Econ

Inadequate dredging is killing our shipping competetivness which collapses the economy triggering massive wars and protectist measures causing tension and instability. Also, as long as we boost tradewe check back all their impacts

Status quo doesnt solve - plan is key to dredge a sufficient number of ports AP 12 by RUSS BYNUM and BRUCE SMITH (Charleston and other Southeast, Gulf port cities need deeper waterways; Corps of Engineers, 6/22/12, http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120622/PC05/120629718/1010/charleston-and-othersoutheast-gulf-port-cities-need-deeper-waterways-corps-of-engineers) The deepening projects singled out by the Army Corps represent just a fraction of the money U.S. ports are spending to upgrade their docks, ship-to-shore cranes and other infrastructure. The American Association of Port Authorities released a survey last week showing U.S. ports plan to spend at least $46 billion on improvements in the next five years. Still, the Corps report cautioned that uncertainty will persist for several years after the Panama Canal expansion is finished as to how many supersized ships will call on U.S. ports, which ones theyll frequent and how
full their cargo decks will be. Giant ships sailing through Egypts Suez Canal have already begun making trips to the East Coast, where high tides give them enough of a boost to reach ports such as Savannah and Charleston.

The budget crisis has made federal funding for port projects extremely tight, especially since Congress and President Barack Obama for the past two years have sworn off so-called earmark spending that was used to fund such projects in the past. The Army Corps report said current funding levels for port improvements wont cover all the projects that should be done. If Congress wont increase the agencys funding for harbor projects, the report said, then perhaps state
governments and private companies such as shipping lines should be required to pay a greater share

Navy
Absent dredging the maritime industry will collapse killing our ability to support a strong navy triggering great power wars. Also, deeper ports are vital to allowing us to rapidly respond to crisis which is key to checking escalation and solves back their war impacts. The pursuit of hegemony is inevitable, sustainable, and prevents great power war star this card, it answers all turns Ikenberry, Brooks, and Wohlforth 13 *Stephen G. Brooks is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, **John Ikenberry is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, **William C. Wohlforth is Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth College (Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement, January/February 2013, Foreign Affairs, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138468/stephen-g-brooks-g-john-ikenberry-and-william-cwohlforth/lean-forward) Since the end of World War II, the United States has pursued a single grand strategy: deep engagement . In an effort to protect its security and prosperity, the country has promoted a liberal economic order and established close defense ties with partners in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. Its military bases cover the map, its ships patrol transit routes across the globe, and tens of thousands of its troops stand guard in allied countries such as
Germany, Japan, and South Korea. The details of

U.S. foreign policy have differed from administration to administration, including the emphasis placed on democracy promotion and humanitarian goals, but for over 60 years, every president has agreed on the fundamental decision to remain deeply engaged in the world, even as the rationale for that strategy has shifted. During the Cold War, the United States' security commitments to Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East served primarily to prevent Soviet encroachment into the world's wealthiest and most resource-rich regions. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the aim has become to make these same regions more secure, and thus less threatening to the United States, and to use these security partnerships to foster the cooperation necessary for a stable and open international order.
Now, more than ever, Washington might be tempted to abandon this grand strategy and pull back from the world. The rise of China is chipping away at the United States' preponderance of power, a budget crisis has put defense spending on the chopping block, and two long wars have left the U.S. military and public exhausted. Indeed, even as most politicians continue to assert their commitment to global leadership, a very different view has taken hold among scholars of international relations over the past decade: that the United States should minimize its overseas military presence, shed its security ties, and give up its efforts to lead the liberal international order.

Proponents of retrenchment argue that a globally engaged grand strategy wastes money by subsidizing the defense of well-off allies and generates resentment among foreign populations and governments. A more modest posture, they contend, would put an end to allies' free-riding and defuse anti-American sentiment. Even if allies did not
take over every mission the United States now performs, most of these roles have nothing to do with U.S. security and only risk entrapping the United States in unnecessary wars. In short, those in this camp maintain that pulling back would not only save blood and treasure but also make the United States more secure.

They are wrong. In making their case, advocates of retrenchment overstate the costs of the current grand strategy and understate its benefits. In fact, the budgetary savings of lowering the United States' international profile are debatable, and there is little evidence to suggest that an internationally engaged America provokes other countries to balance against it, becomes overextended, or gets dragged into unnecessary wars.

The benefits of deep engagement, on the other hand, are legion. U.S. security commitments reduce competition in key regions and act as a check against potential rivals . They help maintain an open world economy and give Washington leverage in economic negotiations. And they make it easier for the United States to secure cooperation for combating a wide range of global threats. Were the United States to cede its global leadership role, it would forgo these proven upsides while exposing itself to the unprecedented downsides of a world in which the country was less secure, prosperous, and influential.
AN AFFORDABLE STRATEGY Many advocates of

retrenchment consider the United States' assertive global posture simply too expensive. The international relations scholar Christopher Layne, for example, has warned of the country's "ballooning budget deficits" and argued that "its strategic commitments exceed the resources available to support them." Calculating the savings of switching grand strategies, however, is not so simple, because it depends on the expenditures the current strategy demands and the amount required for its replacement numbers that are hard to pin down.
If the United States revoked all its security guarantees, brought home all its troops, shrank every branch of the military, and slashed its nuclear arsenal, it would save around $900 billion over ten years, according to Benjamin Friedman and Justin Logan of the Cato Institute. But few advocates of retrenchment endorse such a radical reduction; instead, most call for "restraint," an "offshore balancing" strategy, or an "over the horizon" military posture. The savings these approaches would yield are less clear, since they depend on which security commitments Washington would abandon outright and how much it would cost to keep the remaining ones. If

retrenchment simply meant shipping foreign-based U.S. forces back to the United States, then the savings would be modest at best, since the countries hosting U.S. forces usually cover a large portion of the basing costs. And if it meant maintaining a major expeditionary capacity, then any savings would again be small, since the Pentagon would still have to pay for the expensive weaponry and equipment required for projecting power abroad.
The other side of the cost equation, the price of continued engagement, is also in flux. Although the fat defense budgets of the past decade make an easy target for advocates of retrenchment, such high

levels of spending aren't needed to maintain an engaged global posture. Spending skyrocketed after 9/11, but it has already begun to fall back to earth as the United States winds down its two
costly wars and trims its base level of nonwar spending. As of the fall of 2012, the Defense Department was planning for cuts of just under $500 billion over the next five years, which it maintains will not compromise national security. These reductions would lower military spending to a little less than three percent of GDP by 2017, from its current level of 4.5 percent. The Pentagon could save even more with no ill effects by reforming its procurement practices and compensation policies.

Even without major budget cuts, however, the country can afford the costs of its ambitious grand strategy.
The significant increases in military spending proposed by Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, during the 2012 presidential campaign would still have kept military spending below its current share of GDP, since spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would still have gone down and Romney's proposed nonwar spending levels would not have kept pace with economic growth. Small wonder, then, that the case for pulling back rests more on the nonmonetary costs that the current strategy supposedly incurs. UNBALANCED

One such alleged cost of the current grand strategy is that, in the words of the political scientist Barry Posen, it "prompts states to balance against U.S. power however they can." Yet there is no evidence that countries have banded together in anti-American alliances or tried to match the United States' military capacity on their own or that they will do so in the future. Indeed, it's hard to see how the current grand strategy could generate true counterbalancing. Unlike past hegemons, the United States is geographically isolated , which means that it is far less threatening to other major states and that it faces no contiguous great-power rivals that could step up to the task of balancing against it. Moreover, any competitor would have a hard time matching the U.S. military. Not only is the United States so far ahead militarily in both quantitative and qualitative terms, but its security guarantees also give it the leverage to prevent allies from giving military technology to potential U.S. rivals. Because the United States dominates the high-end defense industry, it can trade access to its defense market for allies' agreement not to transfer key military technologies to its competitors. The embargo that the United States
has convinced the EU to maintain on military sales to China since 1989 is a case in point.

If U.S. global leadership were prompting balancing, then one would expect actual examples of pushback especially during the administration of George W. Bush, who pursued a foreign policy that seemed particularly unilateral. Yet since the Soviet Union collapsed, no major powers have tried to balance against the United States by seeking to match its military might or by assembling a formidable alliance; the prospect is simply

too daunting. Instead, they have resorted to what scholars call "soft balancing," using international institutions and norms to constrain Washington. Setting aside the fact that soft balancing is a slippery concept and difficult to distinguish from everyday diplomatic competition, it is wrong to say that the practice only harms the United States. Arguably, as the global leader, the United States benefits from employing soft-balancing-style leverage more than any other country. After all, today's
rules and institutions came about under its auspices and largely reflect its interests, and so they are in fact tailor-made for soft balancing by the United States itself. In 2011, for example, Washington coordinated action with several Southeast Asian states to oppose Beijing's claims in the South China Sea by pointing to established international law and norms.

