NDT Round 2 Neg vs Indiana AF

1NC
 off
Significantly’ is vague – guarantees circumvent and redeployment which takes
out the aff – gotta specify in the plan text or it guts counterplan competition
and disad links
Franken 10 – Minnesota Senator
(Al, “RESTORING AMERICAN FINANCIAL STABILITY ACT OF 2010-CONTINUED,” 156 Cong Rec S
3303)

Although the bill's supporters have and will argue that the fears are unfounded because the bill
says that merchants not engaged "significantly" in offering consumer financial services are
excluded from the new consumer regulatory bureaucracy. ∂ The bill does not, however, define
what the word "significantly" means-leaving that to the discretion of the benevolent
bureaucrats.∂ The supporters of this massive new government agency trust the bureaucrats. I
trust American small business owners.

Voter for fairness and education.

The United States should significantly reduce its military
presence in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council
 off
The United States should:

 Create a bipartisan National Security Commission, modeled off of the

Government Accountability Office, with senior executives appointed by
both the executive and legislative branches

 Task the National Security Commission with studying United States

military presence in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
The National Security Commission should review United States military
presence in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council and publish a
recommendation to the Department of Defense that: The United States should
significantly reduce its military presence in the states of the Gulf Cooperation
Council

Prior review of presence withdrawal by a bipartisan commission builds inter-

branch cooperation and shapes agency decision-making—solves 100% of the aff
and avoids politics
Collins 14 - teaches strategy at the National War College. A retired Army colonel, he served for
nearly 12 years in the Pentagon. From 2001 to 2004, he was the deputy assistant secretary of
defense for stability operations.

Joseph J., 4-6, Two Cheers for the QDR, Armed Forces Journal,
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/two-cheers-for-the-qdr/

Filling the strategic void¶ While the QDR has done what it could, how can we get at the concerns
expressed by HASC Chairman McKeon? For a better and more thoughtful product, we need a
less politicized version of strategic studies to light the path to the future and spur intra- and
inter-branch dialog about strategic issues.¶ The QDR’s limitations have been discussed, above. In
conjunction with the QDR, at Congress’s insistence, in various laws, we are required to have a
National Security Strategy, signed by the President; a Defense Strategy, signed by the Secretary
of Defense and included with the QDR; and a National Military Strategy (NMS), signed by the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The latter is generally the least interesting of the three because the
Chairman commands no formations and directly controls very few defense resources. All three
of these documents are routinely ridiculed for pulling punches, ambiguity, and pablum-like
pronouncements. We can do better strategic analysis, but not as long as all of our strategic
studies are tied to bureaucracies with an eye on independence, programs, and budgets. ¶ We
need a standing commission, something to serve the field of thoughtful strategy in the same
way that the Government Accountability Office does the field of audit and accounting. The
National Strategy Commission can be both a creature of the Executive and Legislative branches,
with senior executives appointed by each. Its mission would be the conduct of strategic studies,
classified or unclassified, on an agreed-on agenda, by individual tasking, or at the initiative of the
commissioners themselves. The Commission can also serve as a standing red team for other
strategic studies. Its work would range from the practical to the highly theoretical. It would be
free to speculate about futures and to work on real cases or hypotheticals. Any public
Commission product would be available to both the Executive and Legislative branches, but
either branch could also request an eyes only study. The National Strategy Commission would
not be a public think-tank, but it would be a consumer of think-tank products. Indeed, it should
help in-box strategists by vacuuming up and assessing think-tank products.¶ The Commission
could study the issue of how small the US Armed Forces could become before it was necessary
to change the strategy. Risk assessments could become its specialty. It could also do alternative
strategies, comparing, for example, today’s strategy of forward presence and
engagement with an over the horizon, off-shore balancing strategy , favored by John
Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and Christopher Layne. ¶ We will never have neutral vessels of
knowledge working for the government. Policy, strategy, program, and budget are branches of
the same tree, and we will need senior leaders who can bring them into harmony. We can also
benefit by having strategists who are more like the mythical rational actor, and who can do
studies with greater bureaucratic objectivity. In the process, they may be able to inoculate us
against the quadrennial defense delusion.
 off
The United States should:
 Allow American diplomats to engage with their Iranian counterparts
without high-level approval.
 Open up channels of communication between the United States and the
Islamic Republic of Iran, including but not limited to, a channel between
the American National Security Advisor and the head of the Iranian
Supreme National Security Council.
 Create a U.S.-Iranian agreement on incidents at sea.
 Increase U.S.-Iranian cooperation on stemming the Afghanistan opium
trade.
 Expand U.S.-Iranian cultural exchange and people-to-people programs in
fields such as sports, business and academia.
 Not pursue a strategy of regime change against Iran.
 Create a regional dialogue forum between the United States, Iran, and
the Gulf Cooperation Council.
 Maintain its military presence in the Arab States of the Persian Gulf.
 Privately reassure the Gulf Cooperation Council and Israel of its intent to
maintain its military presence and defend them in the event of an attack
by Iran.
The CP is the perfect middle ground—a multi-pronged strategy of engagement
solves containment and boosts US-Iranian cooperation without alienating Saudi
Arabia or Israel
Goldenberg 9/24/15 -- Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Security Program at
the Center for a New American Security, previously served as the Iran Team Chief in the office of
the Secretary of Defense.

(Ilan, The Real Reason America Needs to Engage with Iran, The National Interest,
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-real-reason-america-needs-engage-iran-13921)

In the aftermath of the nuclear agreement with Iran, indications from both Washington and
Tehran are that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is strictly an arms control deal. U.S.
policy makers argue America should prioritize implementation of the agreement, reassuring
Israeli and Gulf partners, and countering Iran’s malign activities in the Middle East. But if the
United States focuses exclusively on mitigating the risks of the agreement and does not test
opportunities for collaboration with Iran, it may close off a historic opportunity to reshape
relations with the Islamic Republic.¶ When it comes to Iranian intentions and actions, there is
much to be skeptical about. A naïve policy that seeks to turn Iran into an ally and ignores its
provocative actions will not work. In many arenas, American and Iranian interests are
fundamentally at odds. Iran supports and arms the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon
and Shia militias in Iraq. Only last week, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei stated that Israel will not
exist in twenty-five years.¶ There are also significant objections from two long-standing allies—
Israel and Saudi Arabia. Both fear this agreement is the beginning of an American pivot towards
Iran that will come at a cost to their interests. While the United States does not always see eye-
to-eye with its partners, they have been reliable bedrocks of American strategy in the Middle
East for fifty years. Undermining those relations by putting all of the chips on Iran is a risky and
unnecessary gamble.¶ But even if comprehensive rapprochement is not in the cards, a slow
thaw characterized by increased engagement and limited cooperation can create
opportunities to advance U.S. interests while not undermining relations with key partners.
Such an approach is compatible with a strategy that also pushes back on Iran’s nefarious
activities, recommits to regional partners and emphasizes vigorous implementation of the
JCPOA. Indeed, for the past ten years, the United States successfully pursued a dual track
strategy of diplomatic engagement and economic pressure to address the nuclear challenge.
This duality characterizes relations with Russia and China, with whom the United States both
cooperates on issues of common interest even as it aggressively competes in some arenas.¶ The
place to start is with better communication. For the first time in thirty-five years there is no
taboo on direct high-level channels between the United States and Iran. Few foreign officials
have spent more time with Secretary of State John Kerry then his Iranian counterpart,
Mohammad Javad Zarif. To deepen communication, the United States should remove the
outdated policy which forces rank and file diplomats to seek high-level approval before engaging
Iranian counterparts on even minute issues. A channel between Susan Rice, the American
National Security Advisor, and Rice’s counterpart, Ali Shamkhani, head of the Iranian Supreme
National Security Council, should be established. Shamkhani’s influence—bolstered by his
position, military background, relationship with the Supreme Leader and nonideological foreign-
policy positions—make him an ideal interlocutor.¶ There is also an opportunity to cooperate on
discrete issues of common interest. An agreement on incidents at sea, which creates protocols
for de-escalation in the event of a naval incident in the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf,
would be in all parties’ interest. In Afghanistan, Iran and the United States share an interest in
stability and stifling the opium trade, and have worked together in the past —most notably in
2001, when Iran played a central role in the Bonn Conference that brought a new Afghan
government to power after the fall of the Taliban. The United States and Iran are already de-
conflicting operations to counter ISIS in Iraq with the Iraqi government acting as a go-between.¶
The United States should also expand exchange and people-to-people programs in fields such as
sports, business and academia. This could strengthen the hand of pragmatic forces such as
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani. While far from a liberal democrat, Rouhani leads a faction that
prioritizes economic development and international engagement over the nuclear program and
aggressive regional policies championed by the hardliners. Historically, the hardliners have
controlled Iranian policy, but the Iranian ruling class’ acquiescence to the nuclear agreement
represents a historic victory of pragmatism over extremism. It portends a coming political
struggle, one where positive American engagement can provide marginal assistance to more
pragmatic actors.¶ Reshaping the U.S.-Iranian relationship will be a long and difficult process
with no guarantees of success. A policy that simultaneously counters bad Iranian behavior while
increasing engagement will not turn two old enemies into allies. But it may over time turn them
into “just” competitors, which would be a meaningful improvement .
 off
Harm reduction legislation is top of the agenda---PC is key
Bennett 3-28 - White House reporter for CQ Roll Call (John, “Obama to Stump for Anti-Heroin
Plan as GOP Resists,” Roll Call, http://www.rollcall.com/news/obama-stump-anti-heroin-plan-
gop-resists)

President Barack Obama on Tuesday will headline a major summit on prescription drug and
heroin abuse organized by a powerful House Republican who is trying to convince the party to
fund the president's ambitious plan to fight the nationwide epidemic. With Republicans raising
concerns about what kinds of initiatives Washington should be funding, Obama is expected to
devote some of his remarks in Atlanta to press them to act. And, conveniently for Obama, one
of the event’s organizers is a lawmaker who helps control the federal pocketbook: House
Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky. The president also is expected to announce a set
of administrative actions that will not require congressional approval. A major thrust of the
Obama administration and congressional Democrats has been to use federal dollars to help
expand treatment for most vulnerable populations. Expect Obama to reiterate themes he has
turned to before when pushing for congressional action as the House returns from a recess
period with a Senate-passed anti-opioid bill awaiting its action. Obama could use Rogers’
conference to continue a plea for bipartisanship on the issue that made it into his final State of
the Union address. “I hope we can work together this year on bipartisan priorities like criminal
justice reform, and helping people who are battling prescription drug abuse and heroin abuse,”
the president said in January. “We just might surprise the cynics again.” Obama in February
asked Congress to spend $1.1 billion next fiscal year to help the federal and state governments
fight addiction to prescription painkillers and heroin. “Opioid abuse and overdoses have hurt
families from across this nation,” Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell
told reporters in February. “My home state of West Virginia has felt the cost almost more than
any other.” Opioids, a category that includes prescription painkillers and heroin, contributed to
nearly 29,000 deaths in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 10,500 fatalities that year stemmed specifically to heroin use, according to the
American Society of Addiction Medicine. In the audience Tuesday will be individuals who are
recovering from opioid and heroin abuse and some of their family members, as well as medical
and law enforcement officials. The White House will hope that backdrop will help spur House
Republicans to send the Senate a revised version of its bill that can produce a final bill Obama
would sign. The Senate earlier this month passed a bill that would authorize grants to states to
expand their treatment programs and increase access to naloxone, an overdose prevention
drug. That legislation, which passed 94-1, also would give the Justice Department additional
tools to combat drug trafficking. Obama’s State of the Union comments came in late January,
and the Senate nearly unanimously passed a measure in mid-March. That’s rocket speed in an
era marked by dysfunction and a paucity of bipartisan legislation. Still, partisan squabbling
could sink the Senate’s measure. So, too, could a truncated election-year legislative calendar.
For instance, the bill does not contain $600 million in emergency funds Senate Democrats tried
to tack on. Republicans blocked those attempts, arguing a fiscal 2016 tax and spending measure
passed in December included $400 million to fight the heroin and opioid epidemic. Senior GOP
members noted in recent weeks that additional funding will come later this year when Congress
takes up fiscal 2017 spending bills. The House is expected to take up the Senate-passed bill in
the coming weeks, and Democrats in that chamber are expected to revive the push for the
emergency funds.

Persian Gulf withdrawal is unpopular—there’s bipartisan support for an

expansive US military role in the Middle East
Faux, 5-17-’15 -- principal founder of the Economic Policy Institute, author of
The Servant Economy
(Jeff, Why Are We in the Middle East?, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-
faux/why-are-we-in-the-middle_b_7301370.html)

Since 1980, we have invaded, occupied and/or bombed at least 14 different Muslim countries.
After the sacrifice of thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars, the region is now a cauldron of death and destruction. Yet, we persist, with no

end in sight. As a former Air Force General Charles F. Wald remarked told the Washington Post, "We're not going to see an end to this in our lifetime."¶
Democrats and Republicans snipe over tactics, but neither wants to discuss the question of
whether we should be there in the first place. Even liberals counseling caution, like the New York Times
editorial board, hasten to agrees that the U.S. must play a "leading role" in solving the Middle East's

many problems. In other worlds, stay the course. ¶ The ordinary citizen trying to make sense of all this might reasonably ask: why?
The president's answer is that the war is in our "national interest." Congress says, Amen. The phrase
causes politicians and pundits on talk shows to synchronize the nodding of their heads, signaling that the national interest should not have to be explained -- and certainly not
debated.¶ When pressed for more specifics, our governing class offers four rationales for this endless war:¶ 1. Fighting terrorism¶ 2. Containing Iran¶ 3. Securing oil¶ 4.
Defending Israel.¶ But when the citizen in whose vital interest the war is supposedly being fought takes a close look, he/she will find that none of these arguments -- or all of
them together -- justifies the terrible cost, or even makes much sense.¶ Terrorism¶ The claim is that we will prevent another 9/11 by killing terrorists and keeping them
offshore. But by now it is obvious that our interventions are counter-productive, i.e., they have vastly enlarged the pool of American-hating fanatics, willing to kill themselves in
order to hurt us.¶ Americans are appalled when shown ISIS's public beheadings on TV. What they are not shown is the beheadings routinely performed by the Saudi Arabian
government and our "moderate" allies. Nor are they told that militias allied to the U.S.-backed government in Iraq have killed prisoners by boring holes in their skulls with
electric drills. This is the way bad people behave in that part of the world. ISIS is a symptom, not a cause, of Middle East fanaticism -- a problem rooted in corruption, tyranny and
ignorance, which the United States cannot solve. Meanwhile, Arab governments themselves have enough firepower to defeat ISIS if they can put aside their own differences to
do it. If they can't, it is not our job to save them from their own folly.¶ The rationale here is embarrassingly circular -- we must remain in the Middle East to protect against
terrorists who hate America because we are in the Middle East. George W Bush's often echoed claim that "They hate us for our freedoms" is nonsense. They hate us because we
are foreign invaders. The longer we stay, the most likely it is that we will see another 9/11. And as the Boston Marathon bombing demonstrates, the people who carry out the
next attack are more likely to live here, than there.¶ Iran¶ Iran is not a threat to U.S. security and will not be as far as one can see into the future. Its hostility to the U.S. is a
product of over 50 years of our active interference in its politics, beginning in 1953 when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected prime minister and replaced him with a
king.¶ Barack Obama is right that stopping the spread of nuclear weapons should be one of our highest international priorities. But taking sides in the Middle East's political and
religious civil wars has undercut our credibility, making it look like we are more interested in checking Iran's influence than nuclear proliferation. Why, the inquiring American
citizen might ask, is it OK for Israel and Pakistan to refuse to sign international treaties and allow inspection of their nuclear facilities, but not Iran?¶ In any event, the leverage
that brought Iran to the negotiating table was not the U.S. military's presence or saber rattling in Washington. It was the economic sanctions.¶ Oil¶ Oil is an international
commodity. When it comes out of the ground it is sold on world markets. Producing countries need consumers. U.S. consumers buy oil at world prices, and it is available to them
as it is to everyone else who can pay for it. They get no special discount for having military bases in the area.¶ The economic motivation for the invasion of Iraq was not to assure
that we Americans would have gas for our cars and oil for our furnaces, but to assure that American-based oil companies would be the ones to bring it here.¶ Today, we get less
than 10 percent of our oil from the Persian Gulf. The U.S. is now projected to pass both Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world's largest oil producer in the next two years. By 2020
North America, and likely the U.S. alone, will be self-sufficient in oil and gas.¶ The claim that Americans need to be in the Middle East for the oil has gone from dubious to
implausible.¶ Israel¶ The United States does not need Israel to protect its security. Nor does Israel need the U.S.¶ Israel has by far the most powerful sophisticated military in
the entire region. Its arsenal includes nuclear and chemical weapons that, because Israel has refused to ratify international nonproliferation treaties banning, it can continue to
develop with no outside interference. The surrounding Arab states are dysfunctional, disorganized and caught in the brutal quasi-religious war between Sunnis led by Saudi
Arabia and Shiites led by Iran that is likely to drag on for decades. Hezbollah, which arose in Lebanon as a result of Israel's 1982 invasion, can harass, but is certainly no threat to
Israel's existence.¶ Even if Iran eventually builds a bomb, Israel would still have the capacity to blow that country back to the Stone Age, and there is no evidence that Iran's
political establishment is suicidal.¶ The security problem for Israel comes from within the territory it controls: the status of the conquered, embittered Palestinians, who in 1948
and 1967 were driven out of their homes and herded into the ghettos of the West Bank and Gaza in order make room for the Jewish state.¶ The Palestinians are militarily
powerless. They can throw stones and occasionally talk some lost soul into becoming a suicide bomber. From Gaza they can lob wobbly mortars over the Israel border. But
always at the cost of harsh retaliation. Two thousand Gazans were killed in the Israeli punitive attacks of August 2014. It will take them ten years to rebuild their homes and
infrastructure.¶ Yet the Palestinians will not give up their own dream of an independent homeland -- at least on the territory occupied by the Israel army since 1967. So for
almost a half century, our governments have pushed both sides to negotiate a permanent solution, pouring billions in aid to Israel, and lesser, but substantial amounts to placate
the Palestinians and to bribe Egypt and Jordan into recognizing Israel. We have paid a huge political price; our role as collaborator in the Palestinian oppression is a major source
of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.¶ The U.S. effort has failed. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis -- both driven by anger, mutual distrust and historical grievances --
have behaved well. But, Israel is the one in control of the West Bank. So any credible solution requires that it end the apartheid system they have imposed, either by giving
Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians (One-State) or by permitting the establishment of an independent Palestine (Two-States).¶ The Israelis will never accept a one state solution
with the Palestinians. Among other reasons is a widely shared fear of the faster Palestinian birthrate. The re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu in March after he promised Israeli
voters he would never accept two states, has buried that idea as well. The real Israel solution is already in motion on the ground -- pushing Jewish settlements further and
further into the Palestinians' territory until there is no space left for a Palestinian state.¶ There are now about 600,000 people in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and
their number is growing. No Israeli government in the foreseeable future will be capable of evicting a substantial share of them in order to give the Palestinians room to form an
independent country. The only pressure on Israel is the fear that it might become an international pariah state -- as South Africa did before it ended its apartheid. But so long as
Israel is under the political protection of the U.S., it can, and will, ignore world opinion.¶ Our choice therefore is either to remain as enabler of Israel's "settler" solution, or, as
part of a general withdrawal from the region, to let the Israelis and Palestinians deal with the consequences of their own behavior. Indeed, U.S. disengagement might be the
 Thus, the real answer to the question of why our country is stuck in the
political jolt needed to force a change.¶

