1NC

Off Case

Off
The affirmative is symptomatic of Vietnam Syndrome: a demand for military
drawdown premised on a fear of forward deployment the plan enables a form of
anti-war militarism which causes endless intervention and mass suffering
Buchanan 5
Ian Buchanan, foundation Chair of Communication and Cultural Studies at Charles Darwin University, War in the age of intelligent
machines and unintelligent government 2005, Research Online, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, KB
The 2004 US election must have caused hearts to sink everywhere in the Third World. The bloody insurgency in Iraq only
strengthened the position of the 'War President', giving him greater license to continue his campaign of terror. At the time of the
election the death toll of US soldiers was nearing a thousand with the number injured seven times that. To which toll one must add
the haunting fact that of the 500 000 plus US servicemen and women who served in the First Gulf War some 325 000 are now on
disability pensions suffering a variety of acute maladies generally attributed to the toxic cocktail of radiation and other pollutant
chemicals from the hundreds of oil fires they were exposed to during their tour of duty. Those who fight in Iraq today can scarcely
look forward to a healthier future given that it is effectively twice as irradiated now as it was in 1991.1 Yet still the minority who vote
voted in the main for the man who put these soldiers in harm's way; but then it isn't as though John Kerry was promising to bring the
troops home. As important as Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? is as explanation of conservatism in the heartland of the
USA, it doesn't answer this question - why did the war on terror fail to ignite anti-Bush sentiment? 2 More to the point,

why was it impossible to vote against the war? This is militarism at its peak - you cannot decide
between going to war or not, only which is the most desired (least worst?) way of handling the conduct of the
war.
Problem: Is today's militarism really new?

Militarism has always been with us, like a dark shadow, but its history is not continuous. The idea that war
should be considered a logical and necessary extension of politics was given expression by Clausewitz, but he was merely putting
into philosophical form what was already accepted thinking in government: arms are a legitimate means of achieving political goals.
Militarism is not always as unabashed about its existence, not to say its intentions, as it is now when - as
Debord so presciently put it - it has its own inconceivable foe, terrorism to bedazzle a frightened, confused,
and misinformed public.3

But out of the limelight does not mean out of the picture; militarism has not been officially questioned
since the end of the first world war when disarmament had its last genuine hurrah . World War Two, which
caught the US and the UK, in particular, underarmed and underprepared for conflict, eliminated in a stroke the very
concept of disarmament - strategic arms limitation and force reduction are essentially fiscal notions,
decisions made in the interest in preserving a militarist posture in the face of rising costs, not
disarmament. Neither should we delude ourselves that anti-war is anti-militarism. As we shall see, the
very opposite is true.
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it is generally thought that a paradigm shift in the nature of
militarism has occurred, and as the violence in the Middle East continues with no sign of abatement in
sight (the running-sore that is the Israel/Palestine conflict, the smouldering fires of Iraq and Afghanistan and the gathering storm in
Iran all forebode ill for a peaceful future) any doubt that a new era of 'hot' war has been ushered in tends to
vanish. What is less certain, however, at least from a philosophical perspective, is the conceptual nature of the
change. Those who demur that the present era is substantially different enough to warrant the label 'new' do so on the grounds
that what we are seeing today is merely the continuation of an older struggle, or struggles, as it might be better to say given the
tangled mess of multiple rivalries and resentments on both sides. Obviously, many of the struggles fuelling the present war are
legacies of the Second World War, the Yalta summit in particular (many of course predate that by hundreds of years).4 On this
score, I am persuaded by Immanuel Wallerstein's thesis that the first and second world wars should be treated as a single thirty year
struggle for global hegemony between Germany and the USA, but it seems to me the militarism we are faced with today is

different to the one spawned in 1945 in the aftermath of victory; the militarism of today no longer thinks in
terms of winning and losing - it has another agenda. 5 So even if the origins of the present crisis are to be found in
the wash-up of WWII, as Wallerstein and many others have rightly argued, the nature of the response to this crisis is not similarly
located there.
Historians generally agree that the Vietnam War put paid to that 'victorious' mode of militarism the US knew following WWII when it
was briefly the lone nuclear power.6 Following its demoralising defeat at the hands of a comparatively puny third world country,
however, even the idea that it was a superpower was questioned. Amongst the decisionmakers in Washington there took hold a
moribund and risk-averse mentality that came to be called the 'Vietnam Syndrome'. This syndrome allegedly explains the US's
failure to act on a number of occasions when it might have been prudent - or, as perhaps would have been the case in Cambodia,
humanitarian to do so - culminating in the embarrassing mishandling of the Teheran Embassy siege in the last days of Jimmy
Carter's administration. It also explains the tactics used on those occasions when the US has acted, as in Clinton's decision to
initially restrict the engagement in the Balkans to airpower alone and use aerial bombardment where deft geopolitical negotiation

was needed. On this occasion, as has now become routine, an alleged ethical imperative combined powerfully with a rhetoric of
'surgical strikes' and 'smart bombs' to stall protest and garner support from even those who ought to have known better.7 Taken at
face value, this would seem to confirm the existence of the 'Vietnam Syndrome', but when in political analysis is it sensible to accept
something at face value? I would argue the 'Vietnam Syndrome' is a convenient cover story not a genuine
explanation of US foreign policy. What makes anyone think, for instance, that a peaceful settlement to the
Israel/Palestine conflict (as much a potential Vietnam as Iraq ) is on the US agenda? Countless commentators have
pointed out that the US backing of Israel can but inflame the Middle East situation as though this was news to the ones responsible,
or, more to the point, as though winning or losing, peace or war, are the only options open to US foreign policy. Isn't the answer

perpetual unrest is the solution that present action is achieving.

The 'Vietnam Syndrome' is an optical illusion, a wish-fulfilment on the part of those who would like to see
an end to US imperialism.8 In philosophical terms, the 'Vietnam Syndrome' was the negative needed by
staring us right in the face:

militarism to resurrect itself. What the military realised in Vietnam is that the US public will not tolerate
a high casualty rate amongst its own troops unless there is a pressing need. While saving freedom might
be construed as a pressing need, stopping communism in a country most people hadn't heard of before
the war started couldn't. Lacking ideological support, the US military publicly adopted a zero-casualty
approach to its 'elective wars' (to continue with the surgical trope) and banked on technology to achieve it. The
anti-war sentiment ignited by the Vietnam conflict played a large part in securing public acceptance for
this strategy in spite of the escalating costs it entailed. The US showed it was anti-war only to the extent
that war put its people in harm's way, but had no strong opinion on the matter when it was merely a
question of unloading deadly ordinance from a high altitude on faceless peoples far from the
homeland.

Whatever the eventual cost, and the figures for military expenditure are always astronomical (consider the 2004

budget of $400 billion a year to wage war in Iraq),

technology was to become the solution to

what is essentially

an

ideological problem , the US population isn't willing to commit its body to the US's military causes. 9 After
Vietnam, no administration of the future could afford to be soft on military spending (if they lost spending $30
billion a year, they could hardly afford to spend less in the future is the presiding logic).10 The spin-doctoring that has gone
into talking up the capabilities of the new class of so-called 'smart' weapons is worthy of Madison
Avenue.11 Its effect has been to persuade the American people that technology has made them
invulnerable. Thus war has entered the age of intelligent machines and unintelligent government. 12
In any case, the present conflict proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that the

US will not hesitate to embroil itself in

a potentially Vietnam-like conflict if the conditions are ripe. I have read reports that US soldiers based in Iraq
are writing 'Is this Vietnam yet?' on their helmets, sadly they're not asking the right question. Given
the admission that the insurgency problem may never be resolved it plainly is another Vietnam. If this isn't
the view of the Hawks in Washington who orchestrated the war, and I don't believe for a second that it is, then it begs the question:

what makes the present conflict not another Vietnam in the eyes of its architects? What are the conditions
under which the US will engage in a potentially protracted foreign war? To answer this we have to ask what were
the lessons of Vietnam? Behind the smokescreen of the 'Vietnam Syndrome', the US has taken on board two
hard lessons learned in Vietnam which shape its foreign policy: (1) It can win battles, but it can't
necessarily win wars; (2) It can afford battles, but it can't pay for wars. Both of these lessons were heeded by Bush
the elder who pointedly decided not to take Baghdad though it was there for the taking precisely because he didn't want an
expensive quagmire.13 It is tempting to think Bush the younger is simply Bush the dumber and that's the reason why he felt
emboldened to go where his daddy dare not, but I believe there is an even more sinister explanation.

Whereas

daddy

figured out how to get someone else to pay for the battles that needed to be fought to dislodge Saddam's
forces from Kuwait, he didn't solve the problem of how to pay for a long war so he avoided it. Neither did
the son, but he figured out how to get the loser to line the pockets of the victor and transform a costly war
into a privateer's mother lode.14 The father's expensive quagmire is the son's reconstruction goldmine.
Reconstruction is the surplus value of war. If, as Chalmers Johnson suggests the US military has gone Hollywood,
then war has gone Wall St.15 Profit is put before everything.16
But we still haven't articulated what turned out to be the greatest change to militarism. This occurred in
the late stages of the Vietnam War, past the point when anyone - not even the President of the United States could say there was any worthwhile military reason to continue the fight , apart from the need to defend the
credibility of the fighting forces. The last years of the war saw the first outing of what has now become standard
procedure, the use of airpower as a substitute for diplomacy. At the time it was narrated as being a necessary

complement to diplomacy to insure proper attention at the bargaining table, but its effect was to make the North Vietnamese dig
their heels in harder. And yet the US persisted in spite of its obvious failure as a tactic, convinced no doubt that

there had to be a limit to the willingness of the people of North Vietnam to endure the terrible toll of death
its B52s were able to lay upon them. Ho Chi Minh's bravado claim that Vietnam had struggled against China for a thousand
years before winning its freedom, and had carried the fight to the French for one hundred and fifty years, and therefore felt
unthreatened by the US who had only been on their soil a mere fifteen years plainly fell on deaf ears in Washington. The cost in
lives of this tactic has never been officially toted up, but doubtless it was not inconsiderable. It is generally assessed as a military
and diplomatic failure, but this is where I think history is being a little hasty. The determination that it was the credibility

of
the fighting forces that was at stake in the final years of the war is no doubt correct, but as with all political
manoeuvres it shouldn't be taken at face value. For Wallerstein, the Vietnam War represented a rejection by the
Third World of the ' Yalta accord', the less than gentlemanly agreement between the two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, to
divide the planet into spheres of interest (the USA grabbing two-thirds and the USSR a third). He treats America's willingness to
invest all its military strength into the struggle and more or less bankrupt itself in the process as testament to the felt geopolitical
significance of the conflict. And yet, as he puts it, they were still defeated. While I accept the first part of his thesis, I disagree with
his conclusion because I think the very premise on which it rests lost its validity in the course of the war. A pragmatically

conceived intervention designed to stop the spread of revolutionary communism became the US military's
own equivalent of a 'cultural revolution' as it underwent a profound rethinking of its mode of acting in the
world.17 I do not mean to claim as military revisionists have done that Vietnam was actually a victory for
the USA (the right wing rhetoric on this, so resonant of the early days of the Nazi party, is that the government and the people
back home betrayed the soldiers on the front line and didn't allow them to win).18 With Baudrillard, I want to argue that there
occurred a paradigm shift during the course of that protracted and bitter struggle which resulted in the
concepts of victory and defeat losing their meaning.
Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA ) have no internal repercussions in
America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would
necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system. Nothing of
the sort occurred. Something else, then, took place .19
Baudrillard's answer to this question is that war ceased to be real, it ceased to be determined in terms of
winning and losing and became instead 'simulation', a pure spectacle no less terrifying or deadly for its
lack of reality. The consequences of this metaphysical adjustment are shocking and go a long way towards explaining the rise of
terrorism in recent years. As Andrew Bacevich writes, it is not only the superpowers like the US that have
relinquished the concept of victory. It is as though war itself has jettisoned it as so much extra
baggage. The typical armed conflict today no longer pits like against like - field army v. field army or
battle fleet v. battle fleet - and there usually is no longer even the theoretical prospect of a decisive
outcome. In asymmetric conflicts, combatants employ violence indirectly. The aim is not to defeat but to
intimidate and terrorise, with women a favoured target and sexual assault often the weapon of
choice. 20 The B52 pilot unloading bombs on an unseen enemy below knows just as well as the suicide
bomber in Iraq that his actions will not lead directly to a decisive change , that in a sense the gesture is futile; but,
he also knows, as does the suicide bomber, that his actions will help create an atmosphere of fear that, it is
hoped, will one day lead to change. Deprived of teleology, war thrives in an eternal present.
Terror is not merely the weapon of the weak, it is the new condition of war, and no power can claim
exception status. For Clausewitz and his spiritual tutor Machiavelli the only rational reason to wage war is to win where winning
means achieving a predetermined and clearly prescribed goal. Britain's colonial wars are an obvious case in point. The self-serving
claim that Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absence owes its sense to the fact that it never set out to gain its eventually quite
considerable empire (it was at least geographically true, albeit not historically true, that the sun never set on the British Empire,
encompassing as it did territories in virtually every region of the world) all at once as Hitler and Hirohito were later to do, but built it
one territory at a time over a two century-long period. Through a sequence of limited wars it was able to deploy its limited means to
obtain colossal riches. The first world war essentially started out in the same way. Germany's goal was to

secure a European empire before it was too late, but the machine-gun put paid to that ambition and
instead of a quick war returning a specific prize there irrupted a global conflagration that was to consume
the wealth and youth of Europe. As Wallerstein argues, the true victor of the first world war wasn't Britain or
France, but American industry, and by extension the true loser wasn't Germany and its allies but Europe
itself. Eric Hobsbawm has defined the twentieth century as the age when wars of limited means and limited aims gave way to wars
of limited means and unlimited aims.21 The twenty-first century appears to be the age of wars of unlimited
means and no precise aim.

This , according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the point at which Clausewitz's formula is effectively
reversed. When total war - i.e., war which not only places the annihilation of the enemy's army at its
centre but its entire population and economy too - becomes the object of the State-appropriated war
machine, then at this level in the set of all possible conditions, the object and the aim enter into new
relations that can reach the point of contradiction. In the first instance, the war machine unleashed by the
State in pursuit of its object, total war, remains subordinate to the State and merely realises the maximal
conditions 22 of its aims. Paradoxically, though, the more successful it is in realising the State's aims, the
less controllable by the State it becomes. As the State's aims grow on the back of the success of its war
machine, so the restrictions on the war machine's object shrink until - scorpion like - it effectively
subsumes the State , making it just one of its many moving parts. In Vietnam, the State was blamed for
the failure of the war machine precisely because it attempted to set limits on its object. Its inability to
adequately impose these limits not only cost it the war, but in effect its sovereignty too. Since then the State
has been a puppet of a war machine global in scope and ambition. This is the status of militarism today and
no-one has described its characteristics more chillingly than Deleuze and Guattari:

This worldwide war machine, which in a way 'reissues' from the States, displays two successive figures:
first, that of fascism, which makes war an unlimited movement with no other aim than itself; but fascism is
only a rough sketch, and the second, postfascist, figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its
object directly, as the peace of Terror or Survival. The war machine reforms a smooth space that now
claims to control, to surround the entire earth. Total war is surpassed, toward a form of peace more
terrifying still.23
It is undoubtedly Chalmers Johnson who has done the most to bring to our attention the specific make-up of what Deleuze and
Guattari call here the worldwide war machine.24 His description of a global 'empire of bases' is consistent with Deleuze and
Guattari's uptake of Paul Virilio's concept of the 'fleet in being'. This is the paradoxical transformation of the striated

space of organisation into a new kind of 'reimparted' smooth space which outflanks all gridding and
invents a neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturbing than the States. 25 Bases do
not by themselves secure territory, but as is the case with a battle fleet their mobility and their firepower
mean they can exert an uncontestable claim over territory that amounts to control. This smooth space
surrounding the earth is, to put it back into Baudrillard's terms, the space of simulation. The empire of bases is
a virtual construct with real capability.

Fittingly enough, it was Jean Baudrillard who first detected that a structural

the Vietnam War was a

demonstration of a new kind of will to war, one that no longer thought in terms of winning or losing, but
defined itself instead in terms of perseverance.26 It demonstrated to the US's enemies, clients and allies alike its
willingness to continue the fight even when defeat was certain, or had in a sense already been
acknowledged (the US strategy of 'Vietnamising' the war which commenced shortly after the Tet offensive in 1968, and become
change in post-WWII militarism had taken place. In Simulacra and Simulation he argues that

official policy under Nixon, was patently an admission that the war couldn't be won - in the short term it was Johnson's way of putting
off admitting defeat until after the election so as to give Hubert Humphrey some chance of victory; in the longer term it was a way of
buying time for a diplomatic solution).27 It was a demonstration of the US's reach, of its ability to inflict destruction
even when its troops were withdrawing and peace talks (however futile) were under way. It also

demonstrated to the American people that the fight could be continued as the troops were
withdrawn , a factor that as I've already pointed out would become decisive in re-shaping militarism as an
incorporeal system.
It was also a demonstration to the American domestic population that the country's leaders were willing to
continue to sacrifice lives to prove this point.28 The contrary view, that Nixon wanted to end the war sooner
but was unable to do so because domestic politics didn't allow it, in no way contradicts this thesis. If
anything it confirms it because if true it would mean, as Deleuze and Guattari have said of fascism, at a certain
point, under a certain set of conditions, the American people wanted Vietnam , and, as they add, it is this
perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for. 29 While there can be no doubt Vietnam
was an unpopular war that was eventually brought to a halt by popular pressure, it is a sobering thought to remind oneself that it
was a war that lasted some 10 years. If one takes 1967 as the decisive turning point in popular opinion, the

moment when protest against the war became the prevailing view and support for it dwindled into a
minority murmur, then one still has to take stock of the fact that it took a further 6 years for US troops to
be fully withdrawn.30 The kind of sustained popular pressure that brought the Vietnam War to a close has

not yet even begun to build in the US in spite of the fact that the death toll has passed 1500 (as of March
2005).

Wars are spectacles in the traditional sense of being events staged to convey a specific message, but
also in the more radical or postmodern sense that spectacle is the final form of war, the form war
takes when it takes peace as its object. Hence the military's facilitation of the media (this backfired to a
large degree in Vietnam, but the lessons learned then are put to good use today). Ultimately, though, as Baudrillard rightly argues,
the media and official news services are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality , of the
reality of the stakes , of the objectivity of the facts. 31 Chomsky's analyses of current trends in US imperialism
confirm this thesis. As he argues, 'preventive' wars are only fought against the basically defenceless. 32 Chomsky
adds two further conditions that chime with what we have already adduced: there must be something in it for the aggressor, i.e., a
fungible return not an intangible moral reward, and the opponent must be susceptible to a portrayal of them as 'evil', allowing the
victory to be claimed in the name of a higher moral purpose and the actual venal purpose to be obscured.33 At first glance,

waging war to prevent war appears to be as farcical as fucking for virginity, but that is only if we assume
that the aim of the war is to prevent one potential aggressor from striking first. Or, rather, given that it is
alleged that the putative enemy, Al Qaeda and its supposed supporters, took first blood (the Rambo reference
is of course deliberate), we are asked to believe the current war is being fought to prevent a second, more
damaging strike. The obsessive and suitably grave references to Weapons of Mass Destruction by the various mouthpieces of
the Bush regime (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, but also Blair and Howard) is plainly calculated to compel us to accept that any such
second strike will be of biblical, or worse, Hollywood proportions.
As one joke put it, the Americans could be certain that Iraq had at least some Weapons of Mass Destruction because they had the
receipts to prove it. The grain of truth in this joke reveals the true purpose of the war - it was a demonstration to all of
America's clients that it wouldn't tolerate 'price-gouging'. Obviously I am speaking metaphorically here, but the fact is
that Iraq is a client of the US, it purchases arms and consumer goods and sells oil at a carefully controlled

price. Why this arrangement suddenly became so unsatisfactory is subject to a great deal of speculation
which centre on two basic theories: (1) when Iraq switched from the dollar to the euro it posed an
intolerable threat to the stability of the US currency; (2) the US is positioning itself to monopolise oil ahead
of growing Chinese demand. Either way, if one wants a metaphor to describe US imperialism it wouldn't it
wouldn't be MacDonald's, a comparatively benign operator, but the predatory retail giant Wal-Mart. 34 In
other words, today's wars are fought to demonstrate will. The age of gunboat diplomacy has given way
to the age of gunboat commerce.35
When war changed its object it was able to change its aim too and it is this more than anything that has
saved 'real' war from itself. Baudrillard's later work on the spectacle of war misses this point: through becoming
spectacles the fact that real wars (i.e., territorial wars) are no longer possible has not diminished their
utility - the US isn't strong enough to take and hold Iraq, but it can use its force to demonstrate to other
small nations that it can inflict massive damage and lasting pain on anyone who would dare defy it.
Baudrillard's lament that the real Gulf War never took place can only be understood from this viewpoint - although he doesn't put it in
these words, his insight is essentially that war in its Idealised form is much more terrifying than peace. Again, although Baudrillard
himself doesn't put it this way, the conclusion one might draw from the paradigm shift in war's rationalisation enumerated above from pragmatic object (defeating North Vietnam) to symbolic object (defending the credibility of the fight forces) -is that war has
become 'postmodern'.36 This

shift is what enables the US to ideologically justify war in the absence of a

proper object and indeed in the absence of a known enemy. The Bush regime's 'War on Terror' is the
apotheosis of this change: the symbolic (terror) has been made to appear instrumental (terrorism), or
more precisely the symbolic is now able to generate the instrumental according to its own needs.

Counterterrorism studies are conditioned by a politics of anti-knowledge the

emergence of the new terrorist has institutionalized precautionary thinking that
makes preemptive action the only rational response
Jackson 15
Richard Jackson, professor of peace studies at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, New
Zealand, (2015) The epistemological crisis of counterterrorism, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 8:1, 33-54, KB

How did this epistemological crisis the condition where lack of knowledge is the main thing we
know about the terrorist threat arise? By what steps did we reach the present juncture in which the known and
unknown mutually reinforce each other and constitute a crisis of counterterrorism knowledge? Lisa Stampnitzky (2013) argues that
it is inherent to the counterterrorism field as a result of the particular way the field developed after
separating from counterinsurgency studies in the 1970s. She argues that a politics of anti-knowledge
(2013, 20) developed which rejected any rational explanation for terrorism. This was the result of a decision
to characterise terrorism largely in moral terms, in contrast to other morally neutral, rational forms of political violence,
and as a way of drawing a boundary between terrorism and insurgency. That is, if terrorists are evil and
irrational, then one cannot and, indeed should not know them (Stampnitzky 2013, 189; emphasis added). As a
consequence, the counterterrorism field has thus been precluded from knowing who the terrorists are and
why they might attack and can only focus on imagined future scenarios when they most certainly will
attack.
Zulaika and Douglass (1996) take a broader but related view, arguing that the crisis of knowledge in counterterrorism
reflects a wider cultural imaginary or mythography of terrorism, which has grown up over a long period. In
this cultural imaginary, terrorism represents a modern taboo requiring constant ritualistic moral
condemnation, even from scholars seeking to understand it, and in which there is a prohibition on contact with
or intimate knowledge of the terrorist. Later, Zulaika specifies the process more clearly, arguing that the crisis in
counterterrorism knowledge is the result of a faulty epistemology caused by the placement of the
entire phenomenon in a context of taboo and the willful ignorance of the political subjectivities of the
terrorists (2012, 52). In any event, as a consequence of the operation of the taboo, terrorism has long been an arena in
which the boundary between the factual and non-factual is blurred where fact and fiction were
sometimes difficult (if not impossible) to distinguish (Frank 2014, 150).
Frank goes on to suggest that the crisis of knowledge is due to the future oriented, what if? nature of the act of
terrorism itself. As he describes it: For what characterizes terrorism is less the single act of violence than it is
the fact that this act is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a (potential) series, and that further acts are
expected to occur. To achieve its defining effect collective fear of more violence to come terrorism relies on the
belief that the next attack is impending, and that it could happen anywhere, anytime. In this sense, the terror
caused by terrorism is a halfway house between the real (actual attacks and their tangible aftermath) and the
imaginary (possible future assaults). This gives terror a fantastical dimension, a fact reinforced by the
perception of the perpetrators as being both invisible and in our very midst, omnipresent in public
discourse but still elusive in person. (Frank 2014, 9)
In other words, anticipatory fear is inherent to the act of terrorism which terrifies through its unknown future
threat. For the counterterrorist, therefore, the anticipatory nature of terror plays a significant role in the terrorist imaginary
Terrorism incites possibilistic or worst-case thinking in political and scientific discourse (Frank 2014,
49). Moreover, this kind of clandestine, anticipatory violence is inherently mimetic; it becomes mirrored in the
counterterrorist obsession with secrecy and counter-imagination, which is a central characteristic of the
epistemological crisis (Zulaika 2012).
In addition to these three factors the nature of terrorism itself, the way the terrorism field developed and the broader culture or
mythography of terrorism based on the operation of taboo I want to suggest that there are a number of more specific steps or
epistemic developments which have also contributed to the current manifestation of the epistemological crisis of counterterrorism.
The first is the effect of the 2001 terrorist attacks, which in many ways, amplified the existing tendencies and characteristics within
the counterterrorism field, leading to a permanent rupture in the remaining epistemological certainties. In particular, the hyper-

real spectacle of 9/11 tore down any remaining epistemic barriers to the seemingly infinite imagination of
terror, thereby appearing to render previous knowledge obsolete and the future governed solely by
uncertainty.
In other words, as Hellmich and Behnke (2012, 23) note, the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al Qaeda were constituted
an event in the Derridaian sense that exceeded existing cognitive and discursive frameworks, thereby

as

creating a shocking and immediate void of meaning (see Campbell 2002; Der Derian 2002). In particular, the
difficulty of interpreting the attacks through traditional Western concepts of politics and political action
enveloped the perpetrators terrorists in a web of uncertainty. Consequently, once the terrorist event
itself was understood and accepted as existing beyond meaning, then the terrorist perpetrators similarly

became wrapped in the same web of unknowing in terms of their motives, targets and the potential future
threat they posed. In effect, constructing 9/11 in this way functioned epistemologically to sever the
connections to previous understandings of terrorists and terrorism . As a number of prominent terrorism experts
argued, the 9/11 attacks wiped the slate clean and rendered previous terrorism knowledge obsolete
(see Hoffman 2006).
In a second important development, which was directly related to the epistemologically rupturing effects of 9/11, terrorism as a form
of political violence had already been subject to a steady discursive reconstruction by terrorism scholars and experts since the early
1990s. The so-called new terrorism thesis argued that contemporary terrorism could not be understood through the prism of
previous research and epistemic frameworks, because unlike the old terrorism the new terrorism was motivated by religious
extremism rather than politics, was unconstrained in its targeting of civilians and thus willing to employ weapons of mass
destruction, and was organised in non-hierarchical, fluid networks (Duyvesteyn and Malkki 2012; Crenshaw 2009).
This meant that we could no longer be sure that terrorists would behave according to previously predictable patterns, or follow
previously identified pathways. It meant previous data and analysis relating to terrorism was largely obsolete and we could no longer
be certain where, when, why or how terrorists might strike, or what kind of threat they really posed (except that it was potentially
unlimited). This was a nascent epistemological crisis insomuch as it only applied to the new type of groups; the old terrorist
groups, such as the IRA, ETA and the like, were considered to be epistemologically predictable and knowable at least in
retrospect.3 At the same time, popular cultural production of depictions of new terrorists attacking with nuclear

bombs, chemical weapons and biological agents in an effort to cause maximum civilian casualties
proliferated across the media. Thus, severed from previous forms of knowledge and evidence and fed by fantastical media
images, the new terrorists became a new nightmare spectre haunting the Western imagination (in many
ways, replacing the spectre of communist-inspired nuclear war).
A third step or development relates to broader developments in society. As the sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992, 1996) and others have
demonstrated, over the past few decades, the social paradigm of traditional risk analysis has been replaced by a

virulent form of precautionary thinking , and public officials have come to be preoccupied with the
possible over the probable (Daase and Kessler 2007; Aradau and Van Munster 2007; Ewald 2002). That is, they have
come to prioritise and be concerned about the potential terrible consequences of imagined risks, rather
than the very low statistical probability of those potential risks actually materialising. For public
officials, what could happen in future acts of terrorism now assumes greater significance than what has
happened over the past centuries of terrorist violence, or what might actually happen in a calculable, probabilistic
sense.
At the same time, officials have come to believe that society expects them to adopt a zero-risk, hypercautious approach to public safety: no level of risk, even a 1% risk , can now be tolerated (Furedi 2002;
Zulaika 2012; Ewald 2002). This

precautionary dogmatism is important because it places a burden of action on

the security official: if a scenario can be imagined, even if it is only a 1% risk , then a moral imperative
exists to try and prevent it. Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, expressed it this way:
Sit in my seat. Here is the intelligence. Here is the advice. Do you ignore it? [] On each occasion, the most careful judgment has
to be made taking into account everything we know and advice available. But in making that judgment, would you prefer us to act,
even if it turns out to be wrong? Or not to act and hope its ok? And suppose we dont act and the intelligence turns out to be right,
how forgiving will people be? (Cited in Aradau and Van Munster 2007, 105)
At one level, Blair is suggesting that public sentiment is now also caught up in the epistemological crisis. Officials are expected

to act against future terrorist threats, even in the face of real uncertainty or if turns out to be wrong.
A fourth development relates specifically to the counterterrorist field and the role played by key figures in the Bush administration
after 9/11. As Donald Rumsfelds famous quotation aptly illustrates, senior security officials acting as security entrepreneurs have
come to focus almost exclusively on the unknown element of terrorism, particularly the unknown unknowns those things we do
not even know we do not know about the terrorism threat. As well as a logical step along the pathway forged by the previous new
terrorism narrative, the rupturing event of 9/11 and the developing risk society, it nonetheless represents a key moment of decision
by the counterterrorist industry.