Another argument for retrenchment holds that the United States will fall prey to the same fate as past hegemons and accelerate its own decline. In order to keep its ambitious strategy in place, the logic goes, the country will have to divert resources away from more productive purposes infrastructure, education, scientific research, and so on that are necessary to keep its economy competitive. Allies, meanwhile, can get away with
lower military expenditures and grow faster than they otherwise would.

The historical evidence for this phenomenon is thin; for the most part, past superpowers lost their leadership not because they pursued hegemony but because other major powers balanced against them a prospect that is not in the cards today. (If anything, leading states can use their position to stave off their decline.) A bigger problem with the warnings against "imperial overstretch" is that there is no reason to believe that the pursuit of global leadership saps economic growth. Instead, most studies by economists find no clear relationship between military expenditures and economic decline.
To be sure, if the United States were a dramatic outlier and spent around a quarter of its GDP on defense, as the Soviet Union did in its last decades, its growth and competitiveness would suffer. But in 2012, even as it fought a war in Afghanistan and conducted counterterrorism operations around the globe, Washington spent just 4.5 percent of GDP on defense a relatively small fraction, historically speaking. (From 1950 to 1990, that figure averaged 7.6 percent.) Recent economic difficulties might prompt Washington to reevaluate its defense budgets and international commitments, but that does not mean that those policies caused the downturn. And any money freed up from dropping global commitments would not necessarily be spent in ways that would help the U.S. economy. Likewise, U.S. allies' economic growth rates have nothing to do with any security subsidies they receive from Washington. The contention that lower military expenditures facilitated the rise of Japan, West Germany, and other countries dependent on U.S. defense guarantees may have seemed plausible during the last bout of declinist anxiety, in the 1980s. But these states eventually stopped climbing up the global economic ranks as their per capita wealth approached U.S. levels - just as standard models of economic growth would predict. Over the past 20 years, the United States has maintained its lead in per capita GDP over its European allies and Japan, even as those countries' defense efforts have fallen further behind. Their failure to modernize their militaries has only served to entrench the United States' dominance.

LED NOT INTO TEMPTATION The costs of U.S. foreign policy that matter most, of course, are human lives, and critics of an expansive

grand strategy worry

that the United States might get dragged into unnecessary wars. Securing smaller allies, they argue, emboldens those
states to take risks they would not otherwise accept, pulling the superpower sponsor into costly conflicts -- a classic moral hazard problem. Concerned about the reputational costs of failing to honor the country's alliance commitments, U.S. leaders might go to war even when no national interests are at stake.

History shows, however, that great powers anticipate the danger of entrapment and structure their agreements to protect themselves from it. It is nearly impossible to find a clear case of a smaller power luring a reluctant great power into war. For decades, World War I served as the canonical example of entangling alliances supposedly drawing great powers into a fight, but an outpouring of new historical research has overturned the conventional wisdom, revealing that the war was more the result of a conscious decision on Germany's part to try to dominate Europe than a case of alliance entrapment. If anything, alliances reduce the risk of getting pulled into a conflict . In East Asia, the regional security agreements that
Washington struck after World War II were designed, in the words of the political scientist Victor Cha, to "constrain anticommunist allies in the region that might engage in aggressive behavior against adversaries that could entrap the United States in an unwanted larger war." The same logic is now at play in the U.S.-Taiwanese relationship. After cross-strait tensions flared in the 1990s and the first decade of this century, U.S. officials grew concerned that their ambiguous support for Taiwan might expose them to the risk of entrapment. So the Bush administration adjusted its policy, clarifying that its goal was to not only deter China from an unprovoked attack but also deter Taiwan from unilateral moves toward independence. For many advocates of retrenchment, the problem is that the mere possession of globe-girdling military capabilities supposedly inflates policymakers' conception of the national interest, so much so that every foreign problem begins to look like America's to solve. Critics also

argue that the country's military superiority causes it to seek total solutions to security problems, as in
Afghanistan and Iraq, that could be dealt with in less costly ways. Only a country that possessed such awesome military power and faced no serious geopolitical rival would fail to be satisfied with partial fixes, such as containment, and instead embark on wild schemes of democracy building, the argument goes. Furthermore, they contend, the United States' outsized military creates a sense of obligation to do something with it even when no U.S. interests are at stake. As Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the un, famously asked Colin Powell, then

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when debating intervention in Bosnia in 1993, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" If the U.S. military scrapped its forces and shuttered its bases, then the country would no doubt eliminate the risk of entering needless wars, having tied itself to the mast like Ulysses. But if it instead merely moved its forces over the horizon, as is more commonly proposed by advocates of retrenchment, whatever temptations there were to intervene would not disappear. The bigger problem with the idea that a forward posture distorts conceptions of the national interest, however, is that it rests on just one case: Iraq. That war is an outlier in terms of both its high costs (it accounts for some two-thirds of the casualties and budget costs of all U.S. wars since 1990) and the degree to which the United States shouldered them alone. In the Persian Gulf War and the interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya, U.S. allies bore more of the burden, controlling for the size of their economies and populations. Besides, the

Iraq war was not an inevitable consequence of pursuing the United States' existing grand strategy; many scholars and policymakers who prefer an engaged America strongly opposed the war. Likewise, continuing the current grand strategy in no way condemns the United States to more wars like it. Consider how the country,
after it lost in Vietnam, waged the rest of the Cold War with proxies and highly limited interventions. Iraq has generated a similar reluctance to undertake large expeditionary operations -- what the political scientist John Mueller has dubbed "the Iraq syndrome." Those

contending that the United States' grand strategy ineluctably leads the country into temptation need to present much more evidence before their case can be convincing.
KEEPING THE PEACE Of course, even if it is true that the costs of deep engagement fall far below what advocates of retrenchment claim, they would not be worth bearing unless they yielded greater benefits. In fact, they do. The

most obvious benefit of the current strategy is that it reduces the risk of a dangerous conflict. The United States' security commitments deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony from contemplating expansion and dissuade U.S. partners from trying to solve security problems on their own in ways that would end up threatening other states. Skeptics discount this benefit by arguing that U.S. security guarantees aren't necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries from erupting. They maintain that the high costs of territorial conquest and the many tools countries can use to signal their benign intentions are enough to prevent conflict. In other words, major powers could peacefully manage regional multipolarity without the American
pacifier. But that

outlook is too sanguine. If Washington got out of East Asia, Japan and South Korea would likely expand their military capabilities and go nuclear , which could provoke a destabilizing reaction from China. It's worth noting that during the Cold War, both South Korea and Taiwan tried to obtain nuclear weapons; the only thing that stopped them was the United States, which used its security commitments to restrain their nuclear temptations. Similarly, were the United States to leave the Middle East, the countries currently backed by Washington notably, Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia might act in ways that would intensify the region's security dilemmas.
There would even be reason to worry about Europe. Although it's hard to imagine the return of great-power military competition in a postAmerican Europe, it's not difficult to foresee governments there refusing to pay the budgetary costs of higher military outlays and the political costs of increasing EU defense cooperation. The result might be a continent incapable of securing itself from threats on its periphery, unable to join foreign interventions on which U.S. leaders might want European help, and vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. Given how easily a U.S. withdrawal from key regions could lead to dangerous competition , advocates of retrenchment tend to put forth another argument: that such rivalries wouldn't actually hurt the United States. To be sure, few doubt that the United States could survive the return of conflict among powers in Asia or the Middle East but at what cost? Were states

in one or both of these regions to start competing against one another, they would likely boost their military budgets, arm client states, and perhaps even start regional proxy wars, all of which should concern the United States, in
part because its lead in military capabilities would narrow.