Middle East will not be found in the phrase, "national interest." Rather it will be found among a
much narrower group of special interests -- military contractors, oil sheikdoms, the Israel lobby,
and a media that hypnotizes the electorate into equating patriotism and war. ¶ These interests
are formidable. Their fallback argument is that we are in too far even to contemplate pulling out. Much too complicated. And America's "credibility" is at stake.¶
Maybe. But our credibility as a democracy is also at stake. To maintain it, responsible citizens should at least demand clarity about why we are slogging deeper and deeper into
this quagmire, putting lives at risk, wasting enormous resources and diverting the attention of the U.S. government from the deterioration of our national economy -- the

America's bi-partisan governing class has no intention of opening up

fundamental source of national security.¶

their Middle East misadventure to such scrutiny. So it's up to the citizenry. The 2016 president election campaign will force candidates
into forums, town meetings and question-and-answer sessions. It may be the last chance for citizens to pierce the veils of glib rhetoric that hide the reasons our rulers have
pushed us into a part of the world where we have no real business and where our presence has only made things worse.

The impact is 10 deaths by the end of this debate---thousands yearly and

outweighs deaths from major wars
Jacobs 3-22 – Mayor from OC, CA (Theresa, “REP. JASON CHAFFETZ HOLDS A HEARING ON
AMERICA'S HEROIN AND OPIOID ABUSE EPIDEMIC,” Congressional Quarterly Transcriptions,
America’s News)

Unfortunately, the United States is experiencing a historic epidemic of drug overdose deaths.
Today drug overdose -- overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in the United States.
In 2014, I don't have the 2015 figures yet but in 2014 there -- listen to this 47,055 deaths caused
by drug overdose death. That means that if this hearing lasts for two hours, 10 people will die in
the next two hours in the United States from drug overdose deaths. For Americans -- and this is
the little chart showing the increase since 1999. I remember I chaired criminal justice drug policy
oversight subcommittee from '98 to '99 and we thought we had an epidemic back in '99 when it
was 16,000. And I can show you some of the headlines from my local newspapers where we had
people dying over -- many people dying over a weekend. Unfortunately, that's what we're
seeing again in my community and across the United States. Unfortunately, more Americans
have died from drug-related overdoses than in one year than all that were killed and the lengthy
Korean War. If the current trend continues the annual death rate could climb down those killed
in Vietnam over that multi- year struggle in one year. The graph from the Washington Post
illustrates that this disturbing rise in drug overdoses between 1999 and 2014. Now, of the
47,000 of more than 10,000 Americans died of heroin related overdoses. Heroin uses increasing
at a faster rate. You want to talk about a war on women and war on our young people, the
heroin deaths are killing our women twice the rate of man and 109 percent more with our
youth. Unfortunately, we've seen according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
that again, with heroin use among deaths among our youth, between 18 to 25 in the past

the
decade have soared. And the again lead the statistics,

deadly statistics.
 off
The US is preparing to increase pressure on Israel over Palestine---ends the US
shield at the UN
Mitnick 2-5 – CSM Correspondent
(Joshua, “Shrill wind from Israel: Does it risk alienating its allies?,” CSM,
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2016/0205/Shrill-wind-from-Israel-Does-it-risk-
alienating-its-allies)

EXPLAINING MOTIVES Even as Israel loudly tangles with Sweden, the UN, and the US envoy,
Netanyahu is quietly trying to 'muddle through' amid signs of eroding US diplomatic cover. TEL
AVIV — The acrimony started with Sweden’s foreign minister, continued with the US
ambassador, and reached a crescendo with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Israel has been
getting an earful in public recently from its friends over its policies toward Palestinians , and the
comeback from the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu has often been shrill.
Sweden’s Margot Wallstrom is now unwelcome in Israel for criticizing the police killings of
Palestinian knife assailants. Remarks by Dan Shapiro, the US envoy, were called “unacceptable
and incorrect” for suggesting that a double standard exists in West Bank law enforcement.
Recommended: How much do you know about Israel? Take the quiz And Mr. Ban – despite his
good ties with Israel – was assailed by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s ambassador to the
UN as fanning terrorism for warning that Palestinian “resistance” would not subside absent
statehood. TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE How much do you know about Israel? Take the quiz
PHOTOS OF THE DAY Photos of the day 02/12 Israel’s responses demonstrate the Netanyahu
government's style of blunt pushback against all critics of its military occupation of Palestinian
territories. They also reflect its retreat to a diplomatic bunker amid a vacuum in peace
negotiations and the absence of any new diplomatic initiative of their own regarding the
Palestinians. The bunker could be costly. Though the stridency may play well at home, the spats
risk eroding Israel’s ability to fend off potential initiatives in Europe and at the UN aimed at
supporting Palestinian statehood. And this at a time that the United States is signaling it is less
inclined to come to Israel’s diplomatic rescue. “There’s an accumulation of [diplomatic]
incidents in which the one common thing is growing international criticism of certain
phenomena in Israeli behavior in the occupied territories,” says Oded Eran, a former Israeli
ambassador to the European Union. “What is new is the tone coming from the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs responding more forcefully to the accusations.” Amir Tibon, diplomatic
correspondent for Israel’s Walla! News, says that while UN treatment of Israel overall is biased,
Secretary Ban himself has sided with Israel against Hamas and Iran. “It's more than legitimate to
criticize his organization’s attitude toward Israel,” he says, “but turning him personally into an
enemy is a mistake that will backfire.” Warnings from US Behind the fiery rhetoric, however,
analysts say Netanyahu is quietly tempering his moves in order to preserve ties with allies like
the US who can help an isolated Israel fend off new initiatives on behalf of Palestinian
statehood. “Because ultimately he wants to muddle through, what we are seeing from a policy
perspective is an avoidance of certain steps because they cross the lines of international allies,”
says Ofer Zalzberg, an analyst at the International Crisis Group. “These confrontations make it
more difficult for Netanyahu to deflect more imminent [diplomatic] risks.” Last week, France
called for an international conference to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks – a format
Israel has always resisted for fear such a conference would impose a deal. The proposal has also
stirred concern that France will try to push a series of peace parameters as a resolution at the
UN Security Council. Separately, after the European Union decided to label products from Jewish
settlements in the occupied West Bank, there is concern in Israel that the Europeans will add
new sanctions against Israeli settlers and businesses with operations across the Green Line.
“Israelis feel that they are becoming a target for European policies and are unfairly treated. This
brings about a more radical reaction from the Israeli side,” says Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli
ambassador to the US and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party. “The way that Israel is going
about to minimize the damage is to try to balance European initiatives by maintaining a close
relationship with the US.” Indeed, US officials have been making the case in public and private
that they are less able to shield Israel from such initiatives when there is no peace process and
when it appears that prospects for a two-state solution are growing dim. The fact that the US
made no immediate public attempt to shut down the new French proposal is evidence of the
wavering US diplomatic cover even as defense ties remain strong, says one Western diplomat.

The plan causes US to increase its strategic reliance on Israel which prevents
pressure ver Palestine
Kahl 13 – Associate Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown
and a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, with Marc Lynch, Associate
Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at
the Center for a New American Security

(Colin H., “U.S. Strategy after the Arab Uprisings: Toward Progressive Engagement,” The
Washington Quarterly, 36.2)
This critique is the starting point for an alternative realpolitik approach: ‘‘offshore balancing.’’ Offshore balancers have a narrower definition of U.S.
interests and favor retrenchment to address the military and economic causes of American decline. Instead of maintaining a robust
military presence in the region, this approach would reduce U.S. strategic commitments and
conserve resources for the rare instances when vital national interests were at stake (like the threatening of regional oil supplies). The United

States would not seek to dominate the region, but rather work indirectly by, with, and through
U.S. allies and partners to maintain a balance of power favorable to American interests. Moreover,
by pulling back, offshore balancing would aim to prevent regional states from free-riding on the United
States, forcing them to take on more of the regional security burden.29 ¶ Needless to say, this strategy would avoid ambitious efforts to transform the
nature of regimes in the region or an active role in new military interventions in places such as Syria. Because
this approach requires
working through partner states to advance hard U.S. security interests in the region, it would also by
necessity take a much lighter touch in pushing controversial reforms which could alienate
partners and complicate security cooperation. As such, even if political reform was a priority,
Washington would have difficulty promoting it. Moreover, while some advocates of offshore balancing are
highly critical of America’s special relationship with Israel,30 it is worth noting that, in practice,
the approach would have to rely on and work indirectly through allies such as Israel to help uphold a
regional balance of power favorable to U.S. interests. This would make it more difficult for Washington to
press Israel to accommodate Palestinian concerns.
That eviscerates the credibility of international institutions as a constraint on
power politics
Falk 11 – Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, UN
Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine, interviewed by Global Policy Forum associate
Harpreet Paul

(Richard, “Israel/Palestine Conflict - Interview with Richard Falk,” June 2, 2011,

https://www.globalpolicy.org/security-council/index-of-countries-on-the-security-council-
agenda/israel-palestine-and-the-occupied-territories/50404-israelpalestine-conflict-interview-
with-richard-falk.html?itemid=866)
Richard Falk: I think the essential US position (regardless of the president or the leadership) has been to suggest that only a negotiated settlement agreement between the

the US] have viewed any UN initiative based on trying to make

parties could produce a sustainable peace. Therefore, they [

Israel comply with international law as somehow inconsistent with that vision of the appropriate path
to peace and have, therefore, opposed any independent assessments of Israeli behavior. That , in effect,
has given Israel a green light to continue to defy international law – which they have done
repeatedly and flagrantly perhaps most dramatically by maintaining an unlawful blockade on the 1.5 million people living in Gaza. This is a blockade that has
been maintained ever since 2007 and is a very explicit form of collective punishment that is unconditionally prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel has
defied international law also by attacking the so called ‘Freedom Flotilla’ on May 31st 2010 in international waters using excessive violence and also trying to enforce this

So, with the United States (despite the President continuing often to say how committed
unlawful blockade.¶

the country is to the rule of law and how different it is from the Bush presidency), if you look at it from the point of this conflict, there is perfect
continuity in unconditionally supporting Israel and being one sided in every significant respect with regard to the

diplomacy connected to the conflict.¶ Harpreet K Paul: Legal scholars such as yourself and Marjorie Cohn have
spoken out against the inconsistent way in which international law is applied – most recently in relation to the
“Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. I wondered if you could speak a little about that.¶ Richard Falk: It’s a very important issue and is hard to understand without an appreciation

that the rule of law depends, for its legitimacy, on treating equals equally. If equals are treated unequally then what is
called the rule of law is really just another version of the rule of power. What is very notable in this conflict and in relation to a doctrine like “R2P” (or

“Responsibility to Protect”) is the reliance on double standards – that is, using the norms of international law

when they correspond to geo-political interests and neglecting them when they contradict geo-
political positions. And, nothing illustrates that better in recent times than the enthusiasm for
humanitarian intervention in relation to the Libyan conflict (even though that seems like a civil war), versus the
absolute silence relating to the vulnerability and suffering that the people of Gaza have
experienced over a four year period of unlawful blockade and bad water, insufficient electricity, insufficient medical supplies – barely subsistence living. There is a
situation where one would think it was the poster child of the rational for a “Responsibility to Protect” being vested in the international community. Particularly in relation to
occupied Palestine which is in some sense a legacy of the failure of the UN to solve this conflict way back at the end of World War Two.¶ Harpreet K Paul: What does it mean

for the legitimacy of the UN if doctrines like “Responsibility to Protect” are applied inconsistently or used
further geo-strategic political goals rather than to do as the name of the doctrine suggests – to protect all civilians?¶
Richard Falk: I think it re-enforces the sense that the UN in some situations – not in all situations – is an instrument of great

power politics rather than an alternative to it. I think when the UN was established and the Charter was agreed upon, the notion that was
widely prevalent and hoped for was that there would be a framework of law and behavior that would apply to all states – the strong as well as the weak. Of course, there’s some
ambiguity in the UN system. Especially in the Security Council where the five permanent members [China, Russia, US, UK and France] – essentially the winners in World War Two
– were given a power of veto and permanent membership which means, in effect, that they only have to obey the Charter when they wish to. It [compliance to the rule of law] is
discretionary for them and obligatory for every other member of the UN. This is a kind of constitutional recognition of double standards. One can say it is either a realistic
accommodation to geo-politics or it shows that you should never have expected the rule of law to apply on a global level within the UN framework.

Extinction
Sachs 14—Jeffrey, D. is a Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and
Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is also Special Adviser
to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals “Ukraine and
the Crisis of International Law,” http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/jeffrey-d--
sachs-sees-in-russia-s-annexation-of-crimea-the-return--with-us-complicity--of-great-power-
politics

International law itself is at a crossroads. The US, Russia, the EU, and NATO cite it when it is to
their advantage and disregard it when they deem it a nuisance. Again, this is not to justify Russia’s unacceptable actions;
rather, it is to add them to the sequence of actions contrary to international law.¶ The same problems may soon spill over into Asia. Until
recently, China, Japan, and others in Asia have staunchly defended the requirement that the Security Council approve any outside military intervention in sovereign states.

Recently, however, several countries in East Asia have become locked in a spiral of claims and counterclaims regarding
borders, shipping lanes, and territorial rights. So far, these disputes have remained basically peaceful, but tensions are rising. We
must hope that the countries of the region continue to see the great value of international law
as a bulwark of sovereignty, and act accordingly.¶ There have long been skeptics of international law – those who believe that it can never prevail
over the national interests of major powers, and that maintaining a balance of power among competitors is all that really can be done to keep
the peace. From this perspective, Russia’s actions in the Crimea are simply the actions of a great power asserting its prerogatives.¶ Yet such a world is profoundly

and unnecessarily dangerous. We have learned time and again that there is no such thing as a true “balance of
power.” There are always imbalances and destabilizing power shifts . Without some scaffolding of
law, open conflict is all too likely.¶ This is especially true today, as countries jostle for oil and other
vital resources. It is no coincidence that most of the deadly wars of recent years have taken place in regions rich in valuable and contested natural resources.¶ As we
look back in this centennial year toward the outbreak of WWI, we see again and again that the only possible route to safety is

international law, upheld by the United Nations and respected on all sides. Yes, it sounds naive, but no one has to
look back to see the naiveté of the belief that great-power politics will preserve peace and
ensure humanity’s survival.
 off
Hillary will win but Obama’s approval is key
Klein 3-29-16 - Editor-in-Chief
Ezra, This presidential campaign is making Americans like Obama — and that's good for Dems in
November, Vox, http://www.vox.com/latest-news/2016/3/29/11326606/campaign-americans-
like-obama

Political scientist Alan Abramowitz emailed over an interesting insight about the effect the
presidential race is having on Barack Obama's numbers — and what that might mean in
November:¶ All the noise being made by the presidential campaign, especially by the Republican
campaign, has taken attention away from what may turn out to be more significant for the
general election — Barack Obama’s rising approval rating.¶ Obama’s weekly approval rating in
the Gallup tracking poll (I ignore the daily fluctuations which are largely meaningless) has risen
to its highest level in many months — 53 percent approval vs. 44 percent disapproval for the
past week.¶ This is potentially very significant for the November election because much research,
including my own, has found that the president’s approval rating is a key predictor of the
election results even when the president is not on the ballot. Thus a very unpopular George W.
Bush probably doomed John McCain to defeat in 2008 no matter what happened during the
campaign that year. A 53-44 approval-disapproval balance would give Democrats a good shot at
keeping the White House even if they were not running against a badly divided Republican Party
led by perhaps the most unpopular nominee in decades.

