We can test for it and we can treat it," Ghebreyesus said.
2. IP protections are the vital internal link to reduce vaccine inequality. Empirics disprove all pro patent arguments Kumar, PhD, 7-12-21 (Rajeesh, Associate Fellow Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, https://www.idsa.in/issuebrief/wto-trips-waiver-covid-vaccine-rkumar-120721) In October 2020, India and South Africa had submitted a proposal to the World
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not expedient in a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.
3. Failure to contain COVID-19 causes extinction Guy R. McPherson, PhD, 20 PhD Range Science, Professor Emeritus, University of Arizona School of Natural Resources and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, “Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?” Eart and Envi Scie Res and Rev, Volume 3 Issue 2, 4-8-2020, https://opastonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/will-covid-19-trigger-extinction-of-all-life-on-earth-eesrr-20-.pdf Small lives matter. Indeed, the “human body contains about 100 trillion cells
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that a microscopic virus could pull the trigger on our extinction 15.
Contention 2: Global Security
Continued COVID spread causes great power war and is the death knell of the LIO -diversion, nationalism, psychology Kitfield 20 (James, the only three-time winner of the prestigious Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/will-covid-19-kill-the-liberal-world-order/, 5-22) For a brief moment it seemed that the worst global pandemic in a century might
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dangerous period when cooler heads may not prevail among the great power leaders.”
2. Risk of U.S.-China nuclear escalation to total war is high – Chinese planners don’t believe nuclear weapons are usable and US decisionmakers are too confident in limited nuclear war. Fiona CUNNINGHAM Poli Sci @ GW AND Taylor FRAVEL Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ’19 “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation” International Security 44 (2) p. EBSCO Chinese views of nuclear escalation are key to assessing the potential for nuclear escalation in
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but it investigates only one of multiple pathways to nuclear escalation.11
3. The LIO is crucial to resolve a laundry list of existential threats- alternatives will magnify existing problems post transition war Deudney and Ikenberry, PhDs, 18 (Daniel, PoliSci@JohnsHopkins, G. John , InternationalAffairs@Princeton, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-06-14/liberal-world, 6-14) In many respects, today's liberal democratic malaise is a byproduct of the liberal world
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of renewed ideological rivalry could be good news for the liberal international order.
all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text," she said.
2. The WTO dampens US-China great power conflict which is crucial to solve a laundry list of existential threats. Cooperation on global vaccine distribution is a vital test case Shaffer, JD Stanford, 21 (Gregory Shaffer is Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the forthcoming book, “Emerging Powers in the World Trading System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law.” https://thehill.com/opinion/international/559049-the-us-must-engage-with-china-even-when-countering-china, 6-21) A policy statement heard around the world is that U.S. engagement with
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outcomes, such as to provide vaccines globally and to develop green technologies.
3. The WTO reduces war through peace dividends, interdependence, and rule of law Baldwin, PhD, and Nakotomi 15 (Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Michitaka, Consulting Fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) and a Special Adviser to the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO). https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/policy_insights/PolicyInsight84.pdf, July) The WTO, and the GATT before it, has been one the planet’s precious
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only – example of a multilateral and nearuniversal framework of rules and law.
Plan: Member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines for COVID-19
up by blocking competitors and raising prices pushes in the completely wrong direction.
2. Critics of the IP waiver are wrong- it’s the most effective way to combat covid inequality, alternatives fail Erfani et al, 21 (Parsa Erfani, Fogarty global health scholar1 2, Agnes Binagwaho, vice chancellor2
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other people’s” problem. It is not. It is our problem.
1AR
Case
AT: Lack of Knowledge
Removing IP protections will increase production, diversify supply, and spur innovations that protect against future pandemics Human Rights Watch 6-3-21 https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/03/seven-reasons-eu-wrong-oppose-trips-waiver# Intellectual property is currently a barrier to swiftly scaling up and diversifying the production of
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and safety for vaccines, which have a very stringent process for approval.
AT: Slow Previous estimates wrong- waiver fast enough to solve Jecker and Atuire , PhDs, 21 (Nancy S., 1 Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Caesar, Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Ghana, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/47/9/595.full.pdf) It might be objected that waiving IP protections will not increase supply, because it takes years to establish manufacturing capacity. However, since the pandemic began, we have learnt it takes less time. Repurposing facilities and vetting them for safety and quality can often happen in 6 or 7months, about half the time previously thought.17 Since COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic humanity faces, expanding manufacturing capacity is also necessary preparation for future pandemics. Nkengasong, Director of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, put the point bluntly, ‘Can a continent of 1.2billion people—projected to be 2.4billion in 30 years, where one in four people in the world will be African—continue to import 99 of its vaccine?
The plan is the only chance for equal distribution Jecker and Atuire , PhDs, 21 (Nancy S., 1 Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Caesar, Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Ghana, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/47/9/595.full.pdf) Since consequentialist justifications treat the value of IP as purely instrumental, they are also
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when India halted vaccine exports amidst a surge of COVID-19 cases.
AT: FW Theory
The standard is maximizing expected well-being. To clarify, hedonistic act util. Prefer –
1 Pleasure and pain are intrinsic value and disvalue – everything else regresses – robust neuroscience. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S. Pleasure is not only one of the three primary reward functions but it also defines
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these circuits contribute to diverse pathologies, including obesity and addiction or RDS.
2 No act omission distinction – outweighs on actor specificity because different actors have different obligations. Shwartz 19 Schwartz, Gregory. (2019). THE ETHICS OF OMISSION. Think, 18(51), 117–121. doi:10.1017/s1477175618000404 A trolley worker in Victoria London is near the tracks when he sees a runaway
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same source: consent. Ultimately, the root of responsibility is consent.