Greater regional insecurity could also produce cascades of nuclear proliferation as powers such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan built nuclear forces of their own. Those countries' regional competitors might then also seek nuclear arsenals. Although nuclear deterrence can promote stability between
two states with the kinds of nuclear forces that the Soviet Union and the United States possessed, things get shakier when there are multiple nuclear rivals with less robust arsenals. As

the number of nuclear powers increases, the probability of illicit transfers, irrational decisions, accidents, and unforeseen crises goes up. The case for abandoning the United States' global role misses the underlying security logic of the current approach. By reassuring allies and actively managing regional relations , Washington dampens competition in the world's key areas, thereby preventing the emergence of a hothouse in which countries would grow new military capabilities. For proof that this strategy is working, one need look no further than the defense budgets

of the current great powers: on average, since 1991 they have kept their military expenditures as a percentage of GDP to historic
lows, and they have not attempted to match the United States' top-end military capabilities. Moreover, all of the world's most modern militaries are U.S. allies, and the United States' military lead over its potential rivals is by many measures growing. On top of all this, the current grand strategy acts as a hedge against the emergence regional hegemons. Some supporters of retrenchment argue that the U.S. military should keep its forces over the horizon and pass the buck to local powers to do the dangerous work of counterbalancing rising regional powers. Washington, they contend, should deploy forces abroad only when a truly credible contender for regional hegemony arises, as in the cases of Germany and Japan during World War II and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Yet there is already a potential contender for regional hegemony -- China -- and to balance it, the United States will need to maintain its key alliances in Asia and the military capacity to intervene there. The implication is that the United States should get out of Afghanistan and Iraq, reduce its military presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia. Yet that is exactly what the Obama administration is doing. MILITARY DOMINANCE, ECONOMIC PREEMINENCE Preoccupied with security issues, critics of the current grand strategy miss one of its most important benefits: sustaining an open global economy and a favorable place for the United States within it. To be sure, the sheer size of its output would guarantee the United States a major role in the global economy whatever grand strategy it adopted. Yet the

country's military dominance undergirds its economic leadership. In addition to protecting the world economy from instability, its military commitments and naval superiority help secure the sea-lanes and other shipping corridors that allow trade to flow freely and cheaply. Were the United States to pull back from the world, the task of securing the global commons would get much harder. Washington would have less leverage with which it could convince countries to cooperate on economic matters and less access to the military bases throughout the world needed to keep the seas open. A global role also lets the United States structure the world economy in ways that serve its particular economic interests. During the Cold War, Washington used its overseas security commitments to get allies to embrace the economic
policies it preferred -- convincing West Germany in the 1960s, for example, to take costly steps to support the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. U.S. defense agreements work the same way today. For example, when negotiating the 2011 free-trade agreement with South Korea, U.S. officials took advantage of Seoul's desire to use the agreement as a means of tightening its security relations with Washington. As one diplomat explained to us privately, "We asked for changes in labor and environment clauses, in auto clauses, and the Koreans took it all." Why? Because they feared a failed agreement would be "a setback to the political and security relationship." More broadly, the United States wields its security leverage to shape the overall structure of the global economy. Much of what the United States wants from the economic order is more of the same: for instance, it likes the current structure of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund and prefers that free trade continue. Washington wins when U.S. allies favor this status quo, and one reason they are inclined to support the existing system is because they value their military alliances. Japan, to name one example, has shown interest in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Obama administration's most important free-trade initiative in the region, less because its economic interests compel it to do so than because Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda believes that his support will strengthen Japan's security ties with the United States.

The United States' geopolitical dominance also helps keep the U.S. dollar in place as the world's reserve currency, which confers enormous benefits on the country, such as a greater ability to borrow money.
This is perhaps clearest with Europe: the EU's dependence on the United States for its security precludes the EU from having the kind of political leverage to support the euro that the United States has with the dollar. As with other aspects of the global economy, the United States does not provide its leadership for free: it extracts disproportionate gains. Shirking that responsibility would place those benefits at risk. CREATING COOPERATION What goes for the global economy goes for other forms of international cooperation. Here, too, American leadership benefits many countries but disproportionately helps the United States. In

order to counter transnational threats, such as terrorism, piracy, organized crime, climate change , and pandemics , states have to work together and take collective action. But cooperation does not come about effortlessly, especially when national interests diverge. The United States' military efforts to promote stability and its broader leadership make it easier for Washington to launch joint initiatives and shape them in ways that reflect U.S. interests. After all, cooperation is hard to come by in regions where chaos reigns, and it flourishes where leaders can anticipate lasting stability. U.S. alliances are about security first, but they also provide the political framework and channels of communication for cooperation on nonmilitary issues. NATO, for example, has spawned new institutions, such as the
Atlantic Council, a think tank, that make it easier for Americans and Europeans to talk to one another and do business. Likewise, consultations with allies in East Asia spill over into other policy issues; for example, when American diplomats travel to Seoul to manage the military alliance, they also end up discussing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Thanks

to conduits such as this, the United States can use bargaining chips in one issue area to make progress in others. The benefits of these communication channels are especially pronounced when it comes to fighting the kinds of threats that require new forms of cooperation, such as terrorism and pandemics . With its

alliance system in place, the United States is in a stronger position than it would otherwise be to advance cooperation and share burdens. For example, the intelligence-sharing network within NATO, which was originally designed to gather information on the Soviet Union, has been adapted to deal with terrorism. Similarly, after a tsunami in the Indian Ocean devastated surrounding countries in 2004, Washington had a much easier time
orchestrating a fast humanitarian response with Australia, India, and Japan, since their militaries were already comfortable working with one another. The operation did wonders for the United States' image in the region.

The United States' global role also has the more direct effect of facilitating the bargains among governments that get cooperation going in the first place. As the scholar Joseph Nye has written, "The American military
role in deterring threats to allies, or of assuring access to a crucial resource such as oil in the Persian Gulf, means that the provision of protective force can be used in bargaining situations. Sometimes the linkage may be direct; more often it is a factor not mentioned openly but present in the back of statesmen's minds." THE DEVIL WE KNOW Should America come home? For many prominent scholars of international relations, the answer is yes -- a view that seems even wiser in the wake of the disaster in Iraq and the Great Recession. Yet their arguments simply don't hold up. There

is little evidence that the United States would save much money switching to a smaller global posture. Nor is the current strategy self-defeating: it has not provoked the formation of counterbalancing coalitions or caused the country to spend itself into economic decline. Nor will it condemn the United States to foolhardy wars in the future. What the strategy does do is help prevent the outbreak of conflict in the world's most important regions, keep the global economy humming, and make international cooperation easier. Charting a different course would
threaten all these benefits. This is not to say that the United States' current foreign policy can't be adapted to new circumstances and challenges. Washington does not need to retain every commitment at all costs, and there is nothing wrong with rejiggering its strategy in response to new opportunities or setbacks. That is what the Nixon administration did by winding down the Vietnam War and increasing the United States' reliance on regional partners to contain Soviet power, and it is what the Obama administration has been doing after the Iraq war by pivoting to Asia. These episodes of rebalancing belie the argument that a powerful and internationally engaged America cannot tailor its policies to a changing world.

A grand strategy of actively managing global security and promoting the liberal economic order has served the United States exceptionally well for the past six decades, and there is no reason to give it up now. The country's globe-spanning posture is the devil we know, and a world with a disengaged America is the devil we don't know. Were American leaders to choose retrenchment, they would in essence be running a massive experiment to test how the world would work without an engaged and liberal leading power. The results could well be disastrous.

Naval dominance is key to prevent the rise of any global challengers and the lynchpin of hegemony Stratfor 2008 - the worlds leading private intelligence service. (U.S.: Naval Dominance and the Importance of Oceans, http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/u_s_naval_dominance_and_importance_oceans)

Our statement that control of the worlds oceans is a cornerstone of U.S. geopolitical security and keeps any potential adversary half a world away sparked extensive comment. This is a long-standing Stratfor position, not a casual assertion, and is crucial to the way we see the world. In his 1890 classic The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, U.S. Naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan examines the decisive role superior sea power played in geopolitical competition and conflict from 1660 to 1783. His work has made him perhaps the foremost theorist of naval power in the United States. At the risk of oversimplification, Mahans thesis is that control of the sea can be decisive in both peacetime and wartime, and has far-reaching military, economic and geopolitical ramifications. Mahan is required reading at Stratfor. The
world has changed quite a bit since the time of Mahan, who wrote as sail was giving way to steam as the principal method of naval propulsion. Indeed, a common question from our readers has been about the applicability of the oceans to U.S. security in the 21st century, particularly in the context of globalization. In essence, readers have asked us whether oceans still matter after

. While aviation, the intercontinental ballistic missile, satellites and the Internet have all fundamentally altered the way the
globalization has so reduced transit times and increased interconnectivity that transnational terrorism and cyberspace have come into existence

world interacts and how wars are fought, Mahans analysis holds true. Over the course of a century, but particularly during and after
World War II, the United States honed and perfected expeditionary naval operations. Washingtons ability to function on the o ther side of the planet from home port is unparalleled and has

