The affirmative’s discourse of threats to hegemony locks-in insufferable violence that prevents any true interrogation of actual American intentions --- The 1AC’s securitization and narrative justifies the worst forms of oppression and violence

Liberal internationalists like Ignatieff, John Ikenberry, and AnneMarie Slaughter – self-identified adherents to a school of thought that claims historical origins in the international vision of Woodrow Wilson and who came to prominence following Obama’s election in 2008 – believe that the strength of their approach lies in its unique combination of abstract, liberal principles and practical, foreign policy sensibilities, what Ignatieff describes as a fusion of the “view from nowhere” with the “view from somewhere.”28 The confidence expressed by liberal internationalists that they speak more directly and realistically to global politics than do liberal theorists and global justice scholars no doubt emerges, in part, from the fact that these thinkers are often public intellectuals who straddle the worlds of academia, popular media, and the “foreign policy establishment.” Whatever their origins, the “realist” impulses of the liberal internationalists lead them to explicitly embrace – in a way that most global justice scholars do not – the permanent necessity of American military, political, and economic domination; an ideal of international order that Ikenberry describes as “liberal hegemony.”29 At base, these thinkers understand themselves as balancing between the soft realm of “professional ethicists” and the hard zone of “realist” policy-making.

Thus, while both liberal internationalists and most global justice scholars dismiss the impact of imperialism on contemporary politics, they frame that dismissal differently. In contrast to many global justice scholars, liberal internationalists usually admit that most of the existing international norms, traditions, and institutions associated with the current global order are the product of former imperial relations and the triumph of Western powers after World Wars I and II. At the same time, they insist that these norms were never, in Ignatieff’s words, “imposed from the top down by an international elite.”30 Rather, as Ikenberry puts it, after 1945, “other countries, particularly in Western Europe and later in East Asia, handed the reins of power to Washington just as Hobbes’ individuals in the state of nature first construct and then hand over power to the Leviathan.”31 In an odd torqueing of the global justice argument that history has no bearing on the constructions of ideal moral solutions to the problems of the contemporary world, liberal internationalists acknowledge the imperial and coercive origins of today’s American-led order but insist that this order is liberal nonetheless and, even when it isn’t, it is the best we can get. Moreover, their intense belief in “the idea” of America as the indispensable nation without whom “nothing gets done” compels liberal internationalists to obsessively fixate on maintaining the status quo of American power because they are convinced that this power is always the only thing standing between stability and utter chaos.32

Liberal internationalists thus share with Blake (and much global justice scholarship) both a fascination with international crises that threaten American hegemony and a fixation on the need to address these crises as quickly as possible (with no reference to history) in order to shore up global peace and security. Ignatieff’s response to the crisis in Syria is particularly illustrative of this fascination/fixation. Co-author of the R2P doctrine, Ignatieff has always insisted that the United States and Canada ought to intervene militarily in Syria for humanitarian reasons.33 By the summer of 2014, however, Ignatieff’s rhetorical urging had shifted from mild fear to the kind of full-on panic that he experienced just before the war with Iraq in 2003 when he insisted that our “contemporary situation in global politics has no precedent since the age of the later Roman emperors.”34 For Ignatieff, this was a “new world” in which, “the proclamation of a terrorist caliphate in the borderlands of Syria and Iraq” indicated that “the dissolution of the state order created by Mr. Sykes and Monsieur Picot in their treaty of 1916 is proceeding to a fiery denouement.”35

The Sykes–Picot Agreement was, of course, a secret treaty brokered by Britain and France during World War I in which these two imperial powers divided up the former Ottoman territory of the Middle East between themselves after having promised independence to the Arabs who fought with them against the Axis powers. Sykes–Picot, and eventually the Mandated territories that resulted from it, transformed this corner of the Ottoman empire into one of most volatile regions of the world through the creation of new borders, the installation of puppet leaders, the rampant extraction of oil, the violent repression of civilian populations – sometimes, as with the British Mandate in Iraq, through the use of chemical weapons – and the promotion of religious and ethnic distinctions and hierarchies that remain to this day. The states it created were never stable and were often purposely destabilized by France, Britain, and the United States throughout the coming century.36 The order it secured served no one’s purpose aside from those global world powers intent on oil extraction and the anti-democratic leaders they supported, and the kind of Arab Nationalism it engendered was often state-centered and militaristic. Ignatieff’s conviction that this “order” was preferable to anything else speaks volumes. His is an international vision rooted in a reactive attachment to an American-led status quo that is imperial in all but name, that is always the only thing standing between stability and chaos, and that must be protected through urgent intervention in the sovereign politics of putatively nonliberal states.

This presentist fixation with preserving order because the alternative to American hegemony is always worse stops inquiry in its tracts and demands action, action that, in Said’s words, usually entails “more destruction and death for distant civilizations.”37 There is never time in a disordered world on the brink of catastrophe to reflect on the nature of Sykes–Picot, to stop and think seriously about the history of power lurking behind the looming crisis. Rather, in the minds of liberal internationalists, America is both the hegemonic power that sews together the strands of liberal civilization in a disordered world and perennially in peril.38 This temporally compressed vision reduces the aspirations of all the people in a region as fraught with recent imperial history as the Middle East to a feedback loop of order versus disorder that inadvertently strips democratic protestors, rebel fighters, stateless civilians, children, ethnic minorities, soldiers, and refugees alike of historical context and lived experience. By this logic, if the end of American hegemony signifies the end of the world, any narrative that calls the good intentions of that hegemon into question – whether that narrative issues from anticolonial theorists, “hostile revisionist powers,” or Donald Trump himself – becomes complicit in a project that can only end in Armageddon.39