The epistemological consequence of actively and deliberately embracing ontological uncertainty as a

fundamental condition of terrorism knowledge was the immediate severing of links to previous
empirical evidence , analytical frameworks and knowledge and the remaking of terrorism as an
unlimited, infinite risk. In practical terms, it meant that the unknown, and the unperceived, became potential
indicators of imminent terrorist violence; or, as Donald Rumsfeld put it: Absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence (cited in Daase and Kessler 2007, 428). In other words, if terrorism is now defined primarily by
what is unknown, then there is no reliable empirical evidence or data from the past which can help us to
know terrorism in the present. Among other things, this meant that there was no basis or imperative for
officials to conduct empirical evaluation or cost-benefit analysis of current counterterrorism measures (see

Mueller and Stewart 2011, 2012). After all, what could such an investigation tell us about an unknown and ultimately unpredictable
danger? More importantly,

if terrorism is conceptualised in terms of a lack of knowledge, then its threat

becomes limitless because there are no epistemological limits to what is unknown (see Daase and Kessler
2007, 419).
Fifth, as I have argued elsewhere (Jackson 2012b), a

process of knowledge subjugation in regards to terrorism

has also taken place over the past decade. This is the condition of what in Donald Rumsfelds formulation might be
called unknown knowns, or those things we know but which we do not wish to know. As Daase and Kessler
(2007, 412) imagine another verse of Donald Rumsfelds poem:
Finally, there are unknown knowns
The knowns
We dont want to know.

This has been described as the politics of anti-knowledge, or the active refusal of explanation
itself

(Stampnitzky 2013; citing Ferguson 1994). Zulaika and Douglass (1996) argue that

the moral status of terrorists as

evil and irrational proscribes intimate knowledge of them, making the search for real knowledge about
terrorists taboo.
Certainly, as a great many analysts have noted, with only a handful of notable exceptions, little

effort has been made by

terrorism experts and officials to try and understand terrorist motivations by listening to their own words
and messages, and seriously engaging with their subjectivity.4 Zulaika describes this as the
counterterrorists passion for ignorance , particularly in relation to basic knowledge regarding the
languages or cultures of the peoples they are engaged with, much less their political goals or motivation
(2012, 54). This is especially noticeable in the case of al Qaeda , where the voice of Osama bin Laden,
despite a vast corpus of open letters, interviews, propaganda videos and statements, has remained
largely unheard among Western audiences (Hellmich and Behnke 2012, 3).5 However, there are many other examples of
knowledge subjugation in counterterrorism. For example, as I have noted elsewhere (Jackson 2012b), it was known within
the United States military and political intellectual establishment that foreign military intervention was
directly linked to anti-American terrorism

(Eland 1998; see also Du Bois and Buts 2014). After 9/11,

it was well

known by many actors, including the military and intelligence establishments as well as academics, that the invasion
of Iraq would provoke more anti-Western terrorism. It has long been similarly known that the torture
and abuse of terrorist suspects, especially at Guantanamo Bay, would , far from helping to prevent more terrorism,
provoke further attacks by terrorists. The beheadings of Western journalists dressed in Guantanamo Bay
orange jumpsuits by ISIS in September 2014 would appear to confirm this. More recently, reports and testimony on the
drone killing programme in Afghanistan and Pakistan clearly demonstrates that counterterrorism officials know that drone killings
enrages local populations, amplifies anti-Americanism and provokes attacks on Coalition forces (Zulaika 2012, 55). More broadly, it
is known, at least in academic circles accessible by counterterrorist officials, that the violent suppression of terrorism

is less effective than conciliation-oriented approaches such as direct dialogue (English 2009; Araj 2008).
This condition of willful ignorance is achieved by forgetting , suppressing or repressing evidence,
knowledge and perspectives which challenge accepted ideas (or in this case, accepted lack of knowledge or antiknowledge). Consequently, counterterrorist officials, the media and many terrorism experts frequently assert that we simply do not
know why terrorists attack or what causes their actions: their motives are inexplicable and unknown to us, despite the existence of
terrorists own explanations for their actions (see Bin Laden 2002; Lawrence 2005). Moreover, because they represent a dangerous
taboo, they cannot and should not be known: for example, the Western audience has largely been shielded from the
voice of bin Laden, almost as if hearing him unedited posed a threat to the national wellbeing (Hellmich and
Behnke 2012, 3). For

counterterrorists and terrorism experts , this has meant that Rather than rely upon

the creation of knowledge about terrorism, the dominant approach has rejected the very possibility of
knowing terrorists (Stampnitzky 2013).
Finally, at the same time as terrorism has been constructed as unknowable and unpredictable, and officials have become
preoccupied with the possible over the probable, they have also embraced the impossibility of ever completely securing society
against terrorism. This is evident in the Prepare strand of the United Kingdoms CONTEST counterterrorism strategy, for example.
The Home Office (UK Home Office n.d.) states: Prepare is the workstream of the counterterrorism strategy that aims to mitigate the
impact of a terrorist incident where it cannot be stopped. In other words, official UK counterterrorism policy and that of most
other Western states is based on the assumption that terrorist attacks will inevitably occur regardless of any
of the measures currently undertaken to prevent such an outcome: they cannot be stopped. This

assumption that no matter what they do to deter or protect, or what they ultimately know about terrorism, they will never be able
to prevent at least some future terrorist attacks has the paradoxical effect of rendering any (little) knowledge we
hold about terrorism impotent. In the end, the only thing we know for sure is that more terrorist attacks are inevitable, and no
amount of knowledge or action can prevent them all from occurring.
It is easy to see how in combination, and on the foundation of broader processes related to the nature of terrorism and the evolution
of the terrorism studies field and its cultural context of possibility, these steps or developments have led to a profound crisis of
knowledge about terrorism, which in turn results in an endless but fruitless search for practical, actionable knowledge about
terrorism. That is, faced with a profound lack of knowledge and a seemingly intractable condition of uncertainty, the

counterterrorist is forced to employ imagination as the primary tool to detect, prevent and deter terrorist
attacks before they occur ; and employing imagination rather than empirical evidence , data and
scholarly analysis, inevitably ends in fantasy thinking and self-defeating policies. In other words, bizarre,
wasteful, counterproductive and ever-expanding and intrusive counterterrorism practices are not
exceptions; they are the inevitable fruits of the self-imposed epistemological crisis. As Zulaika (2012, 58) puts it:
Once the situation is defined as one of inevitable terrorism and endless waiting, what could happen
weighs as much as what is actually the case; once a threat, whose intention or possibility is unknown to
us, is taken seriously, its reality requires that we must act on it.

The aff is embedded in an economy of national security affect which militarizes

subjectivity and ensures endless global warfare in a futile attempt to exterminate
the unknown
Masco 14 (Joseph Masco, professor of anthropology and the social sciences at the University of
Chicago, PhD in anthropology from UC San Diego, November 2014, Theater of Operations: National
Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror, pp 1-21) gz
In the fall of 2001, the United States inaugurated a new project to secure the American future, and did so
in the name, and language, of counterterror. The very real terrorist violence of September 2001 was
quickly harnessed by U.S. officials to a conceptual project that mobilizes affects (fear, terror, anger) via
imaginary processes (worry, precarity, threat ) to constitute an unlimited space and time horizon for
military state action . By amplifying official terror and public anxiety , the U.S. security apparatus
powerfully remade itself in the early twenty-first century, proliferating experts, technological
infrastructures, and global capacities in the name of existential defense. Counterterror constitutes itself
today as endless , boundless , and defensive a necessary means of protecting American interests
in a world of emergent and violent dangers. The resulting security state apparatus no longer
recognizes national boundaries or citizenship as the defining coordinates of its governance; rather, it
constitutes a dangerous future as its object of concern. The motivating force behind this radical renewal
and expansion of the national security state in the twenty-first century is a vision of a world without
borders, generating threats without limit . The goal of the counterterror state is to produce and
administer a U.S.-centric world, one in which American interests can never be surprised by external
events, let alone shocked by them (see U.S. White House 2002a). Always already in crisis and failing, this aspirational
image of American power has nonetheless been hugely productive in its first decade, generating new expert worlds devoted to
counterterror as a planetary project while rewriting the domestic social contract in fundamental ways.
The relationship between affect, technological capacity, and political agency in U.S. national security culture is the central concern of
this book, which investigates the conditions of possibility for the most powerful military state in human history to declare war on an
emotion. In particular, it traces how the affective politics of the Cold War nuclear state both enabled, andafter

2001were transformed into those of the counterterror state . Terror , as we shall see, has a specific
genealogy in the United States after 1945, one that is deeply structured by the revolutionary effects of military technoscience on
American society and governance. But existential terror (after 1945, of the atomic bomb; after 2001, of the WMD) not only

empowers the most radical actions of the security state; it also creates ideological barriers to dealing with
a vast set of everyday forms of suffering and vulnerability that Americans experience, now rejected in
favor of warding off imagined catastrophes . The escalating violence of neoliberal economics in the
twenty-first century (poverty, bankrupt municipal governments, spectacular white-collar crime, energy
scarcity) and of an increasingly destabilized biosphere (affecting health, agriculture, city
infrastructures) generate an intensifying experience of precarity in the United States but rarely rise to

the level of a formal national security concern. Although cities lost to storm surges and bankruptcies create terrors of the
most visceral and immediate kind for citizens, such events do not activate the attention of the counterterror state. 1 The state
security apparatus today sets aside these everyday insecurities endured by citizens to pursue a specific,
if expansive, universe of terroristic potentials . American insecurity may derive from many sources, but
it can be affectively channeled to enable a state project with specific logics and coordinates . Put
differently, the

United States is a global hyperpower that increasingly produces the conditions for its

own instability (politically, economically, environmentally) and then mobilizes the resulting
vulnerability of its citizens and systems to demand an even greater investment in security
infrastructures. Counterterror has thus become recursive and self-colonizing , replacing the social
commitment to building a prosperous collective future and a stable international order with the project of
warding off a field of imagined and emergent dangers .
Given the wide-ranging global violence (involving wars, covert operations, and drone strikes) as well
as the extraordinary costs of counterterror, its incompatibility with democratic governance, and its
overwhelmingly negative vision of citizens, international relations, and the future, it is important to
consider how and why counterterror has become so American . What a national community fears and how it
responds to those fears are cultural forms as well as technologically mediated processes, the basis for a domestic politics as well as
a geopolitics. The affects and infrastructures of the contemporary security state, as we shall see, have both a history and an
emerging logic and purpose. This book explores why American society, at the very height of its global military, economic, and
cultural power, has been so receptive to a state program that offers little in the way of material everyday

security in exchange for increasing public docility , private excitability , and the promise of unending
war . The Theater of Operations is ultimately an examination of American self-fashioning through technoscience and threat
and terror have been domesticated as a primary national resource and projected out
globally as a twenty-first-century American project.
projection, of how fear

Threatening Histories
One of the very first formal acts of the War on Terror was a purge of the U.S. national archives. After the suicide-hijacker attacks on
New York and Washington in 2001, researchers at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, myself included, began
to notice the disappearance of long-available files or the absence of documents within them, sometimes marked with a withdrawal
notice stating that this item was removed because access to it is restricted (figure I .1; see Aid 2006; U.S. Information Security
Oversight Office 2006). Specific historical materials related to national intelligence estimates, emergency response planning, nuclear
policy, and covert actions dating back to World War I were pulled from public access and reclassified. Documents that had been in
the public domain for years and, in some cases, already published in official government histories were nonetheless inexplicably
recategorized as official secrets. Codified in secret legal agreements with U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, this
reclassification program extended from the National Archives to the presidential library system, involving records from the State
Department, National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Department of Defense (DOD), as well as from
agencies that no longer officially existsuch as the Atomic Energy Commission, Defense Nuclear Agency, and Chemical Warfare
Service. Thus, before the United States invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 (which inaugurated the George W.
Bush administrations global War on Terror), or adopted the U.S.A. Patriot Act on October 26 (which profoundly redefined the
concept of U.S. citizenship through search, seizure, surveillance, and detention policies),

a war on public memory was

already well under way.

We might well ask: Why would national security policy documents, particularly those of the long-dead Cold War, be of such
immediate concern to U.S. officials, appearing to undermine the War on Terror at its very founding? And if American history

began anew with the violence of September 2001, as White House officials reiterated over and over again
in their public statements, declaring the end of Cold War security logics of deterrence and a new normal
of preemptive counterterrorism, then why was it so important to control the deep history of the national security state?
We should begin by recognizing that the official declaration of a new counterterror state in 2001 was actually a
repetition, modeled in language and tone on the launch of the national security state in 1947 . Both projects
involved the designation of new insecurities, new institutions to fight them, a public mobilization campaign grounded in fear, and
above all, official claims that a new kind of war (a cold war or a war on terror) was a multigenerational commitment, constituting a
new mode of everyday life rather than a brief intensity of conflict. The former cold warriors in the George W. Bush administration
intended the War on Terror to be as powerful as the Cold War in realigning citizen-state relations and defining American geopolitical
objectives, constituting a renewed commitment to state and nation building through confronting an existential danger. Nonetheless,
official desires for a newly militarized consensus, and a reliance on a prior model of state and nation building, still do not explain the
immediate anxiety about the public history of the national security state in the fall of 2001.
Consider the following two instances of War on Terror reclassification of Cold War materials. 2 A top secret memo from April 27,
1951 (originally declassified in 1996), on the subject of Chinese Communist Intentions to Intervene in Korea seems to have been
reclassified because it documents a failure to predict the future. The CIA intelligence estimate states that the Chinese would not
invade Korea in 1950, as they in fact did in November of that year (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 1951). It was pulled for

reclassification on October 16, 2001. A CIA report to the National Security Council from April 1949 (originally declassified in 1996
and reclassified in 2005) on the subject of the Atomic Energy Program of the USSR also attempts to engage the future, stating that
in order to estimate the capability of the USSR to wage atomic warfare, it is necessary to know, not only the events that preceded
the date when the first bomb is detonated, but also the capability for bomb production thereafter (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
1949, 1). It calls for a comprehensive effort to study Soviet capabilities in nuclear weapons science, including special intelligence,
interrogations, covert operations, attention to Soviet technical literatures, as well as the production of a detection system to
discover when a nuclear explosion has occurred (ibid.). The document suggests that in spring 1949 the CIA was unaware that the
Soviets would test their first atomic bomb on August 29 of that year. Today, these documents show how the newly formed U.S.
intelligence agencies of the mid-twentieth century calculated Communist activities and nuclear threat at the very start of the Cold
War. However, the documents also reveal something else that is deeply important to national security professionals to this day: the
valueand the shameof strategic surprise.
In their historical moments, the shock of the first Soviet nuclear test and of the Communist revolution in China and later actions in
Korea were driving forces for a massive expansion of the national security state in the 1950s, a radical investment in militarism not
to be repeated until the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the nuclear security state, shocked by suicide-

hijacker attacks on two American cities, remade itself under the logics of counterterror. The politics of
shock are central to the conceptualization of the national security state as a distinctly American form of
power. We might think of the reclassification project as not only a sign of the deep commitment of the
counterterror state to official secrecy and covert action in all its forms, but also as an effort to purge
evidence of the inability of the national security apparatus to perfectly predict the futureto anticipate
and mediate crisis and thereby produce a normalized everyday , unbroken by trauma. It is as if the
failure to prevent the suicide hijackers in 2001 created a reverberating anxiety not only about the
attacks but also about the concept of national security itself, connecting seemingly disparate and
historically distinct expert judgments within an alternative understanding of American power, an
infrastructure of failure rather than success. The failure to predict global events , let alone protect U.S.
citizens and cities from violence, haunts U.S. security culture today, creating the constant drive for
new technical capacities and the increasing militarization of American life . It also generates
professional desires for revenge against those who have revealed the institutional weakness of the global
hyperpower. These administrative commitments fuse the problem of futures, infrastructures, expertise,
and international competition with affect in a new way, one that creates the expectation of a total
anticipatory control of the future even as that possibility breaks down from one second to the next,
producing the grounds for serial shocks (and thus, perpetual trauma ).
During the Cold War constituting, mobilizing, and exploiting existential danger was a central domain of
national politics, with each federal election in part based on how prospective leaders would handle the production of nuclear
technologies as well as manage the minute-to-minute threat of nuclear attack. Evoking existential threat became the
core vehicle for building a military-industrial state , pursuing rivalries between political parties, and
mobilizing ideological campaigns on both the Right and the Left. Nuclear fear was thus a total social formation in the
second half of the twentieth century, mobilizing all aspects of American society through specific images of the
end of the nation-state . This negative view of the future was balanced by investments in a welfare-state apparatus devoted
to improving the conditions of everyday life for citizens in terms of health, education, and the environment (Light 2003). Thus, the
catastrophic as well as the utopian potentials of the nuclear state were explicit terms of public discourse, making both panic and
promise the basis for the domestic political sphere. Americans now live in a postwelfare state society, which is no
longer so formally invested in improving the qualities of collective life through social programming; thus,
terror has increasingly become the primary domain of everyday politics in the early twenty-first century.
The lack of a positive vision of the collective future is pronounced in the United States today, and it is
amplified by the increasingly blurred public memory of the historical evolution of the security state
itself. Indeed, the proliferation of Cold War nuclear panics is rarely discussed as a model for contemporary counterterror politics,
leaving largely unexamined the truth or falsity of official claims of Soviet nuclear advantage: the 1950s bomber gap, the 1960s
missile gap, the 1970s window of vulnerability, and the 1980s Soviet first-strike capability. But it is important to recognize that these

domestic productions, as iconic moments in American politics, were emotional recruitments before they
were technological or military claims of fact. These episodes were domestic political campaigns of threat
proliferation before, and sometimes even after, the technological and scientific reality of Soviet military
capabilities had been determined. From this perspective, terror has a specific American logic and domestic

history, one that since 1945 has drawn on the destructive capacities of nuclear weapons to focus social
energies, unlock resources, and build things . In the twentieth century, the United States remade itself
through the atomic bomb , using nuclear fear as a coordinating principle for U.S. institutions, citizenstate relations, and geopolitics alike (Masco 2006).
The counterterror state, like the countercommunist state before it, attempts to install through domestic
affective recruitments a new perception of everyday life that is unassailable . The campaign to
normalize threat is the flip side of identifying and articulating new kinds of danger , allowing new
forms of governance to be pursued as a necessary counterformation . Consider, for example, the following official
statements about insecurity in the United States framed in the future conditional:
This situation will continue as far ahead as anyone can foresee. We cannot return to normalcy. This is the new normalcy. Only by
winning what at best will be a long war of endurance can we hope to avoid . . . the very possible destruction of civilization itself.
(quoted in Chernus 2002, 44)
Homeland security is not a temporary measure just to meet one crisis. Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will
become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against
perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy. (Cheney 2001)
As far as anyone can foresee . The first statementfrom July 1953is by Eisenhower administration official James Lambie, who
was charged with developing a national communications strategy to mobilize citizens in the thermonuclear age. In response, he
helped craft one of the largest public education campaigns in U.S. history (a program that we remember today as civil defense),
devoted to teaching citizens to fear the bomb in a specific way so as to prepare them for a potentially short nuclear or long cold war.
The second evocation of a new normalfrom an October 2001 speech to the Republican Governors Associationis by Vice
President Dick Cheney, who also attempts to standardize danger and to create a new psychic infrastructure capable of
accommodating a permanent, imminent danger. In both cases,

existential threat is presented as both novel and

emergent and is then positioned as the baseline reality for a new kind of everyday American life. Future
crisis is projectedas conceptto be the basis for life at institutional , technological , and affective
levels, reordering domestic politics and geopolitics in a startlingly economical gesture.
Declaring a new normal is thus anything but new as a state security practice in the United States. However, the objects, logics, and
consequences of defense have significantly changed with the shift from the twentieth centurys nuclear balance of terror to the
twenty-first centurys War on Terror. 3 Interrogating the links between the first decade of the Cold War and the first decade of the
War on Terror is a central project of this book, which pays specific attention to how technological revolution, surprise,
normality, and terror have been used to orchestrate a new kind of security culture . I pursue these comparisons
not because they are absolutely symmetrical or simply code shifts from nuclear fear to terrorism, but because each iteration of

the national security state announces itself through acts of normalization and naturalization
Derian 2002). It is increasingly important to understand how historically

(see Der

crafted images and logics of imminent

danger allow feelings to be nationalized and directed to produce antidemocratic actions and policy.
These affective logics constitute a specific zone of interaction between citizens and the state, one that is
the very basis for the social contract (which Hobbes once defined as the exchange of public obedience for collective
security). As we shall see, national security affect is a special kind of collective experience, one that is
central to enabling the technological and administrative capacities of the security state. Infrastructures
affective, imaginative, and materialare linked in the production of American power today, creating an
unprecedented global projection of American fears and desires in the name of existential defense .
The Threat Matrix

Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surprise and its opposite, anticipation, have been
foundational concerns of the U.S. national security state . A formal rationale for the 1947 National Security Act (which
created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the CIA) was to prevent a nuclear Pearl Harborto prevent
strategic surprise in the nuclear age. 4 U.S. policy makers immediately understood the power of the atomic bomb to be
revolutionary, enabling U.S. leaders to threaten rival nations with prompt and utter destruction, as President Harry Truman did in
July 1945, or with shock and awe, in the language of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the eve of the U.S. invasion of
Iraq in 2003. 5 The ability to shock (at both psychic and material levels) and not experience shock, in other

words, became a primary goal of the American security state after 1945. The national security state also
sought right from the beginning to politically exploit the psychological effects of nuclear fear as much
as the destructive physical capacities of nuclear weapons. This formulation of security makes the near
future as well as the human nervous system specific objects of state scrutiny, with perceptions and
temporalities of danger the guiding administrative logics of the security state.

At the start of the Cold War, the

United States transformed an anticipated Soviet nuclear capability into the

rationale for building a global technological system, which became the always-on-alert infrastructure of
mutual assured destruction. The nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter (1958) famously called this the delicate balance of
terror, a phrase that underscores the Cold Wars affective logics but not always its material reality. Indeed, the era of most
acute nuclear paranoia in the United States was a largely self-generated effort to mobilize and coordinate
citizens, officials, military personnel, and major social institutions through a new concept of nuclear terror .
In the first decade of the War on Terror, the United States also committed to building an ever-expanding, alwayson-alert global security apparatus , but one that had an astonishing new range of interests (weapons,
people, data, microbes). This is a broad-based effort to create a kind of American power that can
administer the global future, prevent rivals from amassing threatening power, and is never deterred or
shocked. Counterterror is a project subject to constant failure , and precisely because it fails
constantly , it energizes a hyperactive, and increasingly planetary, U.S. security apparatus, one that is
forever striving to realize its imaginary potential.
For defense experts, the challenge of the September 2001 attack was not only its spectacular violence
but also the shocking display of American vulnerability (see RETORT 2005). The fact that the global nuclear
hyperpower could still suffer strategic surpriseand by suicide hijackers armed not with atomic bombs
and state-of-the-art bombers, but with simple box cutters and commercial airplaneschallenged the
existing rationale for the massive multigenerational investment in defense . The U.S. nuclear complex alone has
cost over $6 trillion since 1943, a federal expenditure exceeded only by those for the nonnuclear military and social security (S.
Schwartz 1998). Rather than enjoying the end of history with the demise of the Soviet Union and the start

of
a new, unipolar American century, U.S. security experts were shocked and shamed by the ease with
which the attacks were carried out. Indeed, the attacks transformed the most powerful security apparatus in
the world into a nervous system in a state of global panic (Taussig 1992). Immediately after the attacks,
President Bush ordered that all potential threats made to U.S. interests around the world be routed directly to the White House.

This unfiltered threat matrix became a daily exercise in expanding the field of imminent danger for
decision makers, as unvetted threats piled on top of one another to create a world of seemingly
endless and varied forms of danger , with verifiable information mixed in with rumor, error, and hearsay
(Mayer 2008, 5).