3 Weighability – only consequentialism can explain the ethical difference in breaking a promise to take someone to the hospital and breaking a promise to take someone to lunch
A Resolvability – there’s no way to weigh between competing offense under a deontological fw which means their fw can’t guide action
B Intuitions – they’re a necessary side constraint on all ethics – if a very well justified, logical theory concluded "rape good” you wouldn’t say “huh I guess rape is good” you would abandon it
9/18/21
Long Beach Round 3 v Westwood AP
Tournament: Long Beach | Round: 3 | Opponent: Westwood AP | Judge: Alvarez, Diana 1AC Framework The standard should be preserving human life Epistemic modesty breaks any tie and answers all AC pre-empts. Bostrom 12 Nick Bostrom, Existential Risk Prevention as a Global Priority, 2012. NS These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk. Let me elaborate. Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know—at least not in concrete detail—what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving—and ideally improving—our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. Case Contention 1: Vaccine Inequality
We can test for it and we can treat it," Ghebreyesus said. 2. IP protections are the vital internal link to reduce vaccine inequality. Empirics disprove all pro patent arguments Kumar, PhD, 7-12-21 (Rajeesh, Associate Fellow Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, https://www.idsa.in/issuebrief/wto-trips-waiver-covid-vaccine-rkumar-120721) In October 2020, India and South Africa had submitted a proposal to the World
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not expedient in a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. 3. Failure to contain COVID-19 causes extinction Guy R. McPherson, PhD, 20 PhD Range Science, Professor Emeritus, University of Arizona School of Natural Resources and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, “Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?” Eart and Envi Scie Res and Rev, Volume 3 Issue 2, 4-8-2020, https://opastonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/will-covid-19-trigger-extinction-of-all-life-on-earth-eesrr-20-.pdf Small lives matter. Indeed, the “human body contains about 100 trillion cells
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that a microscopic virus could pull the trigger on our extinction 15. Contention 2: US-China War
Continued COVID spread causes great power war and is the death knell of the LIO -diversion, nationalism, psychology Kitfield 20 (James, the only three-time winner of the prestigious Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/will-covid-19-kill-the-liberal-world-order/, 5-22) For a brief moment it seemed that the worst global pandemic in a century might
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dangerous period when cooler heads may not prevail among the great power leaders.” 2. Risk of U.S.-China nuclear escalation to total war is high – Chinese planners don’t believe nuclear weapons are usable and US decisionmakers are too confident in limited nuclear war. Fiona CUNNINGHAM Poli Sci @ GW AND Taylor FRAVEL Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ’19 “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation” International Security 44 (2) p. EBSCO Chinese views of nuclear escalation are key to assessing the potential for nuclear escalation in
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but it investigates only one of multiple pathways to nuclear escalation.11 3. The LIO is crucial to resolve a laundry list of existential threats- alternatives will magnify existing problems post transition war Deudney and Ikenberry, PhDs, 18 (Daniel, PoliSci@JohnsHopkins, G. John , InternationalAffairs@Princeton, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-06-14/liberal-world, 6-14) In many respects, today's liberal democratic malaise is a byproduct of the liberal world
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of renewed ideological rivalry could be good news for the liberal international order. Contention 3: WTO
all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text," she said. 2. The WTO dampens US-China great power conflict which is crucial to solve a laundry list of existential threats. Cooperation on global vaccine distribution is a vital test case Shaffer, JD Stanford, 21 (Gregory Shaffer is Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the forthcoming book, “Emerging Powers in the World Trading System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law.” https://thehill.com/opinion/international/559049-the-us-must-engage-with-china-even-when-countering-china, 6-21) A policy statement heard around the world is that U.S. engagement with
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outcomes, such as to provide vaccines globally and to develop green technologies. 3. The WTO reduces war through peace dividends, interdependence, and rule of law Baldwin, PhD, and Nakotomi 15 (Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Michitaka, Consulting Fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) and a Special Adviser to the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO). https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/policy_insights/PolicyInsight84.pdf, July) The WTO, and the GATT before it, has been one the planet’s precious
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only – example of a multilateral and nearuniversal framework of rules and law. Plan: Member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines for COVID-19 Contention 4: Solvency
up by blocking competitors and raising prices pushes in the completely wrong direction. 2. Removing IP protections will increase production, diversify supply, and spur innovations that protect against future pandemics Human Rights Watch 6-3-21 https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/03/seven-reasons-eu-wrong-oppose-trips-waiver# Intellectual property is currently a barrier to swiftly scaling up and diversifying the production of
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and safety for vaccines, which have a very stringent process for approval. 3. Waiving IPR is the vital internal link to equitable distribution- patents are a key deterrent to expanded manufacturing capabilities Kang, PhD, et al., 7-14-21 (Hyo Yoon Kang is Reader in Law at the University of Kent. Aisling McMahon is Assistant Professor of Law in the Department of Law at Maynooth University. Graham Dutfield is Professor of International Governance at the University of Leeds. Luke McDonagh is Assistant Professor of Law in the Department of Law at the LSE. Siva Thambisetty is Associate Professor of Law in the Department of Law at the LSE. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/covid19-trips-waiver/) The temporary TRIPS waiver – as proposed by India and South Africa and supported by
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fulfil this promise and, in so doing, to end the pandemic. 1AR Case AT: Can’t Solve Removing IP protections will increase production, diversify supply, and spur innovations that protect against future pandemics Human Rights Watch 6-3-21 https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/03/seven-reasons-eu-wrong-oppose-trips-waiver# Intellectual property is currently a barrier to swiftly scaling up and diversifying the production of
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and safety for vaccines, which have a very stringent process for approval. 2. Waiving IPR is the vital internal link to equitable distribution- patents are a key deterrent to expanded manufacturing capabilities Kang, PhD, et al., 7-14-21 (Hyo Yoon Kang is Reader in Law at the University of Kent. Aisling McMahon is Assistant Professor of Law in the Department of Law at Maynooth University. Graham Dutfield is Professor of International Governance at the University of Leeds. Luke McDonagh is Assistant Professor of Law in the Department of Law at the LSE. Siva Thambisetty is Associate Professor of Law in the Department of Law at the LSE. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/covid19-trips-waiver/) The temporary TRIPS waiver – as proposed by India and South Africa and supported by
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to end the pandemic. Bonadio 15 evidence not specific to COVID. Communication from India and South Africa to the WTO 20 (WAIVER FROM CERTAIN PROVISIONS OF THE TRIPS AGREEMENT FOR THE PREVENTION, CONTAINMENT AND TREATMENT OF COVID-19 https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=q:/IP/C/W669.pdfandOpen=True, 10-2) 5. An effective response to COVID-19 pandemic requires rapid access to affordable medical products including diagnostic kits, medical masks, other personal protective equipment and ventilators, as well as vaccines and medicines for the prevention and treatment of patients in dire need. 6. The outbreak has led to a swift increase in global demand with many countries facing acute shortages, constraining the ability to effectively respond to the outbreak. Shortages of these products has put the lives of health and other essential workers at risk and led to many avoidable deaths. It is also threatening to prolong the COVID-19 pandemic. The longer the current global crisis persist, the greater the socio-economic fallout, making it imperative and urgent to collaborate internationally to rapidly contain the outbreak. 7. As new diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19 are developed, there are significant concerns, how these will be made available promptly, in sufficient quantities and at affordable price to meet global demand. Critical shortages in medical products have also put at grave risk patients suffering from other communicable and non-communicable diseases. 8. To meet the growing supply-demand gap, several countries have initiated domestic production of medical products and/or are modifying existing medical products for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. The rapid scaling up of manufacturing globally is an obvious crucial solution to address the timely availability and affordability of medical products to all countries in need. 9. There are several reports about intellectual property rights hindering or potentially hindering timely provisioning of affordable medical products to the patients.3 It is also reported that some WTO Members have carried out urgent legal amendments to their national patent laws to expedite the process of issuing compulsory/government use licenses. 10. Beyond patents, other intellectual property rights may also pose a barrier, with limited options to overcome those barriers. In addition, many countries especially developing countries may face institutional and legal difficulties when using flexibilities available in the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). A particular concern for countries with insufficient or no manufacturing capacity are the requirements of Article 31bis and consequently the cumbersome and lengthy process for the import and export of pharmaceutical products.