Gulfpresence is popular and supported by a majority of Americans

Chicago Council 14 -- Independent, non-partisan organization committed to influencing the
discourse on global issues

2014 CHICAGO COUNCIL SURVEY: FOREIGN POLICY IN THE AGE OF RETRENCHMENT, CHAPTER
3: The Power of Deterrence, Trade, and Diplomacy,
http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/survey/2014/chapter3.html

Continued support for maintaining military presence overseas ¶ A majority of Americans have
consistently supported a military posture overseas . Today, six in ten (59%) want to maintain as
many long-term overseas bases as there are now, up from 52% in 2012 and the highest level
ever recorded. Of the rest, 12 percent would increase long-term overseas bases (up from 9% in
2012) and 29 percent would like to decrease the number (down from 38% in 2012). ¶ Americans
believe that the US military presence abroad helps increase regional stability in the Middle East
(56%) and East Asia (63%). Yet, they are less supportive of maintaining military bases in specific
countries in the Middle East and South Asia. The public is divided over US military basing in
Kuwait (47% support, 49% oppose), and majorities oppose bases in Turkey (54%, down from
57% in 2012), Iraq (56%, up from 53% in 2012), and Pakistan (59%, similar to 58% in 2012). A
majority also opposes bases in Afghanistan (54% oppose, same as in 2012). In a separate
question, only 33 percent say that the United States should leave some US troops in Afghanistan
beyond 2014 for training, anti-insurgency and counter-terrorism activities.
A GOP president destroys the Paris agreement which accelerates warming and
causes extinction—democrats solve
Graves 1-5-16 - columnist for the Guardian and a staff correspondent at National Journal
magazine

Lucia, The Whole World Has a Stake in the Outcome of Our Presidential Election, Pacific
Standard Magazine, http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/2016-presidential-election-does-
the-world-have-a-future *gender modified

It would be difficult but not impossible for a Republican president to undo the Paris Agreement .
For that reason alone, the 2016 election is about whether the world has a future.¶ Last year, 2015,
was easily the hottest year on the books, but you would never know it to hear our presidential candidates talk on the trail. Just days after

world leaders forged the Paris climate agreement, the planet's best hope for curbing the catastrophic effects of global warming,
Republican presidential candidates assembled for a debate. And nobody, not the nine candidates on the main stage or
the three moderators before them, mentioned the Paris Agreement as anything more than a passing jab.¶ "And when I see they have a

climate conference over in Paris, they should have been talking about destroying ISIS," Ohio Governor John Kasich said. Donald Trump merely

scoffed at how President Obama thinks climate change is even a priority. That was it, in the wake of the historic
moment: nada, zip, zilch, zero actual conversation. Just a one-touch dismissal from a guy most people don't know is even running, and a jibe in the
deal's general direction from The Donald. It
wasn't an oversight—it's standard practice on climate for
Republicans.¶ The party's internally incoherent consensus on the matter seems to be that the climate
agreement is somewhere between "reckless," "ridiculous," and a "threat" to our sovereignty— and anyway,
climate change is not really happening.¶ But how, exactly, would the candidates respond to the landmark deal once in office?
Specifically, would they submit an even stronger climate plan by 2020, as the U.S. is now required to do under the international accord? Or would they
tear up the document entirely?¶ It might not be easy for a Republican president to destroy the Paris Agreement—
but it would be a whole lot easier than what the world pulled off at le Bourget.¶ Where
candidates come down on this matter will have tremendous consequences, not just for environmentalists or
even for Americans, but for the world.¶ While Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have done a remarkable job of skirting Republican

opposition in Congress—laying the groundwork through intercountry alliances in recent years—experts say a GOP president could

legally unravel the deal.¶ Whether it's by rolling back Obama's Clean Power Plan—a lynchpin of
the U.S. commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions—or by pulling out of the deal directly, a
Republican president could single-handedly undo the past decade of progress on climate and propel
the world far beyond the warming cap of two degrees Celsius needed to stave off the worst
consequences

of climate change. The U.S., as the world’s second-largest emitter currently and the biggest
emitter cumulatively, has an outsized duty in preserving the planet’s future. ¶ Obama seems to be betting
that a GOP president wouldn't go through with breaking the global contract; as he told reporters in Paris: “Your credibility and America’s ability to
influence events depends on taking seriously what other countries care about.” Now that there's global consensus behind taking action, Obama added,
the next president "is going to need to think this is really important."¶ So far, however, that looks like wishful thinking, particularly where Republican
frontrunners are concerned.¶ Ted Cruz has already said he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris accord, telling reporters in a high
school classroom in Knoxville, Tennessee: "Barack Obama seems to think the SUV parked in your driveway is a bigger threat to national security than
radical Islamic terrorists who want to kill us. That’s just nutty. These are ideologues, they don’t focus on the facts, they won’t address the facts, and
what they’re interested [in] instead is more and more government power."¶ Trump, while he hasn't directly addressed the accord, has
argued in the past that climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. Meanwhile
Rand Paul thinks granting power to the United Nations would threaten U.S. sovereignty, resulting in "a bunch of two-bit dictators telling America what
to do," as he put it recently. Marco Rubio insists the Paris climate deal is an "unfunny joke" that's "hurting
the American dream."¶ “Here’s the most outrageous part,” Rubio told Fox News recently. “This is a deal that’s going to require the
American taxpayer to send billions of dollars to developing countries. Well, China considers itself a developing country. Does that mean the American
taxpayer is going to send billions to China to help them comply with the arrangement here?” ¶ Short answer: no. Contrary
to Rubio's
impressions, China played a leadership role in the Paris talks and was on the giving side of the
equation, offering up to $3.1 billion to help actual developing countries. ¶ In fact, the only
Republican candidate supporting clear actions on climate change , Lindsey Graham, dropped out in
late December after failing for months to break the one percent mark in the polls. He never even made it onstage for anything but an undercard
debate. The only other Republican contender to express (tepid) support for the deal, George Pataki, dropped out a week later. ¶ This, apparently, is

what happens when you take a realistic , even semi-honest approach to climate change in the
Republican primary: You’re drummed out. ¶ There remains no candidate on the Republican side
who will commit to upholding the deal, and the majority of candidates have said nothing about the agreement at all. By
contrast, all three candidates on the Democratic side have said they'd not just honor the Paris
Agreement, but advance it; before the gavel even went down in Paris, Bernie Sanders was lamenting that the deal doesn't go far
enough.¶ But denial won't play well in the general election. A recent Pew Research Center survey found 69 percent of Americans favor a multilateral
commitment to limit the burning of greenhouse gas emissions; and that such statistics are sharply divided by political affiliation won't work in
Republicans’ favor come November. The leading Democratic contender, Hillary Clinton—well aware of her party's edge here—has
been
increasingly vocal on climate, as when she came out against the Keystone XL pipeline even before president Obama nixed the project
ahead of Paris. She's also voiced her support for all the president’s executive actions on climate . Still,
many environmental advocates still favor Sanders, who, as movement leader Bill McKibben noted in an aside at Paris climate talks, was against
Keystone as early as 2011, when the pipeline first came on the national stage. Given how things looked (say) 18 months ago, environmentalists can
perhaps take comfort in watching Democratic candidates argue in prime-time over who hated Keystone first, and most. ¶ The world will be
presented with two stark choices come the general election . But the White House, for its part, expresses hope that
the accord can be upheld regardless. "I think it's going to be incredibly difficult to move back from this position," a senior administration official told
reporters post-Paris. "Momentum begets momentum."¶ "We don't want to be naive to the domestic policies here," he added, "but I think with every
passing month and with every passing milestone, [the ideals of the Paris Agreement] will get more and more baked in." ¶ Of course it'spossible
that Republicans are just pandering and that, if elected to office, a Republican president might not seek

to destroy the deal. Obama has gestured to this possibility, arguing: "Even if somebody from a different party succeeded me, one of the
things you find is when you're in this job, you think about it differently than if you're just running for the job." ¶ Maybe he's right. But is

it worth betting the world?¶ For years the U.S. has had the dubious distinction of being the only country anywhere with a major party
that denies the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real, man-made, and accelerating. It was always a denial with far-reaching
effects, given the U.S.'s hefty emissions, currently the second largest after China's, but now that pernicious reach is extended farther still. If America
elects a Republican in 2016, he (it would almost certainly be a “he”) could undermine the diplomatic efforts of almost 200 countries, offering our global
partners a tempting excuse to abandon their climate commitments—and to distrust the U.S. for years to come. ¶ Given America’s long history of
hypocrisy in climate negotiations and repeated broken promises to world partners, such a reversal could be devastating. ¶ In Paris, for the
first time ever, the U.S. played the role of a climate leader, hero even, in these talks, a hard-won victory that's been
years in the making. That Obama has invested so much in this deal for so long , that he's made it a centerpiece of his

administration—and, many expect, the overarching mission of his final year in office— underscores just how difficult it is to achieve the kind of

victory we saw in Paris, and just how much these global climate talks depend on the power of the U.S.

president.¶ If Obama could make this, the next guy [president] could break it. It might not be easy to destroy
the Paris Agreement, but it would be a whole lot easier than what the world pulled off at le Bourget.

Extinction
Flournoy 12 -- Citing Feng Hsu, PhD NASA Scientist @ the Goddard Space Flight Center. Don
Flournoy is a PhD and MA from the University of Texas, Former Dean of the University College @
Ohio University, Former Associate Dean @ State University of New York and Case Institute of
Technology, Project Manager for University/Industry Experiments for the NASA ACTS Satellite,
Currently Professor of Telecommunications @ Scripps College of Communications @ Ohio
University (Don, "Solar Power Satellites," January, Springer Briefs in Space Development, Book,
p. 10-11
In the Online Journal of Space Communication , Dr. Feng Hsu, a  NASA scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, a research center in the forefront of science of space and Earth,

The evidence of global warming is alarming,” noting the potential for a catastrophic

writes, “

planetary climate change is real and troubling (Hsu 2010 ) . Hsu and his NASA colleagues were engaged in
monitoring and analyzing climate changes on a global scale, through which they
received first-hand scientific information and data relating to global warming issues, including the dynamics of
polar ice cap melting. After discussing this research with colleagues who were world experts on the subject, he wrote: I now have no
doubt global temperatures are rising, and that global warming is a serious problem
confronting all of humanity. No matter whether these trends are due to human
interference or to the cosmic cycling of our solar system, there are two basic facts that are crystal clear: (a) there is
overwhelming scientific evidence showing positive correlations between the level of CO2
concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere with respect to the historical fluctuations of global
temperature changes; and (b) the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientific
community is in agreement about the risks of a potential catastrophic global climate
change. That is, if we humans continue to ignore this problem and do nothing, if we continue dumping huge quantities of
greenhouse gases into Earth’s biosphere, humanity will be at dire risk  (Hsu 2010 ) . As a technology risk assessment expert, Hsu says he can show
with some confidence that the planet will face more risk doing nothing to curb its fossil-based energy addictions than it will in making a fundamental shift in its energy supply.

the risks of a catastrophic anthropogenic climate change can be potentially the

“This,” he writes, “is because 

extinction of human species , a risk that is simply too high for us to take any chances” (Hsu 2010 ) 
 Adv 1
Withdrawal triggers conflict over the SCS
Thompson 12 – national security writer for Forbes
(Loren, “What Happens When America No Longer Needs Middle East Oil?,”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2012/12/03/what-happens-when-america-no-
longer-needs-middle-east-oil/)

So there’s a real possibility that Washington will go through the same East-of-Suez debate that
London did in the 1960s. The Obama Administration’s new Asia-Pacific military posture may be
the first, tentative sign that America is losing its enthusiasm for securing Middle East oil supplies.
Of course, everyone in the administration will vigorously reject any such interpretation. But just
for fun, let’s ask the question of who wins and who loses if America decides it’s had enough of
being the policeman on the beat in the Persian Gulf. The biggest losers would be the Arab oil
states grouped in the Gulf Cooperation Council, most of which are monarchies kept in power by
a combination oil dollars and American military power. Despite their oil revenues, none of these
countries except Saudi Arabia has the wherewithal to defend itself against military pressure
from Iran if America leaves the stage – or for that matter from Iraq, which has repeatedly laid
claim to oil fields in Kuwait and other nearby states. The vacuum created by an American
departure would force nations like Bahrain and Qatar to seek new military protectors, either by
submitting to the influence of bigger regional powers or by reaching out to China. The second
category of losers would be the economies of East Asia, which the International Energy Agency
says will be the main consumers of Persian Gulf oil in the years ahead. China, Japan, South
Korea and Taiwan are heavily dependent on the flow of oil passing through the Strait of
Hormuz, and yet do little to assure that flow is not disrupted by local tensions. If America pulls
out of the Gulf, the nations of East Asia will either have to play a bigger military role in the
Middle East, or find other sources of oil. America might have sufficient new-found reserves of
fossil fuel to supply Japan and South Korea in an emergency, but concern about access to
Persian Gulf oil would undoubtedly exacerbate tensions over who owns contested oil reserves
in the South China Sea and elsewhere.

Increased tensions lead to nuclear war

Rando 15 – serves as the U.S. Correspondent and a frequent contributing author for the
Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Warfare Journal and the Non-Conventional Threat Newsletter,
DHS Certified Weapons of Mass Destruction/CBRNE Instructor, Weapons of Mass Destruction
Hazardous Materials Specialist, Radiological-Nuclear HAZMAT Technician, NFPA Certified
HAZMAT Defensive Operations and HAZMAT Technician

(Frank G., Fire on the Water: The South China Sea and Nuclear Confrontation, CBRNe Portal,
http://www.cbrneportal.com/fire-on-the-water-the-south-china-sea-and-nuclear-
confrontation/)
Robert Kaplan, one of the world’s foremost experts on China, has stated “The South China Sea
will be the 21st Century’s defining battleground.” The obsession with supremacy in the South
China Sea is certainly not a new phenomenon in the realms of international security and
maritime strategy. In opinionated discussions related to naval warfare, prominent political
scientists and military strategists have been addressing the geopolitical and military significance
of the region for decades. For example, the enlightening 1997 article “The Chinese Way”,
written in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists by Professor Chalmers Johnson of the University of
California-San Diego, noted significantly increased defense budgets and expenditures in the
region. In addition, the article eludes to the fact that China had claimed the entire South China
Sea and would use its naval forces to counter any encroachment. ¶ The argument for an
increased U.S. naval presence in East Asia is certainly not without precedent. This contested
aquatic region has tremendous geopolitical, strategic and economic significance. While, the
Persian Gulf has immense importance and global recognition due to its strategic location in the
Middle East, as well its significance to global commerce, industry and sought after oil, the South
China Sea is crucially important to nations seeking to obtain their economic riches and
geopolitical advantages.¶ The South China Sea is geographically located near the Pacific Ocean
and encompasses an area of 1.4 million square miles (3.5 million square kilometers). As a semi-
closed area, the South China Sea extends from the Singapore Strait to the Taiwan Strait, with
China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan surrounding it. In
terms of economic value, fishery stocks and potential fossil fuel reserves are two major
commodities that may spark an armed conflict, even to the point of nuclear confrontation. As a
rich source of the region’s staple diet, fish, the sea guarantees a steady flow of food to the
countries of the region. Control and supremacy of the sea would also assure claiming the much
touted hydrocarbon reserves in the seabed, possibly exceeding those of the OPEC nations such
as Iraq and Kuwait. The conquest of this vast resource would virtually assure energy
independence and high monetary returns for those that would gain supremacy over the South
China Sea. Thus, seizing the opportunity to gain dominance will lead to control and manipulation
of vital food and energy resources, economic wealth and geopolitical power in the region. ¶ A
scenario of regional and maritime domination and control could lead to the partial or total
exclusion of adjacent nation-states to access any food or natural resources derived from a sea
ruled with an iron hand; leading to a massive complex humanitarian catastrophe of immense
proportions from malnutrition and starvation, limitations in energy production, and economic
collapse. These factors make the South China Sea a national security priority for nations in the
region, including one of the world’s superpowers, China. ¶ The dependence of China and other
regional nations surrounding the South China Sea on the Strait of Malacca is analogous in
geopolitical and economic terms, to the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. Approximately one
-third of all global trade funnels through the strait and also serves as a conduit for raw materials
and energy needs for China and other adjacent nation-states. Such potential dominance in any
region, leads to a high-stakes game of brinkmanship, and at least the possibility of a regional
war which could conceivably escalate to engulf nation-states external to the regional sphere.
Tensions and skirmishes have the propensity to evolve into armed conflict and full-scale war,
and apprehensive leaders and military planners in such a contested region serve as the
facilitators for disaster.¶ China continues to assert sovereignty by constructing man made islands
using sand dredged from the sea bottom and these artificial islands could be militarized. China
has even affirmed its desire to have a military presence on these islands; however, the Chinese
Foreign Minister Wang Yi, also professes the use of these land masses to facilitate commerce via
shipping lanes and to protect Chinese fishing and other vessels from piracy. ¶ China will never
cease its quest for supremacy and its perceived “ownership” of the South China Sea, as the
legitimacy and structure of the Chinese government is based on nationalism and achievement of
the “Chinese Dream”. The Chinese regime continues to vehemently assert their perceived
“right” to the South China Sea, and it forges ahead with plans and operations that could lead to
naval warfare and conflict escalation. The knowledge that China possesses formidable naval
capacity and capabilities, including nuclear-capable ballistic missile submarines, is, indeed,
disconcerting at the very least.¶ As we examine and evaluate the “submarine factor”, it is evident
that China’s submarines have no practical value in its disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines.
Essentially, nuclear ballistic missile capable submarines serve as a deterrent against
thermonuclear war. Without doubt, the primary reason that China possesses nuclear-capable
submarines is to deter an American attack, although India’s nuclear weapons are also a
consideration for Beijing. Nuclear capable submarines are capable of deep dive capabilities and
shorter launch to target times. While China’s submarine capabilities may appear worrisome to
some, sudden deployment from port in a geopolitical crisis would serve as a critical indicator to
the US and Western allies, and its submarine fleet still remains somewhat noisy and detectable. ¶
China has already demonstrated its aggression at sea in several instances, such as the ramming
and sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat in disputed waters claimed by both countries in the
region and an ominous presence and military mobilization exercises which have been monitored
by military and intelligence assets. A report by the National Air and Space Intelligence Center,
indicates that Chinese SSBNs are able to target portions of the U.S. from strategic operational
positions near the Chinese coast. China’s Global Times published an unprecedented report that
revealed a nuclear missile strike on the western U.S. with JL-2 missiles could generate up to 12
million American fatalities. The Obama administration and senior U.S. naval officials have not
retorted to China’s claims of a potentially devastating nuclear threat, which included graphics
showing radiological plumes and collateral damage induced by radiation. The possibilities of
China’s anti-satellite strategies to disable communications and intelligence-gathering capabilities
must also be taken seriously.¶ Most assuredly, the South China Sea would serve as an obvious
arena for the projection of Chinese power, including conventional and, potentially, nuclear
scenarios.
 *1NC—Solvency
No solvency—withdrawal isn’t sufficient to build trust with Iran
Bhalla, ’11 -- STRATFOR's Director of Analysis and a senior analyst for the
Middle East, South Asia and Latin America region
(Reva, 7-19, The U.S.-Saudi Dilemma: Iran's Reshaping of Persian Gulf Politics, STRATFOR,
https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110718-us-saudi-dilemma-irans-reshaping-persian-gulf-
politics)