By embracing an amplifying economy of fear , policy makers became the most terrified of American
subjects. When a second wave of attacks hit on September 18, 2001, in the form of anthrax-filled letters aimed at top elected
officials and figures in the news media, the result was a spectacularly consequential dislocation: the U.S. Congress moved into
improvised facilities while its members deliberated some of the most important security legislation in U.S. history; at the same time,
prominent media figures who might otherwise have been reporting on those deliberations instead focused on securing their work
spaces from biological agents, while generating a proliferating and hysterical media narrative of imminent attack. In this context, key
White House officials came to believe they had been victims of a chemical warfare attack when a sensitive, specialized sensor,
designed to alert anyone in the vicinity that the air they were breathing had been contaminated by potentially lethal radioactive,
chemical, or biological agents sounded (Mayer 2008, 3). This alarm led Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell,
and others to believe that they might have been lethally infected by nerve gas. A faulty White House bioweapons sensor played a
significant role in the evolution of the War on Terror, creating an affective atmosphere of immediate danger to officials huddled in
their most secure facilities. At this moment of vulnerable uncertainty, every worst-case scenario might have been playing out in real
timea cascading set of imagined horrors and potentials. The ever-expanding threat matrix created both escalating

responsibilities and new institutional opportunities to pursue specific visions of American power, which in
turn allowed a vast range of interests to quickly agree on terror as the operative principle for a renewal
and expansion of American power in the twenty-first century.
The inability to perfectly predict and preempt low-tech terroristic violence in 2001 enabled a new vision of
the future to emerge among security experts, one in which nearly every aspect of American life was
potentially at risk from unknown forces , requiring not only a conceptual remaking of the concept of
security but also a new global apparatus to achieve it. Identifying threat, in all its myriad forms and
temporalities, transformed the state security project from a focus on capabilitiesthat is, an expert effort
to identify existing technological capacities of known enemies to a world of what ifs . A key innovation
of the counterterrorist state is this commitment to using the imaginary to locate danger . Since 2001
scenarios, speculations, and hypotheticals have been endowed with the power to drive American
policy across the spectrum of government agencies, which are now charged not only with administering a

day-to-day lived reality but also with responding to threatening probabilities, potentials, and possibilities
before they become fact .
Consider, for example, how one branch of the Department of Defense (DOD) currently defines both its mission and U.S. national
security:
The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) was established in 1958 to prevent strategic surprise from negatively
impacting U.S. national security and create strategic surprise for U.S. adversaries by maintaining the technological superiority of the
U.S. military. To fulfill its mission, the Agency relies on diverse performers to apply multi-disciplinary approaches to both advance
knowledge through basic research and create innovative technologies that address current practical problems through applied
research. DARPAs scientific investigations span the gamut from laboratory efforts to the creation of full-scale technology
demonstrations in the fields of biology, medicine, computer science, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, materials
sciences, social sciences, neurosciences and more. As the DODs primary innovation engine, DARPA undertakes projects that are
finite in duration but that create lasting revolutionary change. (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency n.d.)
To prevent strategic surprise at home while creating it for others through revolutionary technological change. DARPA announces
itself programmatically here as an unending series of Manhattan Projects, using the full spectrum of scientific inquiry for U.S.
national advantage. The success or failure of U.S. national security is thus determined by the register of

surprisea highly slippery term whose negation requires a specific ability to read the future, as well as
the capacity to anticipate intentions, accidents, and opportunities on a global scale . DARPAs mission statement
also assumes nothing less than a permanent war posture and a planetary field of action .
When amplified across the global U.S. national security apparatus, the logics of threat designation and
preemption transform counterterrorism into a project of constant affective recruitment and capacity
generation . The Congressional Research Service estimates the formal costs of the first decade of the War on Terror at $1.4
trillion (Belasco 2011)a vast U.S. expenditure that is in addition to the costs of maintaining the largest formal military budget in the
world, which has almost doubled since 2001 (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2011). The Watson Institute at
Brown University estimates that total costs of the first decade of counterterror come closer to $4 trillion (Costsofwar.org 2013). The
first decade of the War on Terror has produced multiple fronts: many Manhattan Projectlike research
programs located across the military sciences (from drones to cyberwar to biosecurity ); the creation
of a second defense department in the Department of Homeland Security; and a vast new commitment to
intelligence gathering, data mining, global digital communications systems, and, above all, new forms of
expert threat perception . Dana Priest and William Arkin have shown that since 2001 a new intelligence apparatus
has been built that is too big for any single person to understand its reach, level of redundancy, or output .
The authors found that over 850,000 people now have security clearances in counterterrorism alone, and generate some 50,000
reports a year. Priest and Arkin were able to identify 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies working on
programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security, and intelligence at over 10,000 locations across the United States
(Priest and Arkin 2010, 1; see also 2011). Committed to recognizing vulnerabilities in the global web of U.S. interests and imagining
proliferating vectors of foreign and domestic threat, the catastrophic terrorist future is now a competitive domain for

security experts at multiple agencies and companies making disaster calculation the major growth
industry of the new century. The worst-case terrorist scenario is produced across this spectrum of
expert activity, dictating the terms of the counterterror formation, and maintaining a charged hold on the
concept of security as well as the future. The paradox is that despite this commitment to preemption and
the fact that the United States outspends almost all other countries combined on its security, Americans in
the twenty-first century are caught in multiple forms of crisis (economic, environmental, and political).
Counterterror is a mode of global engagement that attempts to extend U.S. military dominance but one
that paradoxically generates new forms of insecurity : by installing technological and bureaucratic
capabilities to preempt imagined threats , counterterror simultaneously creates new forms of
uncertainty , ripple effects from expert practices that create their own realities and retaliations and
threats. Every system has built into its infrastructure a future crisis: the counterterror state is loading new
capacities into the future as well as the conditions of possibility for new nightmares not yet realized
(Cazdyn 2007; see also Berlant 2007). This is not quite the epistemic murk that Michael Taussig (1987) encounters in the mutual
terror of colonial-native encounters in rubber-boom Colombia, as its domain is the future instead of the present. But by allocating

conceptual, material, and affective resources to ward off imagined but potentially catastrophic terroristic
futures, the counterterror state also creates the conditions for those catastrophic futures to emerge .
It does so by generating new arms races ; increasing international blowback from war, covert actions,
and drone strikes; and by not responding to existing suffering at home and abroad with the same

urgency as it addresses real and imagined terrorist acts. A perverse effect of the counterterror system is
that failure and disaster, like surprise and shock, can be absorbed as part of its internal circuit, authorizing
an expansion of the number of objects to be surveilled and secured, empowering expert speculation
about the various forms of danger that might emerge from an ever-shifting landscape of information and
potential threat. Thus, for defense experts most of all, an affective recruitment to constant crisis is one of the
chief effects of the counterterror formationwhich is self-colonizing , opening a potentially endless
conceptual space of worry and projected dangers.
Counterterror thus approaches the American future as both already ruined a boundless source of
violenceand as perfectible a conceptual universe requiring radical social and technological
engineering and intervention. One powerful effect of these administrative logics is that demilitarizing becomes
increasingly impossible to imagine, as potential dangers pile up for experts, while citizens feel
increasingly insecure with the diversion of funds and psychic energies from everyday welfare to
anticipatory defense

(see Gusterson and Besteman 2009). Counterterror, then, constitutes

itself as an endless

horizon , providing a self-justifying rationale for radical expenditures and actionoffering a potentially
eternal project for the security state . For when can the future ever be perfectly secured? When can
terror ever be eradicated from both thought and action? Threat, as an imaginary engagement with the
future, is limitless , offering an ever-expanding field of potentials , possibilities , and fears for
counterterror governance.
Gaming Death

Perceptions of the future are affectively laden , as well as tied to expert judgment and information; they
are based on feelings and intensities that can be nonrational but that link people together through
threat-based projection . Put differently, one can be afraid only of that which one knows to fear. Fear
requires a kind of familiarity with danger that the future does not allow us full access to. In the realm of
esoteric military technologiesweapons of mass destruction, for examplethe general public has no expert knowledge to draw on
and must instead be educated to think and feel a particular way about technological capacities and worst-case outcomes.

Rehearsing the end of the nation-state at the level of imagination has consequently been a core
American project since the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with each generation
embracing its own concept of nation-ending apocalyptic danger , consolidated most powerfully in
the image of the mushroom cloud .
The innovation of the War on Terror is that it formally rejects deterrence, with its focus on global stability,
as an objective in favor of preemption an unending manipulation of the future for national
advantage. The counterterror state is devoted to locating and/or conjuring up images of dangers from
an unrealized future and then combating each of those alternate futures as if they were material and
imminent threats. In this way, imagined futures and the affects they produce have become
institutionalized as national security policy, creating a form of expert judgment that is at war with its
own apocalyptic imaginary before it meets the real world, creating a massively productive form of
militarization that is easily delinked from evidence , facts, or the observable in the name of
confronting and eliminating potentially cataclysmic future danger . How did this kind of governance come to be?
The origins of the preemptive, counterterror state reside in the logics and lessons of the Cold War. The nuclear arms race,
with its minute-to-minute calculation of threat and advantage and the always ready-to-launch nuclear war
machine, was an effort to stabilize the present by loading nuclear destruction into the everyday and
continually displacing it by a few minutes into the future . Mutual assured destruction promised that
any state that started a nuclear war would only minutes later be destroyed by it, an unprecedented
compression of time, space, and destructive capability in the name of global defense. To make this
system work, U.S. defense experts not only built nuclear weapons and delivery systems that could function in any environment,
launch within minutes, and operate on a planetary scale, but they also gamed, modeled, and fantasized future war scenarios
incessantly (see Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005). Locating security in intercontinental missile systems that were never fully

tested and trusting a vast web of machines, institutions, and people to respond perfectly in the first
moments of global crisis, the nuclear war machine was designed first and foremost to produce fear of
the near future in adversaries and to harness that fear to produce a stable bipolar world. The Cold War
system was therefore saturated with affective and imaginary recruitments as well as anticipatory
logics. Deterrence, however, restrained both sides of the conflict, putting a break on both U.S. and Soviet desires and aggressions.
The Cold War focus on nuclear weapons and delivery systems also set material parameters for the speculative expert imaginary; it
focused experts attention on the numbers and types of Soviet weapons, their deployments and machinic capabilities (speed and
force), as well as on the psychologies of nuclear command and control. These technoscientific forms were never free of political
calculation but had a material basis: Donald MacKenzie (1990) has shown how the accuracy of intercontinental missiles was
determined in the United States not by exacting experimental proof but rather by a political consensus among all the interested
scientific, military, and industrial parties (adding an unacknowledged uncertainty to nuclear targeting going forward). Similarly, Lynn
Eden (2004) has shown how the urban consequences of fire from nuclear explosions fell out of formal nuclear war planning in the
1960s, enabling the development of nuclear war and civil defense concepts that vastly underestimated the material effects of each
detonation and allowed far greater numbers of U.S. weapons to be deployed globally (see also Gusterson 2008).
In other words, although nuclear war remained at the conceptual stage after the bombings of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki in 1945, it was fought incessantly at the level of the imagination , with an unending statebased commitment to trying to model, game , intuit, and assess the likely actions of all parties in a
nuclear conflict. By contrast the future imagined by counterterror officials today is an endless spectrum
of threat , with a proliferating set of objects, vectors, scales, and possibilitiesa spectrum that is literally
not bounded by time, space, technology, or the rules of evidence . By defining terror as
constantly emergent , the counterterror state also assumes an open-ended futurity that cannot be
deterred by external forces. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (2002) famously put it in a press conference about the
(ultimately fictional) threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion, the counterterror state needs to
make not-yet-visible dangers its central concern because:
Reports that say that something hasnt happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns;
there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do
not know. But there are also unknown unknownsthe ones we dont know we dont know. And if one looks throughout the history of
our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones. And so people who have the
omniscience that they can say with high certainty that something has not happened or is not being tried, have capabilities . . . they
can do things I cant do.

Unknown unknowns can now be the basis for war.

Here, Rumsfeld

transforms a catastrophic

future at the level of the speculative imaginary into an urgent problem of counterterror. Security is thus
constituted as both a necessity (to defend against catastrophic shock) and as an unachievable goal (as
the future is an inexhaustible source of threat ), a perverse logic that the counterterror state uses to
drive increasing calls for resources, technical capacities, and agency . In the first decade of counterterror, a
strategic mobilization by security officials of the unknown, not yet emergent, or invisible danger
has powerfully overturned long-standing American democratic values about the rule of law, the
treatment of captives, the surveillance of citizens, and the necessity of covert actions. It has
transformed intuitions and desires into policy , invalidated long-standing forms of expert judgment
that worked to constrain official fears by attending to material reality, andas a resulthas enabled
deadly actions in the absence of facts . Rumsfelds visionprecisely because it transforms the
unknown into a space of terror requiring immediate action simultaneously validates and
eliminates the possibility of factual evidence , creating both a rationale for unrestrained American
power and a security apparatus of constantly expanding capacities and infrastructures. This logic
renders security itself obsolete , replacing it with a constant conceptual agitation and physical
mobilization. Threat (as pure potential) is used to enable a radically active and ever emerging
counterterror state, allowing action to be favored over restraint , possibilities over capabilities,
hypotheticals over knowledge .
Excitable Subjects

The uniquely destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons and the speed of their potential delivery
constituted a new kind of technologically mediated existential threat after 1945, one that made feelings
(fear, terror, shock, aggression, futility, revenge) a new national project . I argue in this book that the first
and most powerful effect of the nuclear revolution in the United States was the constitution of a new
affective politics , one that informs the evolution of the national security state to this day and that is key
to the formation of the counterterror state. Put differently, in the age of thermonuclear war, the security state
became a committed affect theorist , investing substantial multidisciplinary resources in efforts to
understand public morale, contagious affects (panic, fear, terror), resilience, resolve, and the long-term
effects of stress. The nuclear balance of terror was always an all-encompassing formation, creating a new
executive (a president preauthorized to start a nuclear war any second of the day) and a new citizensubject (recruited to reorganize everyday life around the minute-to-minute reality of nuclear
danger ). Military science funded extensive research on affects, feelings, and emotions with the goal of
both psychologically strengthening and militarizing American society, using nuclear fear to calibrate
officials and citizens alike through a new image of collective death .
National security affect has thus become a new kind of infrastructurea structure of feeling , to use
Raymond Williamss felicitous phrase (1978, 132)that is historically produced, shared, and officially constituted as
a necessary background condition of everyday life (see Stoler 2009). It is based on fears that are officially
sanctioned and promoted as a means of coordinating citizens as members of a national security
state . It can be a specific and negative form of what Kathleen Stewart calls ordinary affects (2007), in the sense that certain
kinds of fear are now coded into social life as potentials that can be triggered by small events fear
of the unattended suitcase in the airport, for exampleor directly recruited by official statements, such as
terrorist alert warnings. National security affect also relies on a specific political aesthetic , one that
rehearses certain forms and images to produce what Jacques Rancire calls a sensuous shock that limits
thought as much as expands it (2009, 6; see also M. Hansen 2004). The goal of a national security system is to
produce a citizen-subject who responds to officially designated signs of danger automatically ,
instinctively activating logics and actions learned over time through drills and media indoctrination . An
individuals response to this kind of emotional call (in either the affirmative or negative) reveals his or her membership in a national
community. Indeed, the

production of a fearful and docile public in the nuclear age has been historically
matched by the rise of vibrant activist movements (across the antinuclear, peace, justice, and
environmental spectrum), counterpublics that mirror the intensities of officially sanctioned nuclear terror
in pursuit of different collective futures . 6
An affective atmosphere of everyday anxiety

(Anderson 2009), grounded

in an understanding that

accidents, disasters, and attacks can happen at any moment of the day , is transformed into
individualized emotion by specific events, becoming a personalized and deeply felt experience . As
Stewart puts it, what affects usthe sentience of a situationis also a dwelling, a worlding born from an
atmospheric attunement (2011, 449). I argue in this book that national security affect has a specific form in the
United States, one that is tied to a deep structural investment in the atomic bomb and that has been
recalibrated and expanded since 2001 to address a new concept of terror (consolidated in the logic of the
WMD ). American citizens have been taught through official and mass-media campaigns to attune
themselves to the possibility of terroristic violence as an unlimited daily potential . This new
concept of terror maintains the minute-to-minute threat made familiar by decades of Cold War nuclear
culture, but it is different in that it is an open-ended concept, one that links hugely diverse kinds of
threats ( nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to be sure, but also attacks on the public image

of the United States, computer hacking , infectious disease , and disruptions to daily life, to name but a
few) and treats them all as equally imminent, equally catastrophic .
Counterterror today requires a continual expansion of the security state , reaching a limit only when
its key objects attain planetary scale ( exhausting space ) or when federal monies run out ( exhausting
resources ). That is, counterterror sets no conceptual or territorial limit to defense, scaling its problems
up to the ultimate spatial unitthe earthwhile offering an unlimited call for resources to secure life
from the species to the population to the individual to the microbe . In this manner, counterterror produces a
highly mobile sovereignty , one that uses the potential of catastrophic future events as a means of
overcoming legal, ethical, and political barriers in the here and now and that is endlessly
searching for new objects of concern . However, this commitment to total securityand the constant
failure to achieve it creates an unending bureaucratic circuit where shock requires ever more
militarization and normalization in the name of warding off future shock .
A war on shock, like a war on terror, locates national security within the human nervous system
itself, constituting a peculiarly embodied psychopolitics

(Orr 2006) that

fuses an energetic apocalyptic

imagination with both an immediate and deep future. Conceptually, a national security project of this kind would
seem to offer only two means of achieving stability: first, by changing the nature of the individual at the level of emotions, senses,
and psychology so that he or she experiences threat in a different mannera project of normalization through militarization; and
second, by changing the global environment in the hope of eliminating the possibility of danger. The Cold War state and the
counterterror state in specific formulations have attempted to do both:

endeavoring to produce a new citizen who is

tuned to the specific threats of the age and psychologically capable of supporting permanent war ,
while simultaneously mobilizing U.S. economic and military power to change the international system, in
the hope of eradicating threat on a planetary basis. However, the impossibility of this dual effort to
produce a completely compliant citizen incapable of resisting the national security state or to eliminate
danger on a planetary scale creates an endless feedback loop of shock, normalization, and
militarization . We could say that this recursive system is what constitutes the United States as a global
hyperpower , but an increasingly fragile one as experts see danger coming in all physical
dimensions (land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace) as well as in all temporal conditions (past,
present, and future). This requires a new kind of expert psychopolitics that is not grounded in the effort
to establish facts but rather is committed to generating speculative futures (imagined dangers of
cataclysmic scale) that it will then need to counter. Security thus becomes a highly conceptual enterprise,
one that moves past statistical, fact-based, or capability-based assessments of risk (see Collier 2008;
De Goede 2008). Threat assessmentwith all its imaginative, affective recruitmentsbecomes the chief
domain of counterterror.
The inability to perfectly predict and counter threat creates in the American security system the
opportunity to constitute nearly every domain and object of everyday life as a potential vector of attack,
creating a national security project that performs as a nearly perfect paranoid system , but one with
planetary reach . Peter Sloterdijk has noted that a nervous condition is an attribute of globalization, which he
sees as:
the establishment of the system of synchronous stress on a global scale . This has progressed to such an
extent that those who do not make themselves continuously available for synchronous stress seem asocial.
Excitability is now the foremost duty of all citizens . This is why

military service . What is required is the

we no longer need

general theme of duty , that is to say, a readiness to

play your role as a conductor of excitation for collective, opportunist psychoses . (Sloterdijk and Henrichs
2001, 82)

Excitability is now the foremost duty of all citizens . The circulation of affect , the ability to be
coordinated as subjects through felt intensities rather than reason at a mass level, is a core aspect of
modern life (see Mazzarella 2010; Clough 2007, 19; Orr 2006). The atomic bomb is one key origin of this kind of governance (see
Lutz 1997, 247), a WMD that greatly expanded American power but that also created a world of constant existential danger, one that
was quite formally managed for generations by suturing collective life to an imminent destruction located in each minute of the day.

A security culture of existential threat was embedded quite thoroughly in American society and U.S.
security institutions by decades of Cold War, allowing national politics of every kind (domestic,
international, activist) to be positioned as a matter of collective life or collective death . From this
perspective, terror is a familiar mode of governance in the United States, one that was merely reconstituted
in 2001 with a new set of objects, ambitions, and concerns .

The 1ACs avowal of military withdrawal mystifies the ontological schema which
subtends global imperialism by capitulating to a notion of peace based in
whiteness and the end of history vote negative to overdetermine the
ontological only dwelling in debates interregnum brings theory and praxis into
concomitance
Spanos 8 (William V Spanos, distinguished professor of English at Binghamton University, PhD from
the University of Wisconsin, 2008, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of
Vietnam, pp 26-31, modified) gz
I will return later in this book to Saids provocative retrieval of empires spectral Othershis bringing of this marginalized figure out
of the shadows of imperialisms periphery to center stage, as it were. It will suffice here to suggest that by thus assuming the exilic
perspective of the Abgeschiedene in addressing the question of global colonialism , it should now be clear that my
intervention has not been intended to mimic the by now commonplace critical imperative of a certain postcolonial
discourse, usually identified with Salmon Rushdie and Malek Alloula, in which the Empire writes back to the imperial center.32
This critical initiative, perhaps needless to say, has contributed significantly, especially by way of identifying the colonial project with
cultural, specifically literary, production, to the inauguration of an anticolonial discourse that would be commensurate to the complex
and multisituated operations of American (neo)colonialism in the postimperial age of globalization, above all, in that phase that has
been represented by its intellectual deputies as the end of history and is now bearing witness to Americas unilateral imposition of
capitalist democracy on rogue states that threaten the American Peace. But, as I have suggested, it

remains inadequate

to this most difficult of tasks, not impossible. This inadequacy is not simply the result of this criticisms vestigial adherence
to the kind of imperial thinking it would interrogate (i.e., its not being postcolonial exilic or, rather, a-partenough).33 It is also,
and primarily, the result of a paradoxically limited historical sense . Despite its insistent appeal to
history against theory, this praxis-oriented postcolonial criticism , like the genealogical criticism of
Foucault and even Said, from which it ultimately derives, is not historical enough . In keeping with its
indifference to, if not its antitheoretical bias against theory , it has, in fact, reduced the critical potential
of this resonant motif of resistance by restricting the genealogy of imperialism by and large to the
modern erafrom the age of exploration in the fifteenth century to the age of imperialism in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In overlooking its own origins in the exilic theory that emerged in response to the
decisive self-destruction of the imperial (onto)logic of the discourse of the Occident in the middle of the twentieth century, this
postcolonial discourse, in other words, has also lost sight of an earlier, deeper, and polyvalent
structural origin of the colonial project . I mean the very epochal moment of the founding of the idea
of the Occidental polis in late Greek and especially (imperial) Roman antiquity. This was the moment that
bore witness to the Wests self-conscious inscription of metaphysics of thinking the transitory and
singular (contingent or always incomplete) event from the exclusionary or accommodational providential/
panoptic vantage point of its (preconceived) completionas the truth of being and history at large .34 As
a consequence of this forgetting of the provenance of imperialism in the Roman transformation of the
errant thinking of the Greeks into a correct (and, in Fukuyamas term, directional) thinking, the
discourse of postcolonialism has delimited its genealogy of Western imperialism to the
Enlightenment and after and thus the ideological parameters of imperialism to the practice of empire, that
is, to the site of cultural geopolitics. Despite its suggestive spontaneous probings beyond it (mostly in the form of its
inadequately thought reiteration of the relay of white metaphorscenter/periphery; light/darkness; plantation/wilderness;

settler/nomad, development (improvement)/underdevelopment that systematically informs the truth discourse of metaphysics),
they therefore remain vestigially and disablingly [stultifyingly] disciplinary.
In other words, this privileged version of postcolonialist discourse is determined by a problematic that

restricts itself to an idea of the imperial that remains indifferent to or, more accurately, overlooks
the inaugural ontological ground on which the developing structure of the West as the West restsa
ground that, as I have shown, visibly reasserts itself in the neo-Hegelianism of the post-Cold War end-ofhistory discourse. As such, it is a critical discourse that addresses an imperialism that has been
rendered anachronistic , if not exactly obsolete , by the triumphant cultures representation of the end
of the Cold War as the end of history and the annunciation of this good news as the advent of the New
World Order. I mean, to retrieve and reconstellate into the present historical occasion the forgotten and
decisively important ideological function of the ruse of the Pax Romana, the peace of what I have been
calling the Pax Americana.
On the other hand, I do not want to suggest that the theoretical perspective of Heideggers Abgeschiedene as such (or, for that
matter, its poststructuralist allotropes) is entirely adequate to this task of resistance either, since the consequences of his (and, in a
different way, of those he influenced) failure to adequately think the political imperatives of his interrogation of Western ontology are
now painfully clear. We

must, rather, think the Abgeschiedene the ghostly ontological exile evolving a

way of errant thinking that would be able to resist the global imperialism of
Occidental/technological logic with, say, Saids political Deleuzian nomad : the displaced political
emigr evolving, by way of his or her refusal to be answerable to the Truth of the Occident , a
politics capable of resisting the polyvalent global neo-imperialism of Occidental political power. The
Abgeschiedene, the displaced thinker, and the migrant, the displaced political person, are not incommensurable entities; they are
two indissolubly related, however uneven, manifestations of the same world-historical event.

The political Left of the 1980s, which inaugurated the momentum against theory, was entirely
justified in accusing the theoretical discourse of the 1970s of an ontological and/or textual focus that, in
its obsessive systematics, rendered it, in Saids word, unworldlyindifferent to the imperial politics of
historically specific Western history. But it can be seen now, in the wake of the representation of the global
triumph of liberal democratic capitalism in the 1990s as the end of history, or, at any rate, of Americas
arrogant will to impose capitalist-style democracy on different, destabilizing cultures, that this Lefts
focus on historically specific politics betrays a disabling [stultifying] indifference to the polyvalent
imperial politics of ontological representation. It thus repeats in reverse the essential failure of the
theoretically oriented discourse it has displaced. This alleged praxis-oriented discourse , that is,
tendseven as it unconsciously employs in its critique the ontologically produced white metaphorics
and rhetoric informing the practices it opposesto separate praxis from and to privilege it over
theory , the political over the ontological . Which is to say, it continues, in tendency, to understand being
in the arbitraryand disabling [ stultifying ] disciplinary terms endemic to and demanded by the very
panoptic classificatory logic of modern technological thinking , the advanced metaphysical logic
that perfected , if it did not exactly enable, the colonial project proper.35 In so doing, this praxisoriented discourse fails to perceive that being , however it is represented, constitutes a
continuum , which, though unevenly developed at any historically specific moment, nevertheless
traverses its indissolubly related sites from being as such and the epistemological subject through the
ecos, culture (including family, class, gender, and race), to sociopolitics (including the nation and the
international or global sphere). As a necessary result, it fails to perceive the emancipatory political
potential inhering in the relay of differences released (decolonized) by an interrogation of the
dominant Western cultures disciplinary representation of being. By this relay of positively potential
differences I do not simply mean the nothing (das Nichts) or the ontological difference (Heidegger),
existence (Sartre), the absolutely other (Levinas), the differance or trace (Derrida), the differend (Lyotard),
the invisible or absent cause (Althusser) that belong contradictorily to and haunt white/totalitarian

metaphysical thinking .36 I also mean the pariah (Arendt), the nomad (Deleuze and Guattari), the hybrid
or the minus in the origin (Bhabha), the nonbeings (Dussel), the subaltern

(Guha), the

emigr (Said),

the denizen (Hammar), the refugee (Agamben), the queer (Sedgwick, Butler, Warner), the multitude
(Negri and Hardt),37 and, to point to the otherwise unlikely affiliation of these international postcolonial
thinkers with a certain strain of postmodern black American literature, the darkness (Morrison) that
belong contradictorily to and haunt white/imperial culture politics :
The images of impenetrable whiteness need contextualizing to explain their extraordinary power, pattern, and consistency. Because
they appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under
complete control, these images of blinding [totalizing] whiteness seem to function as both antidote for meditation

on the shadow that is the companion to this whiteness a dark and abiding presence that moves
the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing. This haunting , a darkness

from which

our early literature seemed unable to extricate itself, suggests

the complex and contradictory situation in which

American writers found themselves during the formative years of the nations literature .38
In this chapter, I have overdetermined the ontological perspective of the Abgeschiedene , the errant
thinker in the interregnum who would think the spectral nothing that a triumphant empirical
science wishes to know nothing about,39 not simply, however, for the sake of rethinking the question of
being as such, but also to instigate a rethinking of the uneven relay of practical historical
imperatives

precipitated by the post-Cold War occasion. My

purpose, in other words, has been to make visible

and operational the substantial and increasingly complex practical role that ontological
representation has played and continues to play in the Wests perennial global imperial project, a
historical role rendered disablingly [stultifyingly] invisible as a consequence of the oversight inherent in
the vestigially disciplinary problematics of the privileged oppositional praxis-oriented discourses ,
including that of all too many New Americanists.