. The importance of this cannot be overstated, and has broad applicability. Globalization has massively increased, not decreased seaborne commerce. As the dominant global naval power, Washington exercises a decisive influence over the principal avenue of both international trade and the flow of the worlds oil (and, increasingly, natural gas). In addition to wielding this as a lever over other countries, the U.S. Navy is the guarantor of Americas global supply lines. That Washington has claim to both the worlds foremost navy and the worlds foremost economy is no coincidence, and it is a key dynamic of the entire international system. From a military perspective, the last shooting war in the
surpassed the sea power of the British Empire that Mahan so admired Western Hemisphere of any strategic significance for the United States was the Spanish-American War. That conflict resulted in the expulsion at the end of the 19th century of the last Eastern Hemispheric power from Washingtons periphery. For more than a century now, the United States has fought its wars abroad, with the only strategic threat to the homeland being Soviet (and to a

. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington was able to prevent the re-emergence of an outside powers beachhead in Cuba because U.S. naval dominance
much lesser extent, Chinese) nuclear weapons. Indeed, the fundamental value of naval dominance was demonstrated in 1962 made the situation untenable for the Kremlin. The Russian navy was not in a position to sustain forces there in the face of concerted U.S. naval opposition. And w hile the notion of invasion in

. That apparent anachronism is symptomatic of fundamental U.S. geopolitical security. Across the oceans, even much of Europe still looks east over the open Northern European plain and remembers columns of Soviet armor. Nations the world over continue to struggle day in and day out with their neighbors. Pakistan, India and China continue to squabble over Kashmir, which they each consider core to their geographic security. Russias foremost geopolitical struggle is the re-establishment of some semblance of a peripheral buffer in Europe and the Caucasus necessary buffers, but a poor compensation for unfavorable geography. These issues crucial geopolitical objectives keep Eurasia divided and restrict (but obviously do not eliminate) other countries bandwidth to deal with global issues farther afield. The ultimate consequence of this division is the prevention of the emergence of a potential challenger to the United States. By this, we mean the emergence of a country so secure in its geopolitical position that the mustering of resources necessary to project military force across the Atlantic or Pacific to meaningfully challenge the strategic security of the North American continent becomes a possibility. More simply, U.S. naval dominance allows Washington to keep the costs of projecting hostile military force across the worlds oceans prohibitively high. The countries of the world are thus largely left confronting geopolitical challenges in their own backyards, unable to militarily challenge the United States in its backyard. All the while, the U.S. Navy conducts operations daily in Eurasias backyard. This is a secure and enviable geopolitical position.
the 21st century may seem anachronistic in the U.S. perspective, the rest of the world sees things very differently

Predictions
Framework: the role of the ballot is to determine whether the aff is better than the status quo or a competitive policy option. This means that they can have the K but fiating the alt is a voting issue a) Utopian fiatthey do not specify an agent or mechanism for achieving the alt. It is a rigged game to test the aff versus utopia. This kills fairness and is an independent voting issue. b) Decision-makingThe agent of the alt is not directly competitive with the plan so we are not engaging in opportunity cost thinkingwhich is the most rigorous way to test the aff and is one of the most important critical thinking skills we take away from debate Floating PIKs are a voterreject the team to deter bad practices and compensate for strategic damage: A) Makes it impossible to be affwe could never defend a single representation in a vacuum and making the debate that narrow crushes the educational value of the topic. They have no offenseif their arguments were meaningful they wouldnt need to steal all our offense. B) Even if they kick it, its functionally a new 2nc advocacy that wasnt in the 1nc which is an independent voter because it skews 1ar strategy and forces us to read new offensethat causes shallow debate. We justify our epistomolgy using empirically tested data and statistical probabilities Their predictions arguments dont apply to our affimagining unintended catastrophes is both accurate and necessarythis is the author that did their studies TETLOCK 2009 (Philip Tetlock is the Mitchell Endowed Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Expert Political
Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, The National Interest, August 25, http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=22040) The authors point out too that just

because somethinglike geopolitical riskis hard to quantify does not give you license to ignore it. Rough approximations are better than tacitly treating the risk as zero. Ask the energy
companies that rushed into Yeltsins Russia in the 1990s to make large fixed-capital investments and were then compelled by Putin in the next

This means we need to value contrarian thinkers, even though they can be a royal pain and slow might consider one much-hyped, but still-useful, method of prying open otherwise-closed minds: scenario planning. This requires policy advocates to envision worlds in which things dont work out as planneda world in which we are not greeted as liberators in Iraq; or a world in which deregulation leads not to greater market efficiencies but rather to excessive borrowing that severely destabilizes financial markets. History rarely overtly repeats itself but it often rhymes and there is an advantage to those who can pick up the more subtle similarities. Saddam Hussein bore some
decade to renegotiate. down the adoption of policies preferred by insiders. And so the authors suggest we resemblance to Hitler, but he also bore some to Ceauescu, Mussolini, Kim Il Sung and Stalin, all of whom played a far more risk-averse geopolitical game. The case for the

2003 invasion of Iraq loses much of its rhetorical force when we use historical analogies in a more nuanced fashion. The authors are even nimble enough to see that although there are many
settings in which foxes like themselves have an advantagethey are slower to jump to premature conclusions and are quicker to change their minds in response to new evidencehedgehogs

are still sometimes remarkably prescient. As far back as 1933, Churchill classified Hitler as a grave threat to Great Britaina category into which, incidentally, he also tossed Gandhi. Similarly, the most bearish and bullish financial pundits occasionally have their days in the sun. Even if our predictions are bad the possibility of extinction means that we should use them

POSNER 2004 (Richard, US Court of Appeals judge and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Catastrophe: Risk and Response 18) The example suggests that the reason human survival beyond, say, the twenty-second century has little resonance with most of us is merely that the future is hazy; the haziness illustrates the operation of imagination cost. The future that is now the present was as hazy to the Romans as our future is to us. But that would not have been a good reason for their risking the destruction of the human race in what to them was the remote and therefore weightless future. Where the example is misleading, however, is in failing to extrapolate from the Romans assumed ability
(assumed in my example, that isobviously the assumption is contrary to fact) to build a particle accelerator 2,000 years ago. If they had had that much knowledge in 4 A.D., then probably within a few hundred more years they would have learned how to avoid an accelerator disaster, and so the risk of extinction by 2004 would have been smaller than 1 in 500. Nevertheless the

example is relevant to whether we

should be utterly insouciant about the fate of our remote descendants (remote on the scale of thousands, not millions or billions, of years). It does not answer the question how much we owe the remote future, but the answer may not be important. The threat that the catastrophic risks pose in the near future, the current century, may be a sufficient basis for taking effective action now to prevent the risks from ever materializing.
Perm do the plan and reject

linear scenario planning in favor of complex theoretical analysis

Empiricism is the most useful form of knowledge for policymakersuseful in making theories to shape policy Walt, 5 Prof, Kennedy School of Government @ Harvard (Stephen M., Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2005. 8:2348, pg. 25-26, The Relationship Between
Theory and Policy in International Relations, http://www.iheid.ch/webdav/site/political_science/shared/political_science/3452/walt.pdf)

Policy decisions can be influenced by several types of knowledge. First, policy makers invariably rely on purely factual knowledge (e.g., how large are the opponents forces? What is the current balance of payments?). Second, decision makers sometimes employ rules of thumb: simple decision rules acquired through experience rather than via systematic study (Mearsheimer 1989).3 A third type of knowledge consists of typologies, which classify phenomena based on sets of specific traits. Policy makers can also rely on empirical laws. An empirical law is an observed correspondence between two or more phenomena that systematic inquiry has shown to be reliable. Such laws (e.g., democracies do not fight each other or human beings are more risk averse with respect to losses than to gains) can be useful guides even if we do not know why they occur, or if our explanations for them are incorrect. Finally, policy makers can also use theories. A theory is a causal explanation it identifies recurring relations between two or more phenomena and explains why that relationship obtains. By providing us with a picture of the central forces that determine real-world behavior, theories invariably simplify reality in order to render it comprehensible. At the most general level, theoretical IR work consists of efforts by social scientists. . .to account for interstate and trans-state processes, issues, and outcomes in general causal terms (Lepgold & Nincic 2001, p. 5; Viotti & Kauppi 1993 (). IR theories offer explanations for the level of security competition between states including both the likelihood of war among particular states and the warproneness of specific countries); the level and forms of international cooperation (e.g., alliances, regimes, openness to trade and investment); the spread of ideas, norms, and institutions; and the transformation of particular international systems, among other topics. In constructing these theories, IR scholars employ an equally diverse set of explanatory variables. Some of these
theories operate at the level of the international system, using variables such as the distribution of power among states (Waltz 1979, Copeland 2000, Mearsheimer 2001), the volume of trade, financial flows, and interstate communications (Deutsch 1969, Ruggie 1983, Rosecrance 1986); or the degree of institutionalization among states (Keohane 1984, Keohane & Martin 2003). Other theories emphasize different national characteristics, such as regime type (Andreski 1980, Doyle 1986, Fearon 1994, Russett 1995), bureaucratic and organizational politics (Allison & Halperin 1972, Halperin 1972), or domestic cohesion (Levy 1989); or the content of particular ideas or doctrines (Van Evera 1984, Hall 1989, Goldstein & Keohane 1993, Snyder 1993). Yet another family of theories operates at the individual level, focusing on individual or group psychology, gender differences, and other human traits (De Rivera 1968, Jervis 1976, Mercer 1996, Byman&Pollock 2001, Goldgeier&Tetlock 2001, Tickner 2001, Goldstein 2003), while a fourth body of theory focuses on collective ideas, identities, and social discourse (e.g., Finnemore 1996, Ruggie 1998, Wendt 1999). To

develop these ideas, IR theorists employ the full range of social science methods: comparative case studies, formal theory, large-N statistical analysis, and hermeneutical or interpretivist approaches.