Internationally, there is an urgent call for global solidarity, and the unhindered global sharing of technology and know-how in order that rapid responses for the handling of COVID-19 can be put in place on a real time basis. 12. In these exceptional circumstances, we request that the Council for TRIPS recommends, as early as possible, to the General Council a waiver from the implementation, application and enforcement of Sections 1, 4, 5, and 7 of Part II of the TRIPS Agreement in relation to prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19. 13. The waiver should continue until widespread vaccination is in place globally, and the majority of the world's population has developed immunity hence we propose an initial duration of x years from the date of the adoption of the waiver. 14. We request that the Council for TRIPS urgently recommends to the General Council adoption of the annexed decision text. Off-Case AT: Heg Solves War Empirics go neg – most qualified studies disprove hegemonic stability theories. Fettweis 17 –Christopher J. Fettweis is an American political scientist and the Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. “Unipolarity, Hegemony, and the New Peace, Security Studies” 26:3, 423-451; EG) Even the most ardent supporters of the hegemonic-stability explanation do not contend that US influence extends equally to all corners of the globe. The United States has concentrated its policing in what George Kennan used to call “strong points,” or the most important parts of the world: Western Europe, the Pacific Rim, and Persian Gulf.64 By doing so, Washington may well have contributed more to great power peace than the overall global decline in warfare. If the former phenomenon contributed to the latter, by essentially providing a behavioral model for weaker states to emulate, then perhaps this lends some support to the hegemonic-stability case.65 During the Cold War, the United States played referee to a few intra-West squabbles, especially between Greece and Turkey, and provided Hobbesian reassurance to Germany’s nervous neighbors. Other, equally plausible explanations exist for stability in the first world, including the presence of a common enemy, democracy, economic interdependence, general war aversion, etc. The looming presence of the leviathan is certainly among these plausible explanations, but only inside the US sphere of influence. Bipolarity was bad for the nonaligned world, where Soviet and Western intervention routinely exacerbated local conflicts. Unipolarity has generally been much better, but whether or not this was due to US action is again unclear. Overall US interest in the affairs of the Global South has dropped markedly since the end of the Cold War, as has the level of violence in almost all regions. There is less US intervention in the political and military affairs of Latin America compared to any time in the twentieth century, for instance, and also less conflict. Warfare in Africa is at an all-time low, as is relative US interest outside of counterterrorism and security assistance.66 Regional peace and stability exist where there is US active intervention, as well as where there is not. No direct relationship seems to exist across regions. If intervention can be considered a function of direct and indirect activity, of both political and military action, a regional picture might look like what is outlined in Table 1. These assessments of conflict are by necessity relative, because there has not been a “high” level of conflict in any region outside the Middle East during the period of the New Peace. Putting aside for the moment that important caveat, some points become clear. The great powers of the world are clustered in the upper right quadrant, where US intervention has been high, but conflict levels low. US intervention is imperfectly correlated with stability, however. Indeed, it is conceivable that the relatively high level of US interest and activity has made the security situation in the Persian Gulf and broader Middle East worse. In recent years, substantial hard power investments (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq), moderate intervention (Libya), and reliance on diplomacy (Syria) have been equally ineffective in stabilizing states torn by conflict. While it is possible that the region is essentially unpacifiable and no amount of police work would bring peace to its people, it remains hard to make the case that the US presence has improved matters. In this “strong point,” at least, US hegemony has failed to bring peace. In much of the rest of the world, the United States has not been especially eager to enforce any particular rules. Even rather incontrovertible evidence of genocide has not been enough to inspire action. Washington’s intervention choices have at best been erratic; Libya and Kosovo brought about action, but much more blood flowed uninterrupted in Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Syria. The US record of peacemaking is not exactly a long uninterrupted string of successes. During the turn-of-the-century conventional war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, a highlevel US delegation containing former and future National Security Advisors (Anthony Lake and Susan Rice) made a half-dozen trips to the region, but was unable to prevent either the outbreak or recurrence of the conflict. Lake and his team shuttled back and forth between the capitals with some frequency, and President Clinton made repeated phone calls to the leaders of the respective countries, offering to hold peace talks in the United States, all to no avail.67 The war ended Table 1. Post-Cold War US intervention and violence by region. High Violence Low Violence High US Intervention Middle East Europe South and Central Asia Pacific Rim North America Low US Intervention Africa South America Former Soviet Union in late 2000 when Ethiopia essentially won, and it controls the disputed territory to this day. The Horn of Africa is hardly the only region where states are free to fight one another today without fear of serious US involvement. Since they are choosing not to do so with increasing frequency, something else is probably affecting their calculations. Stability exists even in those places where the potential for intervention by the sheriff is minimal. Hegemonic stability can only take credit for influencing those decisions that would have ended in war without the presence, whether physical or psychological, of the United States. It seems hard to make the case that the relative peace that has descended on so many regions is primarily due to the kind of heavy hand of the neoconservative leviathan, or its lighter, more liberal cousin. Something else appears to be at work. Heg Unsustainable Decline in hegemony inevitable and good – COVID, Iraq, financial crisis, and Trump thump, and China is stability-oriented. Karabell, PhD IR@Harvard, 07-13-20 (Karabell, Zachary (Founder of Progress Network@New America, President@River Twice Research, Contributing Editor@Politico, Snr. Advisor@Business for Social Responsibility, PhD IR/History@Harvard, with a focus on US-USSR relations during the Cold War). “The Anti-American Century,” Foreign Policy Magazine, July 13, 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/13/anti-american-century-united-states-order//SHL) The remainder of the century saw the United States bestride the world as the dominant power, sometimes for better and often for worse. But Luce was correct that it was the American Century (or at least half-century). As of 2020, though, the 21st century has become “the Anti-American Century,” an identity already well-advanced before the pandemic but certainly accelerated and cemented by it. The Anti-American Century may turn out to be aggressively hostile to the United States, but for now it is anti-American mostly in the sense of being antithetical to the American Century. The three pillars of American strength—military, economic, and political—that defined the last century have each been undermined if not obliterated. In this moment, those failures may seem like profound negatives. In his most recent book, the writer Robert Kagan laments that, without American leadership around the world, the jungle will grow back. In the United States’ absence, Beijing may be able to define a less liberal world order. In terms of domestic politics, the left and the right are oddly united in their despair at the erosion of the American Century, as the left bemoans the failure of the American experiment in an age of racial divisions and government ineptitude and the right defends to the hilt “Make America Great Again” redux. Yet the dawn of the Anti-American Century may be precisely what both the world and the United States need to meet the particular challenges of today. A world of nearly 7.8 billion people demands multiple nodes of support, not one hegemon or two jockeying for power. And a United States of great affluence and great deficiencies needs to accept that it is not ordained to lead and that its past results are, as investors like to disclaim, no guarantee of future success. The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging that you have one; failure to do so—to believe only that one’s country is uniquely powerful and destined by history and culture for greatness—is a recipe for a fall. At the dawn of the new millennium, a scant 20 years ago that feels like an eternity, the United States was able to say to itself and the world that it had found a uniquely potent formula for how to manage democracy. It pointed to its role as a global superpower and its resilient and flourishing economy. It asserted that it had excelled in advanced research, education, and innovation and stood as an example to countries everywhere. All that was never nearly as true as Americans wished it to be, but those strengths were, relative to much of the world, undeniable. The pandemic has exposed structural fissures in the United States. It has also underscored that a country whose central government is constrained not just by the three-branch structure of the federal government but also by substantial local and state autonomy is not particularly well suited to marshaling a forceful national effort that isn’t an actual war. But the tut-tutting and eye-rolling abroad about the anemic U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic (“The world is taking pity on us,” went the line in one prominent column and in many other since) is simply the next iteration of a process that has been unfolding for two decades. The first pillar of the American Century to be knocked aside was military. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 enjoyed considerable support internationally as a justified response to the Taliban’s sheltering of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. But the subsequent invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with a paucity of international support followed by a bungled occupation and years of guerrilla war against American troops evoked the Vietnam War. Initial misgivings were exponentially magnified by revelations of American-sanctioned torture in Iraq, at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, and at various sites around the world, in clear contravention of the Geneva Conventions that the United States had long defended. Add to that revelations of spying on domestic citizens in the name of national security and the war on terrorism, and many of the pieties of American strength crumbled. The United States emerged by 2008 from its Iraq imbroglio with its military still second to none in size and capacity but with its image severely undermined. The second pillar to crumble was economic. One of the central conceits of Luce’s American Century was that the unique virtues of the American economic system would act as a powerful rebuke of communism. And even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the flourishing American economy was a magnet for talent and innovation, with U.S. technology firms defining the first internet boom of the 1990s and then the next wave in the 2000s. Meanwhile, the Washington Consensus that coalesced in the 1980s about how to structure free markets was the blueprint for post-1989 reconstruction of Eastern Europe and Russia. It was also used as a loose framework by both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in their efforts to push countries around the world to drop trade barriers, end state-run businesses, and open up their capital accounts to global flows. While some countries, especially Russia, suffered mightily from this medicine, the sheer economic power of the United States left little alternative for most nations. China was the notable exception, and its size and the widespread perception that it would eventually move toward the U.S. model after joining the World Trade Organization allowed it to evolve along its own path. China’s economic success eroded American dominance, but it was the financial crisis of 2008-2009 that truly knocked away the economic pillar. For years, the question in investors’ minds had been: “When would the bad loans on the books of China’s state-owned banks lead to a crash in China?” It turned out that it wasn’t China’s banks that were the problem; it was banks in the United States. And they were a contagion that went global. The U.S.-led financial system survived, but the economic reputation of the United States—the prestige that Luce understood as a key element of its power—was devastated. The final pillar was democracy. For decades, the United States could boast that it was the oldest and most established democracy in the world, with a singular system for preserving individual freedoms and harnessing collective energies. It routinely nudged and sometimes coerced allies and adversaries to open up and democratize. That in no way precluded dealing with dictators, but the presumption was that democracy was the best bulwark against autocracy and the best path to affluence. The United States, whatever its flaws, got democracy about as right as anyone. It was never quite the “strongest democracy” according to those who measured such things: The Scandinavian countries led there. But it was undoubtedly the strongest of the large and dynamic democracies, which combined with its other two pillars created the American Century. Then Donald Trump was elected president. Already by 2016, American democracy was showing signs of strain. Public faith and participation in government had so declined as to put the system on notice. But the election of Trump severely eroded the ability of Americans to say either to themselves or to the world that their process was uniquely able to withstand the pressures of populism and nascent authoritarianism that Americans for decades had preached against. Arguably, Trump has done much less damage than his many critics aver, and that may indeed reflect a domestic system of checks and balances that makes it devilishly difficult for any one president to commit major abuses of power. But the strength of American democracy in the world was also as a symbol and a beacon, one that drew immigrants and talent because of the opportunities that the United States offered and nurtured. On that score, the Trump administration dramatically eroded the United States’ global standing. Yes, the image of the United States also suffered mightily in the 1970s, with the humiliation of Vietnam and the revelations of American anti-democratic policies in much of what was then known as the Third World. It is possible that had the economic revival of the 1980s not happened, the American Century would have ended then. It didn’t, but then came the pandemic. Much as Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai once famously said of the legacy of the French Revolution that it was too soon to make final judgments, it is premature to start ranking nations conclusively by how well they met a pandemic that is still raging. It is clear, however, that what may be American strengths in other contexts are in this moment a panoply of weaknesses: decentralized domestic governance, highly contested politics, and immense cultural variations across states and regions. All of those inoculate Americans against autocracy and government overreach but leave the country vulnerable to national crises that require a unified response. Coming in the midst of the Trump administration, the American pandemic response has utterly crushed the image of the United States as an ambassador for good governance and democracy—and with it, the last pillar of the American Century. Many in both the United States and throughout the world may believe that the end of the American Century is tragic, but the dawn of the Anti-American Century holds the promise of better times for the globe and the opportunity for Americans to finally confront their country’s structural problems. After all, unless one believes that the United States has a monopoly on the desire for peace, individual rights, and prosperity, 7.8 billion people and nearly 200 nations large and small are just as capable as Americans of acting in those collective interests. To believe otherwise is to hold that the only formula for international stability and prosperity is an endless continuation of the American Century. That inevitably leads to the question of China and its status as an emerging global power, especially as the United States retreats or is forced to. True, China defines rights differently than the United States, and many outside of China may not find that template an appealing one. But the Chinese template remains a Chinese one, propagated by a government that seems quite interested in keeping the global peace even while asserting its power. And whatever one thinks of China’s future, it remains true that you’d have to think that the United States is somehow a freakish and exceptional nation alone committed to peace and prosperity to believe firmly that the end of the American Century spells a backward step for humanity. As for the United State domestically, decades of global preeminence have not done Americans well at home in recent years. Standards of living have stagnated and not kept pace with those in numerous other countries. Racism persists. None of the countries that have excelled at education, health care, and standards of living are as large or complicated as the United States, but even by its own standards, the country has fallen short of what it once achieved. It spends massively on education, infrastructure, poverty alleviation, health care, and defense—but it does not manage to spend smartly. Yes, material life is better now for almost everyone than it was 50 years ago; people live longer, have more health care, eat better, are more educated, live