The United States may be willing to recognize Iranian demands when it comes to Iran's designs for the Iraqi government or
oil concessions in the Shiite south, but it also wants to ensure that Iran does not try to overstep its bounds and

threaten Saudi Arabia's oil wealth. To reinforce a potential accommodation with Iran, the United
States needs to maintain a blocking force against Iran, and this is where the U.S.-Iranian
negotiation appears to be deadlocked.¶ The threat of a double-cross is a real one for all sides to
this conflict. Iran cannot trust that the United States, once freed up, will not engage in military
action against Iran down the line. The Americans cannot trust that the Iranians will not make a bid for Saudi Arabia's oil wealth (though the military
logistics required for such a move are likely beyond Iran's capabilities at this point). Finally, the Saudis can't trust that the United States will defend them in a time of need,
especially if the United States is preoccupied with other matters and/or has developed a relationship with Iran that it feels the need to maintain.
 1NC—No Iran Miscalc
Iranian miscalc won’t escalate—empirically proven
Reardon, ’12 -- Research Fellow with the International Security Program and the Project on
Managing the Atom at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

(Robert J., Containing Iran: Strategies for Addressing the Iranian Nuclear Challenge, Rand
Corporation, Sep 27, 2012, Google Books, pg. 153)

Iran also could adopt a more aggressive posture toward the Gulf States, believing that the
nuclear shadow will encourage bandwagon- ing. Here again, however, Iran's options would be
limited. Iran does not possess the conventional military capabilities to challenge the GCC states
on the battlefield, and an attack could be adequately met by technologically superior Gulf
military forces as well as existing U.S. military assets in the region . It is unlikely that Iran would
risk a direct conventional military confrontation with the United States in the Gulf and, in fact,
Iran has consistently avoided such a confrontation in the past.38 Even during the Iran-Iraq War,
after the United States accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner, Tehran exercised restraint.
 1NC—No Iran Aggression
No Iranian aggression—multiple factors ensure restraint
Salsabili, 3-20-15 – former Iranian diplomat, associate with the International Security
Program/Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs and a visiting scholar at the MIT Center for International Studies where
he conducts research on establishing a WMD-free zone in the Middle East

(Mansour, Iran is a rational actor whom America should embrace, The National Interest,
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-iran-became-the-middle-easts-moderate-force-12451)

The political maturity of Iran as a rational state not only renders Netanyahu’s congressional
speech futile but further inspires the United States to advance a nuclear deal. The insistence on
Iran being a threat is based on the delusion that Iran has remained unchanged since its
inception as the Islamic Republic. Yet, three major indicators highlight a deep development in
Iranian politics in the region. These signposts include Iran’s constructive regional military
presence; its peaceful and balancing role in resolving politico-cultural issues within the UN and
regional venues; and its highly educated and modernized society that guarantees the
irreversibility of the other two developments.¶ There is only one country in the Middle East that
is truly in alliance with the United States in its fight against the ISIS and that is Iran. The military
presence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) elite forces in defense of the
territorial integrity and political stability of Iraq has already expanded from the Kurdish city of
Erbil to the multiethnic capital city of Baghdad. This is happening at a time when Turkey finds it
hard even to declare ISIS as a terrorist group, Saudi Arabia only last year felt obliged to take its
public funds away from feeding ISIS, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) air force abandoned
the allied forces against ISIS last December. ¶ The crux of the matter is not just the tactical
presence of the IRGC in the region but their strategic justification for such a presence. Two
major commanders along with Admiral Ali Shamkhani, Secretary of the Supreme National
Security Council of Iran, have recently declared that if we do not fight ISIS today at Samarra,
tomorrow we have to fight them back in Tehran, with no reference to jihad or a path to free Al-
Quds (Jerusalem) or Palestine from Israeli occupation. This is a massive development in that the
IRGC's military mission has shifted from being a transnational, idealist, and unpredictable force
to a national, realist, and predictable one, restricted to the national boundaries of Iran .¶ In fact
this mature stance is not a new phenomenon. For the past two decades, it has been recurring in
separate situations, but never as specific as this. Iranian behavior in the region shows a history
of pacifism and problem solving. Take, for example, Iran’s tacit cooperation with the U nited
States during the Afghanistan campaign against the Taliban, its calming and controlling of Shiite
extremists in Iraq, its role as a middleman between Azerbaijan and Armenia, compelling the
Assad regime to join the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and dismantle its chemical
arsenal, its firm stance against the ISIS extremists in Syria and Iraq and its avoidance of
radicalization on a range of regional issues, from Chechnya to the Bahrain uprisings. The
professional behavior of the Iranian and the U.S. navies in the Persian Gulf over the last two
decades is another example of the possibility for harmony and cooperation in the region .¶ Yet, it
is argued that Iranian support for the Shiite Hezbollah and Sunni Hamas groups against Israeli
occupation forces represents an aggressive position beyond Iranian borders. This support,
however, demonstrates a common religious commitment. The fact that the majority of the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) resolutions have been devoted to the Palestinian
cause proves the global importance of this issue to all Muslims and not just Iran. ¶ Decades of
hard economic conditions, eight years of bloody war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and internal
factional rivalry, have not only led to Iranian restraint in exporting the Islamic Revolution, but
have also moved Iran to pursue cultural and political issues through temperance and
international forums as in the case of “defamation of religions” at the UN and the OIC. A
comparison between the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie with the modest
behavior of Ayatollah Khamenei regarding the Charlie Hebdo cartoons is instructed. The fact
that Iran’s President condemned the attacks against Charlie Hebdo speaks for itself. ¶ The young,
highly educated, urbanized, modern society of Iran has already coined a new identity with
unique needs and sensations that sometimes catch the older generation by surprise. One recent
example of Iran’s social evolution was symbolized by the massive turnout for the funeral of an
Iranian pop singer, Morteza Pashaei, popular for his humanistic love songs. This example reveals
a massive change within the Iranian society for nonviolent and humanistic aspirations that can
serve societal assurances for the continuation of peaceful statesmanship.
Adv 2
 *1NC Russia War
No russian war- 5 reasons
Maral Margossian 14, columnist for the Massachusetts Daily Collegian,, 3/27/14, Five reasons
why Russia won’t start World War III, http://dailycollegian.com/2014/03/27/five-reasons-why-
russia-wont-start-world-war-iii/

The recent events in Eastern Europe involving Russia and Ukraine have spawned, at their most
extreme, apocalyptic claims. Here are five reasons why Russia won’t start World War III, or any
other war for that matter: 1. The world is MAD. The end of World War II ushered the world into
a precarious atomic age that characterized the international atmosphere during the Cold War.
Luckily, the Cold War never escalated to nuclear war. Why? Because of mutually assured
destruction (or MAD). Russia knows that if it pushes that big red button, we have our own even
bigger, redder button to push in retaliation. The odds of a nuclear war with Russia are
extremely unlikely . 2. The impact of economic sanctions on the Russian economy is far too
crippling for Russia to fund a war. As a part of a globalized world, economic sanctions are more
than mere slaps on the wrist. Already the sanctions imposed on Russia have begun to take their
toll. The West has yet to attack Russia’s strongest economic assets, but the declining strength
of the Russian economy puts Putin far from a position to wage a world war . 3. Putin’s actions
demonstrate his longing for Russia’s glory days before the fall of the Soviet Union. His
annexation of Crimea is more out of fear than strength.

Putin feels threatened by Russia’s changing role in world affairs and is using Crimea to tell the
world that Russia still matters. 4. Russia is already seen as the “big bad wolf” of Europe. Though
Putin may have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his involvement in the Syrian
chemical weapons deal, Russia’s popularity among many Western countries is not very high. The
recent suspension of Russia from the G8 group is a symbolic action that demonstrates that
Russia will have to face a united front of world powers if it chooses to start a war. 5. There is just
too much at stake. War between Ukraine and Russia is one thing; Russia’s military is large
enough and strong enough to easily defeat Ukraine. However, if Russia decides to take further
aggressive action, it must also contend with surrounding European Union member nations and
their potential involvement in the war. Moreover, Russia’s involvement in other international
affairs will be affected. For example, the ongoing effort to normalize relations between Iran and
the rest of the world will be jeopardized, considering Russia is involved in those efforts. Crimea
may have symbolic meaning close to the hearts of Russians, but it isn’t worth risking the domino
effect of events that can potentially occur. So, those of you who feel abnormally unsettled by
the recent turn of events can rest easy. While Russia’s actions can’t be brushed aside and should
be taken seriously, the chances of this confrontation escalating to a great war are slim —
assuming these countries act rationally.
 *1NC Econ Collapse
Economic decline doesn’t lead to war—best studies
Drezner 14
Daniel W. Drezner, Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, World
Politics 66, no. 1 “The System Worked Global Economic Governance during the Great
Recession”, January 2014

The final outcome addresses a dog that hasn’t barked: the effect of the Great Recession on cross-
border conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial
crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.37 Whether through greater
internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict, there
were genuine concerns that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict. Violence in the Middle East,
border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fuel impressions of surge in global
public disorder. ¶ The aggregate data suggests otherwise, however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has
constructed a “Global Peace Index” annually since 2007. A key conclusion they draw from the 2012 report is that “ The
average level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007.”38 Interstate
violence in particular has declined since the start of the financial crisis – as have military
expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has not
triggered any increase in violent conflict; the secular decline in violence that started with the end of the Cold War
has not been reversed.39 Rogers Brubaker concludes, “the crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist
nationalism or ethnic exclusion that might have been expected.”40¶ None of these data suggest that the
global economy is operating swimmingly. Growth remains unbalanced and fragile, and has clearly slowed in 2012. Transnational
capital flows remain depressed compared to pre-crisis levels, primarily due to a drying up of cross-border interbank lending in
Europe. Currency volatility remains an ongoing concern. Compared to the aftermath of other postwar recessions, growth in
output, investment, and employment in the developed world have all lagged behind. But the Great Recession is not like other
postwar recessions in either scope or kind; expecting a standard “V”-shaped recovery was unreasonable. One financial analyst
characterized the post-2008 global economy as in a state of “contained depression.”41 The key word is “contained,” however.
Given the severity, reach and depth of the 2008 financial crisis, the proper comparison is with
Great Depression. And by that standard, the outcome variables look impressive . As Carmen
Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff concluded in This Time is Different: “that its macroeconomic outcome has been only the most
severe global recession since World War II – and not even worse – must be regarded as fortunate.”42
 A2: Oil Prices I/L
Low oil prices won’t kill the regime—the Saudi econ is resilient
Ali, 7-18-‘15 -- Gulf News business columnist and a member of the parliament in
Bahrain
(Jasim, A chance for Saudi Arabia to show resilience, Gulf News Analysis,
http://gulfnews.com/business/analysis/a-chance-for-saudi-arabia-to-show-resilience-
1.1552037)

The Saudi economy seems to be coping with the sustaining low oil price regime.¶ The movement
of oil prices affects budgetary revenues and hence expenditures of the world’s largest oil
exporter. Saudi Arabia prepared its 2015 budget with projected expenditure of $230 billion
(Dh844 billion) and revenues of $191 billion, resulting in a deficit of $39 billion. ¶ The
corresponding numbers from recent years do not offer a clue to the future. In retrospect, the
final figures for fiscal years 2013 and 2012 had surpluses of $53 billion and $103 billion,
respectively. That for 2012 was a record due to the rise in oil prices and production, with the
kingdom compensating for the market disruption caused by events in Syria and Libya. ¶
Conversely, the budget posted a shortfall of $14 billion in 2014, brought on by the rapid fall in oil
prices during the second half of the year. It is widely projected that the kingdom would post
another deficit this year, though it is not clear to what extent. ¶ Recently Saudi authorities
undertook a series of measures to cope with anticipated budgetary shortage. One such resulted
in the government issuing bonds worth $4 billion, the first such in seven years. The bonds were
offered to banks operating in the kingdom rather than the general public to ensure institutional
buyer participation.¶ It is understandable the kingdom saw the need to issue bonds, on the back
of its attractive ratings. Standard & Poor’s assigns Saudi Arabia a notable AA- rating, the fourth
highest debt grade.¶ Outlook¶ However, there is reason for concern, as S&P has changed its
outlook from “positive” to “stable” and lately “negative” in a span of a year, reflecting the
adverse effects of the fall of oil prices on the fiscal position. The petroleum sector accounts for
90 per cent of the treasury revenues and 85 per cent of exports. ¶ Saudi Arabia is not suffering
from a debt burden, which barely makes up 2 per cent of the gross domestic product. It has a
GDP of $780 billion, the largest among Arab countries. Commendably, Saudi Arabia decided to
largely retire its unsettled public debt during the times of substantial budgetary surpluses .¶
Another measure designed to tackle the budgetary deficit saw withdrawing money from the
country’s general reserves to help enhancing budgetary revenues and thereby spending. By one
account, the kingdom withdrew some $49 billion in the first four months of 2015, a substantial
amount. It is suggested that the withdrawal is partly meant to help covering costs of military
operations in Yemen.¶ Saudi Arabia maintains a substantial amount of sovereign wealth fund
(SWF). According to statistics relating to June 2015, Saudi Arabia boasts SWFs of $763 billion,
the second largest within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) after the UAE. Saudi Arabia is
ranked amongst the top five countries in the world in terms of SWFs.¶ Public sector role¶ The
government’s fiscal position leaves its imprints on performance of other sectors like the stock
market reflecting the public sector’s pivotal role in the economy. The Tadawul All-Share Index or
TASI lost 426 points or almost 4.5 per cent in the first half of 2015 compared to the same period
in 2014.¶ For its part, the IMF is projecting slower economic growth in 2015 and 2016 when
compared to that of 3.5 per cent achieved in 2014. The recently revised economic growth rates
stand at 2.8 per cent and 2.4 per cent in 2015 and 2016, respectively. ¶ Yet, the Saudi economy
remains resilient.
2NC
CP 2
 2nc solves case / AT bureaucracy, inertia
The DoD bureaucracy will fall in line—prior review shapes their calculus
Tama 15 - assistant professor of international relations at American University’s School of
International Service

Jordan, Does Strategic Planning Matter? The Outcomes of U.S. National Security Reviews,
POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY | Volume 130 Number 4 2015–16, DOI: 10.1002/polq.12395

Despite this prevailing sentiment, my expectation is that quadrennial reviews—and formal

reviews more generally—can be useful tools for senior policymakers trying to institutionalize
their priorities within an agency. While structured reviews are not very well suited to the
generation of revolutionary ideas, they can help senior officials build support within the
bureaucracy for important organizational and policy changes. In his landmark analysis of
defense strategy, Samuel Huntington observed that “meaningful policy requires both content
and consensus.”28 Put in those terms, an informal approach to strategy development might
generate more innovative content, but a structured process might sometimes be more useful
because it builds consensus around content. Indeed, studies of strategic planning and reform
efforts in the U.S. Air Force, Defense Department, and State Department have found that
processes involving broad participation are necessary to create buy-in among rank-and-file
personnel for organizational changes.29 The need to generate buy-in is especially pronounced in
government agencies because, unlike corporate leaders, senior political appointees have limited
ability to influence the behavior of rank-and-file personnel through crude means such as the
threat of dismissal.30 Along similar lines, the legitimacy of a decisionmaking process often
heavily shapes whether decisions are accepted throughout an organization.31 In that regard,
highly structured processes may defuse concerns that decisions are being made behind closed
doors, without broad participation.