Focusing on epistemology selfishly ignores real world problems Jarvis, 2K Prof Philosophy @ U South Carolina (Darryl, Studies in International Relations, International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, pg.
2)
While Hoffmann might well be correct, these

days one can neither begin nor conclude empirical research without first discussing epistemological orientations and ontological assumptions. Like a vortex, metatheory has engulfed us all and the question of "theory" which was once used as a guide to research is now the object of research. Indeed, for a discipline whose purview is ostensibly outward looldng and international in scope, and at a time of ever encroaching globalization and transnationalism, International Relations has become increasingly provincial and inward looking. Rather than grapple with the numerous issues that confront peoples around the world, since the early 1980s the discipline has tended more and more toward obsessive self-examination.3 These days the politics of famine, environmental degradation, underdevelopment, or ethnic cleansing, let alone the cartographic machinations in Eastern Europe and the reconfiguration of the geo-global political-economy, seem scarcely to concern theorists of international politics who define the urgent task of our time to be one of metaphysical reflection and epistemological investigation. Arguably, theory is no longer concerned with the study of international relations so much as the "manner in which international relations as a discipline, and international relations as a subject matter, have been constructed."4 To be concerned with the latter is to be "on the cutting edge," where novelty has itself become "an appropriate form of scholarship."5 Failure to engage in the political process will result in the takeover by the extreme right, leading to discrimination and war worldwide Rorty 98 professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy, by courtesy, at Stanford University (Richard, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, 1998, pg. 89-94) *WE DO NOT ENDORSE GENDERED LANGUAGE* Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desperately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for-someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis novel It Cant Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words "nigger" and "kike" will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization?
Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century, no longer have a Left. Since nobody

denies the existence of what I have called the cultural Left, this amounts to an admission that that Left is unable to engage in national politics. It is not the sort of Left which can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma. I have

. The first is that the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the
two suggestions about how to effect this transition country of Lincoln and Whitman might be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he expresses his exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of "individualism versus communitarianism." Dewey thought that all discussions which took this dichotomy seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another. Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver, one which supplies "the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order. "9 For such ascents are now more common on the Left than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been "inadequately theorized," you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan's impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by "problematizing familiar concepts." Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly "subversive" books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors "theorize" is often something very concrete and near at hand-a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal-they

These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called "power." This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook."10
offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.

Perm do the plan and reject all other instances of complexity Prediction is possible and accurate even if not perfect-game theory and political modeling can account for complex social systems by aggregating expertism-forecasting can provide an accurate basis for scenario planning especially for MENA revolutions de Mesquita 11 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution B.A. from Queens, M.A. from Michigan, PhD from Michigan, "FOX-HEDGING OR KNOWING: ONE BIG WAY TO KNOW MANY THINGS" July 18 www.catounbound.org/2011/07/18/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita/fox-hedging-or-knowing-one-big-way-to-knowmany-things/ Given what we know today and given the problems inherent in dealing with human interaction, what is a leading contender for making accurate, discriminating, useful predictions of complex human decisions? In good hedgehog mode I believe one top contender is applied game theory. Of course there are others but I am betting on game theory as the right place to invest effort. Why? Because game theory is the only method of which I am aware that explicitly compels us to address human adaptability. Gardner and Tetlock rightly note that people are self-aware beings who see, think, talk, and attempt to predict each others behaviorand who are continually adapting to each others efforts to predict each others behavior, adding layer after layer of new calculations and new complexity. This adaptation is what game theory jargon succinctly calls endogenous choice. Predicting human behavior means solving for endogenous choices while assessing uncertainty. It certainly isnt easy but, as the example of bandwidth auctions helps clarify, game theorists are solving for human adaptability and uncertainty with some success. Indeed, I used game theoretic reasoning on May 5, 2010 to predict to a large investment groups portfolio committee that Mubaraks regime faced replacement, especially by the Muslim Brotherhood, in the coming year. That prediction did not rely on in-depth knowledge of Egyptian history and culture or on expert judgment but rather on a game theory model called selectorate theory and its implications for the concurrent occurrence of logically derived revolutionary triggers. Thus, while the desire for revolution had been present in Egypt (and elsewhere) for many years, logic suggested that the

odds of success and the expected rewards for revolution were rising swiftly in 2010 in Egypt while the expected costs were not. This is but one example that highlights what Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, who was quoted by Gardner and Tetlock, has said about game theory and prediction (referring, as it happens, to a specific model I developed for predicting policy decisions): Bueno de Mesquita has demonstrated the power of using game theory and related assumptions of rational and self-seeking behavior in predicting the outcome of important political and legal processes. Nice as his statement is for me personally, the broader point is that game theory in the hands of much better game theorists than I am has the potential to transform our ability to anticipate the consequences of alternative choices in many aspects of human interaction. How can game theory be harnessed to achieve reliable prediction? Acting like a fox, I gather information from a wide variety of experts. They are asked only for specific current information (Who wants to influence a decision? What outcome do they currently advocate? How focused are they on the issue compared to other questions on their plate? How flexible are they about getting the outcome they advocate? And how much clout could they exert?). They are not asked to make judgments about what will happen. Then, acting as a hedgehog, I use that information as data with which to seed a dynamic applied game theory model. The models logic then produces not only specific predictions about the issues in question, but also a probability distribution around the predictions. The predictions are detailed and nuanced. They address not only what outcome is likely to arise, but also how each player will act, how they are likely to relate to other players over time, what they believe about each other, and much more. Methods like this are credited by the CIA, academic specialists and others, as being accurate about 90 percent of the time based on large-sample assessments. These methods have been subjected to peer review with predictions published well ahead of the outcome being known and with the issues forecast being important questions of their time with much controversy over how they were expected to be resolved. This is not so much a testament to any insight I may have had but rather to the virtue of combining the focus of the hedgehog with the breadth of the fox. When facts are harnessed by logic and evaluated through replicable tests of evidence, we progress toward better prediction. Vague alt they provide no description of what their alternative political actions would be making it impossible to answer. This is a voter for fairness and education killing disad links and clash over alternative solvency.

Even if predictions in the abstract are wrong, policy debates that predict hypothetical outcomes and weigh evidence of the risk of those outcomes is productive Tetlock & Gardner 11 Philip Tetlock is a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas Business School at the University of California-Berkeley, AND Dan Gardner is a columnist and senior writer for the Ottawa Citizen and the author of The Science of Fear, received numerous awards for his writing, including the Michener Award, M.A. History from York, "OVERCOMING OUR AVERSION TO ACKNOWLEDGING OUR IGNORANCE" July 11 www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/11/dan-gardner-andphilip-tetlock/overcoming-our-aversion-to-acknowledging-our-ignorance/ The optimists are right that there is much we can do at a cost that is quite modest relative to what is often at stake. For example, why not build on the IARPA tournament? Imagine a system for recording and judging forecasts. Imagine running tallies of forecasters accuracy rates. Imagine advocates on either side of a policy debate specifying in advance precisely what outcomes their desired approach is expected to produce, the evidence that will settle whether it has done so, and the conditions under which participants would agree to say I was wrong. Imagine pundits being held to account. Of course