in safer cities and towns, but that is true everywhere in the world. The United States cannot toot its own horn here. The simple fact is that success and strength—military, political, economic, and to that add cultural—are not birthrights. The United States doesn’t get to be great or powerful just because it used to be, although it certainly can help to have a head start. If the country was ever truly exceptional, it was exceptional because successive generations worked and fought and struggled to make it so, not because those generations patted themselves on the back. There have been acute moments of hubris and overreach during the decades of the American Century, but never has the disconnect between what the United States is and what Americans say it is been so profound. Out of this moment, therefore, is the promise not of American exceptionalism but American humility, a moment of recognition that, to move forward, the United States has to let go of the American Century, say goodbye to exceptionalism, and accept that it is a normal country like any other, just richer and with a massive military arsenal and multiple wells of strength and multiple areas of self-delusion. The end of the American Century offers the opportunity to look at where the country falls short and start fixing what is broken. Whether Americans will seize that opportunity, who knows. But this is not a tragedy; it is the beginning of something new. Hegemony is unsustainable and crumbling – polarization, apathy, and deference to the executive is supercharged by the disaster of Trump. Drezner, PhD, 4-16-19 (Daniel W., PoliSci@Stanford, ProfInternationalPolitics@Tufts, Fellow@Brookings, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-04-16/time-different, May/June Issue) BW Despite the remarkable consistency of U.S. foreign policy, behind the scenes, some elements of American power were starting to decline. As measured by purchasing power parity, the United States stopped being the largest economy in the world a few years ago. Its command of the global commons has weakened as China’s and Russia’s asymmetric capabilities have improved. The accumulation of “forever wars” and low-intensity conflicts has taxed the United States’ armed forces. Outward consistency also masked the dysfunction that was afflicting the domestic checks on U.S. foreign policy. For starters, public opinion has ceased to act as a real constraint on decision-makers. Paradoxically, the very things that have ensured U.S. national security—geographic isolation and overwhelming power—have also led most Americans to not think about foreign policy, and rationally so. The trend began with the switch to an all-volunteer military, in 1973, which allowed most of the public to stop caring about vital questions of war and peace. The apathy has only grown since the end of the Cold War, and today, poll after poll reveals that Americans rarely, if ever, base their vote on foreign policy considerations. The marketplace of ideas has broken down, too. The barriers to entry for harebrained foreign policy schemes have fallen away as Americans’ trust in experts has eroded. Today, the United States is in the midst of a debate about whether a wall along its southern border should be made of concrete, have see-through slats, or be solar-powered. The ability of experts to kill bad ideas isn’t what it used to be. The cognoscenti might believe that their informed opinions can steady the hands of successive administrations, but they are operating in hostile territory. To be fair, the hostility to foreign policy experts is not without cause. The interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were massive screwups. Despite what the experts predicted, globalization has not transformed China into a Jeffersonian democracy. The supposedly infallible advice enshrined in the Washington consensus ended up triggering multiple financial crises. Economists and foreign affairs advisers advocated austerity, despite the pain it caused the poor and the middle class, and consistently cried wolf about an increase in interest rates that has yet to come. No wonder both Barack Obama and Trump have taken such pleasure in bashing the Washington establishment. Institutional checks on the president’s foreign policy prerogatives have also deteriorated—primarily because the other branches of government have voluntarily surrendered them. The passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which exacerbated the Great Depression, showed that Congress could not responsibly execute its constitutional responsibilities on trade. With the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, it delegated many of those powers to the president, marking the beginning of a sustained decline in congressional oversight. More recently, political polarization has rendered Congress a dysfunctional, petulant mess, encouraging successive administrations to enhance the powers of the executive branch. Nor has the judicial branch acted as much of an impediment. The Supreme Court has persistently deferred to the president on matters of national security, as it did in 2018 when it ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s travel ban. Foreign policy analysts largely celebrated this concentration of power in the executive branch, and prior to Trump, their logic seemed solid. They pointed to the public’s ignorance of and Congress’ lack of interest in international relations. As political gridlock and polarization took hold, elected Democrats and Republicans viewed foreign policy as merely a plaything for the next election. And so most foreign policy elites viewed the president as the last adult in the room. What they failed to plan for was the election of a president who displays the emotional and intellectual maturity of a toddler. As a candidate, Trump gloried in beating up on foreign policy experts, asserting that he could get better results by relying on his gut. As president, he has governed mostly by tantrum. He has insulted and bullied U.S. allies. He has launched trade wars that have accomplished little beyond hurting the U.S. economy. He has said that he trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin more than his own intelligence briefers. His administration has withdrawn from an array of multilateral agreements and badmouthed the institutions that remain. The repeated attacks on the EU and NATO represent a bigger strategic mistake than the invasion of Iraq. In multiple instances, his handpicked foreign policy advisers have attempted to lock in decisions before the president can sabotage them with an impulsive tweet. Even when his administration has had the germ of a valid idea, Trump has executed the resulting policy shifts in the most ham-handed manner imaginable. Most of these foreign policy moves have been controversial, counterproductive, and perfectly legal. The same steps that empowered the president to create foreign policy have permitted Trump to destroy what his predecessors spent decades preserving. The other branches of government endowed the White House with the foreign policy equivalent of a Ferrari; the current occupant has acted like a child playing with a toy car, convinced that he is operating in a land of make-believe. After Trump, a new president will no doubt try to restore sanity to U.S. foreign policy. Surely, he or she will reverse the travel ban, halt the hostile rhetoric toward long-standing allies, and end the attacks on the world trading system. These patches will miss the deeper problem, however. Political polarization has eroded the notion that presidents need to govern from the center. Trump has eviscerated that idea. The odds are decent that a left-wing populist will replace the current president, and then an archconservative will replace that president. The weak constraints on the executive branch will only make things worse. Congress has evinced little interest in playing a constructive role when it comes to foreign policy. The public is still checked out on world politics. The combination of worn-down guardrails and presidents emerging from the ends of the political spectrum may well whipsaw U.S. foreign policy between “America first” and a new Second International. The very concept of a consistent, durable grand strategy will not be sustainable. In that event, only the credulous will consider U.S. commitments credible. Alliances will fray, and other countries will find it easier to flout global norms. All the while, the scars of the Trump administration will linger. The vagaries of the current administration have already forced a mass exodus of senior diplomats from the State Department. That human capital will be difficult to replace. For the past two years, the number of international students who have enrolled in U.S. university degree programs has fallen as nativism has grown louder. It will take a while to convince foreigners that this was a temporary spasm. After the Trump administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, it forced SWIFT, the private-sector network that facilitates international financial transactions, to comply with unilateral U.S. sanctions against Iran, spurring China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom to create an alternative payment system. That means little right now, but in the long run, both U.S. allies and U.S. rivals will learn to avoid relying on the dollar. Perhaps