Recommendations shape DoD policy—empirics prove

Tama 15 - assistant professor of international relations at American University’s School of
International Service

Jordan, Does Strategic Planning Matter? The Outcomes of U.S. National Security Reviews,
POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY | Volume 130 Number 4 2015–16, DOI: 10.1002/polq.12395

My research further indicates that while secretaries of defense often find the QDR process to be
cumbersome, the review can be a useful—if highly imperfect—vehicle for institutionalizing their
priorities. Barry Pavel, a longtime DOD official who was involved in all four QDRs, noted, “QDRs
are ugly exercises. Everyone is defending turf. But they are the best and perhaps only
opportunity for the Secretary to put a lasting imprint on the defense program.”105 Clark
Murdock, a former DOD official and congressional defense aide, said, “When a public document
says the department is going to do something, it makes it more likely that the department will
do it because it gives debating points that advocates of the idea can use in budgetary wars.”106
Current and former defense officials observed that the QDR has had a significant impact on
some important discrete issues. For instance, the 2010 QDR catalyzed the creation of 10
homeland response units with the mission of responding to a chemical, biological, or nuclear
attack in the United States.107 The creation of these homeland response units, which report to
governors, was favored by civilian homeland defense officials in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense but was opposed by the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), which is responsible
for defending U.S. territory. An official involved in the debate said that the QDR was a necessary
vehicle for gaining approval of the new units: “We had a knock-down, drag-out fight with
NORTHCOM about this. It wouldn’t have happened without the QDR.”108 Kathleen Hicks added,
“The homeland defense community never sees the light of day [in the Pentagon], and the QDR
venue provided them a lot of top cover to make this change.”109 The 2010 QDR also resulted
in other new initiatives to counter weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). During the QDR
process, a pair of mid-level officials—Rebecca Hersman, deputy assistant secretary of defense
for countering weapons of mass destruction, and Hersman’s special adviser, Robert Peters—
used a working group on countering WMDs, which Peters directed, to gain departmental
approval of a set of initiatives in this area. These initiatives included the establishment of the
Standing Joint Force Headquarters for Elimination, which brings together personnel from across
the military services to plan and train for missions to secure, disable, and destroy WMDs in
hostile or semi permissive environments.110 Some of the services opposed this initiative
because they did not want to provide personnel to a joint headquarters, but Hersman and
Peters gained the backing of Under Secretary for Policy Michele Flournoy for the idea during the
QDR process, which allowed them to overcome service resistance.111 In addition, the
countering WMDs working group influenced DOD decisions to allocate more resources to the
development of countermeasures for chemical agents and the detection of biological
weapons.112 A DOD official explained that the QDR process provided a needed venue for
elevating this set of “second-tier” issues to a senior level for decision making, thereby giving
“smaller stakeholders in the department [such as Hersman and Peters] a chance to play in the
big leagues.”113
 2nc solves better
The sequencing of the CP is key to solvency—prior review and deliberation over
military policy is key to effective implementation, durable strategy shifts, and
crisis response
- Also answers indicts of QDR, etc—they empirically grease the wheels for policy changes
and have a tangible influence on decision-making
Tama 3-6-16 - Assistant Professor at the School of International Service at American University
Jordan, Why Strategic Planning Matters to National Security, Lawfare Blog,
https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-strategic-planning-matters-national-security

A recent example illustrates this pattern. After the Republican Party took control of the U.S.
House of Representatives in 2011, Congress cut U.S. defense spending by about $500 billion
over 10 years. This major cut - following a decade of large defense budget increases – prompted
Barack Obama to order a defense strategy review. Obama took charge of this review, chairing
several of its meetings. The review’s outcome was new Defense Strategic Guidance that the
United States would no longer maintain military forces large enough "to conduct large-scale,
prolonged stability operations.” In conjunction with this strategic shift, the Obama
administration decided to reduce the size of the Army and Marine Corps by a total of 82,000
personnel. These changes effectively ended the post-9/11 era of major U.S. counterinsurgency
operations. While the review was certainly not entirely responsible for this strategic shift –
Obama had a pre-existing preference to move away from counterinsurgency missions – the
review process helped to bring key defense officials on board and determined how the shift
would be articulated and carried out.¶ By contrast, many other strategic reviews occur
periodically, based on a predetermined timeline. For instance, the U.S. government conducts
quadrennial reviews in the areas of defense, diplomacy and development, homeland security,
and energy. These reviews have generally not resulted in groundbreaking strategic changes,
because the president is rarely involved in them and because senior officials typically make most
of their own key decisions in response to events, rather than a quadrennial calendar. ¶
Nevertheless, quadrennial reviews can make the government better prepared to address
security challenges and operate effectively. In particular, they can serve as useful devices for the
leaders of government agencies to generate buy-in within the bureaucracy for changes in policy
or management that give greater attention to emerging priorities or address organizational
shortcomings.¶ Consider the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) and
Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR), each of which was conducted for the first two
times during the Obama administration. The QDDR has resulted in State Department reforms
that have strengthened State’s capacity on certain key issues and provided a foundation for
improvements in State’s operational effectiveness. These changes have included reorganizations
that elevated the importance of energy, economics, civilian security, counterterrorism, and
cyber issues within State; personnel reforms that fostered the cultivation of more diverse skills
and interagency experience among State officials; and investments designed to bolster State’s
use of sophisticated data analysis tools. While these reform ideas were not all original to the
QDDR, the review provided a necessary mechanism to overcome resistance to many of them
from powerful constituencies within the department.¶ The QHSR has also generated
organizational improvements. Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
after the 9/11 attacks, the department’s effectiveness has been constrained by its internal
fragmentation – many DHS units that previously existed elsewhere in the government retain
distinct identities – and by the department’s heavy reliance on state, local, and private sector
actors to achieve its goals. The QHSR has helped DHS leaders chip away at these challenges by
building a more common understanding of the department’s missions; articulating department-
wide priorities; integrating the department’s accounting systems; and bringing outside
stakeholders into the department’s planning. As with the QDDR, the inclusive QHSR process was
an essential ingredient of some of these outcomes. ¶ These kinds of changes are not glamorous,
and as a result, the outcomes of quadrennial reviews usually seem underwhelming to most
observers. But organizational changes can represent the difference between being prepared and
being unprepared to anticipate or respond effectively to security dangers and other challenges. ¶
Certainly the track record of quadrennial reviews is far from perfect. Many quadrennial review
proposals represent restatements of pre-existing administration policy. Even when review
proposals are new and innovative, those proposals are not always implemented. The success of
implementation tends to depend heavily on the extent to which government leaders prioritize
implementation and empower a team led by a senior official to direct and monitor it. Since
many strategic initiatives require funding, it is also important to link review processes to the
formulation of government budget proposals. ¶ At the same time, government effectiveness
in addressing emerging challenges requires that strategic planning occur in a variety of forms
and on a range of timelines. When a deadly virus , cyber attack, terrorist threat , or large
number of refugees suddenly moves across borders, the understandable tendency in
government is for day-to-day crisis decision-making to crowd out strategic planning. But our
leaders would be able to make better decisions in such crises if their decision-making was
informed by rigorous planning that evaluated the pros and cons of different policy options .
Integrating this type of planning into crisis decision-making is perhaps the hardest and most
important strategic challenge for governments.
 AT Delay
Only takes a month or two
Campbell 2 – Colton C. Campbell, Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida
International University, visiting Professor of Political Science at American University, 2002,
Discharging Congress: Government by Commission, p. 1-2

Generally speaking, a commission’s mandate includes a termination date more than three years
after the date of creation or at a specified date upon submittal of its recommendations or
alternatives, which is anywhere from thirty to ninety days after its final report to
Congress. Commissions come in various sizes and shapes, with membership ranging anywhere
from nine to twenty commissioners, twelve to fifteen being the normal number of members.
The final number of commissioners will generally accommodate equal appointments by the
majority and minority in both the House and Senate as well as by the president. 2
 AT Perm Do Both
Secrecy---the commission’s deliberations aren’t public, but the plan forces the
issue onto Congress’s radar immediately---ensures backlash
Campbell 2 – Colton C. Campbell, Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida
International University, visiting Professor of Political Science at American University, 2002,
Discharging Congress: Government by Commission, p. 13-14

Life on Capitol Hill has frequently become acrimonious because of escalating partisanship
between parties.48 Increasing polarization in Congress49 has led to gridlock50 and stimulated the
use of message politics,51 thereby limiting both the flexibility and the creativity of congressional
action through normal legislative channels.

The logic of commissions is that leaders of both parties, or their designated representatives,
can meet to negotiate a deal without the media , the public, or interest groups
present . When deliberations are private , parties can make offers without being
denounced either by their opponents or by affected constituency groups; there is less
chance to use an offer from the other side to curry favor with constituents. Agreement to
bipartisan commissions and adherence to their logic are consequential because they
represent a tacit promise not to attack the opponent . On some issues, for instance,
the promise might imply letting the commission pick the solution and relying on party
discipline to encourage lawmakers to go along even if their districts are disadvantaged by
the solution; on others it might involve nothing more than a bipartisan admission that a
commission is the next step Congress should take, without any understanding that all the
players are bound ex ante by the commission’s resolution.52 Commissions also mean
eschewing partisan attacks and suggest a strong preference for reaching an
agreement.53

Doing both links to politics---only giving the commission time generates political
support---the perm’s not a genuine recommendation
Biggs 9 [Andrew Biggs is a Social Security analyst and assistant director of the Cato Institute's
Project on Social Security Privatization, “Rumors Of Obama Social Security Reform Commission,”
Feb 17 http://www.frumforum.com/rumors-of-obama-social-security-reform-commission]
One problem with President Bush’s 2001 Commission was that it didn’t represent the reasonable spectrum of beliefs on Social Security reform. This
didn’t make it a dishonest commission; like President Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security, it was designed to put flesh on the bones laid out
by the President. In this case, the Commission was tasked with designing a reform plan that included personal accounts
and excluded tax increases. That said, a commission only builds political capital toward enacting reform if
it’s seen as building a consensus through a process in which all views have been heard. In both the
2001 Commission and the later 2005 reform drive, Democrats didn’t feel they were part of the process. They
clearly will be a central part of the process this time, but the goal will now be to include Republicans. Just as Republicans

shouldn’t reflexively oppose any Obama administration reform plans for political reasons, so Democrats shouldn’t seek to exclude

Republicans from the process.¶ Second, a reform task force should include a variety of different
players, including members of government, both legislative and executive, representatives of outside interest groups, and experts who can provide
technical advice and help ensure the integrity of the reforms decided upon. The 2001 Bush Commission didn’t include any sitting Members of Congress
and only a small fraction of commissioners had the technical expertise needed to make the plans the best they could be. A broader group would be
helpful.

Only the CP gets perceived as considering options from both sides before
recommending one action---the perm looks like the commission favoring one
side from the beginning---triggers politics and turns the case
Hoyer 10 – congressman, 5th district of Maryland
Steny, 3-1, HOYER SPEAKS ON FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY AT BROOKINGS INSTITUTION,
https://hoyer.house.gov/speeches/hoyer-speaks-on-fiscal-responsibility-at-brookings-
institution/

“I hope congressional Republicans, along with members of my own party, will take the work as
sincerely and seriously as the chairmen take it—that they will come to the table without
preconditions, ready to contribute their ideas and not just their criticism from the sideline. The
commission has a bipartisan pedigree, and it won the votes of 16 Republicans in the Senate. But
I was disappointed to see that seven Republican supporters of the commission bill, including the
Minority Leader, decided they were against it as soon as President Obama said he was for it. ¶
“President Reagan and Speaker O’Neill’s work on Social Security reform in the ‘80s, and the
Republican reaction to the Medicare changes in the health care bill, both teach the same lesson:
the real work of cutting deficits is so easy to demagogue that it rarely succeeds, and will not
succeed this time, without support from both sides. That’s one of the reasons why the fiscal
commission must not take any option off of the table, from raising revenues to cutting
entitlement spending. And that’s why both parties have a duty to appoint members who are
willing to compromise and make tough decisions.¶ “It’s also clear to me that if the commission
takes a one-handed approach, it will fail , both politically and substantively. Congressman Ryan’s
thoughtful budget proposal shows what an approach looks like when it relies entirely on cutting
spending. He should be commended for putting together a serious and detailed plan to tackle
the deficit. It doesn’t raise a single tax. But as a consequence, it significantly changes Medicare.
 AT Perm Do CP
a) “Resolved” is definite.
Dictionary.com 06 (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Resolved, verb)

to come to a definite or earnest decision about; determine (to do something): I have resolved
that I shall live to the full.

b) Severs “should” – it means “must” and requires immediate legal effect

Summers 94 (Justice – Oklahoma Supreme Court, “Kelsey v. Dollarsaver Food Warehouse of
Durant”, 1994 OK 123, 11-8, http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?
CiteID=20287#marker3fn13)

The legal question to be resolved by the court is whether the word "should "13 in the May 18 order
connotes futurity or may be deemed a ruling in praesenti. 14 The answer to this query is not to be divined from rules
of grammar;15 it must be governed by the age-old practice culture of legal professionals and its immemorial language usage. To determine if the
omission (from the critical May 18 entry) of the turgid phrase, "and the same hereby is", (1) makes it an in futuro ruling - i.e., an expression of what the
judge will or would do at a later stage - or (2) constitutes an in in praesenti resolution of a disputed law issue, the trial judge's intent must be garnered
from the four corners of the entire record.16 ¶5 Nisi prius orders should be so construed as to give effect to every words and every part of the text, with
a view to carrying out the evident intent of the judge's direction.17 The order's language ought not to be considered abstractly. The actual meaning
intended by the document's signatory should be derived from the context in which the phrase to be interpreted is used.18 When applied to the May 18
memorial, these told canons impel my conclusion that the judge doubtless intended his ruling as an in praesenti resolution of Dollarsaver's quest for
judgment n.o.v. Approval of all counsel plainly appears on the face of the critical May 18 entry which is [885 P.2d 1358] signed by the judge.19 True
minutes20 of a court neither call for nor bear the approval of the parties' counsel nor the judge's signature. To reject out of hand the view that in this
context "should" is impliedly followed by the customary, "and the same hereby is", makes the court once again revert to medieval notions of ritualistic
formalism now so thoroughly condemned in national jurisprudence and long abandoned by the statutory policy of this State. IV CONCLUSION Nisi prius
judgments and orders should be construed in a manner which gives effect and meaning to the complete substance of the memorial. When a judge-
signed direction is capable of two interpretations, one of which would make it a valid part of the record proper and the other would render it a
meaningless exercise in futility, the adoption of the former interpretation is this court's due. A rule - that on direct appeal views as fatal to the order's
efficacy the mere omission from the journal entry of a long and customarily implied phrase, i.e., "and the same hereby is" - is soon likely to drift into the
body of principles which govern the facial validity of judgments. This development would make judicial acts acutely vulnerable to collateral attack for
the most trivial of reasons and tend to undermine the stability of titles or other adjudicated rights. It is obvious the trial judge intended his May 18
memorial to be an in praesenti order overruling Dollarsaver's motion for judgment n.o.v. It is hence that memorial, and not the later June 2 entry, which
triggered appeal time in this case. Because the petition. in error was not filed within 30 days of May 18, the appeal is untimely. I would hence sustain
the appellee's motion to dismiss.21 Footnotes: 1 The pertinent terms of the memorial of May 18, 1993 are: IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF BRYAN COUNTY,
STATE OF OKLAHOMA COURT MINUTE 5/18/93 No. C-91-223 After having heard and considered arguments of counsel in support of and in opposition to
the motions of the Defendant for judgment N.O.V. and a new trial, the Court finds that the motions should be overruled. Approved as to form: /s/ Ken
Rainbolt /s/ Austin R. Deaton, Jr. /s/ Don Michael Haggerty /s/ Rocky L. Powers Judge 2 The turgid phrase - "should be and the same hereby is" - is a
tautological absurdity. This is so because "should" is synonymous with ought or must and is in itself sufficient
to effect an inpraesenti ruling - one that is couched in "a present indicative synonymous with
ought." See infra note 15. 3 Carter v. Carter, Okl., 783 P.2d 969, 970 (1989); Horizons, Inc. v. Keo Leasing Co., Okl., 681 P.2d 757, 759 (1984); Amarex,
Inc. v. Baker, Okl., 655 P.2d 1040, 1043 (1983); Knell v. Burnes, Okl., 645 P.2d 471, 473 (1982); Prock v. District Court of Pittsburgh County, Okl., 630 P.2d
772, 775 (1981); Harry v. Hertzler, 185 Okl. 151, 90 P.2d 656, 659 (1939); Ginn v. Knight, 106 Okl. 4, 232 P. 936, 937 (1925). 4 "Recordable" means that by
force of 12 O.S. 1991 § 24 an instrument meeting that section's criteria must be entered on or "recorded" in the court's journal. The clerk may "enter"
only that which is "on file." The pertinent terms of 12 O.S. 1991 § 24 are: "Upon the journal record required to be kept by the clerk of the district court
in civil cases . . . shall be entered copies of the following instruments on file: 1. All items of process by which the court acquired jurisdiction of the
person of each defendant in the case; and 2. All instruments filed in the case that bear the signature of the and judge and specify clearly the relief
granted or order made." [Emphasis added.] 5 See 12 O.S. 1991 § 1116 which states in pertinent part: "Every direction of a court or judge made or
entered in writing, and not included in a judgment is an order." [Emphasis added.] 6 The pertinent terms of 12 O.S. 1993 § 696.3 , effective October 1,
1993, are: "A. Judgments, decrees and appealable orders that are filed with the clerk of the court shall contain: 1. A caption setting forth the name of
the court, the names and designation of the parties, the file number of the case and the title of the instrument; 2. A statement of the disposition of the
action, proceeding, or motion, including a statement of the relief awarded to a party or parties and the liabilities and obligations imposed on the other
party or parties; 3. The signature and title of the court; . . ." 7 The court holds that the May 18 memorial's recital that "the Court finds that the motions
should be overruled" is a "finding" and not a ruling. In its pure form, a finding is generally not effective as an order or judgment. See, e.g., Tillman v.
Tillman, 199 Okl. 130, 184 P.2d 784 (1947), cited in the court's opinion. 8 When ruling upon a motion for judgment n.o.v. the court must take into
account all the evidence favorable to the party against whom the motion is directed and disregard all conflicting evidence favorable to the movant. If
the court should conclude the motion is sustainable, it must hold, as a matter of law, that there is an entire absence of proof tending to show a right to
recover. See Austin v. Wilkerson, Inc., Okl., 519 P.2d 899, 903 (1974). 9 See Bullard v. Grisham Const. Co., Okl., 660 P.2d 1045, 1047 (1983), where this
court reviewed a trial judge's "findings of fact", perceived as a basis for his ruling on a motion for judgment n.o.v. (in the face of a defendant's reliance
on plaintiff's contributory negligence). These judicial findings were held impermissible as an invasion of the providence of the jury and proscribed by
OKLA. CONST. ART, 23, § 6 . Id. at 1048. 10 Everyday courthouse parlance does not always distinguish between a judge's "finding", which denotes nisi
prius resolution of fact issues, and "ruling" or "conclusion of law". The latter resolves disputed issues of law. In practice usage members of the bench
and bar often confuse what the judge "finds" with what that official "concludes", i.e., resolves as a legal matter. 11 See Fowler v. Thomsen, 68 Neb. 578,
94 N.W. 810, 811-12 (1903), where the court determined a ruling that "[1] find from the bill of particulars that there is due the plaintiff the sum of . . ."
was a judgment and not a finding. In reaching its conclusion the court reasoned that "[e]ffect must be given to the entire in the docket according to the
manifest intention of the justice in making them." Id., 94 N.W. at 811. 12 When the language of a judgment is susceptible of two interpretations, that
which makes it correct and valid is preferred to one that would render it erroneous. Hale v. Independent Powder Co., 46 Okl. 135, 148 P. 715, 716
(1915); Sharp v. McColm, 79 Kan. 772, 101 P. 659, 662 (1909); Clay v. Hildebrand, 34 Kan. 694, 9 P. 466, 470 (1886); see also 1 A.C. FREEMAN LAW OF
JUDGMENTS § 76 (5th ed. 1925). 13 "Should" not only is used as a "present indicative" synonymous with ought
but also is the past tense of "shall" with various shades of meaning not always easy to analyze. See 57 C.J. Shall § 9, Judgments § 121 (1932). O.
JESPERSEN, GROWTH AND STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1984); St. Louis & S.F.R. Co. v. Brown, 45 Okl. 143, 144 P. 1075, 1080-81 (1914). For
a more detailed explanation, see the Partridge quotation infra note 15. Certain
contexts mandate a construction of the
term "should" as more than merely indicating preference or desirability . Brown, supra at 1080-81 (jury
instructions stating that jurors "should" reduce the amount of damages in proportion to the amount of contributory negligence of the plaintiff was held
to imply an obligation and to be more than advisory); Carrigan v. California Horse Racing Board, 60 Wash. App. 79, 802 P.2d 813 (1990) (one
of the
Rules of Appellate Procedure requiring that a party "should devote a section of the brief to the
request for the fee or expenses" was interpreted to mean that a party is under an obligation to
include the requested segment); State v. Rack, 318 S.W.2d 211, 215 (Mo. 1958) ("should" would mean the same
as "shall" or "must" when used in an instruction to the jury which tells the triers they "should
disregard false testimony"). 14 In praesenti means literally "at the present time." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 792 (6th Ed. 1990). In legal
parlance the phrase denotes that which in law is presently or immediately effective , as opposed to something
that will or would become effective in the future [in futurol]. See Van Wyck v. Knevals, 106 U.S. 360, 365, 1 S.Ct. 336, 337, 27 L.Ed. 201 (1882).