In accordance with this need to reintegrate theory and practice

the ontological and the sociopolitical, thinking and doing and to accommodate the present uneven
balance of this relationship to the actual conditions established by the total colonization of thinking in the
age of the world picture, I would suggest, in a prologemenal way, the inordinate urgency of resuming
the virtually abandoned destructive genealogy of the truth discourse of the post-Enlightenment
Occident, now, however, reconstellated into the post-Cold War conjuncture. I mean specifically, the conjuncture that,
according to Fukuyama (and the strategically less explicit Straussian neoconservatives that have risen to power in America
after 9/11), has borne apocalyptic witness to the global triumph of liberal capitalist democracy and the end of
history. Such a reconstellated genealogy, as I have suggested, will show that this triumphant post-Cold War
American polity constitutes the fulfillment (end) of the last (anthropological) phase of a continuous,
historically produced, three part ontological/cultural/sociopolitical Western history : what Heidegger, to demarcate
its historical itinerary (Greco-Roman, Medieval/Protestant Christian, and Enlightenment liberal humanist), has called the
ontotheological tradition. It will also show that this long and various history, which the
neoconservatives would obliterate, has been from its origins imperial in essence . I am referring to the
repeatedly reconstructed history inaugurated by the late or post- Socratic Greeks or, far more decisively,
by the Romans, when they reduced the pre-Socratic truth as a-letheia (unconcealment) to veritas (the
adequation of mind and thing), when, that is, they reified (essentialized) the tentative disclosures of a still
originative Platonic and Aristotelian thinking and harnessed them as finalized, derivative conceptional
categories to the ideological project of legitimizing, extending, and efficiently administering the Roman
Empire in the name of the Pax Romana.
To be more specific, this reconstellated destructive genealogy will show that the reality of the triumphant
American democratic/capitalist polity rests on a fabricated ontological base that privileges the
hierarchically structured binarist principle of principlesthat identity is the condition for the possibility of

difference and not the other way aroundand that, therefore, this polity is imperial in essence as well
as in its multisituated political practices. It will show, in other words, that, in representing being meta ta physica
(from after or above beings temporal disseminations), this ontological base generates a truth discourse
that, far from being transparently objective, open to the empirical event, is actually representational , pan-optic , and retro-spective and, as such, utterly metaphorical and ideological .
To retrieve the now virtually forgotten, but extraordinarily resonant phrase Derrida coined to identify this truth discourse with
European origins and interests, it will show that the alleged disinterested truth discourse of the West is, in

fact,
a binarist white mythology .40 It will show that its truth structuralizes or, more telling in the proximity

of its sublimated metaphorics of temporal closure to the operations of colonization, spatializes or

territorializes the differential dynamics of temporality around a polyvalent (Eurocentric) Logos . I mean
by this Logos a Transcendental Signified or Principle of Presence invariably represented in Western history since the Romans
codification of the domiciled colonus (farmer/settler) as the binary opposite of the nomadic sylvestris (savage, literally, of the
woods) in the form of a combination of indissolubly related, hierarchically structured binary tropes of resolution or accommodation
most notably and enablingly, the centered circle, the panoptic eye (and its light), and, not least, the maturation process (the clearing
of the wilderness and the planting and cultivation of the original seed). It is, for example, this relay of imperial tropes
emanating from and circulating around the presiding Logos that informs Hegels imperial Philosophy of
History, epitomized by the incantatory repetition of World History) in the following famous passage on Enlightenment:
The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning. The History of the
World has an East kat exochen (the term East in itself is entirely relative), for although the Earth forms a sphere, History performs
no circle round it, but has on the contrary a determinate East, viz., Asia. Here rises the outward physical Sun, and in the West it
sinks down: here consentaneously rises the Sun of self-consciousness, which diffuses a nobler brilliance. The History of the World is
the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a Universal principle and conferring subjective freedom.41
And, I will show in chapter 6, it

is this relay of imperial tropes , subsumed to the Hegelian paradigm by

Fukuyama, that has pervaded the unexceptionalist discourse of American exceptionalism from the Puritan
jeremiad in behalf of the errand in the wilderness, through the discourse of the frontier in behalf of the fulfillment of Americas
Manifest Destiny, to that of the post-9/11 effort to recuperate the American national identity in the wake of the
Vietnam War.
More immediately, the reconstellation of destructive genealogy into the post-Cold War occasion will show that
the relay of binarist white metaphors informing the truth discourse of the triumphant postEnlightenment democratic/capitalist society constitutes a naturalized diagram of a mechanism of
power reduced to its ideal form.42 Contrary to the representation of the reigning disciplinary
interpretation of being , this hegemonic diagram of power is operative simultaneously , however
unevenly at any particular historical specific occasion , throughout the continuum of being, from the
representation of being and the subject as such , through gender and race , to culture ,
economics , and the national and international polity . It is, in short, polyvalent in its imperial
applications .

Hegemony is a new name for the white mans burden decline is inevitable due
to free-riding and it relies on circular logic and ignores its racialized foundation
---Read yellow!
Hobson 14 (John M Hobson, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of
Sheffield, October 2014, Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour
Line, pp 88-93) gz
A further subliminal strategy has been the normative prescription of a benign neo-imperial politics
that also goes by a whitewashed or sanitised name . Thus neorealist hegemonic stability theory (HST)
elevates the exercise of (Anglo-Saxon) hegemony to the implicit status of a civilising mission (e.g.
neoliberal institutionalism does much the same with respect to the role played by
Western international institutions, especially the IFIs (Keohane 1984). In both visions, a major rationale of
Western hegemons and their international institutions is to culturally convert Third World states along
Gilpin 1981), while

Western civilisational lines : the very essence of the old liberal mantra of the civilising mission. And
both approaches echo the manifest paternalist Eurocentric formula of awarding pioneering
progressive agency to the West and conditional agency to the East . These two terms refer to the point
that for

paternalist forms of Eurocentrism the West is assumed to have the fully rational capability to

self-generate into modernity (the Eurocentric logic of immanence), while the East is said to be blocked from
doing so on account of its irrational institutions. This led to the paternalist-imperial formula in
which Eastern development can occur but only on condition that the rational institutions of the
civilised West are delivered courtesy of the benign-paternalist Western civilising mission . Thus for
HST and Keohanes neoliberal institutionalism, hegemony and international institutions respectively come
to replace the terminology of the liberal civilising mission , even if these former terms perform the
exact same logic as the latter .
The route into this alternative reading of HST lies with the point that in

order to celebrate British and American

hegemony Gilpin is forced to suspend some of the cardinal axioms of neorealism . For a key property
of hegemony is that it must secure world order and development for all states but in the process this
leads inevitably to the relative decline of the hegemon via the free rider problem . The immediate
problem here is that neorealism, especially in its offensive variant that Gilpin supported in the period when
he constructed HST (i.e. 1975 through 1987), 6 asserts that states seek to maximise their relative gains
over others

(Gilpin 1975, 23, 34 6, 85 92). But

it is clear that in HST this principle applies to all states

bar the hegemon . Or, put differently, in this vision we are treated to a story in which the leading great power
not only does not seek to enhance its relative power over others but instead sacrifices its power
for the benefit of others , thereby contradicting the cardinal realist axiom that the strong do what
they can and the weak suffer what they must . Thus in Gilpins HST this cardinal realist axiom is precisely
inverted: The weak do what they can and the strongest does what it must .
That the hegemon is exceptional is clear, though why it is so is not explained other than through a
circularity as well as through a structural-functionalist mode of reasoning : specifically, that the
hegemon self-sacrifices because that is what hegemons do (i.e. the circularity); and that without
the presence of a hegemon the world economy descends into recession and rising inter-state competition
because the international system requires a hegemon to promote stability and world order (i.e. the
structural-functionalist assertion). But simply asserting that the system requires a hegemon for ensuring
world order and stability does not explain why a leading great power chooses to become a
hegemon in the first place , especially as all it can look forward to is its decline relative to those
that it helps. In essence, then, there is no recourse within neorealist logic to explain the highly anomalous
altruistic status that HST ascribes to the United States in the 1945-73 period or to Britain in 1845-73 .
Explaining this gap in the theory requires focussing on the presence of a subconscious American
ethnocentrism and subliminal paternalist Eurocentrism which, I want to suggest, lies at the very
base of HST . That is, US hegemony reflects the nineteenth-century discourse of American
exceptionalism and its accompanying neo-imperialist idiom of Americas manifest destiny , much as
the notion of helping all other
states, especially those in the Third World, conjures up the idiom of the civilising mission and the
British exceptionalism and manifest destiny underpinned the idea of the British Empire. For

white mans burden . Thus I want to suggest that within Gilpins theory it is precisely this Eurocentricimperialist sensibility that underpins the real explanation for why leading Anglo-Saxon great powers
choose to become hegemons and why they supposedly sacrifice themselves for the good of others.
Still, while my reading thus far is based on logical deduction, nevertheless there is a clear slippage in Gilpins positivist
play of mimetic universalism where he makes explicit reference to hegemony as a benign imperial

civilising mission . As is well known, Gilpin begins by differentiating hegemons from imperial powers .
Although Gilpin argues that, with the exception of the Soviet Union, the modern world is governed by the progressive non-imperialist
politics of liberal hegemons whereas the pre-modern world was based on the cyclical and stultifying/regressive politics of despotic
Eastern empires, this distinction is problematised by the obvious point that Britain was the greatest imperial
power prior to 1945, as much as the United States has been the greatest neo-imperial power in the
post-1945 era . The critical point is that Gilpin attempts to circumvent this obvious inconsistency by
explicitly resorting, paradoxically, to the nineteenth-century imperialist trope of the liberal civilising
mission . To this end he invokes Karl Marxs paternalist civilising mission conception whereby modern European imperial powers
transferred capital and technologies to the colonies not to exploit but to uplift them (Gilpin 1981, 142 3); or again, that
the dominant power helps to create challenging powers. Ironically, as Marx himself appreciated, one of the greatest forces
for diffusion has been imperialism. The imperial power has stimulated the colonized peoples to learn its ways and
frequently has taught them advanced military, political, and economic techniques.
(Gilpin 1981, 176)
Here, then, we encounter the key paternalist-imperial civilising mission trope, in which liberal empires
take on the guise of a benevolent father who teaches his children both directly and by way of
example to embrace and develop what he has already pioneered so that they can grow up and one
day prosper .
Thus in defending his non-imperialist reading of hegemony it seems clear that Gilpin , like Hedley Bull, is
addressing the wrong target. For his assumption is that imperialism is defined by the exploitation of the
weak by the strong. But in Marxs vision as well as that of the paternalist Eurocentric liberal imperialism is
conceptualised as a civilising mission precisely because it entails the West engaging in the
paternalist uplift , rather than the coercive exploitation , of the East.
Post-1945 IR theory and the elision of North-South or East-West relations from world politics
Another generic aspect of subliminal Eurocentric IR theory in the post-1945 era, which stands in marked contrast to
the manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism of the previous era, is a shift in focus away from North/South relations

or East/West relations in favour of a near-exclusive focus on intra-Western relations in which the

provincial West masquerades as the universal . This is indeed a profound and marked change given that the
headlining focus of attention in scientific racist and manifest Eurocentric-institutionalist international theory was precisely a rigid
focus on North-South or East-West relations. One might assume at first glance that such an elision might be
symptomatic of a non-Eurocentric approach. But the move is entirely consistent with subliminal
Eurocentrism given that this vision presents the West as endowed with hyper-agency while
Eastern agency is downgraded, if not erased

altogether . That is, all developments within world politics are explained through Western hyper-agency ,
with the West being presented as the universal and Eastern agency blipping off the ontological
radar screen altogether. This is a typical feature of classical realism and Waltzian neorealism and it is to
a certain extent reproduced in neorealist HST . Because of the importance of this ontological strategy
and the centrality that these realist theories have long enjoyed within the discipline of IR, it is useful
to consider this in a little more detail to illustrate my case .
Hegemonic stability theory effectively instructs the student that she can learn all she needs to know about
world politics/economics by simply focussing all her attention on the actions of the Anglo-Saxon
hegemons . Significantly, one of the theorys prominent advocates replied to a question posed by an audience member
(presumably a Luxembourg national) at the 1990 APSA conference: Sure, people in Luxembourg have good ideas. But who gives a
damn? Luxembourg aint hegemonic (Stephen Krasner, cited in Hobson 2012, 195). Such a narrow focus necessarily
precludes the actions of small Western states (as in American ethnocentrism ) and Third World states

(as in paternalist Eurocentrism ). Analogous to World Series Baseball that involves only North American teams, so for
HST America is the world , much as Britain was the world in the nineteenth century. This exclusive focus is
predicated on the fact that the hegemon graciously provides the key services to ensure the development
of the world economy under conditions of relative peace and stability. For in the absence of hegemony the
world plunges headlong into certain disaster through a reversion to the Dark Age of the interwar period .
Accordingly, the theory encapsulates perfectly the well-known words of Madeleine Albright, uttered in a 1998 UN speech: We [the
United States] are the indispensable nation . We stand tall. We see further into the future. And this in turn propels us
back to the point originally made in Stanley Hoffmanns famous essay, An American Social Science: International Relations, where
he pointed out that American students were drawn to the study of IR because [t]o study United States foreign policy was

to study the international system. To study the international system could not fail to bring one back to the
role of the United States (Hoffmann 2001 [1977], 35). Indeed, no other modern theory of IR conforms so closely
to this American ethnocentric and Eurocentric idiom than does HST .
Waltzian neorealism, which has dominated the discipline in one way or another since 1979, is conventionally thought of
as the universalist theory par excellence given that it has supposedly done away with issues concerning
civilisational/societal difference. But if we dig deep beneath the veneered surface of this representation, a
number of important signs of Eurocentrism reappear. First and foremost, Waltzian neorealism elides
altogether the agency of Eastern actors . Kenneth Waltz expressed this idiom thus: [i]t would beridiculous to
construct a theory of international politics based on Malaysia and Costa Rica. To focus on great powers is not to lose sight of
lesser ones. Concern with the latters fate requires paying more attention to the former (Waltz 1979, 72 3). Nor was this some
kind of ad hoc one-off statement, for the

elision of Eastern agency was fundamentally inscribed within the

heart of his theory given its exclusive focus on the (Western) great powers . As Waltz put it,
theory, like the story of international politics, is written in terms of the great power of an era.. In international politics, as
in any self-help system, the units of greatest capability set the scene of action for others as well as for themselves. In
systems theory, structure is a generative notion, and the structure of a system is generated by the interaction of its
principal parts.
(Waltz 1979, 72)
Though this statement avoids deploying the adjective Western before great powers, it seems to me that this is what he has in
mind; or at least this is in effect what transpires given that his focus is on the post-1648 era.7 But this elision of Eastern

agency is problematic for various reasons, all of which in effect disturb the foundations of his theory ,
both directly and indirectly.
It is often thought that the end of the Cold War caught Waltzs theory off guard, revealing its inability to
explain international change on the one hand while simultaneously problematising Waltzs belief that Cold
War bipolarity was a particularly stable system on the other . But what is usually ignored at this juncture is the point
that some appreciation of Eastern agency is necessary if we are to begin to construct an adequate
explanation of the end of Cold War bipolarity. Such a point is, however, explicitly denied by Waltz . Thus,
writing on the eve of the Second Cold War he announced that
the waning of hegemonic competition in an era of dtente and the increased prominence of north-south relations led many
to believe that the world could no longer be defined in bipolar terms. But the waning of American-Russian competition and
the increased importance of third-world problems do not imply the end of bipolarity.
(Waltz 1979, 204 my emphasis)
However, while the Second Cold War was initiated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, nevertheless it was in

Afghanistan that the Soviets experienced their own Vietnam , with an exhaustive decade-long war
ending in defeat at the hands of the Mujahideen fighters . While defeat at the hands of small-scale
Eastern agents could not in turn wholly account for the end of the Soviet Union, it certainly played a part
in the unfolding drama. Thus the end of bipolarity, which entailed a fundamental change in the distribution
of power in the international system, was at least in part brought about by Eastern agency , none of
which registers on Waltzs theoretical radar screen .
Equally, the

defeat of the United States in Vietnam in the face of intransigent Vietnamese resistance

agency gave rise to the Vietnam Syndrome , which in turn significantly affected American
military thinking in the aftermath of 1975 and placed certain limits on potential future US military actions. Critically,
that such Eastern resistance agency has had a profound impact on the American superpower refutes

Waltzs claim that [t]he United States need worry little about wayward movements and unwanted events in weak states. The
principal pains of a great power, if they are not self-inflicted, arise from the effects of policies pursued by other great powers (Waltz
1979, 202). Thus, we need to amend Waltzs various statements that have been cited already so as to factor in Eastern agency.
Accordingly, his words could be rephrased to the effect that Eastern agents (in part) set the scene of action for the Western
superpowers, and the structure of the system is partly generated by the interactions of East and West. And equally we might
amend his earlier claim by stating that it would be ridiculous to construct a theory of international politics based exclusively on the
United States and the USSR. To focus on small Eastern powers and actors is not to lose sight of the bigger ones. Concern with the
latters fate requires paying at least some attention to the former.
Critically, East-West interactions or North-South relations are obscured in Waltzs theory. Nevertheless, at this
juncture Waltz might well invoke one of his defensive delimiting arguments in this case the defence that interaction relations
should be ignored when constructing a proper structural theory of international politics.

Such interactions are dismissed

as but irrelevant unit-level attributes , the inclusion of which would only blur the strict parsimonious
definition of international structure that he polices with vigilance . As he put it:
Abstracting relations means leaving aside questions about the cultural, economic, political, and military interactions of
states. To define a structure requires ignoring how units relate with one another (how they interact) and concentrating
on how they stand in relation to one another (how they are arranged or positioned). Interactions take place at the level
of the units.
(Waltz 1979, 80)

While such a move might well enable Waltz to conveniently restrict the parameters of his theory in order
to shield him from such criticism, this does not enable an escape from the Eurocentric charge . For it is
precisely this move that elides or dismisses the many East/West interactions that shape the actions
and the inner constitution of the Western great powers that in turn informs their outward
trajectories

(Hobson 2004; 2007). Ignoring

this dimension leads to a reified conception of Western great

powers as self-constituting, autonomous entities , whose societies and economies develop entirely
independently of non-Western economic, military, political and cultural interactions the very
leitmotif of Eurocentric theory.
Nevertheless, the sceptical reader might well object to my overall claim about the dominance of subliminal
Eurocentrism by offering up liberal modernisation theory and dependency/world-systems theory as
examples of theories that focus explicitly on North/South or East/West relations . But they turn out to be
the exceptions that prove the subliminal Eurocentric rule . The Eurocentric cues are found either in
the guise of the reification of Western agency and the erasure of Eastern agency , as in world-systems
theory (Wallerstein 1974; 1984), or in liberal modernisation theorys vision wherein the East is awarded
derivative agency insofar as it can develop but only by replicating the Western development
path , the five stages of which weave a linear line that begins with replicating British industrialisation and
culminates with the American age of high-mass consumption

(Rostow 1960). 8 Moreover, the

old,

manifestly Eurocentric trope of civilisation versus barbarism came to be effectively replaced by the
subliminal Eurocentric tropes of tradition versus modernity or core versus periphery . I shall take
Wallersteins approach by way of illustration since this is clearly a counter-intuitive example.

ISIS

1NC ISIS D
Zero scenarios for ISIS getting a nuclear weapon
Esfandiary and Coitee 14 MacArthur Fellow at the Centre for Science and Security Studies @
Kings College London and research analyst with the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Programme at
the International Institute for Strategic Studies
Dina and Matthew,The very small Islamic State WMD threat [http://thebulletin.org/very-small-islamicstate-wmd-threat7729] October 15 //
With ISIS running amok over such a large swathe of territory, its no surprise that these kinds of fears are growing. But it is
important to be realistic about the threat. It remains unlikely that the group will be able to acquire and effectively use
chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. For a start, concerns that terrorists could buy or steal a nuclear
device from a country that possesses them are exaggerated and have been comprehensively discredited. Very
few countries sponsor terrorism or wish to be seen as doing so, and nuclear forensics would make it relatively
straightforward to find the source of any given device. The consequences for any state conducting such
business would be severe. Some of the hysteria surrounding ISIS and WMD is based on the theft in July
of around 40 kilograms of uranium compounds from Mosul University. But if this was a targeted attempt to
acquire nuclear materialrather than part of a broader raid on the universityit suggests that the thieves
knowledge of nuclear bomb-making lacks sophistication. The stolen material cannot be turned into a
viable nuclear device : The uranium was low-grade and would have to be further enriched and then
weaponized, requiring obscure raw materials and technologies, a delivery means, and facilities that would
take years and a significant sum of money to develop. It took the United States, with its vast resources and advanced
knowhow, six years to develop a nuclear device. It took China roughly 10 years and Pakistan more than two
decades. Needless to say, even for an established country, developing a nuclear weapon is not simple. The
most likely threat is a radiological device of some kind. It is relatively simple to develop a so-called dirty bomb, in which explosives
are combined with a radioactive source like those commonly used in hospitals or extractive industries. But the radioactivity
released by a dirty bomb would have only limited health effects, causing more disruption than destruction. If ISIS
used its stolen uranium in a dirty bomb, the weapons blast would be more deadly than the radiation it released.

1NC Nuclear Terror

No nuke terror
Mueller 14 (John Mueller, professor of political science at Ohio State University, PhD in political
science from UCLA, October 2014, Dangerous World?: Threat Perception and U.S. National Security,
pp 31-8) gz
However, thus far, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and even less progress in
going atomic. That lack of action may be because, after a brief exploration of the possible routes, they unlike
generations of alarmists have discovered that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to
be successful . 34
Obtaining a Finished Bomb: Assistance by a State
One route a would-be atomic terrorist might take would be to receive or buy a bomb from a generous likeminded nuclear state for delivery abroad. That route is highly improbable , however, because there
would be too much risk even for a country led by extremists that the ultimate source of the weapon
would be discovered. As one prominent analyst, Matthew Bunn, puts it, A dictator or oligarch bent on maintaining
power is highly unlikely to take the immense risk of transferring such a devastating capability to
terrorists they cannot control, given the ever-present possibility that the material would be traced back to
its origin. Important in this last consideration are deterrent safeguards afforded by nuclear forensics,
which is the rapidly developing science (and art) of connecting nuclear materials to their sources
even after a bomb has been exploded . 35
is a very considerable danger to the donor that the bomb (and its source) would be
discovered before delivery or that it would be exploded in a manner and on a target the donor

Moreover, there

would not approve of including on the donor itself . Another concern would be that the terrorist
group might be infiltrated by foreign intelligence . 36
almost no one would trust al Qaeda . As one observer has pointed out, the terrorist groups explicit
enemies list includes not only Christians and Jews but also all Middle Eastern regimes; Muslims who
dont share its views; most Western countries; the governments of Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and
Russia; most news organizations; the United Nations; and international nongovernmental organizations .
In addition,

37 Most of the time, it didnt get along all that well even with its host in Afghanistan, the Taliban government. 38
Stealing or Illicitly Purchasing a Bomb: Loose Nukes

There has also been great worry about loose nukes, especially in postcommunist Russia weapons,
suitcase bombs in particular, that can be stolen or bought illicitly. A careful assessment conducted by the
Center for Nonproliferation Studies has concluded that it is unlikely that any of those devices have
been lost and that, regardless, their effectiveness would be very low or even nonexistent because
they (like all nuclear weapons) require continual maintenance . 39 Even some of those people most alarmed by the
prospect of atomic terrorism have concluded, It is probably true that there are no loose nukes, transportable nuclear
weapons missing from their proper storage locations and available for purchase in some way. 40
It might be added that Russia

has an intense interest in controlling any weapons on its territory because

it is likely to be a prime target of any illicit use by terrorist groups, particularly Chechen ones of course,
with whom it has been waging a vicious on-and-off war for two decades. The government of Pakistan,
which has been repeatedly threatened by terrorists, has a similar interest in controlling its nuclear
weapons and material and scientists. As noted by Stephen Younger, former head of nuclear weapons research and
development at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Regardless of what is reported in the news,

all nuclear nations take the

security of their weapons very seriously . 41 Even if a finished bomb were somehow lifted
somewhere, the loss would soon be noted and a worldwide pursuit launched .

Moreover, finished

bombs are outfitted with devices designed to trigger a nonnuclear explosion that would
destroy the bomb if it were tampered with . And there are other security techniques: bombs can be kept

disassembled with the components stored in separate high-security vaults , and security can be
organized so that two people and multiple codes are required not only to use the bomb but also to
store, maintain, and deploy it. If the terrorists seek to enlist (or force) the services of someone who already knows how to set
off the bomb, they would find, as Younger stresses, that only few people in the world have the knowledge to
cause an unauthorized detonation of a nuclear weapon. Weapons designers know how a weapon works, he explains,
but not the multiple types of signals necessary to set it off, and maintenance personnel are trained in only a limited set of functions.
42
There could be dangers in the chaos that would emerge if a nuclear state were to fail, collapsing in full disarray Pakistan is
frequently brought up in this context and sometimes North Korea as well. However, even under those conditions, nuclear

weapons would likely remain under heavy guard by people who know that a purloined bomb would
most likely end up going off in their own territory; would still have locks (and in the case of Pakistan
would be disassembled ); and could probably be followed, located, and hunted down by an alarmed
international community . The worst-case scenario in that instance requires not only a failed state but
also a considerable series of additional permissive conditions, including consistent (and perfect) insider
complicity and a sequence of hasty, opportunistic decisions or developments that click flawlessly
in a manner far more familiar to Hollywood scriptwriters than to people experienced with reality . 43
Building a Bomb of Ones Own
Because they are unlikely to be able to buy or steal a usable bomb and because they are further unlikely to have one handed off to
them by an established nuclear state, the most plausible route for terrorists would be to manufacture the device themselves from
purloined materials. That is the course identified by a majority of leading experts as the one most likely to lead to nuclear terrorism.
44
The simplest design is a gun type of device in which masses of highly enriched uranium are hurled at each other within
a tube. Such

a device would be, as Allison acknowledges, large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable,

unpredictable, and inefficient . 45

The process of making such a weapon is daunting even in this minimal case. In particular, the

task requires that a

considerable series of difficult hurdles be conquered and in sequence.