most important, the Trump administration has unilaterally surrendered the set of ideals that guided U.S. policymakers for decades. It is entirely proper to debate how much the United States should prioritize the promotion of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law across the world. What should be beyond debate, however, is that it is worthwhile to promote those values overseas and enshrine them at home. Trump’s ugly rhetoric makes a mockery of those values. Although a future president might sound better on these issues, both allies and rivals will remember the current moment. The seeds of doubt have been planted, and they will one day sprout. The factors that give the United States an advantage in the international system—deep capital markets, liberal ideas, world-class higher education—have winner-take-all dynamics. Other actors will be reluctant to switch away from the dollar, Wall Street, democracy, and the Ivy League. These sectors can withstand a few hits. Excessive use of financial statecraft, alliances with overseas populists, or prolonged bouts of anti-immigrant hysteria, however, will force even close allies to start thinking about alternatives. The American advantage in these areas will go bankrupt much like Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises did: “gradually and then suddenly.” Right now, the United States’ Jenga tower is still standing. Remove a few more blocks, however, and the wobbling will become noticeable to the unaided eye. What would collapse look like? The United States would remain a great power, of course, but it would be an ordinary and less rich one. On an increasing number of issues, U.S. preferences would carry minimal weight, as China and Europe coordinated on a different set of rules. Persistent domestic political polarization would encourage Middle Eastern allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, to line up with Republicans and European allies, such as Germany and the United Kingdom, to back Democrats. The continued absence of any coherent grand strategy would leave Latin America vulnerable to a new Great Game as other great powers vied for influence there. Demographic pressures would tax the United States, and the productivity slowdown would make those pressures even worse. Trade blocs would sap global economic growth; reduced interdependence would increase the likelihood of a great-power war. Climate change would be mitigated nationally rather than internationally, leaving almost everyone worse off. WHAT, ME WORRY? It would be delightful if, ten years from now, critics mocked this essay’s misplaced doom and gloom. The state of U.S. foreign policy seemed dire a decade ago, during the depths of the financial crisis and the war in Iraq. That turned out to be more of a blip than a trend. It remains quite possible now that Trump’s successor can repair the damage he has wreaked. And it is worth remembering that for all the flaws in the U.S. foreign policy machine, other great powers are hardly omnipotent. China’s and Russia’s foreign policy successes have been accompanied by blowback, from pushback against infrastructure projects in Asia to a hostile Ukraine, that will make it harder for those great powers to achieve their revisionist aims. The trouble with “after Trump” narratives, however, is that the 45th president is as much a symptom of the ills plaguing U.S. foreign policy as he is a cause. Yes, Trump has made things much, much worse. But he also inherited a system stripped of the formal and informal checks on presidential power. That’s why the next president will need to do much more than superficial repairs. He or she will need to take the politically inconvenient step of encouraging greater congressional participation in foreign policy, even if the opposing party is in charge. Not every foreign policy initiative needs to be run through the Defense Department. The next president could use the bully pulpit to encourage and embrace more public debate about the United States’ role in the world. Restoring the norm of valuing expertise, while still paying tribute to the wisdom of crowds, would not hurt either. Nor would respecting democracy at home while promoting the rule of law abroad. All these steps will make the political life of the next president more difficult. In most Foreign Affairs articles, this is the moment when the writer calls for a leader to exercise the necessary political will to do the right thing. That exhortation always sounded implausible, but now it sounds laughable. One hopes that the Church of Perpetual Worry does not turn into an apocalyptic cult. This time, however, the sky may really be falling. AT: Committee CP The CP delay is massive and results in narrowing waiver Reuters 3-6-21 https://www.reuters.com/world/china/vaccine-ip-waiver-could-take-months-wto-negotiate-experts-2021-05-06/ WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) - World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations on a waiver of intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines could take months - provided they can overcome significant opposition from some member countries, trade experts say. The talks also are likely to focus on a waiver that is significantly narrower in scope and shorter in duration than the one initially proposed by India and South Africa last October. 2AR Decline in hegemony inevitable and good – COVID, Iraq, financial crisis, and Trump thump, and China is stability-oriented. Karabell, PhD IR@Harvard, 07-13-20 (Karabell, Zachary (Founder of Progress Network@New America, President@River Twice Research, Contributing Editor@Politico, Snr. Advisor@Business for Social Responsibility, PhD IR/History@Harvard, with a focus on US-USSR relations during the Cold War). “The Anti-American Century,” Foreign Policy Magazine, July 13, 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/13/anti-american-century-united-states-order//SHL) The remainder of the century saw the United States bestride the world as the dominant power, sometimes for better and often for worse. But Luce was correct that it was the American Century (or at least half-century). As of 2020, though, the 21st century has become “the Anti-American Century,” an identity already well-advanced before the pandemic but certainly accelerated and cemented by it. The Anti-American Century may turn out to be aggressively hostile to the United States, but for now it is anti-American mostly in the sense of being antithetical to the American Century. The three pillars of American strength—military, economic, and political—that defined the last century have each been undermined if not obliterated. In this moment, those failures may seem like profound negatives. In his most recent book, the writer Robert Kagan laments that, without American leadership around the world, the jungle will grow back. In the United States’ absence, Beijing may be able to define a less liberal world order. In terms of domestic politics, the left and the right are oddly united in their despair at the erosion of the American Century, as the left bemoans the failure of the American experiment in an age of racial divisions and government ineptitude and the right defends to the hilt “Make America Great Again” redux. Yet the dawn of the Anti-American Century may be precisely what both the world and the United States need to meet the particular challenges of today. A world of nearly 7.8 billion people demands multiple nodes of support, not one hegemon or two jockeying for power. And a United States of great affluence and great deficiencies needs to accept that it is not ordained to lead and that its past results are, as investors like to disclaim, no guarantee of future success. The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging that you have one; failure to do so—to believe only that one’s country is uniquely powerful and destined by history and culture for greatness—is a recipe for a fall. At the dawn of the new millennium, a scant 20 years ago that feels like an eternity, the United States was able to say to itself and the world that it had found a uniquely potent formula for how to manage democracy. It pointed to its role as a global superpower and its resilient and flourishing economy. It asserted that it had excelled in advanced research, education, and innovation and stood as an example to countries everywhere. All that was never nearly as true as Americans wished it to be, but those strengths were, relative to much of the world, undeniable. The pandemic has exposed structural fissures in the United States. It has also underscored that a country whose central government is constrained not just by the three-branch structure of the federal government but also by substantial local and state autonomy is not particularly well suited to marshaling a forceful national effort that isn’t an actual war. But the tut-tutting and eye-rolling abroad about the anemic U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic (“The world is taking pity on us,” went the line in one prominent column and in many other since) is simply the next iteration of a process that has been unfolding for two decades. The first pillar of the American Century to be knocked aside was military. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 enjoyed considerable support internationally as a justified response to the Taliban’s sheltering of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. But the subsequent invasion of Iraq in March 2003 with a paucity of international support followed by a bungled occupation and years of guerrilla war against American troops evoked the Vietnam War. Initial misgivings were exponentially magnified by revelations of American-sanctioned torture in Iraq, at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, and at various sites around the world, in clear contravention of the Geneva Conventions that the United States had long defended. Add to that revelations of spying on domestic citizens in the name of national security and the war on terrorism, and many of the pieties of American strength crumbled. The United States emerged by 2008 from its Iraq imbroglio with its military still second to none in size and capacity but with its image severely undermined. The second pillar to crumble was economic. One of the central conceits of Luce’s American Century was that the unique virtues of the American economic system would act as a powerful rebuke of communism. And even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the flourishing American economy was a magnet for talent and innovation, with U.S. technology firms defining the first internet boom of the 1990s and then the next wave in the 2000s. Meanwhile, the Washington Consensus that coalesced in the 1980s about how to structure free markets was the blueprint for post-1989 reconstruction of Eastern Europe and Russia. It was also used as a loose framework by both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in their efforts to push countries around the world to drop trade barriers, end state-run businesses, and open up their capital accounts to global flows. While some countries, especially Russia, suffered mightily from this medicine, the sheer economic power of the United States left little alternative for most nations. China was the notable exception, and its size and the widespread perception that it would eventually move toward the U.S. model after joining the World Trade Organization allowed it to evolve along its own path. China’s economic success eroded American dominance, but it was the financial crisis of 2008-2009 that truly knocked away the economic pillar. For years, the question in investors’ minds had been: “When would the bad loans on the books of China’s state-owned banks lead to a crash in China?” It turned out that it wasn’t China’s banks that were the problem; it was banks in the United States. And they were a contagion that went global. The U.S.-led financial system survived, but the economic reputation of the United States—the prestige that Luce understood as a key element of its power—was devastated. The final pillar was democracy. For decades, the United States could boast that it was the oldest and most established democracy in the world, with a singular system for preserving individual freedoms and harnessing collective energies. It routinely nudged and sometimes coerced allies and adversaries to open up and democratize. That in no way precluded dealing with dictators, but the presumption was that democracy was the best bulwark against autocracy and the best path to affluence. The United States, whatever its flaws, got democracy about as right as anyone. It was never quite the “strongest democracy” according to those who measured such things: The Scandinavian countries led there. But it was undoubtedly the strongest of the large and dynamic democracies, which combined with its other two pillars created the American Century. Then Donald Trump was elected president. Already by 2016, American democracy was showing signs of strain. Public faith and participation in government had so declined as to put the system on notice. But the election of Trump severely eroded the ability of Americans to say either to themselves or to the world that their process was uniquely able to withstand the pressures of populism and nascent authoritarianism that Americans for decades had preached against. Arguably, Trump has done much less damage than his many critics aver, and that may indeed reflect a domestic system of checks and balances that makes it devilishly difficult for any one president to commit major abuses of power. But the strength of American democracy in the world was also as a symbol and a beacon, one that drew immigrants and talent because of the opportunities that the United States offered and nurtured. On that score, the Trump administration dramatically eroded the United States’ global standing. Yes, the image of the United States also suffered mightily in the 1970s, with the humiliation of Vietnam and the revelations of American anti-democratic policies in much of what was then known as the Third World. It is possible that had the economic revival of the 1980s not happened, the American Century would have ended then. It didn’t, but then came the pandemic. Much as Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai once famously said of the legacy of the French Revolution that it was too soon to make final judgments, it is premature to start ranking nations conclusively by how well they met a pandemic that is still raging. It is clear, however, that what may be American strengths in other contexts are in this moment a panoply of weaknesses: decentralized domestic governance, highly contested politics, and immense cultural variations across states and regions. All of those inoculate Americans against autocracy and government overreach but leave the country vulnerable to national crises that require a unified response. Coming in the midst of the Trump administration, the American pandemic response has utterly crushed the image of the United States as an ambassador for good governance and democracy—and with it, the last pillar of the American Century. Many in both the United States and throughout the world may believe that the end of the American Century is tragic, but the dawn of the Anti-American Century holds the promise of better times for the globe and the opportunity for Americans to finally confront their country’s structural problems. After all, unless one believes that the United States has a monopoly on the desire for peace, individual rights, and prosperity, 7.8 billion people and nearly 200 nations large and small are just as capable as Americans of acting in those collective interests. To believe otherwise is to hold that the only formula for international stability and prosperity is an endless continuation of the American Century. That inevitably leads to the question of China and its status as an emerging global power, especially as the United States retreats or is forced to. True, China defines rights differently than the United States, and many outside of China may not find that template an appealing one. But the Chinese template remains a Chinese one, propagated by a government that seems quite interested in keeping the global peace even while asserting its power. And whatever one thinks of China’s future, it remains true that you’d have to think that the United States is somehow a freakish and exceptional nation alone committed to peace and prosperity to believe firmly that the end of the American Century spells a backward step for humanity. As for the United State domestically, decades of global preeminence have not done Americans well at home in recent years. Standards of living have stagnated and not kept pace with those in numerous other countries. Racism persists. None of the countries that have excelled at education, health care, and standards of living are as large or complicated as the United States, but even by its own standards, the country has fallen short of what it once achieved. It spends massively on education, infrastructure, poverty alleviation, health care, and defense—but it does not manage to spend smartly. Yes, material life is better now for almost everyone than it was 50 years ago; people live longer, have more health care, eat better, are more educated, live in safer cities and towns, but that is true everywhere in the world. The United States cannot toot its own horn here. The simple fact is that success and strength—military, political, economic, and to that add cultural—are not birthrights. The United States doesn’t get to be great or powerful just because it used to be, although it certainly can help to have a head start. If the country was ever truly exceptional, it was exceptional because successive generations worked and fought and struggled to make it so, not because those generations patted themselves on the back. There have been acute moments of hubris and overreach during the decades of the American Century, but never has the disconnect between what the United States is and what Americans say it is been so profound. Out of this moment, therefore, is the promise not of American exceptionalism but American humility, a moment of recognition that, to move forward, the United States has to let go of the American Century, say goodbye to exceptionalism, and accept that it is a normal country like any other, just richer and with a massive military arsenal and multiple wells of strength and multiple areas of self-delusion. The end of the American Century offers the opportunity to look at where the country falls short and start fixing what is broken. Whether Americans will seize that opportunity, who knows. But this is not a tragedy; it is the beginning of something new.
