Impacts - Heg Good - Michigan 7 2023 BEJJP

Heg Good
Sustainability
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2AC---General
US heg sustainable – international bids fail
Stephen M. Walt 2023- columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, Foreign Policy, “Stop Worrying About Chinese Hegemony in Asia”, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/31/stop-worrying-about-chinese-hegemony-in-asia/ //nvb
Why Regional Hegemony Is (Nearly) Impossible to Achieve
Regional hegemony may be desirable in theory, but history suggests that it is an elusive goal. As Jonathan Kirshner points out, several different great powers have launched bids for regional dominance in the modern era and all but one of these attempts ended in disaster. France failed under Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte, Germany was beaten decisively in both world wars, and Japan’s attempt to establish a hegemonic order in Asia ended in total defeat as well. Only the United States managed to pull off becoming the sole great power in its region. In the modern world, in short, the success rate is less than 20 percent.
Furthermore, the failures were not just minor setbacks: They were unmitigated disasters for the countries that made the attempt. Perhaps a million Frenchmen lost their lives in the Napoleonic Wars, and Bonaparte died in exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic. Germany suffered mightily in both world wars and ended up divided into separate states for more than 40 years. Japan was firebombed in World War II, had two cities destroyed by atomic bombs, and its political order was remade by a foreign occupier. Being a regional hegemon might be desirable, but trying to become one almost always makes a state less, rather than more, secure.
Bids for hegemony fail for two main reasons. First, as defensive realists have long emphasized, there is a powerful tendency for major powers to balance against threats. When a powerful state is nearby, when its military forces seem tailored to project power against others, and when it seems to have revisionist ambitions, nearby powers typically band together to deter or defeat them. If a would-be hegemon reveals its aims by starting a war, balancing behavior becomes even more pronounced and effective.
The second barrier to regional hegemony is nationalism. As Napoleon discovered when he invaded Spain, as the Soviet Union and United States both learned in Afghanistan, and as Moscow is now being reminded in Ukraine, local populations will make enormous sacrifices to repel invaders. Even nations that have been temporarily vanquished often remain restive and eager to throw off an aspiring hegemon’s yoke. The dissolution of the European colonial empires during the 20th century further illustrates how the spread of nationalist doctrines has strengthened resistance to foreign dominance.
The US is here to stay---even if there’s some decline, structural advantages mean it will return to its unipolar status.
--at: multipolarity
--at: stagnation
Richard E. Caroll 21, retired economist who has been published in Real Clear Defense, International Policy Digest, and Foreign Policy News, 5/26/21, “Why the United States Is the Once and Future Unipolar Superpower”, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-united-states-once-and-future-unipolar-superpower-186156, vw
The famous Iron Chancellor of Germany, Otto Von Bismarck, once said of the United States, “God protects fools, drunkards and the United States of America.” While said perhaps in jest or frustration, his remarks have proved prophetic throughout the years.
The United States from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the beginning of the Iraq War, enjoyed a moment of unipolarity in international affairs. For the first time in recorded human history, one country occupied the high ground of international affairs by itself.
When the United States became involved in the Iraq War, which soon became a quagmire, its two closest competitors on the world stage, China and Russia, began to extend their influence in world affairs at the expense of the United States. However, when one looks at the entirety of the world situation, unless there is a dramatic change in the internal affairs of the United States, the United States has a good chance of regaining its unipolarity in world affairs.
The Fundamentals of American Power
Part of the reason for the apparent durability of the ability of the United States to maintain its great power status is its geographical location. With an ocean on both coasts, friendly nations to its north and south, and a climate that provides some of the best farmland in the world, coupled with navigable rivers which provides ease of transportation of goods and services from its heartland, the United States is blessed with natural advantages. In addition, the United States is energy independent thanks to the development of oil fracking.
An additional reason for U.S. staying power is the enduring legacy of the U.S. Constitution, which so far has provided for a stable transfer of political power between various political antagonists, notwithstanding the riot and possible attempt at insurrection on January 6, 2021. With its history of stable courts and a friendly business environment, the United States has been an oasis of stability in the world so far.
Combined with the physical and non-physical advantages discussed above, U.S. demographics provide an internal manufacturing and consumer market advantage that no other nation has. While it is true that the annual growth rate of the American population is approaching stagnation levels, it can be argued that the previous Trump administration depressed demographic growth by severely limiting immigration. Coupled with the Covid-19 pandemic, the growth rate for the American population is anemic. Current estimates of demographic growth range from between 376 million to 404 million people by 2060. This would still make the United States a manufacturing and consumer market.
And while the United States did achieve a moment of unipolarity from the end of the Cold War to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it still has the potential to return to unipolarity based not only on its advantages, but also with the poor governance and negative demographic growth of its nearest competitors—Russia and China.