To begin with, now and likely for the foreseeable future, stateless

groups are incapable of manufacturing the

requisite weapons-grade uranium themselves because the process requires an effort on an

industrial scale . Moreover, they are unlikely to be supplied with the material by a state for the same
reasons a state is unlikely to give them a workable bomb. 46 Thus, they would need to steal or illicitly
purchase the crucial material.
A successful armed theft is exceedingly unlikely , not only because of the resistance of guards but also
because chase would be immediate . A more plausible route would be to corrupt insiders to smuggle out the necessary
fissile material. However, that approach requires the terrorists to pay off a host of greedy confederates, including brokers and
money transmitters, any one of whom could turn on them or either out of guile or incompetence furnish
them with stuff that is useless. 47
Moreover, because of improved safeguards and accounting practices , it is decreasingly likely that the
theft would remain undetected. 48 That development is important because if any missing uranium is noticed, the
authorities would investigate the few people who might have been able to assist the thieves, and one who
seems suddenly to have become prosperous is likely to arrest their attention right from the start . Even one
initially tempted by, seduced by, or sympathetic to, the blandishments of the smooth-talking foreign terrorists might soon develop
sobering second thoughts and go to the authorities. Insiders tempted to assist terrorists might also come to ruminate
over the fact that, once the heist was accomplished, the terrorists would , as analyst Brian Jenkins puts it none too
delicately, have every incentive to cover their trail, beginning with eliminating their confederates . 49
It is also relevant to note that over the years, known

thefts of highly enriched uranium have totaled fewer than 16

pounds . That amount is far less than that required for an atomic explosion: for a crude bomb, more than 100

pounds are necessary to produce a likely yield of one kiloton. Moreover, none of those thieves was
connected to al Qaeda , and, most arrestingly, none had buyers lined up nearly all were caught while trying to
peddle their wares. Indeed, concludes analyst Robin Frost, There appears to be no true demand, except where
the buyers were government agents running a sting. Because there appears to be no commercial market for fissile
material, each sale would be a one-time affair, not a continuing source of profit such as drugs, and there is no evidence of
established underworld commercial trade in this illicit commodity. 50

If terrorists were somehow successful in obtaining a sufficient mass of relevant material, they would then
have to transport it out of the country over unfamiliar terrain , probably while being pursued by
security forces . Then, they would need to set up a large and well-equipped machine shop to
manufacture a bomb and populate it with a select team of highly skilled scientists, technicians, and
machinists. The process would also require good managers and organizers. The group would have to be
assembled and retained for the monumental task without generating consequential suspicions among
friends, family, and police about their curious and sudden absence from normal pursuits back home. Pakistan, for example,
maintains a strict watch on many of its nuclear scientists even after retirement . 51
Some observers have insisted that it would be easy for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could get enough fissile
material. 52 However, Christoph Wirz and Emmanuel Egger, two senior physicists in charge of nuclear issues at Switzerlands Spiez
Laboratory, conclude that the task could hardly be accomplished by a subnational group. They point out that

precise

blueprints are required , not just sketches and general ideas, and that even with a good blueprint, the
terrorist group would most certainly be forced to redesign . They also stress that the work, far from being
easy, is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting and that the technical requirements in several
fields verge on the unfeasible . 53
Los Alamos research director Younger makes a similar argument, expressing his amazement at self-declared nuclear weapons
experts, many of whom have never seen a real nuclear weapon, who hold forth on how easy it is to make a functioning nuclear
explosive. Information is available for getting the general idea behind a rudimentary nuclear explosive, but
none is detailed enough for the confident assembly of a real nuclear explosive . Younger concludes, To think

that a terrorist group, working in isolation with an unreliable supply of electricity and little access to tools
and supplies could fabricate a bomb is far-fetched at best . 54
Under the best of circumstances, the process could take months or even a year or more , and it would
all, of course, have to be carried out in utter secret even while local and international security police are
likely to be on the intense prowl . In addition, people, or criminal gangs, in the area may observe with increasing curiosity
and puzzlement the constant comings and goings of technicians unlikely to be locals.
The process of fabricating a nuclear device requires, then, the effective recruitment

of people who at once

have great technical skills and will remain completely devoted to the cause . In addition, a host of
corrupted coconspirators, many of them foreign, must remain utterly reliable ; international and local
security services must be kept perpetually in the dark ; and no curious outsider must get wind of the
project over the months, or even years, it takes to pull off.
The finished product could weigh a ton or more. Encased in lead shielding to mask radioactive emissions, it would then have to
be transported to, as well as smuggled into, the relevant target country. Then, the enormous package
would have to be received within the target country by a group of collaborators who are at once totally
dedicated and technically proficient at handling, maintaining, and perhaps assembling the weapon.
Then, they would have to detonate it somewhere under the fervent hope that the machine shop work has
been proficient, that no significant shakeups occurred in the treacherous process of transportation,
and that the thing after all that effort doesnt prove to be a dud .
The financial costs of the extended operation in its cumulating entirety could become monumental . There
would be expensive equipment to buy, smuggle, and set up, as well as people to pay or pay off. Some operatives might work for
free out of dedication, but the vast conspiracy also requires the subversion of an array of criminals and opportunists, each of whom
has every incentive to push the price for cooperation as high as possible. Any criminals who are competent and capable enough to
be an effective ally in the project are likely to be both smart enough to see opportunities for extortion and psychologically equipped
by their profession to be willing to exploit them.
Interest

In addition, the

evidence about the degree to which al Qaeda has pursued, or even has much interest in, a
nuclear weapons program is limited and often ambiguous . For example, in 2004, the 9/11 Commission insisted
that al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make nuclear weapons for at least ten years. The only substantial evidence it supplies for that
assertion comes from an episode that supposedly took place around 1993 in Sudan, when Osama bin Ladens aides were
scammed when they tried to buy some uranium. 55 Information about that caper apparently comes from a man who

defected from al Qaeda in 1996 after he had been caught stealing $110,000 from the organization. He
tried selling his story around the Middle East, but only the Americans were buying . In his prize-winning The
Looming Tower , Lawrence Wright relays the testimony of the man who allegedly purchased the substance for bin Laden, as well as
that of a Sudanese intelligence agent. Both assert that, although there were various other scams going around at the time,

the

uranium episode never happened . 56

Various sources suggest that radical elements in bin Ladens entourage were interested in pursuing atomic weapons or other WMDs
when the group was in Afghanistan in the 1990s. However, the same sources indicate that bin

Laden had little interest in

that pursuit and essentially sabotaged the idea by refusing to fund it , or even to initiate planning for it.
57 Analyst Anne Stenersen notes that evidence from a recovered al Qaeda computer indicates that only some $2,000$4,000
was earmarked for WMD research, all of it apparently for (very crude) chemical work with some
potentially for biological weapons. For comparison, she points out that the millennial terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo appears
to have invested $30 million in its sarin gas manufacturing program alone. 58 There are also reports that bin Laden had some
academic discussions in 2001 about WMDs with some Pakistani nuclear scientists who did not, actually, know how to build a
bomb.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the apparent mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, reportedly says that al Qaedas atom

bomb efforts never went beyond searching the Internet . 59 After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, technical experts
from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Energy examined information uncovered in Afghanistan and arrived at
conclusions generally supportive of that assertion. They

found no credible information that al Qaeda had

obtained fissile material or a nuclear weapon, and no evidence of any radioactive material suitable for
weapons. They did uncover, however, a nuclear-related document discussing openly available concepts about the nuclear fuel
cycle and some weapons related issues. 60 Physicist and weapons expert David Albright is more impressed with the evidence, but
he concludes that any al Qaeda atomic efforts were seriously disruptedindeed, nipped in the budby the invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001, and that after the invasion, the chance of al Qaeda detonating a nuclear explosive appears
on reflection to be low. 61
Rumors and reports that al Qaeda managed to purchase an atomic bomb, or several, have been around now for well over a decade,
beginning around 1998. One alleges, for example, that bin Laden gave a group of Chechens $30 million in cash and two tons of
opium in exchange for 20 nuclear warheads. If any of those reports were true, one might think the terrorist group (or its supposed
Chechen suppliers) would have tried to set one off by now or that al Qaeda would have left some trace of the weapons behind in
Afghanistan after it made its very hasty exit in 2001.
Bin Laden pronounced on the nuclear weapons issue a few times, talking about an Islamic duty or right to obtain the weapons for
defense. Some of those oft-quoted assertions can be viewed as threatening, but they are rather coy and indirect, indicating perhaps
something of an interest, but not acknowledging any sort of capability. And as Louise Richardson concludes, Statements

claiming a right to possess nuclear weapons have been misinterpreted as expressing a

determination to use them , feeding the exaggeration of the threat we face . 62
When examined, the evidence of al Qaedas desire to go atomic and about its progress in accomplishing that
exceedingly difficult task, even in the comparative safety of its Afghan haven of the 1990s, is remarkably skimpy, if not

completely negligible . The scariest stuff a decades worth of loose nuke rumor, chatter, and hype seems to have no
substance whatever.
After an exhaustive study of available materials, Stenersen concludes that, although al Qaeda central may have
considered nuclear and other nonconventional weapons, there is little evidence that such ideas ever
developed into actual plans , or that they were given any kind of priority at the expense of more
traditional types of terrorist attacks. 63 And there is no reason to believe things got better for them after they were forcefully
expelled from their comparatively unembattled base in Afghanistan.

AT Russia Draw-in
Russia draw-in is empirically denied---no accidents
Ryabikhin 9
Dr. Leonid Ryabikhin (Executive Secretary, Committee of Scientist for Global Security and Arms Control; Senior Fellow, EastWest
Institute), General (Ret.) Viktor Koltunov (Deputy Director, Institute for Strategic Stability of Rosatom), and Dr. Eugene Miasnikov
(Senior Research Scientist, Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies) De-alerting: Decreasing the Operational
Readiness of Strategic Nuclear Forces Discussion paper presented at the seminar on Re-framing De-Alert: Decreasing the
Operational Readiness of Nuclear Weapons Systems in the U.S.-Russia Context in Yverdon, Switzerland, 21-23 June.
http://www.ewi.info/system/files/RyabikhinKoltunovMiasnikov.pdf
Most of the experts define de-alerting as implementing some reversible physical changes in a weapon system that would
significantly increase time between the decision to use the weapon and the actual moment of its launch. The proponents of this
concept consider it as one of the ways to maintain strategic stability. They provide the following arguments in support of this
concept. Radical changes have occurred in US-Russian relations. Russia and the United States are building strategic partnership
relationship. In such situation the high alert readiness of strategic offensive forces targeted at each other does not correspond to the
character of our relations. Strategic nuclear forces high alert readiness in combination with a concept of launch-on-warning strike
increases the risk of accidental nuclear war (as a result of mistakes in the C3I system, inadequate situation analysis, mistaken
decision-making, unauthorized action of personnel or even terrorists, provocation from the third states or non-state actors, etc.);
False signals about missile attacks obtained from early warning system that may trigger an accidental launch. This assumption was
very popular when the Russian early warning system was weakened as a result of collapse of the Soviet Union. Analysis of the
above arguments shows, that they do not have solid grounds. Today Russian and U.S. ICBMs are not targeted at any
state. High alert status of the Russian and U.S. strategic nuclear forces has not been an obstacle for building
a strategic partnership. The issue of the possibility of an accidental nuclear war itself is hypothetical. Both states have
developed and implemented constructive organizational and technical measures that practically exclude launches

resulting from unauthorized action of personnel or terrorists. Nuclear weapons are maintained under
very strict system of control that excludes any accidental or unauthorized use and guarantees that these
weapons can only be used provided that there is an appropriate authorization by the national leadership.
Besides that it should be mentioned that even the Soviet Union and the United States had taken important bilateral steps toward

Direct emergency telephone red line has been established

between the White House and the Kremlin in 1963. In 1971 the USSR and USA signed the Agreement on Measures
to Reduce the Nuclear War Threat. This Agreement established the actions of each side in case of even a hypothetical
accidental missile launch and it contains the requirements for the owner of the launched missile to
deactivate and eliminate the missile. Both the Soviet Union and the United States have developed proper measures to
decreasing the risk of accidental nuclear conflict.

observe the agreed requirements.

Heg

1NC Asia Pivot Inevitable

Military pivot is inevitable Gulf presence doesnt trade off
Keck 14
Zachary,. managing editor of The National Interest. The Diplomat. Americas Military First Asia Pivot, 8/16
http://thediplomat.com/2014/08/americas-military-first-asia-pivot/ accessed 7/31/15 )

Despite its growing operations in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, Americas pivot to Asia still seems
to be led by the Department of Defense and military. In a press conference on Thursday, Pentagon Press
Secretary Admiral John Kirby said that the Pentagon and armed forces new responsibilities in the Middle
East would not come at the expense of its focus on Asia. I think given the fact that theres a lot going on in the
world that were still making these visits and still having these discussions speaks volumes about how important we believe the Asia
Pacific theater is, Kirby told reporters. He also pointed out that more than 350,000 American troops are based

somewhere in the Pacific, 200 ships, the majority of the Navy is in the Pacific. And we have five of our
seven treaty alliances are in the Pacific region. Were very committed to that region. The admiral has a point:
despite the distractions elsewhere in the world, defense and military officials continue to make the Asia-Pacific a high priority.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel just returned from a roughly week long trip to India and Australia. It was his sixth trip to the region
as secretary of defense, and Kirby said that Hagel intends to visit the region at least four times this year. Following closely on the
heels of Hagels trip to the region are ones by General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Bob Work, the
deputy secretary of defense. Gen. Dempseys trip is notable because he is currently spending four days in Vietnam. This is the first
time a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has visited Vietnam since the country united under the government in Hanoi. In other
words, Dempsey is the most senior military leader to ever visit Vietnam. Notably, along with meetings with Vietnams top military
officer and defense chief, Dempsey met with Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung. Right as Dempsey wraps up his trip to Vietnam
over the weekend, Deputy Secretary Work will begin his own trip to the region. Work will spend six days in the region visiting Guam,
Hawaii, Japan, and the Republic of Korea. While the Pentagon hasnt released many details on his itinerary yet, the trip is notable
because it is his first to Asia since he took his current position in May. Taken together, Hagel, Dempsey, and Works trips span

the Indo-Pacific region and include visits to Americas long-standing allies as well as new partners
Washington is looking to increase its cooperation with. To be fair, Secretary of State John Kerry has
stepped up his Asia diplomacy during his second year in office. Last month, Kerry visited both China and India to
hold strategic dialogues. Already this month he has traveled to Myanmar for the ASEAN Regional Forum, Australia for a 2+2 with
Hagel and the Solomon Islands (Kerry also visited Afghanistan last month and this month). Kerry also gave what was at least billed
as a major address on Asia at the East-West Center in Hawaii on his way home from his latest trip to the region. While Kerrys
increased focus on the region is commendable, it has been underwhelming to say the least. To begin with, most of his trips have
been short and narrowly focused around a specific dialogue or summit. With the exception of the 2+2 with Australia, these dialogues
and summits have produced little in substantive achievements. Similarly, his East-West Center speech though entitled U.S.
Vision for Asia-Pacific Engagement offered little in the way of actual vision. Moreover, Kerrys trips have usually been dominated
by events elsewhere in the world, most especially the Middle East. Thus, while Kerry has been physically present in Asia, his
attention has usually remained focused elsewhere. As a result, his trips have not been celebrated in the region in the same way that
Hagels trip to India was, or Dempseys current trip to Vietnam has been. More notably, the White House continues to be entirely
absent from the Asia-Pacific. It is still not clear who Obamas point person is on China or Asia now that Kurt Campbell and Tom
Donilon are gone. Most of the White House advisors appear generally uninterested in the region. This most certainly includes the
president himself, who despite launching the pivot in grand style has hardly mentioned the region since, even in his broad
foreign policy speeches. As a result of all this, the achievements of the pivot are still primarily military in nature.

Examples of these include the new deal on Marines rotating in Darwin, Australia, as well as the
Philippines providing the U.S. military with increased access to some of its bases. Additionally, Americas
mil-to-mil cooperation with China seems to be the only part of the relationship that is improving. Meanwhile,
its unclear if the Trans-Pacific Partnership has made any progress, or if it will still be signed by the end of this year. Even if the TPP
negotiations are concluded this year, the administration has done little to ensure its passage by the Senate. Hillary Clinton has even
publicly doubted the Senate will ratify the TPP.

Although the military component of pivot is important, it is in

this area that the U.S. was already strongest. Moreover, it is Americas economic and political interests
in the Asia-Pacific that dictate the importance of ensuring peace and stability in the region. Unless
America increases its economic and political cooperation in Asia, it will simply be left providing security for
securitys sake.

1NC Asia Pivot Fails

TPP is failing now undermines the pivot and Asian stability China will fill in
because allies doubt our commitment
JOHN HUDSON 15, a senior reporter at Foreign Policy, JUNE 12, 2015, "Obamas Trade Defeat
Imperils U.S. Credibility in Asia", Foreign Policy, foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/12/obamas-trade-defeatimperils-u-s-credibility-in-asia/
Lawmakers from both major American political parties joined forces Friday to defeat a trade bill that would have delivered a
potentially legacy-defining victory for the president. But Fridays lopsided vote wasnt simply a humiliating blow for President Barack
Obama, who invested significant amounts of political capital in a high-profile, last-minute lobbying effort that would help him
complete a landmark trade pact with 11 other Pacific Rim nations. The biggest consequences could instead be felt in Asia, where
jittery U.S. allies are already afraid that Washington is neglecting the region while China continues to expand its economic and
military influence there.

The potential demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership ( TPP ) would further

embolden Pacific leaders who believe their countries would be better off siding with China than
with a United States increasingly seen as rudderless and disengaged. This will be a blow to
American credibility beyond just trade, Michael Green, an Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, told Foreign Policy. Asian leaders will question whether the American political
system has the ability to implement the Asia pivot. Since the beginning of his presidency, Obama has
struggled to implement a planned strategic shift toward Asia, because crises in the Middle East and Eastern
Europe have dominated his agenda and forced the administration to stay heavily engaged in parts of the world where it had
hoped to gradually reduce Washingtons political and military involvement. The president had pitched the TPP pact as a
way to establish rules to guarantee Americas economic primacy across a region that covers 40 percent of
the worlds gross domestic product. The sprawling pact one of the biggest trade deals in the world was also
meant to forge greater economic alliances with Asian partners that would in turn enhance Americas
political standing in the region. Experts fear that the administrations failure to get the pact through
Congress will will only serve to benefit China. If theres a vacuum or perceived vacuum in Asia
China is prepared to fill it, Scott Snyder, director of the U.S.-Korea policy program at the Council on
Foreign Relations, told FP. As an example, Snyder noted Chinas success in establishing the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a multilateral financial institution Beijing formed in 2014. The United States had long
sought to satisfy Asias growing infrastructure needs through the World Bank, but in the last year, Beijing has succeeded in making
the AIIB a major player throughout the region. Key American allies like Germany, Britain, and France have joined the bank, which
has an estimated $100 billion in assets. Another factor that plays into Chinas favor is the increasing irrelevance of the World Trade
Organization, according to Mireya Solis, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Historically, the WTO has been the go-to body to
set the rules on multilateral trade and investment. But for the last 20 years, political disputes at the WTO have rendered it largely
futile, leaving regional clusters of nations to set the rules on key issues like intellectual property, telecommunications, and
transportation. TPP provided a major opportunity for the United States to integrate its economy into this

cluster of Asian countries. Without it, Beijings geographical proximity will help China consolidate its
economic power throughout the region. If we dont write the rules on trade, China will, Solis wrote in a
piece for the think tank. Moreover, we will have no way to encourage China to move away from its
mercantilistic practices. Fridays vote in Congress greatly diminished the prospects for a TPP deal during Obamas final 18
months in office, but it did not seal its fate. In an effort to kill the Trade Promotion Authority bill, a critical mass of Republicans and
Democrats voted against a measure that provides assistance to workers who lose their jobs as a result of free trade. That measure
needed to win congressional approval in order to pave the way for the passage of separate legislation giving Obama fast-track
authority, which the president needs to complete the TPP deal. Republican leaders in the House and Senate may try again next
week, but those efforts will not succeed unless either House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) or Obama can pick off more votes
from their respective parties. That will be difficult for Obama because of strong opposition from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
(D-Calif.) and other prominent Democrats. During the vote, Pelosi took to the House floor to make clear she wanted to kill the
legislation. Whatever the deal is with other countries, we want a better deal for Americas workers, she said. In any event, if

Congress ultimately fails to grant Obama fast-track legislation, it could do lasting damage to a key pillar of
Obamas Asia rebalance. That strategy, according to experts, relied on three pillars of American power: economic, military,
and diplomatic. The first pillar involves an increase in active diplomacy in the region, a goal in which the Obama administration can
credibly claim progress through the importance it has given to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and the East Asia
Summit, two regional meetings that focus on free trade and economic growth. The president and top cabinet officials, including
Secretary of State John Kerry, have regularly attended these forums, which were given far less value during the George W. Bush
and Bill Clinton presidencies. The second pillar of strategy is raising Americas military profile in the region. On this front, its a mixed
bag. The United States has increased military cooperation with Japan and Australia when it comes to air power and basing, but U.S.

allies remain jittery because Beijings defense budget has increased by 10 percent every year as China buys a laundry list of military
hardware. The third pillar is greater economic engagement, which seems far less likely now than it did before Fridays vote.

If

the president cant get a trade agreement through, it will lead to questions about what Congress
and by extension, the American political system, can get done , said Green, the CSIS expert. Those
questions are already being asked by Asian leaders concerned about whether they could still see America
as a reliable partner. In 2013, as a government shutdown loomed in Washington due to a dispute between Democrats and
Republicans on the debt ceiling, Singapores prime minister openly criticized the United States. Speaking with CNN, Lee Hsien
Loong said Americans were unable to get their act together, and that the political dithering in Washington was sending a negative
signal which will last much longer than the shutdown. Because of that political crisis, Obama was forced to cancel his attendance at
the APEC leaders summit in Bali, Indonesia, just days ahead of his scheduled arrival.

1NC Senakku D
No Senkaku conflict
Trefor Moss 13 is an independent journalist based in Hong Kong and defense analyst for the Diplomat,
February 10th, 7 Reasons China and Japan Wont Go To War, http://thediplomat.com/2013/02/10/7reasons-china-and-japan-wont-go-to-war/?all=true, [AB]
But if Shinzo Abe is gambling with the regions security, he is at least playing the odds. He is calculating that
Japan can pursue a more muscular foreign policy without triggering a catastrophic backlash from China,
based on the numerous constraints that shape Chinese actions, as well as the interlocking structure of
the globalized environment which the two countries co-inhabit. Specifically, there are seven reasons to think that war
is a very unlikely prospect , even with a more hawkish prime minister running Japan: 1. Beijings nightmare
scenario. China might well win a war against Japan, but defeat would also be a very real possibility. As China closes
the book on its century of humiliation and looks ahead to prouder times, the prospect of a new, avoidable humiliation at
the hands of its most bitter enemy is enough to persuade Beijing to do everything it can to prevent that outcome
(the surest way being not to have a war at all ). Certainly, Chinas new leader, Xi Jinping, does not want to go
down in history as the man who led China into a disastrous conflict with the Japanese . In that scenario, Xi
would be doomed politically, and, as Chinas angry nationalism turned inward, the Communist Party probably
wouldnt survive either.

1NC Korea
Tensions are inevitable but wont cause war and the North cant use nukes
Lankov 8/23 (Andrei Lankov, professor of Korean Studies at Kookmin University, 8-23-15, Another
Korean war is not in the cards, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/08/korean-war-cards150823053936952.html) gz
Once again, the world media are busily telling their audience that "the heightened tensions in Korea are
creating a risk of war". And once again, these panicky reports are met with little - if any - interest by the
vast majority of Korea watchers and, for that matter, the South Korean public.
This quietness has reasons: First, Koreans - and Korea experts, too - have seen similar developments many
times . Second, there are valid reasons to be certain that the tensions have no chance to escalate . Both
sides are seriously afraid of war , and rightly so.
At first glance, the recent events look like a textbook case of escalation. First, a landmine exploded in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ),
which divides the two Korean states. South Korean soldiers were maimed, and the South Korean military claimed that the mine had
been stealthily installed by the North Koreans. In retaliation, the South's military switched on massive loudspeakers, which had been
silent since 2004, and began to broadcast propaganda across the DMZ, targeting the North Korean military personnel.
Outraged, the North Koreans shelled the loudspeakers, killing nobody. Then, South Korean cannons shot back. Finally, the
exchange of fire was followed by an exchange of bellicose statements and diplomatic gestures, and North Koreans gave an
ultimatum - demanding the loudspeakers be switched off.
Not so aggressive this time

All these events might appear dangerous to foreigners, but this is not the case with Koreans who witness
similar incidents occurring every few years . In 2010, North Koreans torpedoed a South Korean warship, the South
Korean government retaliated with a ban on nearly all trade with - and aid to - their northern neighbour. Angry exchanges continued
for a while, culminating in North Korean artillery shelling a South Korean island, killing some civilians.

Even the rhetoric hasn't been particularly aggressive this time: North Korea declared merely a "semi-state of
war". Back

in 2013, the North Koreans said their country was already at war , and the actual fighting
would start within days, and the evacuation of diplomatic personnel from Pyongyang was officially
proposed. Predictably, this proposal was ignored by foreign diplomats who understood that this was
just another episode of a never-ending diplomatic/military soap opera.
Indeed,

it is clear by now that neither side wants war , since neither side has much to gain from it.

The combination of geography and politics has long ago made a new Korean War a lose-lose option
for both sides.
For the North Koreans, there are very little chances to win a war . Among military analysts, including those from
countries close to North Korea, there exists a near consensus about the prospects of such a confrontation: the North would
certainly lose, and very soon. Its military is armed with antiquated weapons , and it is poorly trained
and badly run . Even the five or 10 low-yield nuclear devices the North Korean army possesses will not
make much difference

to the final outcome - even if somehow delivered to the intended targets (a

big "if", given the

absence of delivery systems

in North Korea).
Lose-lose scenario

Even though North Korea cannot win a war, it can still inflict damage on the South . Its nuclear devices may not
be powerful enough to incapacitate the South Korean military, but they can kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. Even without the
use of nuclear weapons, in the first hours of a full-scale confrontation, North Korea can destroy a significant part of Seoul.

The vast metropolitan (or Greater Seoul) area, where nearly half of all South Koreans live, is located
right on the DMZ , within shooting range of North Korean artillery . Even if the heavily fortified positions of
North Korean guns and missile launchers are destroyed soon, the artillery barrage would kill a large number of people and
irreversibly damage the vulnerable city. Furthermore, the military advance into the North is not going to be easy nor bloodless.

