iraq in 2003 and non‐nuclear Libya in 2011, but it leaves nuclear‐armed North Korea alone.Promises to defend allies, which almost by definition matter less than the homeland, always will beless convincing. After all, Americacould survive, however uneasily, in a world without them. Indeed, during the Cold War, military commanders said they would recommend against using tactical nukes in Europe, since the consequences would be so grievous — including the potential for escalation.Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara offered asobering analysisfour decades ago. He contended thatoncenukes started flying, full‐scale nuclear war couldscarcelybe avoided:Such an expectation requires the assumption that even though the initial strikes would have inflicted large‐scale casualties and damage to both sides, one or the other—feeling disadvantaged—would give in. But under such circumstances, leaders on both sides would be under unimaginable pressure to avenge their losses and secure the interests being challenged. And each would fear that the opponent might launch a larger attack at any moment. Moreover, they would both be operating with only partial information because of the disruption to communications caused by the chaos on the battlefield (to say nothing of possible strikes against communications facilities). Under such conditions, it is highly likely that rather than surrender, each side would launch a larger attack, hoping that this step would bring the action to a halt by causing the opponent to capitulate.