Impacts - LIO Good - Michigan 7 2023 CFMP

LIO Good
1AC/2AC – Impact
Only a US lead international order can prevent great power war.
Dowd '23 - senior fellow with the Sagamore Institute, where he leads the Center for America’s Purpose [Alan; 1/12/23; "Defending the Liberal International Order;" https://providencemag.com/2023/01/defending-the-liberal-international-order/]
As to the benefits side of the ledger, consider this comparison: In the 76 years before World War II—before the liberal international order took hold—America’s per-capita GDP increased by 136 percent. In the 76 years between the end of World War II and 2021—under the liberal international order—America’s per-capita GDP increased by 320 percent.
This increase in economic prosperity didn’t happen magically, organically or accidentally. It was the byproduct of the institutions, systems and guardrails of the liberal international order—and especially the stability and security represented by civilization’s first responder and last line of defense: the United States.
Consider U.S. defense expenditures earmarked for Europe. The International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that over 5.1 percent of the U.S. defense budget (equaling $40 billion in FY2022) is devoted to European security. Again, that seems like a huge sum of money, but $40 billion represents just 0.17 percent of U.S. GDP. In exchange for that $40-billion investment, Americans get an outer ring of security, the ability to project power, sources of material and diplomatic support for U.S. leadership, a Europe not at war with itself, and a Europe reinforced against invasion (and an Indo-Pacific reinforced against invasion, thanks to similar investments in that region). In addition, age-old foes have the confidence to collaborate under the U.S. alliance umbrella, and nations that once were constant sources of conflict are now exporters of security. All of this militates against another great-power war that would cost Americans far more than $40 billion, far more than $857 billion.
If those benefits aren’t direct enough for those who shrug at the liberal international order, consider the vast trade and economic benefits that flow from these upfront investments in security: U.S. trade (in goods) with EU and NATO allies tops $1.56 trillion annually, with Japan, Korea, Australia, Taiwan and the Philippines $513 billion annually.
The “myth is that our allies are making us poor by free-riding on our military expenditures,” the late Gen. William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, observed. “How are we to explain that the United States has gotten richer than its allies? Proponents of this argument cannot explain why. They fail to realize that our military alliances, by lowering transaction costs, have facilitated the vast increases in international trade from which the United States profits enormously. Our military costs should be seen as investments that pay us back.”
These investments in the liberal international order—a military capable of deterring war and ensuring open seas and open skies, a network of alliances serving as an outer ring of our security, a community of liberal democracies promoting peace, prosperity and ordered liberty—reflect America’s ideals and promote America’s interests. An international order led by Beijing, Moscow and other tyrant regimes will do the opposite.
2AC – Retrenchment Bad
The alternative to American leadership is proliferation and war.
Colby ’21 [Elbridge A; The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict; Yale University Press; pp. 279-281]
If the American people do not want to make the effort needed for an effective defense of their allies, they have two options: they can accept Chinese regional hegemony or tolerate (or even encourage) some proliferation of nuclear weapons to US allies and partners. I outlined the demerits of the first earlier.
Some of the demerits of the second are well known. A world in which more states have nuclear weapons is probably a considerably more dangerous one. Although some prominent scholars have argued that general nuclear proliferation would produce a more stable world, this idea has had little purchase outside the academy.54 A world in which many states have nuclear weapons might contribute to deterrence among them, but it would also contain more, and more complex, relationships among nuclear weapons states, more opportunities for accident or error, and more drivers for cataclysm. Whereas general proliferation might promote some level of stability, then, it would come at an extraordinarily high level of risk.
And widespread proliferation might not prove as stabilizing as these scholars have suggested, because it might not be quite as potent a deterrent as its advocates think. It is true that nuclear weapons introduce a fundamentally different level of caution for any prospective attacker, but they do not wholly suspend the rules of logic and reason. States that have nuclear weapons facing a nuclear-armed opponent know that the surest way to invite the most devastating nuclear blow is to launch a nuclear attack. They have the most powerful reasons to avoid such an outcome, even when their territorial integrity is at stake. In other words, even a state at risk of invasion has the strongest incentives to avoid a nuclear reprisal; occupation or even conquest, especially if partial, may be preferable to destruction. This is especially so when a small state faces a large one, such as China, that has a larger and more sophisticated arsenal and likely significant missile defense capabilities.55 This dynamic is only more pronounced when what is at stake is the partial loss of territory or autonomy; nuclear war may be a tenable option when the alternative is total devastation or enslavement, but less so when it means the loss of a few provinces or submission to hegemony.56 Nuclear weapons are not, therefore, a panacea. Their proliferation would complicate and hamper China’s ability to establish hegemony over the Indo-Pacific but would not necessarily defeat it.
That said, selective nuclear proliferation might, rather than supplant the antihegemonic coalition’s defense, strengthen it, in particular by making the binding strategy more effective. This could be especially relevant if China were able to attain commanding conventional military superiority over the coalition or important parts of it. In such an eventuality, a binding strategy confined to conventional forces might not suffice, since China might be able to overcome even a consolidated coalition conventional defense and pick apart its members.