c) “Should” is mandatory
Nieto 9 – Judge Henry Nieto, Colorado Court of Appeals, 8-20-2009 People v. Munoz, 240 P.3d
311 (Colo. Ct. App. 2009)

"Should" is "used . . . to express duty, obligation, propriety, or expediency." Webster's Third

New International Dictionary 2104 (2002). Courts [**15] interpreting the word in various
contexts have drawn conflicting conclusions, although the weight of authority appears to
favor interpreting "should" in an imperative, obligatory sense . HN7A number of courts,
confronted with the question of whether using the word "should" in jury instructions conforms
with the Fifth and Sixth Amendment protections governing the reasonable doubt standard, have
upheld instructions using the word. In the courts of other states in which a defendant has
argued that the word "should" in the reasonable doubt instruction does not sufficiently inform
the jury that it is bound to find the defendant not guilty if insufficient proof is submitted at trial,
the courts have squarely rejected the argument. They reasoned that the word "conveys a sense
of duty and obligation and could not be misunderstood by a jury." See State v. McCloud, 257
Kan. 1, 891 P.2d 324, 335 (Kan. 1995); see also Tyson v. State, 217 Ga. App. 428, 457 S.E.2d 690,
691-92 (Ga. Ct. App. 1995) (finding argument that "should" is directional but not instructional to
be without merit); Commonwealth v. Hammond, 350 Pa. Super. 477, 504 A.2d 940, 941-42 (Pa.
Super. Ct. 1986). Notably, courts interpreting the word "should" in other types of jury
instructions [**16] have also found that the word conveys to the jury a sense of duty or
obligation and not discretion . In Little v. State, 261 Ark. 859, 554 S.W.2d 312, 324 (Ark. 1977),
the Arkansas Supreme Court interpreted the word " should" in an instruction on circumstantial
evidence as synonymous with the word "must" and rejected the defendant's argument
that the jury may have been misled by the court's use of the word in the instruction. Similarly,
the Missouri Supreme Court rejected a defendant's argument that the court erred by not using
the word "should" in an instruction on witness credibility which used the word "must" because
the two words have the same meaning . State v. Rack, 318 S.W.2d 211, 215 (Mo. 1958).
[*318] In applying a child support statute, the Arizona Court of Appeals concluded that a
legislature's or commission's use of the word "should" is meant to convey duty or obligation .
McNutt v. McNutt, 203 Ariz. 28, 49 P.3d 300, 306 (Ariz. Ct. App. 2002) (finding a statute stating
that child support expenditures "should" be allocated for the purpose of parents' federal tax
exemption to be mandatory).

d) “Significant” requires certainty

SMS 13 - Staff Measure Summary, April 25, 2013
(Legislative History, 2013 Legis. Bill Hist. OR H.B. 2202)

Statewide Planning Goal 5 requires local governments to inventory and protect, among other
natural resources, mineral and aggregate resources. In 1996, gravel companies, farmers and the
state came to a compromise allowing mining on Willamette Valley agricultural land. That
compromise was codified in a Land Conservation and Development Commission rule (OAR 660-
023). Specifically, local governments are required to determine whether an aggregate resource
site is "significant" before addi ng that site to its inventory. "Significant" is defined by certain
quality and quantity determinations set by the Oregon Department of Transportation for sites in
the Willamette Valley. Further restrictions are in place if more than 35 percent of the proposed
mining area consists of Class I or Class II soils.
 AT Links to Politics
Commissions avoid politics—it builds bipartisan consensus and removes the
need for short-term expenditure of PC
Glassman & Straus 15 – congressional analysts
*Matthew E, **Jacob R, 1-27, Congressional Commissions: Overview, Structure, and Legislative
Considerations, Congressional Research Service, http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40076.pdf

Reducing Partisanship

Solutions to policy problems produced within the normal legislative process may also suffer
politically from charges of partisanship.30 Similar charges may be made against investigations
conducted by Congress.31 The non-partisan or bipartisan character of most congressional
commissions may make their findings and recommendations less susceptible to such charges
and more politically acceptable to diverse viewpoints. The bipartisan or nonpartisan
arrangement can potentially give their recommendations strong credibility , both in Congress
and among the public, even when dealing with divisive issues of public policy.32
Commissions may also give political factions space to negotiate compromises in good faith,
bypassing the short-term tactical political maneuvers that accompany public
negotiations.33 Similarly, because commission members are not elected, they may be better
suited to suggesting unpopular, but necessary, policy solutions.34¶ Solving Collective Action
Problems¶ A commission may allow legislators to solve collective action problems , situations in
which all legislators individually seek to protect the interests of their own district, despite
widespread agreement that the collective result of such interests is something none of them
prefer. Legislators can use a commission to jointly “tie their hands” in such circumstances,
allowing general consensus about a particular policy solution to avoid being impeded by
individual concerns about the effect or implementation of the solution.35 ¶ For example, in 1988
Congress established the Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC) as a politically and
geographically neutral body to make independent decisions about closures of military bases .36
The list of bases slated for closure by the commission was required to be either accepted or
rejected as a whole by Congress, bypassing internal congressional politics over which individual
bases would be closed, and protecting individual Members from political charges that they
didn’t “save” their district’s base.37

Commissions preserve political capital

Lopez 10 - J.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, 2010
Amanda, ARTICLE: Coleman/Plata: Highlighting the Need to Establish an Independent
Corrections Commission in California, The Regents of the University of California on behalf of
Boalt Journal of Criminal Law, Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, 15 Berkeley J. Crim. L. 97, Lexis
BRAC is an independent and authoritative commission charged with providing the President and
Congress with recommendations and analysis [*123] concerning base closures that the
Department of Defense ("DoD") recommended be closed. n253 The commission may use criteria
outlined by Congress to reject DoD's recommendations and to suggest other military
installations be closed. n254 BRAC publically reports its findings to the President, who can return
the report to BRAC for further analysis or forward BRAC's list of suggested base closures to
Congress. n255 If Congress does not issue a joint resolution rejecting BRAC's findings within
forty-five days, the BRAC report becomes law. n256 Alternatively, the President may essentially
veto BRAC recommendations by refusing to forward BRAC's report to Congress. n257 BRAC's
analysis and recommendations allow both the President and Congress to approve or reject
which bases close through a seemingly independent body, thereby making decisions "which
otherwise would not be politically feasible." n258¶ While many states currently have sentencing
commissions, n259 not all sentencing commissions succeed. n260 The unsuccessful commissions
are commonly temporary and lack support from the judicial or political branches. n261 In
contrast, successful commissions are usually permanent, and can thus evaluate sentencing
policy over time. n262¶ While a sentencing commission was presented in the state's first plan
submitted to the three-judge court, the commission's authority was too narrow in scope. The
plan neither adequately detailed the selection of commission members nor the ability of the
Legislature or Governor to reject the commission's sentencing guidelines. To achieve effective
and comprehensive policies in the corrections system, California needs a commission that is
charged with more than promulgating sentencing guidelines. The commission must determine
sentencing, rehabilitation policies, and parole policies. Furthermore, the commission must be
permanent, in order to effectively monitor and refine sentencing policy over time. n263 ¶ The
California commission should have attributes that have led to success [*124] in other
commissions. Similar to Virginia's successful sentencing commission, California's commission
should include Republican and Democratic legislators, prosecutors, law enforcement, crime
victims, judges, and legal scholars. n264 Also following Virginia's example, California's
commission needs a fully-staffed team of experts in criminology, government, psychology, and
statistics so that the commission may make informed and effective sentencing policy. n265 ¶ To
shield the commission from political pressures, commissioners should receive lifetime or long-
term appointments revocable only for good cause. Additionally, to maintain accountability,
while insulating the commission from politics, the commission's policies should be eligible for
rejection by the Legislature. However, the bar for such rejection should be high; only a two-
thirds vote in both houses should overrule the commission's policies. Similar to BRAC,
politicians can preserve their political image by blaming politically unpopular policies
on the commission . Politicians can further deflect criticism by saying that while they do not
support the policy there is not enough support in the Legislature to meet the high vote
requirement to overturn the policy. At the same time, if the commission promulgates policies
that are completely out of touch with the state's values, the Legislature will be able to muster a
two-thirds vote to prevent implementation of the policy. Contrary to some studies'
recommendations, a gubernatorial veto should not overturn the commission's policies because
such a system will allow a governor to single-handedly roadblock reform and re-politicize the
prison crisis. n266¶ CONCLUSION¶ The state's political history raises concerns about whether the
Legislature can successfully set-up an independent commission to effectively deal with
California's prison crisis. However, an independent commission is a better option for the state
than relying on the Legislature to enact all reforms necessary to resolve the prison crisis in the
long term. The establishment of a commission only requires lawmakers to agree on politicized
reform once, whereas relying on the Legislature to make long-term prison reform requires
lawmakers to agree on politicized reform multiple times. ¶ An independent commission will allow
policymakers who are insulated from politics to make responsible decisions that would
otherwise be difficult for politicians, especially California's legislators. This is not to say,
however, that no issues would arise were such a commission successfully created. For example,
the Legislature might be unwilling to provide the funding necessary to implement controversial
commission policies. Ideally, the Legislature and Executive would work cooperatively with the
commission. However, this [*125] problem might also be alleviated by requiring the Legislature
to allocate funds for the commission's policies in a lump sum before the commission unveils its
new policies. Another potential problem is that "drive-by" sentencing and sentencing laws
created by referendum might subvert commission policies. No solution seems to be a readily
available, but perhaps the commission could develop a method to incorporate such sentencing
issues into its overall policy strategy.
Adv 1
 *1NC—Solvency
Plan doesn’t solve Iran’s perception of encirclement—Central Asian presence,
covert operations and nuclear weapons mean the aff won’t cause a paradigm
shift in US-Iran relations
Sundberg, ’13 – MSc @ London School of Economics and Political Science
(Camilla, 8-10, The Defensive Iran: Rethinking Realism in the Case of Iran’s Nuclear Programme,
E-International Relations, http://www.e-ir.info/2013/08/10/the-defensive-iran-rethinking-
realism-in-the-case-of-irans-nuclear-programme/)

The reason why Obama’s promises has not convinced Iranian leaders is the lack of correlation
between rhetoric and reality. To be sure, the US military presence on Iran’s doorstep severely undermines any rhetoric coming out of
Washington: Bahrain houses the US 5th fleet, and together with Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), it houses substantial US military
air, naval staging and port facilities. The US also has military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq [46], as well as in
Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.[47] The latest development include an increase in US military vessels in the Strait of
Hormuz, additional combat aircraft that can reach targets deeper inside Iran , and the establishment of a docking ship in

the Gulf that can be used as a basis for military operations.[48] The US has certainly been successful in encircling Iran .

Adding to the pressure are the covert operations, undertaken together with Israel to an
increasing extent since 2011, on Iranian nuclear facilities. In November 2011, an explosion
seriously damaged Iran’s main missile facility in Tehran . A few weeks later another explosion was reported at a uranium
conversion facility in Isfahan. January 2012 saw the fourth murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist .[49]
Furthermore, the US is today responsible for some of the strictest sanctions imposed on the country: in 2011, following the IAEA report released the
same year, the US designated all Iranian financial institutions as entities of money laundering concerns, warning companies to do business with Iran. In
December the same year, the US Congress enacted the Menendez-Kirk amendment, which sanctioned the Iranian Central Bank (ICB), as well as foreign
financial entities that processed transaction connected to Iranian petroleum products. Since 2012 there have been reports circulating on a draft
legislation that would sanction financial institutions engaged in non-oil transactions with Iran as well. The US has also frozen all assets of the Iranian
government, including the ICB.[50] Last, let us add the US posture as a nuclear power, with 4,650 nuclear
warheads for delivery by more than 800 ballistic missiles and aircraft; the largest stockpile of
operational warheads – 2150 – in the world today; and its immeasurable conventional military
weapons machinery.[51] Understandably, as Ehteshami notes, ‘in strategic terms, a change of president in the US does not necessarily lead
to fundamentally different policies in the Middle East’[52] and therefore, the US is still the greatest threat to Iran’s security

today.

The plan doesn’t remedy Iran’s security dilemma—Israel is the root cause
Mehdi, 4-16-15 -- writer is with the Nelson Mandela Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi
(Jalil, Let’s talk about Israel, not Iran, The Indian Express,
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/lets-talk-about-israel-not-iran/)

Though the Israeli state has institutionalised nuclear opacity at the highest levels of national strategy, there is
enough data to back Grass’s worry that Israel’s nuclear capability “endangers an already fragile
world peace”. It is now a “public secret”, partly due to the 1986 disclosure by Mordechai Vanunu, a dismissed Israeli nuclear technician, that
Israel possesses a deadly stockpile of nuclear warheads. Add to it Israel’s insecurity , manifest in its nuclear doctrine ,

commonly known as the “Samson Option ”. This doctrine calls for a massive disproportionate
strike on a hostile state in the event of an Israeli defeat in a conventional war . Any such action
could wipe off the whole of West Asia. It is hypocritical of Carmon to repudiate Iran for allegedly trying to build an arsenal that
Israel already possesses. Scholars like Kenneth Waltz see the root cause of Iranian behaviour in the security

dilemma posed by Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly, which for more than four decades has
fuelled instability in West Asia. Indeed, it is Israel’s unchecked nuclear prowess and not the alleged
Iranian desire for an arsenal that has resulted in the current crisis . By their very nature, states want to
balance the power of other states that threaten them . The nuclearisation of South Asia is a vivid example.
 1NC No Saudi-Iran War
No Saudi-Iran war – doesn’t escalate beyond words and economic integration
means no incentive.
Ellyat ‘16
[Holly, writer focusing on European macro-economics and politics. , studied European Social and
Political Studies at University College London, “War with Saudi Arabia is not possible: Iran”
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/20/iran-saudi-arabia-dispute-wont-become-a-war-iran.html]

Diplomatic relations between two of the Middle East's powerhouses may be at a new low but a military
conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia is not a possibility, Iran's foreign minister said on Wednesday. Relations
between the two countries, which are largely divided down sectarian lines with Shiite-majority Iran vying for influence in the Middle
East against Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, hit a low point earlier this month following the Saudi execution of a leading Shiite cleric Sheikh
Nimr al-Nimr. In retaliation for the execution, the Saudi embassy in Tehran was attacked and, despite condemnation from the
Iranian government on the attack, Saudi severed diplomatic relations. A
war of words has followed but Iran's
foreign minister tried to assuage fears that a deeper military conflict could be brewing. "(Will
there be a war?) No. I think our Saudi neighbors need to realize that confrontation is in the
interest of nobody," Javad Zarif said, speaking at a panel on Iran's future at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "There is no
threat coming from Iran to any of its neighbors…and are prepared to engage with confidence-building
measures with our neighbors." Hopes of a new era of economic prosperity and political inclusion
emerged over the weekend when 10 years of sanctions against Iran were lifted after the country convinced
international inspectors that it had curtailed its nuclear ambitions. The ending of sanctions against the country, which have isolated
it economically and diplomatically, came after a landmark nuclear deal between Iran and global powers. Zarif said that the origin of
the breakdown in relations with Saudi Arabia came in 2013 when a preliminary nuclear deal was reached, making Saudi Arabia
nervous. "I want to make a point though that since the agreement in Geneva in 2013 our Saudi neighbors have been panicking but
there is no need to panic, our friends. Iran is there to work with you and Iran doesn't want to exclude anyone from this region. There
is no need to engage in a confrontation." Zarif said those that had attacked the Saudi embassy were being prosecuted but that Saudi
had been "looking for an excuse to break diplomatic relations." "We should try our best, as Iran has done, to exercise self-restraint
and to come to our senses and engage in serious discussions." He added that extremism and terrorist
groups such as the
so-called Islamic State were a common enemy that needed to be defeat ed. More hostility with its
neighbors is the last thing Iran needs as it takes the first steps to get its beleaguered economy ,
isolated by a decade of sanctions, back on track.
Adv 2
 2nc Russia War