The People’s Republic of China
It is a popular bit of wisdom that China is the up-and-coming superpower and that the United States is a nation in decline. While it is a popular saying, a cold and sober examination of the facts about China, the economic challenges that China faces, China’s lack of natural resources, as well as the aging demographics of China, casts a sobering picture for the future of the People’s Republic of China.
While many people rave about China’s economic growth, and businesses’ prostitute themselves to try and tap China’s internal market, very few pay attention to the massive amount of debt that is an impending disaster for the Chinese economy, and the danger that such a collapse could cause.
Estimates of Chinese debt are to the order of $28 trillion. China’s debt to GDP ratio is 282 percent of GDP. It is thought that due to shadow lending, the percentage of debt may be even higher.
Geopolitician Peter Zeihan compares and contrasts the idea of money between the United States and China. In the United States, money is regarded as an economic good. In China, money is regarded as a political good. In the United States, money has value in and of itself. In China, money is a political good, and only has value if it can be used to achieve a political goal. The concepts of rate of return or profit margins do not exist in China, and therein lies the danger; eventually the law of supply and demand will win out, and the Chinese economy will have to face a correction, and the longer it takes to face this economic correction, the greater damage that the inevitable correction will cause to the Chinese economy.
China’s inability of China to feed itself is an even starker problem. Partly to address this issue, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping has launched a Clean Plate Campaign in China. In 2019, the National Bureau of Statistics reported that food prices increased by 11.2 percent. Pork prices, a staple in the Chinese diet, rose some 85 percent. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that domestic supplies of rice, wheat, and corn will fall short of demand by 25 million tons in 2025. Partly in response to its food crisis, China has dispatched fishing fleets all over the world. China has become a fishing superpower. From Ecuador and Ghana to the waters off of North Korea, Chinese fishing vessels prowl the world’s oceans harvesting fish in numbers so huge as to threaten the sustainability of certain fish species.
Another serious issue facing China is the decline of its population. Currently, there are 1.4 billion people in China. The population in China declined for the first time in 2020. According to The Lancet, the Chinese population will drop to 732 million people by 2100. This is coupled with the fact that the majority of the Chinese population will be middle-aged or elderly.
China is also the largest net importer of oil in the world. In 2020, China imported 542.37 million tons of oil. The vast majority of this oil is transported over the ocean, and the ships carrying the oil must run a gauntlet of not only the Indian Ocean but the first island chain as well in order to reach China. In the event of a conflict, China could be strangled economically by denying the use of the sea route to China by any foreign power.
When these factors are considered, China’s claim to great power status has to be questioned, if not denied.
Russia
If China is a paper dragon, Russia is a paper bear. If China’s claim to great power status is tenuous at best, Russia’s claim rests solely on its vast, but aging, nuclear arsenal. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia has declined in almost every respect of great power status, though it maintains a hold on being a regional power.
Russia’s GDP for 2020 was $1.47 trillion. Russia’s economy is currently ranked at the eleventh spot in the top world economies. While an impressive figure for a nation with slightly under 146 million people, contrasted to the U.S. GDP for 2020 of $20.93 trillion, it is lacking in great power status.
Russian demographics trends, like those for China, are on a downward trend. A Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 2.1 represents the Replacement Level Fertility, or the average number of children per woman needed for each generation to replace itself. The TFR for Russia is 1.8. According to a United Nations report, the Russian population is projected to fall to 83.7 million by 2100.
Alcoholism and drug abuse are rampant in Russia, with the latter becoming much more common recently. It is estimated that there are over 2.2 million practicing alcoholics and 4 to 6 million regular drug addicts in Russia. This is a deep-rooted problem among the Russian people, suggesting despair and lack of hope among Russians.
While Russia is blessed with vast amounts of mineral and natural resources—including iron ore, manganese, chromium, nickel, platinum, copper, tin, lead, tungsten, diamonds, phosphates, and gold—only the fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, and coal are the ones that bring in hard currency. Russia’s inability to prosper despite having vast amounts of wealth is a problem that has bedeviled Russia since the Mongol invasion in 1240 AD.
With these issues facing the two nearest U.S. competitors, and the absence of any other world power to assume unipolarity, it is probable that the United States will eventually resume its status as a unipolar power, barring some sort of internal collapse of the United States.
Heg isn’t going anywhere---their ev doesn’t assume international demand for American influence.
G. John Ikenberry 22, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University, 11/1/22, “Why American Power Endures”, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-american-power-endures-us-led-order-isnt-in-decline-g-john-ikenberry#author-info, vw
For over a century, people around the world have lived through an American era: a period dominated by U.S. power, wealth, institutions, ideas, alliances, and partnerships. But many now believe this long epoch is drawing to a close. The U.S.-led world, they insist, is giving way to something new—a post-American, post-Western, postliberal order marked by great-power competition and the economic and geopolitical ascendance of China.