arbitration only works if the arbiter is universally respected and it would be an enormous challenge to create an analytical center whose judgments were not only fair, but perceived to be fair even by partisans dead sure they are right and the other guys are wrong. But think of the potential of such a system to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, to sharpen public debate, to shift attention from blowhards to experts worthy of an audience, and to improve public policy. At a minimum, it would highlight how often our forecasts and expectations fail, and if that were to deflate the bloated confidence of experts and leaders, and give pause to those preparing some great leap forward, it would be money well spent. But the pessimists are right, too, that fallibility, error, and tragedy are permanent conditions of our existence. Humility is in order, or, as Socrates said, the beginning of wisdom is the admission of ignorance. The Socratic message has always been a hard sell, and it still isespecially among practical people in business and politics, who expect every presentation to end with a single slide consisting of five bullet points labeled The Solution. We have no such slide, unfortunately. But in defense of Socrates, humility is the foundation of the fox style of thinking and much research suggests it is an essential component of good judgment in our uncertain world. It is practical. Over the long term, it yields better calibrated probability judgments, which should help you affix more realistic odds than your competitors on policy bets panning out. Alt fails- no spillover Political modeling obviates critiques of expertism de Mesquita 11 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution B.A. from Queens, M.A. from Michigan, PhD from Michigan, "FOX-HEDGING OR KNOWING: ONE BIG WAY TO KNOW MANY THINGS" July 18 www.catounbound.org/2011/07/18/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita/fox-hedging-or-knowing-one-big-way-to-knowmany-things/ Good predictionand this is my beliefcomes from dependence on logic and evidence to draw inferences about the causal path from facts to outcomes. Unfortunately, government, business, and the media assume that expertiseknowing the history, culture, mores, and language of a place, for instanceis sufficient to anticipate the unfolding of events. Indeed, too often many of us dismiss approaches to prediction that require knowledge of statistical methods, mathematics, and systematic research design. We seem to prefer wisdom over science, even though the evidence shows that the application of the scientific method, with all of its demands, outperforms experts (remember Johan de Witt). The belief that area expertise, for instance, is sufficient to anticipate the future is, as Tetlock convincingly demonstrated, just plain false. If we hope to build reliable predictions about human behavior, whether in China, Cameroon, or Connecticut, then probably we must first harness facts to the systematic, repeated, transparent application of the same logic across connected families of problems. By doing so we can test alternative ways of thinking to uncover what works and what doesnt in different circumstances. Here Gardner, Tetlock, and I could not agree more. Prediction tournaments are an essential ingredient to work out what the current limits are to improved knowledge and predictive accuracy. Of course, improvements in knowledge and accuracy will always be a moving target because technology, ideas, and subject adaptation will be ongoing.

States Devolution-l
Conditionality is a voter: 1. Strat Skew They make impossible to effectively allocate my 2ac by being able to kick out of what I spend the most time on. 2. Policymaking Conditionality doesnt force logical concessions to kick arguments promoting a bad form of education. 3. Multiple Conditional Worlds allow the negative to cross apply our offense to become their offense causing affs to be squirrely which is an independent voter. 4. Perf Con forces us to debate against ourselves killing education and fairness which is an independent voter. 4. 1 Conditional Advocacy solves their offense

CP failsa) Without fed funding investment is zero sum- ports will have to compete against each other for funds which means that we cant boost enough sufficiently. Also, courts and legal issues means that the cp would take forever to be implemented which isnt fast enough to solve for Panama. Thats AAPA b) Taxes- the alternative to direct funding is a massive increase in port taxes which would cripple maritime competetivness- literally solves none of our aff. Thats AAPA The devolution counterplan is illegitimate and a voter A) Literaturethere is no literature about devolution in the context of our afflit is the source of our preparation and offense and the only objective way to know whats predictable. B) Decisionmakingno decisionmaker ever faces the choice they poseits an illogical thought process so theres no coherence or jurisdiction to vote on impossible outcomes especially when it costs us a year of debates about transportation infrastructure. C) Aff groundthey fiat through all logical offensethis stifles the topic and forces us to the margins while they use it as a strategic crutch creating stale debates. D) Counter-interpretationthey get the 50 states CP but dont get to fiat through all barriers and legal precedents. Devolution fails- States need federal support Kavinoky, 5/14/12- Executive Director, Transportation & Infrastructure U.S. Chamber of Commerce Vice President (Janet, Long-term funding needs to hit the road, Jack, Campaign for Free Enterprise by The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 5/24/12, http://www.freeenterprise.com/infrastructure/long-termfunding-needs-hit-road-jack)RC

It has been suggested that federal transportation programs be eliminated and the responsibility left to the states. Devolution, as its called, is unworkable and ill-advised. Governors, state legislators, mayors and city council members are not prepared to increase local revenues to take on this huge liability. States and metropolitan areas already are strapped for cash and using transportation trust funds to balance budgets. Without federal funding and the policy and programmatic structures to support them, states cannot be expected to act on their own to ensure that interstate commerce, domestic and international trade, interstate passenger travel and emergency preparedness are adequately supported by the transportation infrastructure in their care. And where will funds come from to seed the public transportation investments to address traffic congestion, mobility and productivity in the economic engines of the U.S. economy our cities? Some people wrongly argue that investment in transit is a less than serious, utopian enterprise. The Chamber strongly believes transit is a critical means of addressing congestion and is driving economic development in many areas around the country. These red herrings, accepting major funding cuts or devolving federal programs to the states, are not real solutions. Congress and President Barack Obama must work toward passage of a bill out of conference before June 30. The nation cannot afford for them to fail in finding a way to sustain federal funds through 2013 or to address many of the inefficiencies of current federal law. Then, before the ink on their agreement dries, we have to get back on the road to a serious conversation about long-term funding for transportation that modernizes American infrastructure and promotes economic stability. Perm: Do both

Giving power to the states fail Heiligenstein 6 [Mike Heiligenstein, Executive Director at the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority
The Devolution of Transportation Funding How Innovative Financing Is Putting Local Communities Back in the Drivers Seat 2006http://dspace.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/1880/44380/1/TransportPaper-Heiligenstein.pdf SMerchant] The devolution of transportation funding and the paradigm shift that has put local leaders in the drivers seat is poorly and not readily understood by the public. As a result, implementation has been difficult. Despite a looming transportation funding crisis and a wide range of new funding tools at the disposal of public officials, the development of new facilities has been painfully slow and plagued by setbacks. Still the process moves forward, driven by the reality that there are few other realistic options and that local government and
regions must bring new dollars to the table to leverage the already scarce gas tax dollars. The most important thing to focus on as this new course is charted is what brought us to this point: the inadequacy of the gas tax, as currently structured, to provide sufficient funding for future completed needs. The promise of surplus revenue from tolling brings with it the same risks born out in the history of the gas tax.

Federal leadership is vital to maximizing competitiveness SCHANK, 5/20 PRESIDENT AND CEO OF THE Eno Center for Transportation, was a Transportation
Policy Advisor for Hilary Clinton, and holds a Ph.D. in urban planning from Columbia University, a Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in urban studies from Columbia University. (Joshua,The Federal Role in Transportation: Four Ideas for Greater Federal Involvement, Eno Center for
Transportation, 5/20/12, http://www.enotrans.org/eno-brief/the-federal-role-in-transportation-four-ideas-for-greater-federalinvolvement)//GP

All of these ideas have a consistent theme they require strong federal leadership to maximize our return on investment. Our
freight system, airports, highways, and

ports all require some federal coordination in these are areas where there not only

order for the U.S. to effectively compete in the global economy . While we consider the federal role in transportation
given the increasing possibility of diminished federal funding in the coming decades,