In other words, South

Korea would probably win a full-scale war, but it would emerge as a state with a
heavily damaged economy. It would also face the nearly impossible burden of developing the conquered
North, one of Asia's poorest countries.
So, the situation is an impasse, and this has long been understood by both sides . Hence, relations between
the two Korean states have been reminiscent of a ballet: there are times when both sides engage in
diplomatic and economic cooperation, and there are times when both sides make moves calculated to
look tough, but take care to ensure that nothing really dangerous happens .

1NC Bernstein
They are wrong about everything
Bernstein et al. 2000
(Steven Bernstein, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Richard Ned Lebow, James O. Freedman
Presidential Professor of Government, Emeritus at Darthmouth University and Professor of War Studies, King's College London,
Janice Gross Stein, member of the Order of Canada and the Royal Society of Canada, University Professor of Political Science at
the University of Toronto, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and Associate Chair and Belzberg
Professor of Conflict Management and Negotiation, and Steven Weber, professor at the School of Information and the Department
of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds an M.D. and a Ph.D in political science from Stanford
University. God Gave Physics the Easy Problems: Adapting Social Science to an Unpredictable World, European Journal of
International Relations 2000 6:43 DOI:10.1177/1354066100006001003)
Many of the scholars responsible for the behavioral revolution in social science were European refugees who

sought to use
the tools of social science to analyze the causes of war, prejudice, civil unrest and poverty . Their commitment
to social science flowed from an even deeper commitment to use disciplined methodologies to generate knowledge
that would help prevent the horrors of war and fascism and improve the world around them. They and their
American collaborators were not interested in theory for its own sake, but principally for the capacity it might provide to
analyze and address world problems. This vision has been largely lost. From the vantage point of the 21st century, it is sadly
apparent that the founding fathers of the behavioral revolution failed to transmit as clearly the value

commitments that motivated their scientific study of international relations. For many of their students and
grand-students, the scientific means has become more an end in itself , and the science of the social, a jeu
desprit, like chess. In the worst instances, researchers choose problems to investigate because the problems
are thought to be tractable, not because they are important. They evaluate solutions in terms of the
elegance of the logic rather than actual evidence. Meanwhile, on the other extreme, those who do study policy problems
frequently do so in isolation from those working seriously with theory. Both communities are thus impoverished. The founders of the
scientific study of international relations would bemoan the separation of theory from evidence and of logic from data.1 Most of all,

the founders would reject the separation of theory from policy and its relative failure to address practical
problems of the political world. A deep irony is embedded in the history of the scientific study of international relations.
Recent generations of scholars separated policy from theory to gain an intellectual distance from
decision-making, in the belief that this would enhance the scientific quality of their work. But five
decades of well-funded efforts to develop theories of international relations have produced precious little
in the way of useful, high confidence results. Theories abound, but few meet the most relaxed
scientific tests of validity. Even the most robust generalizations or laws we can state war is more
likely between neighboring states, weaker states are less likely to attack stronger states are close to
trivial, have important exceptions, and for the most part stand outside any consistent body of theory. A
generation ago, we might have excused our performance on the grounds that we were a young science still in the process of
defining problems, developing analytical tools and collecting data. This excuse is neither credible nor sufficient; there is no

reason to suppose that another 50 years of well-funded research would result in anything resembling a
valid theory in the Popperian sense. We suggest that the nature, goals and criteria for judging social science theory should
be rethought, if theory is to be more helpful in understanding the real world. We begin by justifying our pessimism, both conceptually
and empirically, and argue that the quest for predictive theory rests on a mistaken analogy between physical and social phenomena.
Evolutionary biology is a more productive analogy for social science. We explore the value of this analogy in its hard and soft
versions, and examine the implications of both for theory and research in international relations.2 We develop the case for forward
tracking of international relations on the basis of local and general knowledge as an alternative to backward-looking attempts to
build deductive, nomothetic theory. We then apply this strategy to some emerging trends in international relations. Newtonian
Physics: A Misleading Model Physical and chemical laws make two kinds of predictions. Some phenomena the trajectories of
individual planets can be predicted with a reasonable degree of certainty. Only a few variables need to be taken into account and
they can be measured with precision. Other mechanical problems, like the break of balls on a pool table, while subject to
deterministic laws, are inherently unpredictable because of their complexity. Small differences in the lay of the table, the nap of the
felt, the curvature of each ball and where they make contact, amplify the variance of each collision and lead to what appears as a
near random distribution of balls. Most predictions in science are probabilistic, like the freezing point of liquids, the
expansion rate of gases and all chemical reactions. Point predictions appear possible only because of the large
numbers of units involved in interactions. In the case of nuclear decay or the expansion of gases, we are talking
about trillions of atoms and molecules. In international relations, even more than in other domains of social science, it
is often impossible to assign metrics to what we think are relevant variables (Coleman, 1964: especially
Chapter 2). The concepts of polarity, relative power and the balance of power are among the most

widely used independent variables, but there are no commonly accepted definitions or measures for
them. Yet without consensus on definition and measurement, almost every statement or hypothesis

will have too much wiggle room to be tested decisively against evidence. What we take to be
dependent variables fare little better. Unresolved controversies rage over the definition and
evaluation of deterrence outcomes, and about the criteria for democratic governance and their
application to specific countries at different points in their history. Differences in coding for even a few cases
have significant implications for tests of theories of deterrence or of the democratic peace (Lebow and Stein,
1990; Chan, 1997). The lack of consensus about terms and their measurement is not merely the result of
intellectual anarchy or sloppiness although the latter cannot entirely be dismissed. Fundamentally, it has more to
do with the arbitrary nature of the concepts themselves. Key terms in physics, like mass, temperature and
velocity, refer to aspects of the physical universe that we cannot directly observe. However, they are embedded
in theories with deductive implications that have been verified through empirical research. Propositions containing these terms are
legitimate assertions about reality because their truth-value can be assessed. Social science theories are for the most

part built on idealizations, that is, on concepts that cannot be anchored to observable phenomena
through rules of correspondence. Most of these terms (e.g. rational actor, balance of power) are not
descriptions of reality but implicit theories about actors and contexts that do not exist (Hempel, 1952; Rudner,
1966; Gunnell, 1975; Moe, 1979; Searle, 1995: 68-72). The inevitable differences in interpretation of these concepts
lead to different predictions in some contexts, and these outcomes may eventually produce widely varying
futures (Taylor, 1985: 55). If problems of definition, measurement and coding could be resolved, we would
still find it difficult, if not impossible, to construct large enough samples of comparable cases to
permit statistical analysis. It is now almost generally accepted that in the analysis of the causes of
wars, the variation across time and the complexity of the interaction among putative causes make the
likelihood of a general theory extraordinarily low . Multivariate theories run into the problem of negative degrees of
freedom, yet international relations rarely generates data sets in the high double digits. Where larger
samples do exist, they often group together cases that differ from one another in theoretically important
ways.3 Complexity in the form of multiple causation and equifinality can also make simple statistical
comparisons misleading. But it is hard to elaborate more sophisticated statistical tests until one has a deeper baseline
understanding of the nature of the phenomenon under investigation, as well as the categories and variables that make up candidate
causes (Geddes, 1990: 131-50; Lustick, 1996: 505-18; Jervis, 1997). Wars to continue with the same example are similar
to chemical and nuclear reactions in that they have underlying and immediate causes . Even when all the
underlying conditions are present, these processes generally require a catalyst to begin. Chain reactions are triggered
by the decay of atomic nuclei. Some of the neutrons they emit strike other nuclei prompting them to fission and emit more neutrons,
which strike still more nuclei. Physicists can calculate how many kilograms of Uranium 235 or Plutonium at given pressures are
necessary to produce a chain reaction. They can take it for granted that if a critical mass is achieved, a chain reaction will follow.
This is because trillions of atoms are present, and at any given moment enough of them will decay to provide the neutrons needed
to start the reaction. In a large enough sample, catalysts will be present in a statistical sense. Wars involve relatively few
actors. Unlike the weak force responsible for nuclear decay, their catalysts are probably not inherent properties of

the units. Catalysts may or may not be present, and their potentially random distribution relative to
underlying causes makes it difficult to predict when or if an appropriate catalyst will occur. If in the course
of time underlying conditions change, reducing basic incentives for one or more parties to use force,
catalysts that would have triggered war will no longer do so. This uncertain and evolving relationship
between underlying and immediate causes makes point prediction extraordinarily difficult. It also makes
more general statements about the causation of war problematic , since we have no way of knowing
what wars would have occurred in the presence of appropriate catalysts. It is probably impossible to define the
universe of would-be wars or to construct a representative sample of them. Statistical inference requires knowledge
about the state of independence of cases, but in a practical sense that knowledge is often
impossible to obtain in the analysis of international relations. Molecules do not learn from experience.
People do, or think they do. Relationships among cases exist in the minds of decision-makers, which
makes it very hard to access that information reliably and for more than just a very small number of
cases. We know that expectations and behavior are influenced by experience, ones own and others. The
deterrence strategies pursued by the United States throughout much of the Cold War were one kind of
response to the failure of appeasement to prevent World War II. Appeasement was at least in part a
reaction to the belief of British leaders that the deterrent policies pursued by the continental powers earlier
in the century had helped to provoke World War I. Neither appeasement nor deterrence can be
explained without understanding the context in which they were formulated ; that context is
ultimately a set of mental constructs. We have descriptive terms like chain reaction or contagion effect to describe
these patterns, and hazard analysis among other techniques in statistics to measure their strength. But neither explains how and
why these patterns emerge and persist. The broader point is that the relationship between human beings and their

environment is not nearly so reactive as with inanimate objects . Social relations are not clock-like

because the values and behavioral repertories of actors are not fixed; people have memories, learn from
experience and undergo shifts in the vocabulary they use to construct reality. Law-like relationships
even if they existed could not explain the most interesting social outcomes , since these are precisely the
outcomes about which actors have the most incentive to learn and adapt their behavior. Any regularities would be soft;
they would be the outcome of processes that are embedded in history and have a short half-life. They
would decay quickly because of the memories, creative searching and learning by political leaders.
Ironically, the findings of social science contribute to this decay (Weber, 1969; Almond and Genco, 1977: 496-522; Gunnell, 1982:
Ch. 2; Ball, 1987: Ch. 4; Kratochwil, 1989; Rorty, 1989; Hollis, 1994: Ch. 9). Beyond these conceptual and empirical difficulties lies a
familiar but fundamental difference of purpose. Boyles Law, half-lives, or any other scientific principle based on probability, says
nothing about the behavior of single units such as molecules. For many theoretical and practical purposes this is adequate. But

social science ultimately aspires or should aspire to provide insight into practical world problems
that are generally part of a small or very small n. In international relations, the dynamics and outcomes of
single cases are often much more important than any statistical regularities. Overcoming Physics Envy The
conception of causality on which deductive-nomological models are based, in classical physics as well as social
science, requires empirical invariance under specified boundary conditions . The standard form of such a
statement is this given A, B and C, if X then (not) Y.4 This kind of bounded invariance can be found in closed systems.
Open systems can be influenced by external stimuli, and their structure and causal mechanisms evolve
as a result. Rules that describe the functioning of an open system at time T do not necessarily do so at T
+ 1 or T + 2. The boundary conditions may have changed, rendering the statement irrelevant. Another
axiomatic condition may have been added, and the outcome subject to multiple conjunctural causation.
There is no way to know this a priori from the causal statement itself. Nor will complete knowledge (if it
were possible) about the system at time T necessarily allow us to project its future course of
development. In a practical sense, all social systems (and many physical and biological systems) are open.
Empirical invariance does not exist in such systems , and seemingly probabilistic invariances may be
causally unrelated (Harre and Secord, 1973; Bhaskar, 1979; Collier, 1994; Patomaki, 1996; Jervis, 1997). As physicists
readily admit, prediction in open systems, especially non-linear ones, is difficult, and often
impossible.

AT: Transition Wars

No impact to decline
CEU 15
Central European University, A Multiplex World Will Follow U.S. Hegemony, Acharya Says March 13, 2015, KB
Defining it rather as a metaphor than a theory, Acharya

introduced the concept of the multiplex world order as an

alternative to the current terms bipolar and multipolar, which he regards as inadequate. Drawing comparisons
from the world of cinema, he stated that in

this world it is possible for different systems to coexist , just as several

different movies can be screened in a multiplex theater. In this new world order,

it is no longer only great powers that

count. Lesser powers, regional powers, international and transnational organizations and corporations
will all have a more important role to play. According to Acharya, one of the key characteristics of the multiplex
world is an unprecedented global interdependence , which manifests itself in the financial sector and in
production networks, not primarily in trade. He also mentioned regionalism as a defining trend that
was exempt from the universalistic U.S.-led system of hegemony.
" Regionalism entails neither fragmentation nor instability. If we look at human history, we can only
find 200 years when a global hegemony existed. First came the British Empire, followed by the U.S.led liberal hegemony. But in the remaining time we mostly see regional powers, Acharya said.
He argued that regionalism in the multiplex world order is much more open to cooperation than the blocs
formed in 19th-century Europe. He mentioned the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as one
example of regional cooperation that has shown gradual development in efficiency and recognition by other powers. He
went on to criticize the assumption that stability, public goods and peace would only be achievable through the system of liberal
hegemony.

There is a tendency to list only positive things as inherent attributes of liberalism and ignore the dark
side. Rule-based free trade , for example, existed before liberalism in pre-colonization Southeast Asia.
Some who read my book said that a multiplex order may not only be better for the world, but for the U.S. as well. I personally think
that the unsuccessful handling of recent conflicts was not caused by the U.S. having too little, but rather

having too much power,

Acharya concluded

AT: World Improving

The world isnt getting better
Edward S. Herman 14 is professor emeritus at the Wharton School of Business at the University of
Pennsylvania, David Peterson M.A. from University of California San Diego,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066, Global
Research, June 28th 2014, [AB]
It is amusing to see how eagerly the establishment media have welcomed Steven Pinker s 2011 tome, The Better
Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,[1] which explains not only that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, but that we
may be living in the most peaceful era in our species existence.[2]
A professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University since 2002 and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist in the general nonfiction category,
[3] Pinkers lovable theme coincides with the Nobel Peace Laureates current engagement in wars on at least four separate continents (Asia, Africa,
Europe, and South America); his regretful partial withdrawal from invaded and occupied Iraq; his victorious termination of the 2011 war in Libya; his
buildup and threats to engage in even larger wars with Syria and Iran, both already underway with aggressive sanctions and an array of covert actions;
[4] his semi-secret and ever-widening use of remote-controlled aerial gunships and death squads in global killing operations;[5] and his declaration of
the right to kill any person anywhere for national security reasonsofficially making the entire world a U.S. free-fire-zone.[6] The Barack Obama
regime, and before it the Bush-Cheney regime, have also supported and protected Israels escalated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the hostile
U.S. actions and threats involving Iran and Syria are closely geared with those of Israel.
Whereas in

Pinkers view there has been a Long Peace since the end of the Second World War,[7] in the real world
there has been a series of long and devastating U.S. wars: in the Koreas (1950-1953), Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia (1954-1975), Iraq (1990-), Afghanistan (2001- or, arguably, 1979-), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1996-), with the
heavy direct involvement of U.S. clients from Rwanda (Paul Kagame) and Uganda (Yoweri Museveni) in large-scale Congo killings; and
Israels outbursts in Lebanon (1982 and 2006), to name a few. There were also very deadly wars in Iran, invaded by Saddam
Husseins Iraq (1980-1988), with Western encouragement and support. And with the stimulus-excuse of 9/11, the U.S. political and
defense establishment was able to declare a global War on Terror, open-ended and still ongoing, to
assure that the Long Peace would not be interrupted by a conflict that met the Pinkerian standards for a
real war.
In the same time frame as Pinkers New Peace, alleged to have begun with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the Warsaw Pact,
and of the Soviet Union itself (1989-1991), we have also witnessed the relentless expansion of the U.S.-led NATO
bloc, its 1990s war on and dismantlement of Yugoslavia,[8] its acceptance of new out of area responsibilities for security,[9]
its steadily enlarging membership from 16 to 28 states, including the Baltic and former Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union, and a
growing U.S. and NATO encirclement of and threats to China and Russia.[10] And during the first decade of the 21st
century, the U nited S tates openly embarked on the systematic use of enhanced interrogations (i.e.,
torture) and the frequent resort to extraordinary renditions that send captives to torture-prone clients for some not-so-angelic working
over.[11]
Pinkers standard for an interruption of the Long Peace would be a war between the great powers, and it is true that the major Axis and Allied

Pinker carries this line of thought even

avoid disputes with each other, but that they tend to stay out of disputes
across the board, (283) an idea he refers to as the Democratic Peace.[12] (278-284) This will surely come as a surprise to the
many victims of U.S. assassinations, sanctions, subversions, bombings and invasions since 1945.[13] For
Pinker, no attack on a lesser power by one or more of the great democracies counts as a real war or
confutes the Democratic Peace, no matter how many people die.
Among respectable countries, Pinker writes, conquest is no longer a thinkable option . A politician in a democracy today who
suggested conquering another country would be met not with counterarguments but with puzzlement, embarrassment, or laughter. (260) This is
powers that fought each other during World War II have not made war among themselves since 1945. But
further: He contends not only that the democracies

an extremely silly assertion. Presumably, when George Bush and Tony Blair sent U.S. and British forces to attack
Iraq in 2003, ousted its government, and replaced it with one operating under laws drafted by the Coalition Provisional Authority,
this did not count as conquest,

as these leaders never stated that they launched the war to conquer Iraq, but rather to disarm Iraq , to
free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.[14] What conqueror has ever pronounced as his goal something other than self-defense
and the protection of life and limb? It is on the basis of devices such as this that Pinkers Long Peace, New Peace, and Democratic Peace rest.
(See Massaging the Numbers, below.)
And it is in this kind of context Pinker throws-in his gentle commerce theme by advancing the so-called Golden Arches Peace ideathat no two
countries with a McDonalds have ever fought in a war. The only unambiguous exception that he can name occurred in 1999, when NATO briefly

bombed Yugoslavia. (285) In an endnote he mentions that an earlier marginal exception was the U.S. attack on Panama in 1989, but he dismisses
this U.S. war as too insignificant to make the gradeits death count falls short of the minimum required for a war according to the standard
definition,[15] though according to the UN Charter and customary international law, there was nothing sub-standard about this unambiguous U.S.
aggression against a sovereign country. Here as

in many other places , Pinker selects the estimated death toll

that minimizes the U.S.-inflicted casualties and fits his political agenda .[16]
Pinker mentions in passing that the post-World War II peace among the giants was possibly a result of the immense cost of wars that might
involve a nuclear exchangeand it did extend to the Soviet Union during its post-World War II life but his explanation focuses
mainly on the cultural evolution and biological adaptations of the Civilized , [17] in contrast with the
Uncivilized of the Third World.
explain.

Why this new peaceableness of the Civilized does not stop their violent interventions abroad he fails to

The exclusion of wars against the Uncivilized from his definition of a Long Peace reflects

gross political bias .

Pinker attributes the sense of increased violence to multiple illusions, one of which he believes is caused by the
development of media and other advanced forms of communication that allow a rushing to the spot of bloody events, and recording them and
transmitting them to the world. As he explained in a guest appearance on CBS TVs The Early Show in mid-December 2011: Not only can we send a
helicopter with a film crew to any troubled spot in the world but now anyone with a cell phone is an instant reporter. They can broadcast color footage
of bloodshed wherever it occurs and so were very aware of it.[18] Apparently Pinker believes that the media cover the world on a non-discriminatory
basis, reporting on Guatemalan peasants slaughtered by their army, civilian victims of U.S. drone warfare in Afghanistan, Honduran protesters shot
dead by their own military, and dead and injured U.S. soldiers as aggressively as they report on civilian protesters shot dead on the streets of Tehran,
or the victims of the Syrian government or of the late Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.[19]

The naivet here is staggering.

Pinkers Long Peace and New Peace and their alleged declines of violence not only coincide with the numerous
and ongoing attacks by the giants on the midgets, the huge expansion in arms, and the new burgeoning of
torture,[20] but runs parallel with the increasing structural violence

of a global class war

that has resulted in

growing inequality within and between countries, systematic dispossession of vast numbers, a
widespread seizure of the commons, major migrations, growing cities of slums, increased ethnic tensions and anti-Islamic
fervor, deliberately stoked in a troubled, receptive environment, mass incarceration of minority populations , and more vocal oppositional
forces both here and abroad.[21]

These do not constitute violence in Pinkers accounting system.

Pinkers Cold War

Although Pinker covers a great deal of ground from the earliest humans to the present, with numerous
figures and learned citations, Better Angels is an overwhelmingly ideological work , with biases that
reveal themselves at

every level sourcing, language, framing, historical and political context,

and substance and

on all topics.

2NC

Security

2NC Framework
Re-signification DA Their assertion that the alternative is not political and that
debate should be grounded in the desirability of the plan only reifies colonial,
disciplinary architectures the alternative solves precisely because it shakes the
foundation of how you judge the debate
alkvik 13 (Asl alkvik, faculty member at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at
Istanbul Technical University, PhD in political science from the University of Minnesota, August 2013,
Claiming the International pp 50-5, modified) gz
It is their shared concern with the temporality of world politics that situates different forms of critical thinking on common ground:
they all attempt to expose the way in which what is presented as given and natural is historically produced and hence open to
change. By focusing on change, challenging existing power relations, and showing how contemporary practices and discourses
contribute to the perpetuation of hegemonic structures of power and domination, critical IR, it seems, partakes in the effort to brush
history against the grain (Benjamin 2007: 257). However, despite its claim to be untimely, critical theorizing in IR,
paradoxically, is construed in quite a timely fashion . With a perceived disjuncture between writing the world from within
a discipline and acting in it from the center of the debates, the performance of critical thought is actually evaluated

based upon its punctuality its capacity to be in synch with the times of global politics. Does critical
thought provide concrete guidance and prescribe what is to be done? Can it move beyond mere talk and make timely political
interventions by providing solutions? Does it have answers to the strategic questions of progressive movements? Demanding that
critical theorizing should come clean in the court of these questions, such conceptions of untimeliness force critique to be on time.

Within this framing, some forms of critical theorizing namely, thinking that is viewed as less abstract,
more committed to action, and hence better equipped to deal with real world problems are
considered more useful, while those that do not prove concrete guidance for progressive political change
that [do] not open up to where work needs to be done (Beardsworth 2005: 234) are branded as
inefficient tools for engaging with the perplexities of global politics. The paradoxical demand that
critique should be timely comes across clearly in Anna Aganthangelou and L.H.M. Lings (1997) major
point of contention with certain forms of critical thought in IR . Dissident voices, [p]olitics of resistance [which] offer
little of transformation for those marginalized, silenced and exiled, they write, amounts to an expression of dissident luxury of
observing from off-shore (Aganthangelou and Ling 1997: 9). On this account, forms of critique that prioritize ambiguity, hybridity
and interstitial subject positions paralyze [themselves] to non-action (Aganthangelou and Ling 1997: 7) and carry little utility for
progressive politics. Hence, forms of critical theorizing that do not prove themselves to be timely by providing

program for emancipatory action are branded as not critical at all, but complicit and conservative .
A similar demand for critique to be timely and its perceived failure to deliver its promise underwrites Milja
Kurkis (2011: 129) disillusionment with critical IR theory and her diagnosis of the dismal real-world
failure of critical and philosophical research in IR. Failure, in this view, stems from critical scholarly
discourses falling short of having a real-world impact in terms of affecting any change in political
and economic structures. Once again, anxiety about the relevance of critique whether or not it is in
synch with political time, timed properly or timely in the sense of being appropriate and fitting to the times
under diagnosis becomes the main premise for assessing critical theorizing. Critique in IR, we are told,
is increasingly lacking in relevance in contributing to revitalisation of policy practice or perceptive
critiques of it (Kurki 2011: 130). Critique is lacking because it is not timely enough , not in step , and
falling behind due to its abstract and theory-driven nature and lack of realistic understanding as to
how to challenge the dominance of hegemonic ideas (Kurki 2011: 130).
Such observations about the lack of critique bear their mark in the 2007 special issue of the Review of International Studies, which
commemorates the 25th anniversary of the publication of two key texts in critical IR theory by reflecting upon the impact of critical
theorizing upon the discipline and interrogating what its future might be. Assessing the current state of critical theory in IR, the
introductory article suggests that the fundamental philosophical question [that] can no longer be sidestepped by critical IR theory
is the relation between knowledge of the world and action in it (Rengger and Thirkell-White 2007: 16). Forms of critical
theorizing that leave the future to contingency, uncertainty and the multiplicity of political projects and
therefore provide less guidance for concrete political action (Rengger and Thirkell-White 2007: 15) or, again, those that
problematize underlying assumptions of thought and say little about the potential political agency that might be involved in any
subsequent struggles (Rengger and Thirkell-White 2007: 20) may render the critical enterprise impotent . This point
comes out most clearly in Craig Murphys (2007) contribution. Echoing William Wallaces (1996) argument that critical theorists tend
to be monks with little to offer to political actors engaged in real world politics, Murphy argues that the promise of critical theory has

been only partially kept due to its limited influence outside the academy. Building a different world, he suggests, requires more
than isolated academic talk and demands not only words, but deeds (Murphy 2007: 124). This, according to Murphy, requires
providing knowledge that contributes to change (2007: 127).
Such angst about critiques inability to be timely culminated recently in the addition of a fourth episode to the unfolding first, second,
and third chapters of discipline-making debates. The issue is unequivocally formulated by Steven Roach (2008: xxi): whether we
can develop an empirical and policy-relevant critical IR theory is precisely [the] issue that lies at the core of what some are referring
to as a fourth debate.