Coalition members might then turn to the United States to compensate for this conventional military inferiority with the threat of first use of its nuclear forces. Because China would have immense ability to respond to US fi rst use with nuclear reprisals against the United States itself, however, Americans would have the most powerful reasons for restraint. China might reckon that it could induce US nuclear restraint while salami-slicing away Washington’s Asian allies and partners.
Selective nuclear proliferation to such states as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and even Taiwan might help bridge the gap between regional conventional defeat and US willingness to employ its nuclear forces, especially at scale. In this world, Chinese victory in a conventional war against the United States and its allies might transgress the interests of one of these nuclear-armed regional allies enough to prompt its nuclear use against China to defend its territory. That would likely trigger a Chinese response, including against US forces fighting alongside those of the embattled ally, which in turn would be more likely to catalyze American nuclear use to prevent the full collapse of its allies’ position. Such a posture would likely make the anti-hegemonic coalition’s deterrent posture more formidable. Indeed, selective nuclear proliferation of this sort to the United Kingdom and France is judged by many to have contributed to NATO’s deterrent posture during the Cold War, when the Soviets enjoyed conventional superiority in Europe. This is, in fact, NATO’s official stance.57
Nonetheless, the perils of proliferation make this option a last resort. Far preferable is an effective conventional defense backed by, but not primarily reliant on, the nuclear forces of the United States. That standard will be hard and costly to attain, and it will require sustained focus and discipline—but the alternatives are worse.
Breaks the nuclear firewall.
Schlosser ’23 [Eric; 1/18/23’ THE GREATEST NUCLEAR THREAT WE FACE IS A RUSSIAN VICTORY; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/russias-invasion-ukraine-war-nuclear-weapon-nato/672727/]
Japan has tons of bomb-grade plutonium, left over from its atomic-energy program, and could build a small nuclear arsenal within a year. South Korea could do the same in perhaps two years, and on January 11, its president raised the possibility that his country might need to “possess its own nukes.” Japan and South Korea now face nuclear threats from North Korea and China. More than 70 percent of South Koreans think their country should obtain nuclear weapons, and Japan has decided to double the size of its military budget. Taiwan could have its own nuclear weapons within a few years of deciding to build them. Saudi Arabia could also obtain them quickly. At a conference in Abu Dhabi this December, the Saudi foreign minister made clear that “if Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon, all bets are off.” And if Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Turkey, Egypt, and Algeria might build them soon too.
On a number of occasions during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came perilously close to a nuclear conflict that neither side wanted—a conflict that could have killed hundreds of millions of people. It is remarkable that no city has been destroyed by an atomic blast since Nagasaki in 1945. The spread of nuclear weapons to more countries, amid today’s rising nationalism and bitter ethnic hatreds, would no doubt increase the likelihood of mushroom clouds rising over the rubble of cities.
2AC – Hamid (Not necessary if you read a tech leadership turn)
Liberal democracy is better than any alternative, which cedes Europe to Putin.
Hamid '22 - Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and assistant research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary [Shadi, 3/6/22, "There Are Many Things Worse Than American Power," https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-kremlin-imperialism-ukraine-american-power/624180/]
If there was any doubt before, the answer is now clear. Vladimir Putin is showing that a world without American power—or, for that matter, Western power—is not a better world.
For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the world America had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Middle East more broadly, and for much longer, the United States had built a security architecture around some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For those on the left, this was nothing new, and it was all too obvious. I spent my college years reading Noam Chomsky and other leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy, and they weren’t entirely wrong. On balance, the U.S. may have been a force for good, but in particular regions and at particular times, it had been anything but.
Blaming America first became all too easy. After September 11, U.S. power was as overwhelming as it was uncontested. That it was squandered on two endless wars made it convenient to focus on America’s sins, while underplaying Russia’s and China’s growing ambitions.
For his part, Putin understood well that the balance of power was shifting. Knowing what he knew, the Russian president wasn’t necessarily “irrational” in deciding to invade Ukraine. He had good reason to think that he could get away with it. After all, he had gotten away with quite a lot for nearly 15 years, ever since the Russian war against Georgia in 2008, when George W. Bush was still president. Then he annexed Crimea in 2014 and intervened brutally in Syria in 2015. Each time, in an understandable desire to avoid an escalatory spiral with Russia, the United States held back and tried not to do anything that might provoke Putin. Meanwhile, Europe became more and more dependent on Russian energy; Germany, for example, was importing 55 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Just three weeks ago, it was possible for Der Spiegel to declare that most Germans thought “peace with Russia is the only thing that matters.”
The narrative of a feckless and divided West solidified for years. We, as Americans, were feeling unsure of ourselves, so it was only reasonable that Putin would feel it too. In such a context, and after four years of Donald Trump and the domestic turmoil that he wrought, it was tempting to valorize “restraint” and limited engagements abroad. Worried about imperial overreach, most of the American left opposed direct U.S. military action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the early 2010s, even though it was Russian and Iranian intervention on behalf of Syria’s dictator that bore the marks of a real imperial enterprise, not just an imagined one.
Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, in Europe no less, has put matters back in their proper framing. The question of whether the United States is a uniquely malevolent force in global politics has been resolved. In the span of a few days, skeptics of American power have gotten a taste of what a world where America grows weak and Russia grows strong looks like. Of course, there are still holdouts who insist on seeing the United States as the provocateur. In its only public statement on Ukraine, the Democratic Socialists of America condemned Russia’s invasion but also called for “the U.S. to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” This is an odd statement considering that Russia, rather than the United States, has been the world’s most unabashedly imperialist force for the past three decades. But many on the anti-imperialist left aren’t really anti-imperialist; they just have an instinctive aversion to American power.
America’s low opinion of its own capacity for good—and the resulting desire to retreat or disengage—hasn’t just been a preoccupation of the far left. The crisis of confidence has been pervasive, spreading to the halls of power and even President Barack Obama, whose memorable mantra was “Don’t do stupid shit.” Instead of thinking about what we could do, or what we could do better, Obama was more interested in a self-limiting principle. For their part, European powers—content to bask under their U.S. security umbrella—could afford to believe in fantasies of perpetual peace. Europe’s gentleness and lethargy—coaxing Germany to commit even 2 percent of its GDP to defense seemed impossible—became something of a joke. One popular Twitter account, @ISEUConcerned, devoted itself to mocking the European Union’s propensity to express “concern,” but do little else, whenever something bad happened.
Suddenly, the EU has been aroused from its slumber, and the parody account was rendered temporarily speechless. This is no longer tepid concern, but righteous fury. Member states announced that they would send anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. Germany, for the first time, said that it would ramp up its military budget to 100 billion euros. On the economic front, the EU announced some of the toughest sanctions in history. My podcast co-host, Damir Marusic, an Atlantic Council senior fellow, likened it to a “holy war,” European-style.
Sometimes, unusual and extreme events mark the separation between old and new ways of thinking and being. This week, the Berlin-based journalist Elizabeth Zerofsky remarked that the current moment reminded her of the memoir The World of Yesterday, written by the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig as World War II loomed. In it, he recalls the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with an almost naive fondness. On the first day of the Ukraine invasion, I happened to be speaking to a group of college students who had no memory of September 11. I told them that they may be living in history. Those students, like all of us, are bearing witness to one of those rare events that recast how individuals and nations alike view the world they inhabit.
The coming weeks, months, and years are likely to be as fascinating as they are terrifying. In a sense, we knew that a great confrontation was coming, even if we hadn’t quite envisioned its precise contours. At the start of his presidency, Joe Biden declared that the battle between democracies and autocracies would be the defining struggle of our time. This was grandiose rhetoric, but was it more than that? What does it actually mean to fight such a battle?
In any number of ways, Russia’s aggression has underscored why Biden was right and why authoritarians—and the authoritarian idea itself—are such a threat to peace and stability. Russia invaded Ukraine, a democracy, because of the recklessness and domination of one man, Vladimir Putin. The countries that have rallied most enthusiastically behind Ukraine have almost uniformly been democracies, chief among them the United States. America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but the notion of any moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia has been rendered laughable. And if there is such a thing as a better world, then anti-imperialists may find themselves in the odd position of hoping and praying for the health and longevity of not just the West but of Western power.
2AC/1AR – Terrorism
Only a strong LIO can prevent CBW and nuclear terror.
Meier and Vieluf '21 [Oliver, Senior researcher at the Berlin office of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, and Maren; "Upsetting the nuclear order: how the rise of nationalist populism increases nuclear dangers;" The Nonproliferation Review Volume 28, 2021 - Issue 1-3; pp 13-35]
At the global level, it is difficult to counteract nationalist populists’ influence. Multilateral regimes may be able to withstand temporary problems caused by individual noncompliant states. Some may hope that populism will simply wither away and that they can wait the populists out. But, as argued above, the underlying assumption that populism is a passing phenomenon is questionable.
The Alliance for Multilateralism, which is an “informal network of countries united in their conviction that a rules-based multilateral order is the only reliable guarantee for international stability and peace and that our common challenges can only be solved through cooperation,”Footnote111 can be understood as a way to balance and constrain the destructive policies of nationalist populists at the global level. Yet it is not clear what shared interests, apart from opposing nationalist populism, these multilateralists have.
In the meantime, multilateralists attempt to maintain ties by cooperating with the populists on issues that are deemed noncontentious. In the nuclear area, this relates, for example, to nuclear security and the prevention of terrorist attacks with chemical, biological, nuclear, or radiological weapons through better preparedness and improved resilience.
The challenge is complex. It arises from within the multilateral system but has been created by the anti-multilateralist positions of the nationalist-populist leaders of great powers. If these countries are permanent members of the UN Security Council, the problem is even more difficult to tackle.
The rise of nationalist populism is taking place in the context of an erosion of democracy, a rise of authoritarianism, and the proclaimed

Preview shortened. Download the file for the full document.