9/19/21
Long Beach Round 5 v Christopher Columbus NG
Tournament: Long Beach | Round: 5 | Opponent: Christopher Columbus NG | Judge: Krause, Lukas 1AC Framework The standard should be preserving human life Epistemic modesty breaks any tie and answers all AC pre-empts. Bostrom 12 Nick Bostrom, Existential Risk Prevention as a Global Priority, 2012. NS These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential
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to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. Case Contention 1: Vaccine Inequality
We can test for it and we can treat it," Ghebreyesus said. 2. IP protections are the vital internal link to reduce vaccine inequality. Empirics disprove all pro patent arguments Kumar, PhD, 7-12-21 (Rajeesh, Associate Fellow Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, https://www.idsa.in/issuebrief/wto-trips-waiver-covid-vaccine-rkumar-120721) In October 2020, India and South Africa had submitted a proposal to the World
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not expedient in a public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. 3. Failure to contain COVID-19 causes extinction Guy R. McPherson, PhD, 20 PhD Range Science, Professor Emeritus, University of Arizona School of Natural Resources and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, “Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?” Eart and Envi Scie Res and Rev, Volume 3 Issue 2, 4-8-2020, https://opastonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/will-covid-19-trigger-extinction-of-all-life-on-earth-eesrr-20-.pdf Small lives matter. Indeed, the “human body contains about 100 trillion cells
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that a microscopic virus could pull the trigger on our extinction 15. Contention 2: US-China War
Continued COVID spread causes great power war and is the death knell of the LIO -diversion, nationalism, psychology Kitfield 20 (James, the only three-time winner of the prestigious Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/will-covid-19-kill-the-liberal-world-order/, 5-22) For a brief moment it seemed that the worst global pandemic in a century might
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dangerous period when cooler heads may not prevail among the great power leaders.” 2. Risk of U.S.-China nuclear escalation to total war is high – Chinese planners don’t believe nuclear weapons are usable and US decisionmakers are too confident in limited nuclear war. Fiona CUNNINGHAM Poli Sci @ GW AND Taylor FRAVEL Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ’19 “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation” International Security 44 (2) p. EBSCO Chinese views of nuclear escalation are key to assessing the potential for nuclear escalation in
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but it investigates only one of multiple pathways to nuclear escalation.11 3. The LIO is crucial to resolve a laundry list of existential threats- alternatives will magnify existing problems post transition war Deudney and Ikenberry, PhDs, 18 (Daniel, PoliSci@JohnsHopkins, G. John , InternationalAffairs@Princeton, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-06-14/liberal-world, 6-14) In many respects, today's liberal democratic malaise is a byproduct of the liberal world
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of renewed ideological rivalry could be good news for the liberal international order. Contention 3: WTO
all our ambassadors to the table to negotiate a text," she said. 2. The WTO dampens US-China great power conflict which is crucial to solve a laundry list of existential threats. Cooperation on global vaccine distribution is a vital test case Shaffer, JD Stanford, 21 (Gregory Shaffer is Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the forthcoming book, “Emerging Powers in the World Trading System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law.” https://thehill.com/opinion/international/559049-the-us-must-engage-with-china-even-when-countering-china, 6-21) A policy statement heard around the world is that U.S. engagement with
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outcomes, such as to provide vaccines globally and to develop green technologies. 3. The WTO reduces war through peace dividends, interdependence, and rule of law Baldwin, PhD, and Nakotomi 15 (Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Michitaka, Consulting Fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) and a Special Adviser to the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO). https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/policy_insights/PolicyInsight84.pdf, July) The WTO, and the GATT before it, has been one the planet’s precious
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only – example of a multilateral and nearuniversal framework of rules and law. 4. The WTO is crucial to make global trade equitable and reduce poverty. A collapse in the WTO is a collapse in the bargaining power of poorer countries Narlikar, PhD, 18 (AMRITA NARLIKAR is President of the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies and a professor at the University of Hamburg. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2018-03-05/trade-war-poor, 3-5) Recurrent deadlocks have plagued the Doha negotiations since their launch in 2001, damaging the
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all, but particularly the poorest in developed and rising powers. . Plan: Member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines for COVID-19 Contention 4: Solvency
up by blocking competitors and raising prices pushes in the completely wrong direction. 2. Removing IP protections will increase production, diversify supply, and spur innovations that protect against future pandemics Human Rights Watch 6-3-21 https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/03/seven-reasons-eu-wrong-oppose-trips-waiver# Intellectual property is currently a barrier to swiftly scaling up and diversifying the production of
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and safety for vaccines, which have a very stringent process for approval. 1AR Case AT: Definition We meet – Reduce includes elimination US Code, 09 (26 CFR 54.4980F-1, lexis)
§ 54.4980F-1 Notice requirements for certain pension plan amendments significantly reducing the rate of future benefit accrual. (c) Elimination or cessation of benefits. For purposes of this section, the terms reduce or reduction include eliminate or cease or elimination or cessation. and Federal Register, 10 (26 CFR 1.411(d)-3, Current as of 5/19/10, lexis)
(7) Eliminate; elimination; reduce; reduction. The terms eliminate or elimination when used in connection with a section 411(d)(6)(B) 26 USCS § 411(d)(6)(B) protected benefit mean to eliminate or the elimination of an optional form of benefit or an early retirement benefit and to reduce or a reduction in a retirement-type subsidy. The terms reduce or reduction when used in connection with a retirement-type subsidy mean to reduce or a reduction in the amount of the subsidy. For purposes of this section, an elimination includes a reduction and a reduction includes an elimination. Off-Case AT: CP Perm do both. Their counterplan is plan+ - nothing in their counterplan is mutually exclusive with the aff, and the only competition they have is with the def. Aff won def through cx and 1AR and thus CP is permable. Answers all neg objections to aff case.