What emerges from such discussions about the meaning of being critical is that if critique is to be worthy
of its name, it needs to be in synch with political time and to respond to its immediate demands .
The task of critique, it is argued, is to be on the spot and to hit the mark rather than to disrupt the limits
of what are presented as realistic choices. One is prompted to ask whose realistic understanding of the
unfolding crisis of global politics critique is considered to be lacking for . Or, perhaps more importantly, one is left
bewildered at a formulation of critique in which thinking is reduced to an act of hitting the mark, a form of targeting practice. 2 Stated
less metaphorically, critical theorizing is conceptualized as a tool that seeks to resolve contradictions, and to provide coherence to
historical and political perplexities that resist easy solutions. It

is defined as a form of timely intervention , an

endeavor that responds to what is deemed a political exigency by institutionalized sites of knowledge
production. Reinserting the false dichotomy between critical theory and political action , such a
framing obscures the fact that the difference between various theories rests not on their level of
abstraction and programmatic focus but on the nature of their relationship to the exercise of
power and the social-relational positions and practices through which power operates (Duvall and
Varadarajan 2003: 81).
Critique out of synch
Can critique be judged solely in terms of its utility and relevance for political struggles that are perceived as going on out there,
outside of a disciplinary context? How can we think about the relation between critique and the crisis that triggers it without
succumbing to the temptation to tame that which is by definition untimely through an injunction that it be properly timed in response
to a crisis? And what difference would such a recasting make? How would it help to think about claiming the international as a
critical project?
Perhaps a useful way to grapple with these questions is by revisiting the question of what it means to be untimely. For this, I turn to
political theorist Wendy Browns (2005) exegesis of Walter Benjamins (2007) Theses on the Philosophy of History, which disrupts
predominant understandings of the meaning of critical thought. Such a re-casting of the meaning of critique as an
untimely intervention starts from an effort to trace the etymological roots of the word critique so as to
recover the intimate link between critical thinking and the crisis that triggers it; a link that was severed
with the rise of the modern political order and the consequent de-politicization of critique as a subjective,
private affair, a philosophical activity divorced from the realm of politics (Koselleck 1988). Severing critique
from politics in modernity pivoted on a conception of political time in which moral progress and the
inevitable triumph of reason were secured through a teleological narrative of history . 3
Prior to their modern rendering as two separate domains critique as a subjective affair, a private
judgment passed about a worldly event, and crisis as an objective condition belonging to the public realm
critique and crisis were fused in the same concept krin, which meant to separate, to choose, to
judge, to decide (Koselleck 2006: 358). This concept was intimately related to politics as it connoted a divorce or quarrel,
but also a moment of making a decision, reaching a verdict or judgment (kritik). In Athenian democracy where the defendant was
both a citizen and a member of the Senate constituting the jury, krisis referred to a scene in which the object, agent, process, and
result of critique were intermingled (Brown 2005: 5). Recognition of an objective crisis and subjective judgments passed on it were
fused and implicated in each other. Consequently, there could be no such thing as mere critique or untimely

critique, given that the project of critique always entailed a concern with political time as krisis
signified a crucial point for restoring justice and ensuring the prospects for the continuity of the political
community.
It is this intimate, severed link between crisis and critique that Wendy Browns discussion brings to the fore and re-problematizes.
According to her, the practice of critical theory appeals to a concern with political time to the extent that [t]he

crisis that incites critique and that critique engages itself signals a rupture of temporal continuity ,
which is at the same time a rupture in political imaginary (2005: 7). It is a particular experience with
time, with the present, that informs critical theorizing. Rather than an unmoving or an automatically
overcome present (a present that is out of time), the present is interpreted as an opening that calls for a
response. This call for a response highlights the idea that, far from being a luxury, critique is non-

optional in nature. 4 Such an understanding of critical thought is premised on a historical consciousness

that grasps the present historically so as to break with the self-conception of the age. In its attempt to
grasp the times in their singularity , critique is cast neither as breaking free from its weight (which would
amount to ahistoricity ) nor being weighed down by the times (as in the case of teleology ). It is an
attitude that renders the present a site of non-utopian possibility since it is historically situated and
constrained, yet also a possibility since it is not historically foreordained or determined
13). In its relation to political time, critique

(Brown 2005: 12

entails contestation of what is presented as realistic political

choices and overturning the confinement of politics to existing possibilities . 5

Such a conception of critique in relation to political time provides a counternarrative to prevalent
conceptions of the meaning of critique within the discipline of IR. Browns analysis is especially
significant for highlighting the immediately political nature of critique . It challenges the dominant
notion that critical thought is a self-indulgent, disinterested, distanced or purely academic practice
unless it is overtly committed to political action and ready to offer concrete solutions in the face of urgent
questions posed by global politics. Instead, untimely critique is portrayed as a force of disruption , a form
of intervention that reconfigures the meaning of the times by allowing thinking its wildness
beyond the immediate in order to reset the possibilities of the immediate (Brown 2005: 15).
Untimeliness is not to be mistaken for a method, a tool that can be deployed at the service of advancing disciplinary knowledge
around pre-articulated questions of world politics. In other words, such

a conception of the untimely does not imply

a process of re-signification within the established parameters of a disciplinary discourse . Such a

move would be tantamount to an affirmative intervention that investigates foundations only to fortify the
disciplinary architecture

(Mowitt 1992). Rather, critique

as untimely thinking, conceived in the terms

encouraged by Browns reading, entails a gesture of de-signification that exposes the constitutive
silences of that discourse. Stated differently, it entails an attempt to think about how, under certain
conditions, certain kinds of questions cannot be posed or, rather, can only be framed and posed by
breaking through a certain prohibition that functions to condition and circumscribe the domain of the
speakable (Butler 2009: 776 7). It calls for challenging prevailing structures of domination and an
opening up of new political possibilities beyond what is recognized as a legitimate form of acting, being
and knowing. An untimely intervention is akin to what Butler describes as the staging of a rogue viewpoint that which
cannot be spoken without inflicting some damage to the idea of what is thinkable and speakable .
It is precisely this conception of the untimely that I want to highlight in coming to terms with the meaning of claiming the international
as a critical project. A project that explores worldings beyond the West cannot merely attempt to consolidate disciplinary protocols by
interrogating difference with a view to rendering it more universal and globally encompassing. Rather, the promise of claims

on the international as untimely interventions lies in their attempt to unravel the silent disciplinary
protocols that determine which questions are legitimate to ask and the framework that informs them.
This de-signifying gesture can be clarified and contextualized through reference to the popular question about dialogue and
difference within IR. In an exemplary staging of affirmative critique, a prominent disciple writes that the idea that [t]he study

of International Relations neglects or marginalizes the world beyond the West is no longer a novel
argument (Acharya 2011: 620). Critical acknowledgment of this disciplinary blindness [nescience] is followed
by the assertion of the need to find some agreement on how to redress this problem and move
forward (ibid.). Implicit in this argument is an understanding of difference as a problem encountered
on the way toward a prefigured destination a genuinely international field of IR (ibid.) a disciplinary
synthesis in which difference is envisioned as a moment in the dialectical interplay toward a higher
resolution. The question posed about difference is constrained to what a disciplinary setting allows .
As Mustapha Kamal Pasha (2011: 685) notes, not engaging with the limits internal to IR and avoiding
interrogation of the substrata of assumed settlements that render secured trips undertaken by such

forms of critical thinking do nothing less than to ensure the endur[ance] of IR as a cultural project
equipped with the language of universality . Such lines of questioning thus work to affirm what they
set out to negate .
Taking a rouge route and brushing against the grain of disciplinary reason reveals alternative
possibilities in terms of claiming the international. Untimely critiques of disciplinary injunctions for dialogue
expose the ways in which such calls re-inscribe the subject of IR , both that which the discipline talks
about and those who can participate in such a dialogue. Rather than reproducing the disciplinary subject,
they dismantle it by problematizing the grounds upon which the disciplinary object gets pre-emptively
sequestered within the domain of familiar codes of enunciation

(Grovogui 1998) and

can speak are reinstated as the privileged members of a whites only club

the subjects who

(Shilliam 2011). Such

inquiries unsettle the very terms of disciplinary discourse , pointing the way to a whole series of novel
questions to investigate, and to alternative, anti-imperial paths to explore. 6
Raising questions that cannot be raised within the boundaries of a disciplinary discourse, and acute
awareness of and attunement to the variegated forms in which power and domination operates, renders
critical thinking an untimely endeavor. Hence, its responsiveness and responsibility toward its time cannot
be solely determined by explicit commitment to practical political action, policy relevance, and
programmatic commitments in other words, its punctuality. As David Campbell (2005) reminds us, as
scholars we are always already engaged . Therefore, the question is not whether as scholars critical
or otherwise we are engaged or not, but rather what the nature of our engagement is . 7 Ethos of
political criticism an ethos which takes as its object assumptions, limits, their historical production,
social and political effects, and the possibility of going beyond them in thought and action (Campbell 2005:
133) places the relevance of critical thought and the responsibility of critical scholarship on a
different ground than the one that timely understandings of untimely critique force critical engagements
into. Foregrounding this ethos does not mean that critique does not commit itself to certain political
visions and affirm particular courses of action. On the contrary, as Brown (2005: 16) suggests, critical theory
cannot get off the block without affirming contestable and contingent values . What this proposition
does mean, however, is that whatever

form it takes, critique as untimely endeavor insists upon the political

nature of all interpretation and refuses the blackmail of ahistorical, normative assertions and
moralizing timeless, utopian visions that ultimately demand that critique abide by predetermined
protocols . An untimely critique of the discipline presents a claim not a demand on the international
to the extent that as an act of reclamation it takes over the disciplinary object the international for
a different project than that to which it is currently tethered (Brown 2005: 16). Untimely critique is not
secured, it is open and demanding . It does not guarantee, but doubts , hesitates , and returns
again and again to the same texts of the international to recover and reclaim the disciplinary object
without any reservations.

2NC Impact
Their reproductive project makes macro-level violence inevitable
baedan 12 (baedan is a journal composed by a collective of anonymous queer negativists, Summer 2012, Baedan 1: Journal of Queer
Nihilism, pp 17-9) gz

the cathexis which captures all political ambition

is a drive toward the future. The social order must concern itself with the future so as to create the
forward-moving infrastructure and discourse to proliferate itself . Edelmans name for this insistence on the Child as the future is
reproductive futurism. Reproductive futurism is the ideology which demands that all social relationships and
communal life be structured in order to allow for the possibility of the future through the reproduction of
the Child, and thus the reproduction of society. The ideology of reproductive futurism ensures the sacrifice of all
vital energy for the pure abstraction of the idealized continuation of society. Edelman argues that futurity amounts to a
It should be obvious through Edelmans treatment of the relationship of politics to the Child that

struggle for Life at the expense of life; for the Children at the expense of the lived experiences of actual children.

If queerness is a refusal of the symbolic value of the Child as the horizon of the future, queerness must
figure as being against the future itself. To be specific, our queer project must also pose itself as the denial of the
future of civilization.
Edelman argues that the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to
the social, to every social structure or form. He locates this queer anti-futurity as being the primary fantastic justification for anti-queer violence: If
there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile,
narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for
the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself . He invokes the anti-queer interpretations of the
Biblical destruction of Sodom to describe the ways in which the collective imaginary is still haunted by the notion that a proliferation of queerness can only
result in a persistent threat of societal apocalypse. Thus in the name of the Child and the future it
represents, any repression, sexual or otherwise, can be justified.
The Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege, condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities
precisely insofar as that Child enshrines, in its form as sublimation, the very value for which queerness regularly find itself condemned: an insistence
on sameness that intends to restore an Imaginary past. The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged
investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains,

the battle against queers is a life-and-death struggle for the future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by
queers. Indeed, as the Army of God made clear in the bomb-making guide it produces for the assistance of its militantly pro-life members, its
purpose was wholly congruent with the logic of reproductive futurism: to disrupt and ultimately destroy Satans power to kill our children, Gods
children.

futurism is intrinsic to white supremacist ideology and white nationalism;

bound as the Child is to notions of race and nation :
Edelman goes on to cite the ways in which reproductive

Let me end with a reference to the fourteen words, attributed to David Lane, by which members of various white separatist organizations throughout the United States affirm

we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white
children. So long as white is the only word that makes this credo appalling, so long as the figural children continue to secure our existence through the fantasy that we
their collective commitment to the cause of racial hatred:

survive in them, so long as the queer refutes that fantasy, effecting its derealization as surely an encounter with the Real, for just so long must [queerness] have a future after all.

fantasy of the
future was intrinsic to the spread of fascism in Europe . Edelman, via Benjamin, describes the fascism of the babys face, a phrase meant to
illustrate the absolute power afforded to the ideology of reproductive futurism. This fascism of the babys face serves to reify difference and
thus to secure the reproduction of the existent social order in the form of the future. No atrocity is out of
the question if it is for the Child; no horrible project of industry should precluded if it will serve to hasten
the future of industrial civilization. Armies of men, imperial and revolutionary alike, have always lined up to
the slaughter in the name of the Child.
To bolster his argument about the repressive nature of reproductive futurism, Edelman cites Walter Benjamin in describing the way in which the

But we neednt look any further than todays headlines to see the symbolic power the Childs face deploys in the service of the social order. This year, the nation has been
captivated by two horrific examples of the death-regime of white supremacy in the United States. Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida and Bo Morrison in Slinger, Wisconsin: two
black youth murdered at the hands of racist vigilantes.
While the systematic murder and imprisonment of black people is so commonplace that it cannot make headlines, these stories have swept the nation particularly because of
the way they intersect with the narratives of innocence and childhood. Specifically in the case of Trayvon Martin, whose future was taken from him at the age of seventeen, a
debate is raging centered around his character and his innocence with regard to his symbolic place as the Child.
One side of this debate circulates a angelic picture of his face to assure society of his child-like nature. The other side circulates a doctored picture of him wearing a grill as a
kind of racialized testament to his adultness. Each side feverishly examines the evidence to argue whether or not he had attacked his murderer before he died. Whats at stake
in this debate is Trayvons symbolic position as the Child: if he represents the Child, his murder is the atrocious destruction of his future (and by extensions everyones). If he is
not the Child, then his killer acted out of the need to protect the future of his own community (and the children within it) from a perceived (even if falsely) threat. While politicians
as high-ranking as the President invest Trayvon with the burden of carrying the futurity of their own children, others continue to assert their second amendment right to own
weapons so they may protect theirs.
Bo Morrison was also murdered by a racist homeowner, and his killer continues on with impunity because he can claim that he needed to eliminate any threat to his children.

Young black men who figured, like the queer, as threats to the family were destroyed in the Childs name.
In each instance, the entire discourse is centered on the Child while entirely obscuring the reality of the actual young individuals executed in the Childs name.
Pundits articulate the measures that could be taken by parents and the state to restore the promise of the future: a ban on guns, more responsible gun ownership, the removal

These horrific killings demonstrate that there truly is no

future. It is this truth which young people everywhere are awakening to. They are swarming the streets en masse, hoods up, to outrun the police and snare the flows of the
of hoodies from childrens wardrobes, neighborhood watch, more policing, justice.

cities. They are walking out of school that banal prison of futurity in order to loot stores and be with their friends. They are preparing and coordinating, so that the next time

one of them is burned at the stake for the sake of the Future, theyll make the city burn in kind. The fires of Greece, London and Bahrain hint toward the consequences of such
an awakening.

2NC Link Buchanan

Any link means causes a self-fulfilling prophecy which culminates in extinction
Zulaika 12 (Joseba Zulaika, professor at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada
Reno, PhD in anthropology from Princeton, 2012, Drones, witches and other flying objects: the force of
fantasy in US counterterrorism, Critical Studies on Terrorism Volume 5 Issue 1, modified) gz
The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, writes sociologist Robert Merton,
a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception
come true . This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the
actual course of events as proof that [s/]he was right from the very beginning .Such are the perversities of
social logic. (1968, p. 477)

It was false that there was al-Qaeda in Iraq before the invasion but then it became true after the invasion .
Anti-American radical Islamists could never afford to have antiaircraft missiles, until the CIA provided Stinger missiles to Afghan
rebels battling the Soviets in the mid-1980s. Similarly, over 40 countries are currently developing drone technology

to be used as military robots, with the likelihood that in a not faraway future they might fall into the hands
of terrorists. Such self-fulfilling prophecy of counterterrorist drones being used by terrorists , we
are told, is not far away (Caryl 2011, p. 58).
Kilcullen's main concern is with the formation of what he labels the accidental guerrilla ordinary people caught in the fight
between terrorists and counterterrorists, who end up supporting the local fight against the outsiders
and who would be impossible to distinguish from the terrorists, except by accident . His thesis is that most of
the adversaries encountered by Western powers after 9/11 are the products of such accident
people who fight us not because they hate the West and seek our overthrow but because we have
invaded their space to deal with a small extremist element (Caryl 2011, pp. 34, 263). But even if accidental and a
guerrilla (and not a terrorist), still Kilcullen remains within the counterterrorist mindset when he immediately proposes that: I
theorise that the accidental guerrilla emerges from a cyclical process that takes place in four stages: infection, contagion,
intervention, and rejection (2009, p. 35). The cyclical process is thus not ruled by cultural or political
circumstances or by the logic of historical repetition and action/reaction linkages, but by the medical
analogy of a virus or bacterium the primary associations of infection and contagion which
point to a thinking that is typical of how the logic of witchcraft and taboo operate in ethnographic
communities (Zulaika and Douglass 1996).
The failed approach to insurgency in Iraq is characterised by Kilcullen as enemy-centric (2009, p. 129), with the focus on killing the
terrorists. But despite his criticisms of the very notion of the war on terror, still he cannot avoid framing counterterrorism as a war, his
main reference for comparison/contrast being the Cold War. Kilcullen finds it a limited analogy, [y]et in at least one dimension, that
of time, the enduring trends that drive the current confrontation may mean that the conflict will indeed resemble the Cold War (2009,
p. 301). I agree that

time is central to our analysis but not in the sense that we are at the beginning of a

very long road, rather, in the perversion of temporality implied in such waiting for terror . In such
temporality of waiting, one has to start with the non-hypothetical premise that no matter what, there will be
terrorism. Imagine all the terrorists disappeared tomorrow; still, for Kilcullen, All these [terrorism] trends would endure even if AQ
and its takfiri allies disappeared tomorrow (2009, p. 294). What is indisputable is that we should look at AQ as a harbinger of a new
era of conflict (2009, p. 294).

It is not if, but when . The bedrock premise is that there will always be war

and now there will always be terrorism .

And once

terrorism is defined as inevitable, its very logic will tend to make it self-fulfilling by
producing a behaviour that will make the original false definition come true . The reality itself is that terrorism
constantly morphs into new mutations, Kilcullen tells us, and therefore counterterrorism methods are almost by definition already
obsolete (2009, p. 294). Yet, the

one fact that can never be put into question is that the thing itself is
terrorism. The assassination of President Kennedy was not a terrorist act at the time; nowadays, by one of those mutations into
which it is morphed, it would be the terrorist act by excellence. Your own discursive definitions make things be
what you want them to be. Kilcullen is very aware that there are other threats as well, such as proliferation of nuclear
weapons, climate change, resource conflict, rogue states, actual wars between states and so on; but terrorism will always be a
distinct one, non-reducible to those other threats.

counterterrorism knows
that its vocabulary and discourse produce in part the thing itself of terrorism . But what I find most surprising
A new lexicon is Kilcullen's first proposal among his tentative conclusions (2009, p. 300). Again,

is that, in the study of terrorism, he advocates not international relations (the grand narrative we read about in daily news about the
internationalisation of terrorism), but anthropology with its methodology to [g]et as close as possible (in time and space) to the
actual events, ideally by being present when they unfold but, at the very least, by seeking firsthand descriptions from eyewitnesses
(2009, p. 304). As an ethnographer of political violence myself, I find this recommendation extraordinary in its incongruence with
counterterrorism's ordinary modus operandi.
In fact, as I completed my ethnography of Basque violence (1988), I was faced with the existence of an international committee of
terrorism experts to tackle the very problem I had just studied and which issued a report to much media fanfare that left me
wondering what claims to knowledge did anthropology, as opposed to counterterrorism, have (Zulaika 1991). The basic
recommendation by the terrorism experts was blunt: never see a terrorist (not even on television), never listen to a terrorist (not
even on a radio) and never talk to a terrorist. Anthropology was called upon as a discipline that could help bring valuable information
to carry out the grand counterterrorist agenda of cleansing the Basque Country from terrorism. The Irish were given a similar advice,
lest someone might identify with their cause.

Kilcullen's proposal that counterterrorism should turn into anthropology, I assume on the basis of the
experience gained in Iraq's surge, is a radical departure from the former strategy of complete tabooing
and distancing from the untouchable terrorists. But this is unrealistic and misses the key issue:
counterterrorism has established a political and moral cordon sanitaire regarding terrorism , a strict
taboo backed with the most stringent laws that de facto prohibits conducting an ethnography of
terrorism . Even interviewing a terrorist in prison, let alone while active, is out of the question, as proven
recently by the Bureau of Prisons rejection to grant access to a group of scholars proposing to investigate
how they got into terrorism (Shane 2011, p. 26). Truman Capote could write a compelling narrative of multiple murder,
identifying with the killers; an equivalent identification with terrorists would turn into the anathema of an apology of terrorism (Zulaika
2009, pp. 3759). Indeed, one could argue that, as the result of writing, the same murder becomes a different reality in the hands
of a historian, a sociologist, a journalist, a novelist or a counterterrorist. Similarly, you could argue that the Basque political violence
of my ethnography at a village level was not the same thing as the Basque terrorism of the international experts (Zulaika and
Douglass 1996, pp. 3163). In short, there is again this impasse in Kilcullen's proposal, by which an anthropological

approach might in fact dissolve the violence into cultural patterns and political causes, and yet while
terrorism remains the undisputable, permanent category and counterterrorism the only game in
town.
A central dimension of terrorism, and one that is crucial to show its self-fulfilling quality, has to do with
threats and their perception and the reactions they provoke. A threat plays with the sign as
representing a future event , while we never know whether the issuer actually means it or not or
whether [s/]he might change [her/]his opinion in the future . The Unabomber brought the traffic in California airports to
a halt by simply sending a letter to a newspaper with the threat of bringing down an airliner, while he sent another letter to another
newspaper admitting that the threat was a prank.

The actual reality of the threat might be nothing but play: a zero

that can yet have deadly serious consequences . Counterterrorism is a prime example of what Merton labelled the
Thomas theorem, namely: If men [humans] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences (1968,
p. 475). Once the situation is defined as one of inevitable terrorism and endless waiting, what could happen
weighs as much as what is actually the case; once a threat, whose intention or possibility is unknown to
us, is taken seriously, its reality requires that we must act on it. Terrorism is the catalyst for
confusing various semantic levels of linguistic, ritual and military actions .
Anthropologists have examined phenomena such as divination, which manipulates the axis of time in a cultural context of magic and
witchcraft. They have compared premodern mystical notions of causation and temporality to our own modern standards of
rationality. The discussion leads directly to issues of ontology and epistemology: what is the thing itself of magic or taboo or
divination? What is the nature of reality and what type of knowledge is involved in such beliefs by the natives of those cultures as
well as by the interpretations produced by their analysts?
As we ask what the rationale and the nature of the information supporting counterterrorism's most fateful decisions were, such as
those taken by the Bush Administration before going to war with Iraq or by Bremer after the invasion, an anthropologically informed
observer is reminded of secret oracle consultations among the Azande, as famously described by Edward Evans-Pritchard, and
which were summed up thus by Peter Winch:
Oracular revelations are not treated as hypotheses and, since their sense derives from the way they are treated in their context, they
therefore are not hypotheses. They are not a matter of intellectual interest but the main way in which Azande decide how they
should act. If the oracle reveals that a proposed course of action is fraught with mystical dangers from witchcraft or sorcery, that
course of action will not be carried out; and then the question of refutation or confirmation just does not arise. We might say that the
revelation has the logical status of an unfulfilled hypothetical. (1977, p. 88)

The need to consult oracles concerning witchcraft responds to the urge to know the causation of unfortunate events. How they
happen is perceived by the senses; why they happen is what magical thinking is all about. This is where revelations by oracles
become essential to Azande thought. The spirit of consulting an oracle is obviously very unlike a scientist's experiments.

The central premise of counterterrorism thinking is the oft-repeated formula that it is not if, but when .
Hypotheticals are premised with the conditional if: if A, then B. What characterises basic counterterrorist knowledge
about the next impending attack is that it will happen. In a mindset that parallels Azande witchcraft , the
counterterrorist axiom of not if rules out mere hypotheses. The revelations are thus unfulfilled
hypotheticals that will become real with time . Counterterrorist projections are the equivalent of
oracular certainties : the horror will happen no matter what. This leads in pragmatic terms to the
fatalistic attitude of disregarding actual knowledge and not taking responsibility for actual decisions:
what does it really matter what we decide since it is going to happen anyway and whatever happens is
out of our hands ? What matters, therefore, is that we sort of divine what the course of action will be.
The practical aspect of this temporality of waiting, in which the certainty of the impending evil is beyond
any hypothetical (not if), is that we need to act pre-emptively now against events that are to happen
in the future. The rationale behind nuclear deterrence was that developing armaments now, ready to strike at the push of a
button, guaranteed that they would not be used in the future. Many commentators saw in such logic the quintessence
of technological madness [ absurdity ]. But that was not enough. Since future nuclear attacks by terrorists
are only a matter of time, we must wage a war now pre-emptively, even in a nuclear context , thus
breaking the historic assumption that nuclear arsenals were for deterrence , not for actual usage.
What justifies the use of a just war in the nuclear era is the desire of terrorists for having the WMD
we possess. There is nothing evil or irrational about having or using them, as it is an established fact that terrorists desire them
and one day will have them. Thus, the formula of not if, but when becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy . The
counterterrorist thinking makes it an imperative that the war must start now against Saddam Hussein,
against al-Qaeda, against Iran and against all potential terrorists. This is how the American public, including the
liberal media, accepted the rationale to go to war against Iraq.

It is the play with the axis of time that is most revealing of the manipulations of associative magic, as
well as of counterterrorist thinking. The oracle, based on secret knowledge, reveals whether witchcraft has transpired and
whether its danger looms ahead. The terrorist threat also creates the temporality of waiting . Actual historical
temporality becomes subservient to the feared future . If there are no terrorism attacks, the
counterterrorist can claim success in preventing them; but if the attack does occur , then the
counterterrorist can say I told you so and argue that [s/]he was right in his predictions. At this point,
terrorism foretold becomes prophecy fulfilled . Such imperviousness to error in actual historical
events points to a time warp that goes to the heart of counterterrorist mythology . Such waiting implies in
fact that historical time has surrendered itself to a fateful future.
The result of this passive temporality regarding events we can do nothing to prevent is a fateful mindset in
which the terror events are closer to nature than society and politics , and there is hardly any point
in looking into the intellectual premises or subjective motivations that guide terrorist actions. The
great political victory of the suicide bombers is that they imposed on US politics their own suicidal
temporality of waiting and a culture grounded on the oracular knowledge of secret intelligence, which
then justified the war on terror .