No Russian War
Weitz ‘11 (Richard, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior
editor, “Global Insights: Putin not a Game-Changer for U.S.-Russia Ties,”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/66579517/Global-Insights-Putin-not-a-Game-Changer-for-U-S-
Russia-Ties, September 27, 2011)

Fifth, there will inevitably be areas of conflict between Russia and the United States regardless of who is
in the Kremlin. Putin and his entourage can never be happy with having NATO be Europe's most powerful security institution,
since Moscow is not a member and cannot become one. Similarly, the Russians will always object to NATO's
missile defense efforts since they can neither match them nor join them in any meaningful way. In the case of Iran,
Russian officials genuinely perceive less of a threat from Tehran than do most Americans, and Russia has more to lose from a
cessation of economic ties with Iran -- as well as from an Iranian-Western reconciliation. On the other hand, these conflicts
can be managed, since they will likely remain limited and compartmentalized . Russia and
the West do not have fundamentally conflicting vital interests of the kind countries would
go to war over. And as the Cold War demonstrated, nuclear weapons are a great pacifier under such
conditions. Another novel development is that Russia is much more integrated into the international
economy and global society than the Soviet Union was, and Putin's popularity depends heavily
on his economic track record. Beyond that, there are objective criteria, such as the smaller size of the
Russian population and economy as well as the difficulty of controlling modern means of
social communication, that will constrain whoever is in charge of Russia.
 2NC Econ Collapse – No War
No econ impact
Jervis 11 – Professor of Political Science @ Columbia
Robert, Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public
Affairs at Columbia University, December 2011, “Force in Our Times,” Survival, Vol. 25, No. 4, p.
403-425
Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could
the more peaceful world generate new interests that would bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A
zero-sum sense of status would be one example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a
worsening of the current economic difficulties, which could itself produce greater nationalism,
undermine democracy and bring back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic
policies. While these dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great
enough to lead the members of the community to contemplate fighting each other. It is not
so much that economic interdependence has proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed –
states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have fought bloody civil wars. Rather it
is that even if the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism become
discredited, it is hard to see how without building on a preexisting high level of political conflict leaders and
mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could prosper by impoverishing or
even attacking others. Is it possible that problems will not only become severe, but that people will entertain the
thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that this argument does not
appear as outlandish as it did before the financial crisis , an optimist could reply (correctly,
in my view) that the very fact that we have seen such a sharp economic down-turn without
anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if bad times bring about
greater economic conflict, it will not make war thinkable.

Economy instability doesn’t affect international security

Barnett ‘9 (Thomas P.M. Barnett, senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC, “The New
Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis,” 8/25/2009, http://www.aprodex.com/the-
new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx)

When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with
all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of
the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery --
surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and
realize how globalization's first truly worldwide recession has had virtually no impact
whatsoever on the international security landscape. No ne of the more than three-dozen ongoing
conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last
new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters
of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest
entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed,
but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed by the
U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle between Georgia and its two
breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts,
insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential
state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a
process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied down by
its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our involvement
elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest , both leading up to and following the onset of the
economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia,
mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty much let it burn,
occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us
to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: * No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest
(remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); * The usual frequency
maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places); * Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-
on-great-power crises even triggered); * No great improvement or disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the
emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); * A modest scaling back of international policing efforts by
the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and * No serious efforts by any rising great power
to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of
strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but
the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally
seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even
that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented
"stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was
the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered a
distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies
remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly
friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the board to
insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade
rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is
functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade
agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that
shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent
extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting
evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently
frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and
much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve
currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of
"economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally
integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging
interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead . Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which
America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global
financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international
liberal trade order.
1NR
 venezluea add on
Impact ev is about Chavez and different geopolitical relations – no escalation in
the squo. No warrant for nuclear escalation and alliances check. Internal link =
terrorism, can’t get nukes. Cartels ! we’ll read turns it, funds key.

Impact ev bout failed states – no impact

No impact to failed states

Patrick ’11 (Stewart M, senior fellow, director – program on international institutions and
global governance @ CFR, “Why Failed States Shouldn’t Be Our Biggest National Security Fear,”
http://www.cfr.org/international-peace-and-security/why-failed-states-shouldnt-our-biggest-
national-security-fear/p24689, April 15, 2011)

In truth, while failed

states may be worthy of America's attention on humanitarian and development grounds, most of them
are irrelevant to U.S. national security. The risks they pose are mainly to their own inhabitants.
Sweeping claims to the contrary are not only inaccurate but distracting and unhelpful,
providing little guidance to policymakers seeking to prioritize scarce attention and resources. In 2008, I
collaborated with Brookings Institution senior fellow Susan E. Rice, now President Obama's permanent representative to the
United Nations, on an index of state weakness in developing countries. The study ranked all 141 developing
nations on 20 indicators of state strength, such as the government's ability to provide basic services. More recently,
I've examined whether these rankings reveal anything about each nation's role in major global
threats: transnational terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, international crime and infectious
disease. The findings are startlingly clear. Only a handful of the world's failed states pose security concerns to the
United States. Far greater dangers emerge from stronger developing countries that may suffer from
corruption and lack of government accountability but come nowhere near qualifying as failed states. The link
between failed states and transnational terrorism, for instance, is tenuous. Al-Qaeda franchises are
concentrated in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia but are markedly absent in most failed
states, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Why? From a terrorist's perspective, the notion of finding haven in a failed
state is an oxymoron. Al-Qaeda discovered this in the 1990s when seeking a foothold in anarchic Somalia.
In intercepted cables, operatives bemoaned the insuperable difficulties of working under chaos, given
their need for security and for access to the global financial and communications infrastructure. Al-Qaeda
has generally found it easier to maneuver in corrupt but functional states, such as Kenya, where sovereignty provides some
protection from outside interdiction. Pakistan and Yemen became sanctuaries for terrorism not only because
they are weak but because their governments lack the will to launch sustained counterterrorism
operations against militants whom they value for other purposes. Terrorists also need support from local power brokers and
populations. Along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, al-Qaeda finds succor in the Pashtun code of pashtunwali, which requires
hospitality to strangers, and in the severe brand of Sunni Islam practiced locally. Likewise in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula has found sympathetic tribal hosts who have long welcomed mujaheddin back from jihadist struggles. Al-Qaeda has
met less success in northern Africa's Sahel region, where a moderate, Sufi version of Islam dominates. But as the
organization evolves from a centrally directed network to a diffuse movement with autonomous cells in dozens of
countries, it is as likely to find haven in the banlieues of Paris or high-rises of Minneapolis as in remote Pakistani
valleys. What about failed states and weapons of mass destruction? Many U.S. analysts worry that poorly governed
countries will pursue nuclear, biological, chemical or radiological weapons; be unable to control existing weapons; or decide to
share WMD materials. These fears are misplaced. With two notable exceptions — North Korea and Pakistan — the
world's weakest states pose minimal proliferation risks, since they have limited stocks of
fissile or other WMD material

MArked
and are unlikely to pursue them. Far more threatening are capable countries (say, Iran and Syria)
intent on pursuing WMD, corrupt nations (such as Russia) that possess loosely secured nuclear arsenals and poorly
policed nations (try Georgia) through which proliferators can smuggle illicit materials or weapons. When it comes to crime,
the story is more complex. Failed states do dominate production of some narcotics: Afghanistan cultivates the lion's share of
global opium, and war-torn Colombia rules coca production. The tiny African failed state of Guinea-Bissau has become a
transshipment point for cocaine bound for Europe. (At one point, the contraband transiting through the country each month was
equal to the nation's gross domestic product.) And Somalia, of course, has seen an explosion of maritime piracy. Yet failed
states have little or no connection with other categories of transnational crime, from human
trafficking to money laundering, intellectual property theft, cyber-crime or counterfeiting of
manufactured goods. Criminal networks typically prefer operating in functional countries that provide
baseline political order as well as opportunities to corrupt authorities. They also accept higher
risks to work in nations straddling major commercial routes. Thus narco-trafficking has exploded in
Mexico, which has far stronger institutions than many developing nations but borders the United States. South Africa
presents its own advantages. It is a country where “the first and the developing worlds exist side by side,” author Misha
Glenny writes. “The first world provides good roads, 728 airports . . . the largest cargo port in Africa, and an efficient banking
system. . . . The developing world accounts for the low tax revenue, overstretched social services,
high levels of corruption throughout the administration, and 7,600 kilometers of land and sea borders that have
more holes than a second-hand dartboard.” Weak and failing African states, such as Niger, simply cannot compete.
Nor do failed states pose the greatest threats of pandemic disease. Over the past decade, outbreaks of SARS, avian influenza and
swine flu have raised the specter that fast-moving pandemics could kill tens of millions worldwide. Failed states, in this regard,
might seem easy incubators of deadly viruses. In fact, recent fast-onset pandemics have bypassed most failed states, which are
relatively isolated from the global trade and transportation links needed to spread disease rapidly. Certainly, the world's
weakest states — particularly in sub-Saharan Africa — suffer disproportionately from disease, with infection rates higher
than in the rest of the world. But their principal health
challenges are endemic diseases with local effects,
such as malaria, measles and tuberculosis. While U.S. national security officials and Hollywood
screenwriters obsess over the gruesome Ebola and Marburg viruses, outbreaks of these hemorrhagic fevers are
rare and self-contained. I do not counsel complacency. The world's richest nations have a moral obligation to bolster
health systems in Africa, as the Obama administration is doing through its Global Health Initiative. And they have a duty to
ameliorate the challenges posed by HIV/AIDS, which continues to ravage many of the world's weakest states. But poor
performance by developing countries in preventing, detecting and responding to infectious disease is often shaped
less by budgetary and infrastructure constraints than by conscious decisions by unaccountable or
unresponsive regimes. Such deliberate inaction has occurred not only in the world's weakest states but also in
stronger developing countries, even in promising democracies. The list is long. It includes Nigeria's
feckless response to a 2003-05 polio epidemic, China's lack of candor about the 2003 SARS outbreak,
Indonesia's obstructionist attitude to addressing bird flu in 2008 and South Africa's denial for many years about the
causes of HIV/AIDS. Unfortunately, misperceptions about the dangers of failed states have transformed
budgets and bureaucracies. U.S. intelligence agencies are mapping the world's “ungoverned spaces.” The Pentagon has
turned its regional Combatant Commands into platforms to head off state failure and address its spillover effects. The new
Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review completed by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International
Development depicts fragile and conflict-riddled states as epicenters of terrorism, proliferation, crime and disease. Yet such
preoccupations reflect more hype than analysis. U.S. national security officials would be better
served — and would serve all of us better — if they turned their strategic lens toward stronger developing
countries, from which transnational threats are more likely to emanate.
 At !
Chinese loans will keep the economy afloat
Financial Times 11
Financial Times September 16, 2011 More Chinese loans for Venezuela
http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/09/16/more-chinese-loans-4bn-worth-for-
venezuela/#axzz20KIxMvc2

But what Venezuela and China may lack in mutual cultural understanding is more than made up
for in a burgeoning economic relationship, with a $4bn loan from the Chinese Development
Bank confirmed on Thursday adding to existing lending from China of some $32bn. This follows
projects announced earlier this month, including three contracts signed with Chinese companies valued at $473m intended to
boost steel production. At the same time, Chavez unveiled a project with China’s Chery Automobile, which aims to have built
5,000 cars in Venezuela by the end of the year, and 18,000 next year. Chavez says they will be “buenos, bonitos y baratos” (good
quality, good looking and cheap). These are just the latest in a long line of development projects – the government says there are
now 137, ranging from railways, factories, housing and agricultural projects, and even a new satellite – financed by loans from
China, which are repaid with oil exports. Venezuela says it is currently sending about 400,000 barrels per
day to China, but is hoping, rather optimistically, to raise that to 1m bpd by the end of next year. Given state oil company
PDVSA’s production difficulties, and that it is notoriously poor at meeting its targets, in order to achieve that aim it might have to
cut exports elsewhere, with its main client being the US (also possibly Venezuela’s only customer that pays in full, although
Chavez has insisted that the Chinese do too). What is certain is that Chavez doesn’t want to fall out of favour
with China, which may be one reason why the terms of the loans seem so unfavourable for Venezuela. Given the
magnitude of economic support it has extended to Venezuela enabling its wobbly economy to
stay afloat – Chinese loans amount to about as much as the rest of Venezuela’s outstanding
external debt put together – it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Chavez will owe
some thanks to the Chinese if he wins presidential elections due in just over a year’s time.
*harm reduction da
 !
US heroin addiction drives Afghan opium production
Chuck 15 – writer/editor on the news team. Prior to joining MSNBC.com, Chuck wrote for the
Hartford Courant (Elizabeth, “As Heroin Use Grows in U.S., Poppy Crops Thrive in Afghanistan,”
NBC News, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/heroin-use-grows-u-s-poppy-crops-thrive-
afghanistan-n388081)

In Afghanistan, opium production is growing like a weed — and nothing, not even billions of
dollars of U.S. money, has been able to quell it. According to the United Nations, the war-torn
nation provides 90 percent of the world's supply of opium poppy, the bright, flowery crop that
transforms into one of the most addictive drugs in existence. And as the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention sounds the alarm about a worsening heroin epidemic here in the U.S.,
opium production in Afghanistan shows no signs of slowing down. "Afghanistan has roughly
500,000 acres, or about 780 square miles, devoted to growing opium poppy. That's equivalent
to more than 400,000 U.S. football fields — including the end zones," John Sopko, Special
Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said in a speech in May. The U.S. has spent
$8.4 billion in counternarcotics programs in Afghanistan. But opium output keeps rising: Fifteen
years ago, Afghanistan accounted for just 70 percent of global illicit opium production. Related:
Taliban Talks: Afghanistan Sends Delegation to Meet Militants The problem, experts say, stems
from the country's rampant corruption and the impoverished farmers who feel they have no
choice but to contribute to the drug supply chain. "It's much easier if you're a farmer to grow
opium than to grow saffron or to grow grapes or something like that," said Jonah Blank, a senior
political scientist and Afghanistan expert at the RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C. "Opium is
a much more profitable crop. It requires a lot less infrastructure. You can grow opium practically
anywhere, and it doesn't need to be refrigerated, it doesn't need complex transportation
networks." What seals the deal for many farmers is taxes: In Taliban-controlled areas — or even
areas the Taliban doesn't technically control, but still has enough influence that they can
intimidate local farmers and officials — the Taliban collects taxes. PlayTaliban Suicide Car Bomb
Targets NATO Convoy in Kabul Facebook Twitter Google Plus Embed Taliban Suicide Car Bomb
Targets NATO Convoy in Kabul 0:29 "They demand taxes not on what you're growing, but on
what your land could produce if you were growing opium. So if you decide you don't want to
grow opium, the Taliban's response is, 'Fine, pay me the equivalent amount and you can grow
whatever you want,'" Blank said. Nasir Shansab, author of "Silent Trees: Power and Passion in
War-Torn Afghanistan," said opium production has "become part of the economy." "It brings
money and imported material and consumer goods into Afghanistan," he said. "Afghanistan is
poverty-stricken and farmers have difficulty getting proper returns for their normal products.
They're almost forced to do that to survive," he said. Related: 'Many' Injured as Bomb Hits NATO
Convoy in Afghanistan Neither of the U.S. antinarcotics approaches have yielded success. From
2001 to 2009, the U.S. tried an eradication strategy, giving the Afghan government resources to
wipe out poppy crops. This only eliminated a tiny percentage of suppliers, and led to more local
corruption: Meaning governing warlords got richer as individual farmers got poorer. "The whole
system is criminalized. It runs through the police, the courts, through the whole government
system," Shansab said. "When we talk about corruption in Afghanistan, which is rampant, now
this is part of it." The current approach offers farmers the chance to substitute their opium crops
with legal crops, thanks to billions of dollars in U.S.-funded agricultural development. Related:
Afghans Battle Extremists From 10 Countries: President But while that helped Laos and Thailand,
two former heavyweights in the global opium production trade, get off the list of major
suppliers in the 1990s, it appears to only be making Afghanistan's problem worse by not giving
farmers all the tools they need to grow. "The bottom line — record opium cultivation and
production — clearly shows we are not winning the war on drugs in Afghanistan ," Sopko, the
special inspector general, said. Opium hasn't always blossomed this freely in Afghanistan. Before
being ousted by the U.S., the Taliban banned opium in 2000, arguing that growing drugs was
anti-Islamic. Opium dropped dramatically in the coming year, stunning the international
community — but Blank, the Afghanistan expert, has doubts about their motive. "The theory
that makes the most sense to me is that there was such a glut of opium on the market that the
Taliban basically allowed its favorite suppliers to store opium for the next year to drive the
prices up, expecting that they would around for many years to come, and that they could sort of
be the OPEC of opium," he said. After the Taliban was deposed, the ban was eliminated. But
with so much to fix in Afghanistan, the U.S. was unable to keep crops from popping back up.
Related: U.S. Raid Incites Angry Protests in Afghanistan "The biggest problem from a U.S.
security perspective is not opium. It's what opium leads to," Blank said. "You can't fight
counterinsurgency and counternarcotics at the same time. Essentially, you're pulling in two
different directions. Which is more important? From a security standpoint, I think
counterinsurgency is more important."