needs to be a federal presence, but federal leadership . If local transportation decisions are seen as purely political, with little regard to performance outcomes or national goals, we will fall short of where we need to be as a nation. These transportation investments will require strong federal leadership to ensure that they remain primarily influenced by data, analysis, and desired outcomes. Constitution prevents nuclear war you must uphold it Kucinich 2 Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Oh, March, http://www.downwinders.org/Kucinich_Peace_p.html "Politics ought to stay out of fighting a war," the President has been quoted as saying on March 13th 2002. Yet Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution explicitly requires that Congress take responsibility when it comes to declaring war. This President is very popular, according to the polls. But polls are not a substitute for democratic process. Attributing a negative connotation here to politics or dismissing constitutionally mandated congressional oversight belies reality: Spending $400 billion a year for defense is a political decision. Committing troops abroad is a political decision. War is a political decision. When men and women die on the battlefield that is the result of a political decision. The use of nuclear weapons, which can end the lives of millions, is a profound political decision. In a monarchy there need be no political decisions. In a democracy, all decisions are political, in that they derive from the consent of the governed. In a democracy, budgetary, military and national objectives must be subordinate to the political process. Before we
celebrate an imperial presidency, let it be said that the lack of free and open political process, the lack of free and open political debate, and the lack of free and open political dissent can be fatal in a democracy. We have reached a moment in our country's history where it is urgent that people everywhere speak out as president of his or her own life, to protect the peace of the nation and world within and without. We should speak out and caution leaders who generate fear through talk of the endless war or the final conflict. We should appeal to our leaders to consider that their own bellicose thoughts, words and deeds are reshaping consciousness and can have an adverse effect on our nation. Because when one person thinks: fight! he or she finds a fight. One faction thinks: war! and starts a war. One nation thinks: nuclear! and approaches the abyss. And what of one nation which thinks peace, and seeks peace? Neither individuals nor nations exist in a vacuum, which is why we have a serious responsibility for each other in this world. It is also urgent that we find those places of war in our own lives, and begin healing the world through healing ourselves. Each of us is a citizen of a common planet, bound to a common destiny. So connected are we, that each of us has the power to be the eyes of the world, the voice of the world, the conscience of the world, or the end of the world. And as each one of us chooses, so becomes the world. Each of us is architect of this world. Our thoughts, the concepts. Our words, the designs. Our deeds, the bricks and mortar of our daily lives. Which is why we should always take care to regard the power of our thoughts and words, and the commands they send into action through time and space. Some of our leaders have been thinking and talking about nuclear war. Recently there has been much news about a planning document which describes how and when America might wage nuclear war. The Nuclear Posture Review recently released to the media by the government: 1. Assumes that the United States has the right to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. 2. Equates nuclear weapons with conventional weapons. 3. Attempts to minimize the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. 4. Promotes nuclear response to a chemical or biological attack. Some dismiss this review as routine government planning. But it becomes ominous when taken in the context of a war on terrorism which keeps expanding its boundaries, rhetorically and literally. The President equates the "war on terrorism" with World War II. He expresses a desire to have the nuclear option "on the table." He unilaterally withdraws from the ABM treaty. He seeks $8.9 billion to fund deployment of a missile shield. He institutes, without congressional knowledge, a shadow government in a bunker outside our nation's Capitol. He tries to pass off as arms reduction, the storage of, instead of the elimination of, nuclear weapons. Two generations ago we lived with nuclear nightmares. We feared and hated the Russians who feared and hated us. We feared and hated the "godless, atheistic" communists. In our schools, each of us dutifully put our head between our legs and practiced duck-andcover drills. In our nightmares, we saw the long, slow arc of a Soviet missile flash into our neighborhood. We got down on our knees and prayed for peace. We surveyed, wide eyed, pictures of the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We supported the elimination of all nuclear weapons. We knew that if you "nuked" others you "nuked" yourself. The splitting of the atom for destructive purposes admits a split consciousness, the compartmentalized thinking of Us vs. Them, the dichotomized thinking, which spawns polarity and leads to war. The

proposed use of nuclear weapons, pollutes the psyche with the arrogance of infinite power. It creates delusions of domination of matter and space. It is dehumanizing through its calculations of mass casualties. We must overcome doomthinkers and sayers who invite a world descending, disintegrating into a nuclear disaster. With a world at risk, we must find the bombs in our own lives and disarm them. We must listen to that quiet inner voice which counsels that the survival of all is achieved through the unity of all.

Immigratoion Reform
Immigration reform is at the bottom of the docket plan wont affect it Neyoy, 2/9 (Cesar, Grijalva: Debate on immigration may take time, YumaSun, 2/9/13 00:58 ET,
http://www.yumasun.com/news/reform-85153-congress-immigration.html) EK

Congress could begin debate within six months on an immigration reform measure that could give millions of undocumented immigrants a path toward legal residency in the United States, U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva predicts. But a vote by Congress on any reform bill is not likely to come until just before the end of the year, the Tucson Democrat said during a recent visit to Somerton. Grijalva, whose district includes the southern half of Yuma County, said any measure that advances through Congress will not confer any automatic benefits for immigrants. There will be many people who won't qualify, either because they have committed some crime or because they can't demonstrate that they have roots here aside
from the fact of being in the country. The central issue of this reform is to unify families where, for example, the children are U.S. citizens but the parents have been deported. The process is to unify families. The applicants for legal status, aside from having to pay fines, will have to meet certain requirements for legal residency, he added. In the wake of the November elections, Grijalva said, support in Congress for immigration reform has increased from less than 50 percent of lawmakers to nearly 60 percent. But in the event Congress does not act on the issue, he added, President Obama has the option of taking executive action to enact immigration reform, as he did last summer when his administration suspended deportations of undocumented youths for two years to give them time to apply for legal residency. Grijalva said he and other lawmakers will visit their districts to try to line up broad-based community support for immigration reform amid what he expects will be a drawn-out debate over the subject in Congress. It's

going to be a process of almost seven months, he said. Right now, we don't have any concrete proposal. We are practically starting from scratch. Wont passRepublicans, security and gay marriage fights comingalso empirically will fail Spetalnick 1/30 (Matt, Obama pushes Congress on immigration, split emerges, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/30/us-usa-immigration-obamaidUSBRE90S06U20130130)//DR. H
(Reuters) - Just over a week into his second term, President Barack Obama West on Tuesday and

took his fight for immigration reform to the pushed Congress to quickly find a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented residents. But as Obama praised a bipartisan immigration plan during a speech in Las Vegas, disagreement emerged between the White House and Republicans that underscored the difficulty of resolving an emotive issue that has long defied a legislative fix.
"I'm here today because the time has come for common-sense, comprehensive immigration reform," Obama said at a high school. "The time is now. Now is the time." After years on the back burner, immigration reform has suddenly looked possible as Republicans, chastened by Latino voters who rejected them in the November election, appear more willing to accept a thorough overhaul. Action on immigration was sidelined by economic issues and healthcare reform during Obama's first term but it is part of an ambitious liberal agenda the Democratic president laid out last week in his second inaugural address. That agenda also includes gun control, gay rights and fighting climate change. Hispanic voters were crucial in winning Nevada for Obama in November and the crowd at the high school was supportive. "Si se puede," yelled some, using a Spanish phrase that harked back to Obama's 2008 "Yes we can" campaign slogan. Some in the audience were brought to tears when he talked about the difficulties some immigrants have experienced.

In Washington, however, differences quickly emerged between what Obama would like and the proposals by the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" senators, whose plan is heavy on border security.
Obama pushed for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants that is faster than the one the Senate group proposed.

Rather than emphasize border security first, he would let undocumented immigrants get on a path to citizenship if they first undergo national security and criminal background checks, pay penalties, learn English and get behind those foreigners seeking to immigrate legally.
"We all agree that these men and women should have to earn their way to citizenship. But for comprehensive immigration reform to work, it must be clear from the outset that there is a pathway to citizenship," he said.

For Republicans, this is a sticking point. The Gang of Eight plan envisions first taking steps to toughen security along the U.S.-Mexican border before setting in motion the steps illegal immigrants must take to gain legal status.

That difference was enough to raise concerns among Republican lawmakers who are trying to frame a package that can pass the Republican-led House of Representatives.
RUBIO "CONCERNED" A Hispanic Republican, Senator Marco Rubio,

complained that Obama's speech neglected border security and left the impression that "he believes reforming immigration quickly is more important than reforming immigration right." "I am concerned by the president's unwillingness to accept significant enforcement triggers before current undocumented immigrants can apply for a green card," he said. "Without such triggers in place, enforcement systems will never be implemented and we will be back in just a few years dealing with millions of new undocumented people in our country." Republicans will likely oppose any immigration plan that doesn't put border security first. "This provision is key to ensuring that border security is achieved, and is also necessary to ensure that a reform package can actually move through Congress," said newly elected Senator Jeff Flake of the border state of Arizona.
In addition, Obama made no mention of creating a temporary guest worker program geared to the low-skilled, labor-intensive agricultural industry. Labor unions do not yet support such a program.

Another point of contention is expected to be whether same-sex couples are granted the same benefits as heterosexual couples under immigration reform - something the White House says Obama will insist upon but which the Senate group did not deal with.
Obama's speech in Nevada, coming a little more than a week after his second inauguration, reflects the growing clout of Hispanic voters, as does Republican willingness to move on the issue. The president said that if Congress is unable to act in a timely fashion, he will propose immigration legislation of his own and "insist that they vote on it right away." Immigration reform could give Obama a landmark second-term legislative achievement, but the White House is mindful that success on such a divisive issue will require a delicate balancing act.