Some greet this prospect with joy, others with sorrow. But the story­line is the same. The United States is slowly losing its commanding position in the global distribution of power. The East now rivals the West in economic might and geopolitical heft, and countries in the global South are growing quickly and taking a larger role on the international stage. As others shine, the United States has lost its luster. Divided and beleaguered, melancholy Americans suspect that the country’s best days are behind it. Liberal societies everywhere are struggling. Nationalism and populism undercut the internationalism that once backed the United States’ global leadership. Sensing blood in the water, China and Russia have rushed forward to aggressively challenge U.S. hegemony, liberalism, and democracy. In February 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint declaration of principles for a “new era” when the United States does not lead the world: a shot across the bow of a sinking American ship.
But in truth, the United States is not foundering. The stark narrative of decline ignores deeper world-historical influences and circumstances that will continue to make the United States the dominant presence and organizer of world politics in the twenty-first century. To be sure, no one knows the future, and no one owns it. The coming world order will be shaped by complex, shifting, and difficult-to-grasp political forces and by choices made by people living in all parts of the world. Nonetheless, the deep sources of American power and influence in the world persist. Indeed, with the rise of the brazen illiberalism of China and Russia, these distinctive traits and capacities have come more clearly into view.
The mistake made by prophets of American decline is to see the United States and its liberal order as just another empire on the wane. The wheel of history turns, empires come and go—and now, they suggest, it is time for the United States to fade into senescence. Yes, the United States has at times resembled an old-style empire. But its role in the world rests on much more than its past imperial behavior; U.S. power draws not only on brute strength but also on ideas, institutions, and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity. The global order the United States has built since the end of World War II is best seen not as an empire but as a world system, a sprawling multifaceted political formation, rich in vicissitudes, that creates opportunity for people across the planet.
This world system whirred into action most recently in the global reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The struggle between the United States and its rivals China and Russia is a contest between two alternative logics of world order. The United States defends an international order it has led for three-quarters of a century—one that is open, multilateral, and anchored in security pacts and partnerships with other liberal democracies. China and Russia seek an international order that dethrones Western liberal values—one that is more hospitable to regional blocs, spheres of influence, and autocracy. The United States upholds an international order that protects and advances the interests of liberal democracy. China and Russia, each in its own way, hope to build an international order that protects authoritarian rule from the threatening forces of liberal modernity. The United States offers the world a vision of a postimperial global system. The current leaders of Russia and China increasingly craft foreign policies rooted in imperial nostalgia.
This struggle between liberal and illiberal world orders is an echo of the great contests of the twentieth century. In key earlier moments—after the conclusions of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—the United States advanced a progressive agenda for world order. Its success rested somewhat on the blunt fact of American power, the country’s unrivaled economic, technological, and military capacities. The United States will remain at the center of the world system in part because of these material capabilities and its role as a pivot in the global balance of power. But the United States continues to matter for another reason: the appeal of its ideas, institutions, and capacities for building partnerships and alliances makes it an indispensable force in the years ahead. This has always been, and can remain, the secret of its power and influence.
The United States, despite repeated announcements of its demise as a world leader, has not truly declined. It has built a distinctive type of order in which it plays an integral role. And in the face of threatening illiberal rivals, that order remains widely in demand. The reason the United States does not decline is because large constituencies within the existing order have a stake in the United States remaining active and involved in maintaining that order. Even if U.S. material power diminishes relative to, say, China’s growing capabilities, the order the United States has built continues to reinforce its power and leadership. Power can create order, but the order over which Washington presides can also buttress American power.
Like an onion, the United States’ liberal internationalist order has several layers. At the outer layer are its liberal internationalist ideas and projects, through which the United States has provided the world a “third way” between the anarchy of states furiously competing with each other and the overweening hierarchy of imperial systems—an arrangement that has delivered more gains for more people than any prior alternative. Beneath the surface, the United States has benefited from its geography and its unique trajectory of political development. It stands oceans apart from the other great powers, its landmass faces both Asia and Europe, and it accrues influence by playing a unique role as a global power balancer. Adding to this, the United States has had critical opportunities following major conflicts in the twentieth century to build coalitions of like-minded states that shape and entrench global rules and institutions. As the current crisis in Ukraine shows, this ability to mobilize coalitions of democracies remains one of the United States’ essential assets. Beneath the realm of government and diplomacy, the United States’ domestic civil society—enriched by its multiracial and multicultural immigrant base—connects the country to the world in networks of influence unavailable to China, Russia, and other powers. Finally, at the core, one of the United States’ greatest strengths is its capacity to fail; as a liberal society, it can acknowledge its vulnerabilities and errors and seek to improve, a distinct advantage over its illiberal rivals in confronting crises and setbacks.
No other state has enjoyed such a comprehensive set of advantages in dealing with other countries. This is the reason that the United States has had such staying power for so long, despite periodic failures and disappointments. In today’s contest over world order, the United States should draw upon these advantages and its long history of building liberal order to again offer the world a global vision of an open and rules-based system in which people can work freely together to advance the human condition.
2AC – UQ – Swinland
The ascensi

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