Opium drives instability

McCoy 2-22 –Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Alfred, The Drug that Makes the Taliban Possible, http://www.thenation.com/article/the-drug-
that-makes-the-taliban-possible/
A fter fighting the longest war in its history, the United States stands at the brink of defeat in
Afghanistan. How can this be possible? How could the world’s sole superpower have battled
continuously for fifteen years, deploying 100,000 of its finest troops, sacrificing the lives of 2,200
of those soldiers, spending more than a trillion dollars on its military operations, lavishing a
record hundred billion more on “nation-building” and “reconstruction,” helping raise, fund,
equip, and train an army of 350,000 Afghan allies, and still not be able to pacify one of the
world’s most impoverished nations? So dismal is the prospect for stability in Afghanistan in 2016
that the Obama White House has recently cancelled a planned further withdrawal of its forces
and will leave an estimated 10,000 troops in the country indefinitely. ∂ Were you to cut through
the Gordian knot of complexity that is the Afghan War, you would find that in the American
failure there lies the greatest policy paradox of the century: Washington’s massive military
juggernaut has been stopped dead in its steel tracks by a pink flower, the opium poppy.∂ For
more than three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only
when they fit reasonably comfortably into Central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium, and suffered
when they failed to complement it. The first US intervention there began in 1979. It succeeded
in part because the surrogate war the CIA launched to expel the Soviets from that country
coincided with the way its Afghan allies used the country’s swelling drug traffic to sustain their
decade-long struggle.∂ On the other hand, in the almost fifteen years of continuous combat since
the US invasion of 2001, pacification efforts have failed to curtail the Taliban insurgency largely
because the United States could not control the swelling surplus from the county’s heroin trade.
As opium production surged from a minimal 180 tons to a monumental 8,200 in the first five
years of US occupation, Afghanistan’s soil seemed to have been sown with the dragon’s teeth of
ancient Greek myth. Every poppy harvest yielded a new crop of teenaged fighters for the
Taliban’s growing guerrilla army.∂ At each stage in Afghanistan’s tragic, tumultuous history over
the past 40 years—the covert war of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s, and the US
occupation since 2001—opium played a surprisingly significant role in shaping the country’s
destiny. In one of history’s bitter twists of fate, the way Afghanistan’s unique ecology converged
with American military technology transformed this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s
first true narco-state—a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political
choices, and determine the fate of foreign interventions.

Instability spills over to Pakistan and empowers jihadists

Felbab-Brown 9 - Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and
Intelligence

Vanda, Testimony October 1, Transnational Drug Enterprises: Threats to Global Stability and U.S.
National Security, http://www.brookings.edu/research/testimony/2009/10/01-drug-
enterprises-felbabbrown

Large illicit
economies dominated by powerful traffickers also have pernicious effects on a country’s law
enforcement and judicial systems. As the illicit economy grows, the investigative capacity of the law enforcement and judicial
systems diminishes. Impunity for criminal activity increases, undermining the credibility of law enforcement, the judicial system, and the authority of
the government. Powerful traffickers frequently turn to violent means to deter and avoid prosecution, killing off or bribing prosecutors, judges, and
witnesses. Colombia in the late 1980s and Mexico today are powerful reminders of the corruption and paralysis of law enforcement as a result of
extensive criminal networks and the devastating effects of high levels of violent criminality on the judicial system. In addition, illicit economies
have large economic effects. Drug cultivation and processing, for example, on the one hand generate employment for the poor rural
populations and may even facilitate upward mobility. As mentioned before, they can also have powerful marcoeconomic spillover effects in terms of
boosting overall economic activity. But a burgeoning drug economy also contributes to inflation and can hence harm legitimate, export-oriented,
import-substituting industries. It encourages real estate speculation and undermines currency stability. It also displaces legitimate
production. Since the drug economy is more profitable than legal production, requires less security and infrastructure, and imposes smaller sunk
and transaction costs, the local population is frequently uninterested in, or unable to, participate in

other (legal) kinds of economic activity. The illicit economy can thus lead to a form of so-called Dutch
disease where a boom in an isolated sector of the economy causes or is accompanied by stagnation in other core sectors since it gives rise to
appreciation of land and labor costs. Effects of Regional Manifestations of the Drug-Conflict Nexus on U.S. Security Even though the drug-violent-
conflict nexus follows these general dynamics irrespective of the locale, how acute a threat to U.S. security interests it presents depends on the
strategic significance of the state weakened by such connections and the orientation of the belligerent group toward the United States. Perhaps
nowhere in the world does the presence of a large-scaled illicit economy threaten U.S. primary
security interests as much in Afghanistan. There, the anti-American Taliban strengthens its
insurgency campaign by deriving both vast financial profits and great political capital from
sponsoring the illicit economy. The strengthened insurgency in turn threatens the vital U.S. objectives of
counterterrorism and Afghanistan’s stability plus the lives of U.S. soldiers and civilians deployed there to promote these objectives. The

large-scale opium poppy economy also undermines these goals by fueling widespread corruption of

Afghanistan government and law enforcement, especially the police forces. A failure to prevail against the insurgency will

result in the likely collapse of the national government and Taliban domination of Afghanistan’s south,
possibly coupled with civil war. A failure to stabilize Afghanistan will in turn further destabilize Pakistan,

emboldening the jihadists in Pakistan and weakening the resolve of Pakistan’s military and
intelligence services to take on the jihadists. Pakistan may likely once again calculate that it needs to cultivate its jihadi assets
to counter India’s influence in Afghanistan – perceived or actual. But the seriousness
of the threat and the strategic
importance of the stakes do not imply that aggressive counternarcotics suppression measures
today will enhance U.S. objectives and global stability. Indeed, just the opposite. Premature measures,
such as extensive eradication before legal livelihoods are in place, will simply cement the bonds
between the rural population

<<<MARKED>>>

dependent on poppy for basic livelihood and the Taliban, limit intelligence flows to Afghan and
NATO forces, and further discredit the Afghan government and tribal elites sponsoring
eradication. Nor, given the Taliban’s large sources of other income, will eradication bankrupt the Taliban. In fact, eradication so far
has failed to accomplish that while already generating the above mentioned counterproductive
outcomes. After years of such inappropriate focus on eradication of the poppy crop, the new counternarcotics strategy for Afghanistan,
announced by U.S. government officials in summer 2009, promises to mesh well with the counterinsurgency and state-building effort. By scaling back
eradication and emphasizing interdiction and development, it will help separate the population from the Taliban. A well-designed counternarcotics
policy is not on its own sufficient for success in Afghanistan. But it is indispensible. Counterinsurgent forces can prevail against belligerents profiting
from the drug trade when they increase their own counterinsurgency resources and improve the strategy. Moreover, “success” in suppressing poppy in
Afghanistan may well increase threats to U.S. security in other ways. Given existing global demand, poppy cultivation will
shift elsewhere. There are many countries where poppy can be grown; but Burma, which used to be the number one producer for many years,
Central Asia, and Pakistan are likely candidates. A shift to Pakistan would be by far the most worrisome. In that case,

Pakistani jihadi groups would not only be able to increase their profits, but also, and most
dangerously, their political capital. Today, they have little to offer but ideological succor to the dissatisfied populations in the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the Northwest Frontier Province, and wider Pakistan. If widespread poppy cultivation shifted

to these areas, Kashmir, and possibly even parts of Punjab, the jihadist belligerents would be much
strengthened by providing real-time economic benefits to marginalized populations.

The impact is escalatory nuclear conflict

Riedel 14 – Director, The Intelligence Project, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center for Middle
East Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence (Bruce, “Tensions Rising
Dangerously in South Asia”, http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/10/19-
tensions-rising-dangerously-south-asia-riedel)

India and Pakistan have fought four wars since 1947 and had several crises that went to the
brink of war. Both tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Now tensions are escalating between the
two again. It began in May, when a heavily armed squad of Pakistani terrorists from Lashkar e Tayyiba (Army of the
Pure) attacked India’s consulate in Herat, in western Afghanistan. They planned to massacre Indian diplomats on the eve of the

inauguration of India’s new Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi. The consulate’s security forces killed the LeT terrorists

first, preventing a crisis. Since LeT is a proxy of Pakistan's military intelligence service known as the ISI, Indian intelligence officials assume
the Herat attack was coordinated with higher-ups in Pakistan. They assume another LeT attack is only a matter of time . They are

probably right on both counts. This summer, clashes between Indian and Pakistani troops have escalated along

the ceasefire line in Kashmir. Called “the Line of Control,” the Kashmiri front line this year has witnessed the worst
exchanges of artillery and small arms fire in a decade, displacing hundreds of civilians on both sides. More than 20 have died in the
crossfire already this month. Modi has ordered his army commanders to strike back hard at the Line of
Control to demonstrate Indian resolve. Although Modi made a big gesture in May when he invited his Pakistani counterpart,
Nawaz Sharif, to his inauguration, since then Modi has canceled routine diplomatic talks

<<<MARKED>>>

with Pakistan on Kashmir and signaled a tough line toward terrorism. He also appointed a very experienced
intelligence chief, Ajit Doval as his national security adviser. Doval is known as a hard-liner on terrorism—and on Pakistan. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata
Party strongly criticized his predecessor, Manmohan Singh, for what it saw as a weak response to LeT’s attack on Mumbai in 2008. No military action
was taken after 10 LeT terrorists, armed and trained by the ISI, killed and wounded hundreds of innocents, including six American dead. In 2001, a
previous BJP government mobilized the Indian military for months after a Pakistan-based terror attack on the Indian parliament. The two countries
were eyeball to eyeball in a tense standoff for almost a year. Two years before that, the two countries fought a war in Kashmir around the town of
Kargil. In the 1999 Kargil War, the Pakistani army crossed the LOC to seize mountain heights controlling a key highway in Kashmir. BJP Prime Minister
Atal Vajpayee responded with airstrikes and ground forces. The Indian navy prepared to blockade Karachi, Pakistan’s major port and its critical choke
point for importing oil. A blockade would have rapidly cut off Pakistan from oil supplies. The Indian navy was so eager to strike it had to be restrained
by the high command. The Pakistanis began losing the fight at Kargil. Then they put their nuclear forces
on high alert. President Bill Clinton pressured Nawaz Sharif (the prime minister then and now) into backing down at a crucial summit at Blair
House on July 4, 1999. If Clinton had not persuaded Sharif to withdraw behind the LOC, the war would have

escalated further, perhaps to a nuclear exchange. Kargil is a good paradigm for what a future crisis
might look like. A BJP government is not likely to turn the other cheek. It cannot afford to let
terror attacks go unpunished. That would encourage more. The difference between the Kargil
War and today is that both India and Pakistan now have far more nuclear weapons and delivery
systems than 15 years ago. Pakistan is developing tactical nuclear weapons and has the fastest
growing nuclear arsenal in the world. China provides Pakistan with its nuclear reactors. India has
missiles that can reach all of Pakistan and even to Beijing. The escalatory ladder is far more
terrifying than it was on the eve of the millennium. For retreating in 1999, Sharif was overthrown in a coup by the army
commander, Pervez Musharraf, who had planned the Kargil War. Now Musharraf is calling for Sharif to stand up to Modi

and not be pushed around by India. The main opposition party leader, Bilawal Bhutto, has called for a tough line defending
Kashmiri Muslim rights, promising to take “every inch” of Kashmir for Pakistan if he is elected prime minister in the future. Sharif is under pressure from
another party leader, Imran Khan, to resign. The
politics on both sides in South Asia leave little room for
compromise or dialogue. America is seen in South Asia as a power in decline, a perception fueled by the Afghan War. U.S.
influence in New Delhi and Islamabad is low. A Clinton-like intervention to halt an escalation will
be a tough act to follow . But the consequences of a nuclear exchange are almost too horrible to
contemplate.
 uq
Harm reduction legislation will pass now but Obama’s PC is key – 1nc Bennett 3-
28 says a bill has already passed the Senate, it’s only a question of the House.
Obama’s push gets Republicans on board to expand funding for expanded
treatment. No thumpers b/c the fight is coming in the next few weeks, no ev
any thumpers come before the bill and they are all priced in.
 At pc not key
PC ensures passage
Perry 3-27 - editor of the Daily Telegraph (Samantha, “Frustration, yet renewed hope, amid
drug abuse fight in Washington,” Bluefield Daily Telegraph, America’s News)

West Virginia’s U.S. Senator Joe Manchin is frustrated with the slow pace of government when it
comes to addressing the drug abuse problem. During a telephone interview last week, he spoke
with passion about the difficulties he has faced while attempting to change the culture at the
Food and Drug Administration. “The FDA is allowing pharmaceutical companies to flood the
market with them (opioids), allowing doctors to prescribe things that they have no idea what
they are prescribing and ... flood the country with opioids,” he said. Manchin said it took three
years for him to get Vicodin and Lortab reclassified. Previously they were a Schedule 3
controlled substance, which meant doctors could give 90-day prescriptions. “They were handing
them out like crazy, without seeing patients,” he said. “We agreed overwhelmingly they should
go down to Schedule 2. It took three years for them to do something that should have taken
three days.” lll Manchin called the new sentencing guidelines announced last week “a
tremendous move in the right direction.” The Centers for Disease Control guidelines encourage
doctors to try physical therapy, exercise and over-the-counter pain medications before turning
to painkillers. The CDC is also urging doctors to prescribe the lowest effective dose when it is
determined an opioid is necessary. “Before I went after the FDA they had refused to agree with
the CDC guidelines,” the Democrat senator said, asking, “Can you imagine that? The FDA putting
the CDC on hold.” Manchin also wants insurance companies to reimburse for alternate pain
treatments. “They are happy to pay for opioids but they won’t pay for acupuncture.” lll Manchin
emphasized the need for more recovery centers, and the importance of changing the mindset so
that addiction is viewed as a medical condition. “There are not enough treatment centers,” he
said. “If someone says he wants help, where are you going to put him?” The senator noted that
the government currently charges no tax on opioids, and suggested a “treatment fee” to fund
substance abuse recovery centers. “If we could get one penny per milligram for every milligram
produced — a one penny fee toward treatment — we could raise one-and-half to two million a
year,” he said. “Don’t look at it as a tax, it’s a treatment fee.” With a nod toward outspoken
opposition in Congress to new taxes, Manchin asked a passionate, rhetorical question: “How in
the hell are we going to get our people cleaned up?” lll However, there may be hope on the
horizon. “Unequivocally, after six years in the Senate, I have never been more frustrated, but
I’ve also never been more hopeful that change is going to happen,” Manchin said. “It (the drug
abuse problem) is getting attention from the White House, from Congress.”
 At scotus thumper
Obama has sufficient PC
Grenier 3-11 (Eric, “'Lame duck' U.S. President Barack Obama hits new high in popularity,”
CBC News, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/grenier-obama-us-polls-1.3485657)

Obama more popular than U.S. Congress

While Obama is indeed at the usual political disadvantage a president finds himself in with less
than a year to go in his presidency, his lame duck status (which he technically won't have until
his replacement is elected in November, though that hasn't stopped his critics from using the
term) has been multiplied by the degree of partisanship and obstruction he has encountered in
the U.S. Congress. But the American people think little of the job that Congress is doing. The
latest RealClearPolitics averages show the approval rating of Congress to be just 12 per cent. Its
disapproval rating stands at a staggering 79 per cent. This is not a new phenomenon. The
relative halcyon days of an approval rating of over 20 per cent are nearly five years behind
Congress. So Obama may have a little political capital yet to spend with the "bully pulpit" of the
presidency still at his disposal.

Obama’s pushing Congress---top priority

Bennett 3-29 (John, “Obama: Opioid Treatment Too Scant, 'Underresourced',” Roll Call,
https://www.rollcall.com/news/policy/obama-opioid-treatment-scant-underresourced)

But Obama told the summit that anti-prescription drug and heroin abuse efforts have been “a
top priority of ours for some time.” The president also is expected to announce a set of
administrative actions that will not require congressional approval. A major thrust of the
administration and congressional Democrats has been to use federal dollars to help expand
treatment for most vulnerable populations. Obama reiterated some of the themes he has
turned to before when pushing for congressional action, with the House due back from a recess
period with a Senate-passed anti-opioid bill awaiting action. But his major thrust was arguing for
expanded -- and better-funded treatment programs.

Neither party will act on SCOTUS nominations until after the election
MCCONNELL 3/24 (Michael W., former judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, is a
professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and a senior
fellow at the Hoover Institution, “Defusing the Supreme Court Fight” Wall Street Journal
3/24/16. http://www.wsj.com/articles/defusing-the-supreme-court-fight-1458858228)

There is one course of action that satisfies the needs of Republican senators and President
Obama. The Republicans will refrain from personal or ideological attacks on the nominee, but
also refrain from any actions on the nomination before the election. The president and his allies
will pretend to be outraged by this inaction, but their outrage is nothing but theater for the
politically naive. In November, when the people speak, either a Republican or a Democrat will be
elected. If it is a Republican, that president will substitute a more conservative name for Merrick
Garland's. If it is a Democrat, the Senate will swiftly take up the Garland nomination and confirm
him. Don't expect the Republican leadership to speak publicly of these eventualities, but don't
imagine they aren't thinking along these lines. Depending on the results of the November
election, it will not be surprising to see Associate Justice Merrick Garland on the bench by
January.