The last major attempt at an immigration overhaul was done by Republican President George W. Bush in 2007. It collapsed in Congress. Obama did not follow through with a promise to seek an overhaul in his first
term, fearing a repeat of the earlier debacle.

Fiat solves the link- the plan passes without political repercussions Poltically controversial legislation generates capitalfiscal cliff proves Ye 1/6 (Robin, January 6, 2013, Dianne Feinstein and Obama Should Pressure Democrats to Pass An Assault Weapons Ban ASAP, http://www.policymic.com/articles/22268/dianne-feinstein-and-obamashould-pressure-democrats-to-pass-an-assault-weapons-ban-asap)//DR. H Furthermore, President Obamas White House press statement hours after the Newtown shooting promising meaningful action and his powerful Newtown Sunday address have not been lost on the American public. From his moderate victory over the fiscal cliff, Obama has the earned political capital and some goodwill to push Feinsteins bill. In addition, Obama can stave off some of his criticisms of not being liberal enough by aiding Senator Feinstein in gun control law so elusive to Democrats since Bushs tenure. And amidst his second term in office, the legacy-conscious president is certainly looking to change the narrative on second-term presidencies ones often bereft of meaningful domestic policy. Obama doesnt push the plan Marcario 11 Assistant Editor at Seapower Magazine, Navy League of the United States (John, June 20, 2011, Where Does The Money Go?
http://aapa.files.cms-plus.com/AAPAArticles/Where%20does%20the%20money%20go%20-%20Seapower%20-%20June%202011.pdf)//DR. H

USACE officials said they have heard several complains from ports and maritime officials regarding how little trust fund money is spent each year.

The ports would like to see us fully maintain these navigation channels so that they can economically move their commerce. Once they understand the current legislation is what drives our process, they channel that energy into seeking legislative change through Congress, said Jim Walker, head of the navigation
branch at the Washington headquarters of the USACE.

Plan has bipartisan support Mul, 12 Communications Director for Senator Jeff Landry (Millard, Congressman Landry Leads
Bipartisan Alliance for Port Dredging, Homepage of Senator Jeff Landry, March 14th, 2012. http://landry.house.gov/press-release/congressman-landry-leads-bipartisan-alliance-portdredging)//SS WASHINGTON, DC Fighting to protect American jobs and ports, Congressmen Jeff Landry (R, LA-03) and Tim Bishop (D, NY-01) led a huge bipartisan coalition of 72 House Members calling for proper port dredging. The Landry coalition sent a letter
today to the U.S. House Budget Committee requesting the Committee apportion all Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund (HMTF) proceeds for its stated legal purpose: harbor dredging. At percent,

a time when the national unemployment rate continues to exceed eight we believe it is imperative that all the revenue generated by the HMT be fully committed towards dredging our nations ports, an activity that will put Americans back to work and return economic prosperity to our
manufacturing, agriculture and energy sectors, wrote Landry and his colleagues. Landry, whose district has the most domestic maritime industry jobs in the nation, is hopeful the widespread support will create jobs nationwide and protect the vitality of Americas commercial waterways. I thank Ranking Member Bishop for his steadfast leadership on this issue and recognizing the way to solve problems in Washington is by building coalitions. I also thank the 70 members who joined us in signing this important letter and the members that followed our lead by sending their own letter to the Budget Committee on this important issue. Together, we can properly solve the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund boondoggle. Congressman Tim Bishop, who co-led the letter and serves as the Ranking Member on the U.S. House Transportation & Infrastructure Committees Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, said: Maintaining our nation's ports, harbors and beaches is an economic imperative, and funds collected from the users of waterways

We must change the budgeting process to guarantee the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund is devoted solely to the purpose of maintaining our infrastructure, and I thank Congressman Landry for working with me on this critical issue for our economy.
specifically for dredging should be used only for dredging, not to offset other spending.

The judge voting aff means the plan is popular

Plan doesnt affect immigration- its been pushed back to later this year UPI, 1/1 (Senate won't rush immigration bill, UPI, 1/1/13,
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/02/01/Senate-wont-rush-immigration-bill/UPI31311359732926/#ixzz2JoI9M9X9, SMS)

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- The U.S. Senate will not rush an immigration bill through and will instead put it through the traditional committee process, Democratic lawmakers say. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday a full-fledged debate on immigration reform will be scheduled and a decision on the bill may not be reached until later this year, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Political capital isnt real votes are ideological The Daily Home 10 (Daily newspaper serving the Talladega and and St. Clair Counties since 1867. It is the leading newspaper for the
2 counties as well as much of the surrounding area (There is no Such Thing as Political Capital, The Daily Home, 27 January 2010. < http://www.dailyhome.com/view/full_story/5680369/article-There-is-no-such-thing-as-political-capital?instance=home_opinion>) After winning one of the closest presidential races in the history of the United States in 2004, President Bush proclaimed, I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. The president and the GOP thought they had a sure bet. They were wrong. In following elections, the American voters yanked the rug out from under them, first giving Democrats a majority in Congress, then giving them the White House in 2008. In turn, the Democrats, bolstered by those elections, made the same mistake the Republicans did, believing that they had some grand mandate from voters to push their agenda through. Now, if two recent elections are any indication, the

pendulum is once again swinging the other way, with Republicans gaining ground. And once again, we are hearing from GOP party leaders that they have earned some political capital. Too bad for both parties political capital does not exist never has. In fact, its hugely insulting to Americans as a whole for one party or the other to make such a claim. On average, the United States is split about evenly between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, with a broad margin of moderates between the extremes. And most people are, in real-world situations, conservative on some issues and liberal on others. Very few Americans want unrestricted government spending, which is
traditionally a conservative view point, but at the same time, most of those people would support the government providing food to starving children, which is traditionally a liberal approach. So any time one political party thinks it has the upper hand, as the Democrats most recently did, they are wrong. The Democrats mostly won elections because of a national dissatisfaction among moderates with

how the GOP majority had managed the country NOT because the United States had suddenly become a country of Democrats. It was foolish then for Democrat leaders like Speaker Nancy Pelosi to think otherwise and it is equally foolish now for the GOP to repeat that mistake. American voters want government that advances the best interest of its people and its businesses, instead of focusing on one partys agenda. Given the state of the nation today, neither party has done much to earn anything like political capital and certainly neither has any to spend.

Logical policy maker can do both

War in Asia is highly unlikely and it wouldnt escalateregional stability concerns are being settled and alliance structures check Desker and Bitzinger 2008 *Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, **Dean of the S. Rajaratnam School
of International Studies and Director of the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (Richard and Barry, Survival 50:6, "Why East Asian War is Unlikely", pages 105-28, EBSCO, WEA)

The Asia-Pacific region can be regarded as a zone of both relative insecurity and strategic stability. It contains some of the worlds most significant flashpoints the Korean peninsula, the Taiwan Strait, the Siachen Glacier
where tensions between nations could escalate to the point of major war. It is replete with unresolved border issues; is a breeding ground for transnationa terrorism and the site of many terrorist activities (the Bali bombings, the Manila superferry bombing); and

contains overlapping claims for maritime territories (the Spratly Islands, the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands) with considerable actual or potential wealth in resources such as oil, gas and fisheries. Finally, the Asia-Pacific is an area of strategic significance with many key sea lines of communication and important chokepoints. Yet despite all these potential crucibles of conflict, the Asia-Pacific, if not an area of serenity and calm, is certainly more stable than one might expect. To be sure, there are separatist movements and internal struggles, particularly with insurgencies, as in Thailand, the Philippines and Tibet. Since the resolution of the East Timor crisis, however, the region has been relatively free of open armed warfare. Separatism remains a challenge, but the break-up of states is unlikely. Terrorism is a nuisance, but its impact is contained. The North Korean nuclear issue, while not fully resolved, is at least moving toward a conclusion with the likely denuclearisation of the peninsula. Tensions between China and Taiwan, while always just beneath the surface, seem unlikely to erupt in open conflict any time soon, especially given recent Kuomintang Party victories in Taiwan and efforts by Taiwan and China to re-open informal channels of consultation as well as institutional relationships between organisations responsible for cross-strait relations. And while in Asia there is no strong supranational political entity like the European Union, there are many multilateral organisations and international initiatives dedicated to enhancing peace and stability, including the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. In Southeast Asia, countries are united in a common eopolitical and economic organisation the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which is dedicated to peaceful economic, social and cultural development, and to the promotion of regional peace and stability. ASEAN has played a key role in conceiving and establishing broader regional institutions such as the East Asian Summit, ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and South Korea) and the ASEAN Regional Forum. All this suggests that war in Asia while not inconceivable is unlikely.