Asia pivot is rude

Turner 14 (Oliver Turner, Hallsworth Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, PhD from the
University of Manchester, April 2014, American Images of China: Identity, Power, Policy, pp 158-160) gz

The pivot
priorities, it is

was announced in November 2011 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 39 Presented as a shift in overseas

ostensibly designed to shift the focus of US foreign policy away from the conflicts in

Iraq and Afghanistan, in which the US has long been engaged as part of its global war on terror, and
towards the East Asian region . This pivot was implemented despite widespread contractions in national economic
(including defence) spending, as Obama confirmed that budget reductions will not come at the expense of that critical region. 40
China is not explicitly identified as the primary motivating factor behind this strategic realignment, but, nonetheless, it is clear that
the PRC is central to the Asia Pacific becoming a firmer foreign policy priority in Washington . In January 2012
Secretary of Defense Panetta isolated the Asia Pacific, along with the Middle East, as the two regions the Pentagon considers key
to long-term American interests abroad. 41 Of course, the United States has long held influence in the region . As this
book has already shown, John Hays splendid little war 42 of 1898 resulted in Washington first gaining control over Spains Asia
Pacific territories. Since the Second World War and the Korean War in particular the US has retained a
significant presence in Japan, South Korea, Guam and Taiwan, as well as many other places .
Todays pivot is unfolding in large part through the transference of further military resources to the
region and the reinforcement of security ties. For instance, in November 2011 it was announced that around 200 US
troops would become based in Australia, with the number expected to rise to around 2,500 by 2015 . 43 In
August 2011 the Philippine navy acquired from the US a Hamilton Class cutter, 44 and in May the following year a second was
transferred. 45 In April 2012 Washington and Singapore agreed to intensify military training exercises, to
enhance interoperability and promote greater cooperation between both armed forces . 46 The US
Department of Defense also seeks closer maritime relations with Vietnam 47 and has stated that increased access for US ships to
Vietnams ports will help the US achieve its objectives in the Asia Pacific. 48 In May 2012 the House of Representatives voted in
favour of selling the government in Taipei 66 new fighter aircraft, 49 although a trade deal has since stalled. More broadly, the
proportion of overall US navy resources in the region is set to rise from 50 to 60 per cent . 50
Despite the reaffirmation of security ties with many of Chinas neighbours, however, it is important to note that the increasing
wealth and influence of the PRC is not the sole motivating factor behind the pivot . Between 1973 and 2010
Asia as a whole doubled its share of global trade, to just over 30 per cent. 51 Indias economy has grown consistently since the
1970s so that, with the inclusion of China and Japan, three of the worlds five biggest economies are Asian for the first time in
centuries. Australia, Vietnam and the Philippines have also experienced broadly healthy growth rates in recent years, especially in
comparison with the more stagnant economies of Europe and North America. To isolate China, then, would be to

misrepresent an economically dynamic region and to ignore the broader conditions in which Washingtons
pivot is being conducted. Moreover, Washingtons renewed focus upon the Asia Pacific is not
constituted by military-security activities alone . In March 2011 the United States secured its first resident
ambassador in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). That year the US also became a full member of the East Asia
Summit and Hillary Clinton became the first US Secretary of State since 1955 to visit Burma. Most importantly, in broad terms the
pivot is framed by ideas often ingrained and familiar of what Asia, China and the United States
are and these ideas are being reproduced by the policy itself.
Key is the truth that Chinas increasing wealth and development, as discussed in the previous section,
necessarily means that it represents a destabilising influence in global affairs and a problem to be
resolved . Publicly, the Obama administration states that Chinas growth is a welcome development, and yet the pivot is
a pertinent illustration of the anxieties it causes in Washington . As already noted, in 2011 former Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta

described rising powers as challenges that we are going to have to deal with .
52 He later informed Americans that the Asia Pacific (along with the Middle East) contains the greatest
challenges for the future . Because of this, he asserted, the US military will increase its institutional weight and focus on
enhanced presence, power projection, and deterrence in the Asia Pacific. 53

Selective, subjective images of a

rising China of which we must foremost be wary are central to the moulding of a reality in which not
formulating a strategy such the pivot becomes illogical.
In the future China may become overtly aggressive towards the United States or pursue expansionist and violent foreign policies.
Some argue that this is already evident towards Taiwan 54 or Tibet, 55 for example, or through the mercantilist accumulation of the
worlds natural resources. 56 Yet Chinas

guilt as todays principal rising power is an important component in

the legitimisation of political performances such as those which constitute the pivot towards the Asia
Pacific. The strategy is one element of an approach which in all but name represents a (arguably

continuing rather than novel) broad containment approach comparable to that exercised during
the Cold War . Washingtons reaffirmation of security ties with almost every nation surrounding
China , its refusal to sell military equipment to Beijing and its close relationship with Taiwan which
Chinas government so publicly denounces all point to an underlying desire to limit Chinas regional and
subsequently global influence. This is made unproblematic by discursively manufactured truths
about Chinas rapid development.

Furthermore, those truths are, as ever, reproduced through the performance of US foreign policy ,
which itself still constitutes far more than a mere end point of representational practices .
Leon Panettas identification of rising powers and the resulting challenges that we are going to have to
deal with 57 is a timely reminder of the role of foreign policy discourse in the affirmation of (both Chinas
and the United States) identity. To recap, at the turn of the twentieth century, as the United States capabilities were being
applied more willingly and confidently abroad, the country was lauded from within as a newly powerful yet civilised world leader.
Senator Albert Beveridge argued for the exercise of American material power in Asia to be in the service of
promoting American law . . . order . . . [and] civilization . . . on shores hitherto bloody and benighted . 58
More than a century later, in 2011, Secretary of State Clinton argued that the purpose of Washingtons new pivot strategy was to
sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values across the region. 59 Clintons announcement which
complements enduring wider rhetoric of exporting core American values abroad (seen for example in the wake of the events of
Tiananmen Square in 1989, during the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1996 and in fears of the so-called modern-day Beijing Consensus)

additionally reinforces the United States as Thomas Jeffersons empire for liberty , and China as a
place where that empires influence is still required.
Contemporary US China policy is thus as active today as ever in the perpetuation of discursive
separation and difference , not least between a rising China whose communist values threaten the
stability of an imagined orderly, rule-determined international system , and a United States whose
superior values should be adopted in Beijing . As suggested by the resilience of Threatening China within American
imaginations, the most historically stable constructions of that country and its people interrogated throughout this book are still very
much in circulation today. Their appearance may often be disguised and they have continued to evolve, but their essential elements
remain such that the logic of their existence can still commonly go unquestioned in order to be utilised in the policy foreign arena.
This is the focus of the final analytical section of both this chapter and the book.

2NC Alt
Voting negative is an epistemic disobedience that resists the capitulation of
scholarship to militarized counter-terrorism- their research code all social life
toward a paranoid maintenance of the system at all costs under the guise of a
negative state action
Jackson 15
Richard Jackson, professor of peace studies at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, New
Zealand, (2015) The epistemological crisis of counterterrorism, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 8:1, 33-54, KB
Responsibility and resistance Given the vast suffering engendered by the global war on terrorism since 2001, the spread of
unethical, illegal and counterproductive practices such as torture, rendition, extrajudicial killings, mass surveillance and control
orders (among others), and the economic and social costs of contemporary counterterrorism, there is a clear normative

responsibility to try and resist and deconstruct the current epistemological crisis and all its
harmful effects. Notwithstanding the iron logic of the epistemological crisis, its widespread acceptance and its inherently
expansionary and self-replicating nature, there are a number of potential avenues for resistance. However, to
initiate resistance, it is crucial that we first adopt an attitude of what Walter Mignolo (2009) calls
epistemic disobedience to the dominant paradigm. Although this term is employed by
Mignolo in the context of de-colonial thought, it can readily be applied to the hegemonic
counterterrorist paradigm and the urgent need for the epistemic de-linking of the unknown and
the imperative to act; the unveiling of epistemic silences or knowledge de-subjugation (Jackson
2012b) about risk, actors and political violence; the challenging of the epistemic privilege held by
security experts and officials; and the need to change the terms of the conversation regarding
how we as a society deal with potential threats of political violence, particularly in terms of the
material and legal sacrifices we are prepared to take. More specific suggestions for resisting the epistemological
crisis include Zulaika and Douglasss (1996) suggestion of employing strategies of exorcism to try and rid society of its ontological
terror. In this regard, Charlotte Heath-Kelly (2012b) argues for the important role of laughter and humour as a way of creating space
within which terrorism fears and obsessions can be exorcised and deconstructed. In a similar vein, Zulaika
(2012) suggests a

strategy aimed at heightening the contradictions within the epistemological crisis

through encouraging more fantasy and cooperating with official activities, particularly those that
are obviously bizarre. In this respect, proliferating fantasy scenarios and engaging in constant
reporting of suspicious activities could overload and overwhelm counterterrorist structures,
thereby making the paradigm practically unworkable. Other more traditional modes of resistance
include the employment of academic research and counter-evidence to contradict official
statements and justifications , fill purported knowledge gaps and demonstrate alternative policy
options (see Mueller and Stewart 2011, 2012). While providing an evidentiary base cannot break down the epistemological crisis
on its own (due to the built-in rejection of evidence and knowledge), it is nonetheless crucial in the broader struggle to win legitimacy
for change in the dominant policy paradigm. Related to this, there is an important role for activist groups and

individuals, as well as investigative journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden and others, to
publicise the nature and extent of counterterrorist activities, particularly when they involve secret
wrong-doing and social harm such as mass surveillance, torture, rendition, shoot-to-kill policies
and the like. Other groups like Cageprisoners can then use this information to provide legal support for victims and challenge
government programmes. Whatever approach is adopted, there is an urgent need for greater efforts by
critical scholars and concerned citizens to discover and develop many more effective strategies
of resistance to the epistemological crisis of counterterrorism and its damaging practices and
consequences. Scholars, including many within critical terrorism studies (CTS), have done an excellent job so far of
deconstructing the counterterrorism paradigm and its dominant practices. They have been much less successful, with some notable
exceptions (see, among others, The Rendition Project, n.d.), at devising practical ways of resisting counterterrorism, rolling back
harmful policies and offering alternative forms of counterterrorism. Conclusion Analytically, the notion of the

epistemological crisis of counterterrorism provides a useful diagnostic tool for understanding the
proliferation of all the bizarre, costly and counterproductive counterterrorism policies observed in

recent years, as well the underlying logic driving these and many other practices. More substantively,
while it may not necessarily indicate the adoption of an entirely new paradigm, there is no question that the current influence of this
paradigm shares the characteristics of earlier distinct paradigmatic eras, such as the period of the paranoid style in American
politics (Hofstadter 1964), or McCarthyism and various other red scares (see Campbell 1998a). At the very least,

counterterrorism thought and practice presently constructs and perpetuates a recurring moral
panic about the threat of terrorism (see Shafir and Schairer 2013). However, the current epistemological crisis is
arguably of a different order to previous epistemic periods or counterterrorism paradigms, such as the rise of the new terrorism
discourse in the 1990s, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland (see Heath-Kelly 2012a). That is, while the roots of the current
epistemological crisis existed in earlier times and previous counterterrorism measures often demonstrated aspects of the crisis, the
wholesale adoption and institutionalisation of this paradigm, and the extent to which it has expanded and colonised so many areas
of social life, is unprecedented in scope, reach and effect. The epistemological crisis of terrorism is now an

inherently expansionary, self-replicating and increasingly structurally embedded feature of the

post-9/11 world.

And apart from the resistance strategies suggested above, there appears to be no way out of
this knowledge impasse and the new social reality it creates. The (unknown) exceptional threat
and the requirement to act against it has become a normalised, permanent reality. This
seemingly permanent condition of waiting for terror means that we are likely to see the
continued spread of Western counterterrorism measures and programmes into ever more areas
of social life, and ever more regions of the world, in a bid to stay one step ahead of the
unknown, threatening terrorists Western officials and audiences imagine are out there. The spread
of surveillance programs and technology, counter-radicalisation programmes, the enlistment of the public in counterterrorism
initiatives, and the spread of the CIAs drone killing program to new countries are all examples of this inherent expansionary
tendency. In addition, we are likely to see further attempts to institutionalise imagination in counterterrorism practice, and therefore,
more and more examples of fantasy thinking. Bizarre forms of counterterrorism thought and practice will likely become the norm,
rather than the exception. In part, this situation will persist because the epistemological crisis is functional to the exercise of both
sovereign and governmental power, and generates political capital for politicians and profits for the counterterrorism/security
industry (Priest and Arkin 2011). In other words, there are inbuilt incentives not to resolve the crisis,

despite its costs, dangers and inevitable false positives. At the very least, the epistemological
crisis further de-politicises counterterrorism, making evidence about the context and motivations
for terrorism and the effectiveness of counterterrorism irrelevant and redundant. Waiting for terror
and imagining the form it might take becomes a substitute for political analysis and more importantly, political accountability for the
policies which are known to generate violent opposition and evident harm. Nevertheless, despite the obstacles, a realistic
understanding and deconstruction of the crisis is a necessary first step towards the formulation of more effective strategies of
resistance.

1NR

Security

2NC Perm
Anti-politics DA only eschewing security altogether avoids cooption
Neocleous 8 (Mark Neocleous, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University
London, PhD in philosophy from Middlesex University, 2008, Critique of Security, pp 185-6, modified) gz
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish [obsession], is perhaps to eschew the logic of
security altogether to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political
thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly
something that can not be achieved within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never
even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual . It is also something that the constant iteration
of the refrain this is an insecure world and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity after another will
also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political
way out of the impasse of security.

This impasse exists because security has now become so all-encompassing that it marginalises
all else , most notably the constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life.
The constant prioritising of a mythical security as a political end as the political end constitutes a
rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which
differences can be articulated , in which the conflicts and struggles that arise from such differences can
be fought for and negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible
that they might transform the world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this ;
worse, it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of power and turns political
questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve security, despite the fact that we are never quite told never could
be told what might count as having achieved it. Security

politics is, in this sense, an anti-politics ,141 dominating

political discourse in much the same manner as the security state tries to dominate human beings,
reinforcing security fetishism [obessiveness] and the monopolistic character of security on the political
imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet more sectors to it in a
way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimises state intervention in yet more and more
areas of our lives.
Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in
which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole thats left behind? But Im inclined to

maybe there is no hole .142 The mistake has been to think that there is a hole and that
this hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or
gendered or humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist
agree with Dalby:

political imaginary , and consequently end up reaffirming the state as the terrain of modern
politics , the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of
security, but to fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of
bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the

arms

[control] of the

state . Thats the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. Thus
while much of what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that

the negative

may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths.

For if security really is the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep
harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding more security (while meekly hoping that this increased
security doesnt damage our liberty) is

to blind ourselves to [ conceal] the possibility of building real alternatives

to the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics
would allow us to circumvent the debilitating [damaging] effect achieved through the constant securitising of
social and political issues, debilitating [damaging] in the sense that security helps consolidate the power of

the existing forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic
forms . It would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different conception of the good. We need a new
way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security . This would
perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to debate. But it certainly
requires recognising that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion ; it requires
recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the
human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead learning to
tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and insecurities that come with being human; it requires accepting
that securitizing an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to
the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift .143

A2: Lewandowski
Only our overdetermination of ontology is capable of injecting ethics into the
political
Radhakrishnan 15 (Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, Chancellor's Professor of English and comparative
literature at UC Irvine, PhD in English from Binghamton, February 2015, In the Name of the Nothing,
from Heidegger to Said: A Spanos Itinerary, boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 42 Number 1) gz
I begin this essay with a brief quotation from the acknowledgments of William Spanoss book The Legacy of Edward Said: a
passage that autobiographically recalls a specific leitmotif that would emerge unfailingly each time Bill and Edward met. Said,

Spanos says, was never sympathetic with my obsession with Heideggers destructive ontology, nor was I
entirely sympathetic with his overdetermination of politics at the expense of theory. Said would ask,
Dear Bill, youre a good critic, but why do you weaken your originative criticism by Heideggerianizing it?
And I would respond, antiphonally, Edward, I think youre a good critic, too, but why do you limit
possibilities by not attending to Heideggers destructive ontology? 1 This brief exchange helps me delineate my
agenda in this brief critical appreciation of the legacy of William V. Spanos: a legacy of caring, of indefatigable oppositionality, and of
hope and affirmation during times of learned theoretical exhaustion. In refusing to understand theory as a mode of

eruditely enjoying the symptom, Spanos insists passionately, on the one hand, that something can be
done and, on the other hand, rigorously avoids the hubris of agency as unbridled anthropocentrism .
Indeed, it is, in the most positive sense of the phrase, a quixotic legacy that, in tilting at windmills,
refuses to be framed by the fait accompli of the status quo . It is a critical tradition of a robust and
nonnostalgic retrieval of possibilities that have been seemingly foreclosed and rendered
obsolete by regimes of dominant and hegemonic thought. Retrieval and repetition are pivotal terms in Spanoss
has taken great care to differentiate a recuperative repetition from
a processual and projective repetition: the first mode conservative and nostalgic in intent and the latter
critical lexicon. Throughout his career, Spanos

disseminative and radically futural . To apply Spanoss standards to his own work, how repetitive is he, and in what
particular mode? Spanos is no exception to the general rule that applies to all profound critics with a long and distinguished record,
that is, that they struggle with the same motif all their lives, but in that creative struggle, that same motif is rendered different from
itself through subsequent elaborations and iterations. The repetitions tend to be nonidentical repetitions whereby the original thought
or compulsion is perennially displaced. It is this absent presence of that one original imperative that gives their writings over time a
kind of horizonal consistency. Within that compelling horizon, there is always room for transfers, displacements, and shuttles of
meanings and valences. This is very true of Spanoss trajectory as well. But for his originary Heideggerian impulse, I
dont think Spanos would have turned into the kind of trenchant, oppositional Americanist that he is. But
for his Heideggerian sensibility, he would have been incapable of mounting such a substantive critique of
American exceptionalism or offering us all such exquisitely persuasive readings of Herman Melville,
Hannah Arendt, and Said. But for Martin Heidegger, Spanoss postmodern occasion would not have been
so meaningfully different from the canonical version of postmodernism . In being the same all along, Spanos makes
sure that whatever is worth caring for has a constancy that is not subject to the capriciousness of thought. At the same time, within
the aegis of a constant care, Spanoss thinking reaches out to different sites, different conjunctures, and circumstantial
constellations: the various sites of Being, in Spanoss own terms. The constancy is not reified as a monumental a priori; if anything,
it is forever recreated in response to situations that are existential and historical. To read Spanos is to hear his voice, a voice that will
not surrender its specific register of indignation, resistance, protest, and hope for fear of being identified as that of an oldfashioned
radical. Spanos has never cared for the so-called cutting edge. To care, for Spanos, is to have the courage and the

integrity to keep thinking alive rather than to perpetrate thought as a form of conquest , and it is in
the name of such a thinking that Spanos turns first to Heidegger and later in his career to Said.

Implicit in Saids criticism is the attribution that whatever grist comes into the Spanosian mill turns into
Heidegger. I would agree that very often such is indeed the case. Heidegger is Spanoss preferred ontological and
epistemological homea home, it must be added, to be re-cognized and valorized in an exilic mode. It is Heideggers ability to hold
the language of being and the being of language reciprocally accountable that holds Spanos captive. In Heideggers thinking,
Being and Knowing, Ontology and Epistemology are intimately coimplicated in a relationship of reciprocal constitution as well as
defamiliarization. It is a contrapuntal relationship of strife and concord. For Spanos, whose thinking is fundamentally

existential, Heidegger thoroughly dismantles the rationale of the philosophical ergo in Western
thought. Heidegger cares and ergo thinks, rather than cares because he thinks. To care for Spanos, by way of
Heidegger, is to care for the very thing that thought cannot reach or think about. But this does not

result in the authenticity of mysticism or the certitude of numinous knowledge. On the contrary, the

Cogito is fundamentally
and de-structively implicated in its own finitude . The possibility of the critique is inscribed into the
very being of language . In other words, the critique is acknowledged as something far deeper than as
an opportune political strategy . The figure of the Heideggerian Dasein, in its radical thrownness
(Geworfenheit) or

ek-static disposition , transcends the jurisdiction of humanism in the name of the

nothing. In also being human, the Dasein is more and less and other than human . What is enabled as
a result is the wavelength of negative capability and its way of knowing: letting be. Spanos finds in Heideggers de-structive
hermeneutics the answer to the daunting question, What does it mean to be human? Spanoss response is, To be truly human
is to be human in the name of the nothing. An exilic space , a space of the between , opens up,
and this space is doubly exilic : characterized by neither proper belonging to being nor nameability
by knowledge . It is precisely on the basis of such an anchorless anchorage that Spanos is able to understand the human as a
form of double-consciousness: agentic and transformative as human, and at the same time posthumanist in the name of the
nothing.
Spanos is particularly appreciative of Heideggers formulation of the Earth-World relationship.2 The worlding of the world
does not reduce the Earth to the mere status of raw material earmarked for anthropocentric
depredation . Quite to the contrary, in Heideggers epistemology, the worlding of the world protects and
conserves the mysterious alterity of the Earth as Earth . In this sense, to Spanos, Heideggerian destruction becomes the most sincere and comprehensive way of opposing dominance as such. The
unlearning of dominance is rendered central to the curriculum of thinking . The figure of home is
retained but is signed for in an exilic mode. The

exilic mode also makes thinking available in the form of the

question , not of the answer. Latent in the question is the answer , just as latent in the symptom is
the remedy . The structure of the question or the symptom does not have to be transcended or
deracinated

(restructured in the vocabulary of the World Bank and the discourse of development economics)

to get to the

realm of the answer or the remedy. Heideggers radical strategy of putting the questioner within the
question represents for Spanos something more than the fashionable credo of self-reflexivity, which
often, for lack of directionality of purpose, degenerates into narcissistic navel-gazing or mere formal
virtuosity. The questioner, in placing her- or himself within the question, does not seek to master the question from within. The
objective is to realize a Mobius-strip-like relationship between Being and Knowing , rather than
perpetuate a categorical binary divide between the two .
Spanos is primarily an ontological thinker who derives politics from ontology . It is interesting that in his
rejoinder to Said, Spanos axiomatically associates theory with Heideggers destructive ontology. Spanos cannot conceive
why Said, such a magnificently oppositional thinker, chooses not to avail of the deep phenomenological
possibilities afforded by Heideggers de-structive ontology. Fundamental to Spanoss critical operation is his
adherence to the Heideggerian notion of ontico-ontological difference (which Spanos translates for his purposes as the onticoontological continuum with history, economics, culture, and politics identified, within the continuum, as sites of Being), a formulation
that maintains that the

general and the prior question of Being cannot be reduced to the history of

particular and determinate (the ontic) beings . If powerful political thinkers employ the methodology of symptomatic
the political does not constitute determination in the
ultimate instance; instead, the political as such has to be read symptomatically from an ontological
reading within the realm of the political, Spanos would insist that

perspective .3 The task for ontological thinkers like Spanosand, I would argue, Slavoj iek, Alain Badiou, Judith
to achieve a subtle double-session on behalf of critical
theory: on the one hand, follow the Marxian dictum that to know is not just to interpret but to transform
Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacou-LaBartheis

reality , and, on the other hand, pay heed to the Heideggerian imperative of Gelassenheit, of letting
things be not as an expression of quietism but as a function of an abiding solicitude for Being and
the ontico-ontological difference. Politics in its overdetermined mode disavows this gap between

the ontic and the ontological either in the name of positivism or for reasons of opportunistic
correctness. As a result of this disavowal, politics misrecognizes itself .
In his brief but illuminating foreword to one of Spanoss many influential books, Donald Pease makes the salient claim that the key
term in the title Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction is retrieving, the recovery of the site of
ontological critique at the moment of its possible cover-up through a destruction of the responsible instrumentalities.4 So, what
kind of activity is retrieving? To echo Adrienne Richs magnificent poem on the ontopological politics of revisionism, Diving into the
Wreck, is there some meaning already there in the wreck to be retrieved by the diver in the poem; or does retrieving as a will to
knowledge create its own object?5 Is the site given rather than constructed? Is the act of retrieving an exercise in nostalgia or a
revisionism undertaken in the name, to invoke Michel Foucault strategically, of subjugated knowledges? To both Heidegger and
Spanos, the imprimatur issue is crucial. In whose name, under what official sanction, is the retrieving undertaken?

It is not a

choice between two sites of critique , the one ontological and the other political. Just as in Richs poem,
where the sea is recognized both as the site that houses the human wreck and as that other sea (the sea is another story, as
Rich would phrase it memorably) that is not reducible to human or anthropocentric cartography (The sea is not a question of
power, in Richs words), here too, in Spanoss hermeneutic project, ontological

temporality is the unnameable and

abyssal horizon that houses human and political historicity. For both Spanos and Rich, the challenge is to
coordinate the humanist topos with reference to both itself and a beyond that humanism is unable
to recognize and validate from its hegemonic perspective.
For Spanos, whose primary formation is existential and philosophical, the questionor I would even say, the dilemmahas to do
with the point of entry. If

reality is both ontological and political , what should be the point of entry for the

critique? Should the critique by primarily political on the assumption that politics will automatically speak for ontology? Or should
ontology be privileged with the understanding that there will be a sure trickle-down effect from the ontological to the political? For
example, should all of existence be collapsed within the humanist problematic; or should the humanist hegemon acknowledge its
anthropocentric finitude and make room for an other kind of understanding?6

The slippage or the gap between the political critique and the ontological critique is not to be sutured
over or preemptively disavowed in the name of political rectitude ; on the contrary, the gap has to be
honored by ways of knowing that can only be double-conscious. The integrity of the ontological critique
has to do with its courage to maintain that a retreat from the political is de rigueur for the
reinvention of the political . It is not enough that critics submit a particular regime of politics such as
colonialism, racism, patriarchy, or heterosexist normativity to a deconstructive critique . In addition, the very
placeholder called the political should be the object of critique . I have undertaken this entire detour just to
show that ontology,

with or without Heidegger or Spanos, has always been in the picture with politics .

The problem has always been how to braid the two together

and in what sort of relationality: differential,

in speaking in the name of

ontology one does not name it normatively or definitively: the de-structive endeavor is to retrieve it in the
name of a radical nothingness that has unfortunately been nullified by hegemonic thought .
hierarchical, lateral, concentric, coordinated, or subordinated. The challenge also is that

Here is Spanos commenting retrospectively on the nature of his ontological engagement with Heideggers thought:
In order to foreground the containing or repressing imperatives and the distorting consequences of metaphysical structuration,
however, I gave, like Heidegger, an inordinate rhetorical emphasis in my early writing to the temporality disclosed by destruction. In
doing so, I inadvertently suggested a separation of the ontological (the temporality of being) and the ontic (inscription or reification).
Or rather, I put what was actually simultaneous in such a way as to make it appear to be a hierarchized binary opposition in which
the ontological acts as a base to the ontic superstructure .7
The crucial word here is simultaneous, a word that has to do with time and temporality. Spanos has always been a temporal
thinker. It is quite remarkable how, in his elaboration of the postmodern occasion, Spanos resolutely holds on to a phenomenological
notion of temporality. From early in his career, when he founded boundary 2 as a journal of the postmodern, Spanos has never ever
taken the spatial turn, whereas to most canonical postmodernists, postmodernism is the radical manifesto of detemporalization and
spatialization, of the ideological and structural production of time as disciplinary regime and epistemic template, and eventually, of
the simulacralization of everything ontological. It is tantamount to the implosion of reality into knowledge games with no room for
anything like the constitutive outside. This predominantly spatial version of the postmodern imagination has no relevance for
Spanos. In fact, he sees real danger in any spatial move. To Spanos, any manner of spatializing is deeply antitemporal and
antiphenomenological and therefore conservative and reactionary. His oppositional critical energy is based on the notion of a radical
temporality that can never be mastered by human epistemics and its discursive architectonics. Whether he is writing about Robert
Coover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Burroughs, William Gass, Kurt Vonnegut, or Thomas Pynchon, his unwavering
thesis is that all

of these writers as postmodern testify to the nothingness that they cannot name or

frame by their fictionality. Rather than acquiesce in the linguistic turn and declare Roquentin guilty of logocentric pathos and

naivet, Spanos finds a way to discern a subterranean continuity between Roquentins ontological nausea and the nontranscendent
abyssal postmodern occasion.8 Whereas Roland Barthes would declare that the heart of the matter is dead, and Alain Robbe-Grillet
joyfully celebrate linguistic exteriority at the expense of humanist pathos, Spanos reads Roquentins ontological nausea differently.

While Spanos is totally persuaded by the Foucauldian theses of the analytic of finitude and the
constituter-constituted nexus of the human, and other versions of the postmodern and/or poststructuralist
denaturalization of reality, he will not let go of his concern for Being, the be-ing of Being . To put it differently,
language is all is a thesis that Spanos will not endorse. To put it in the context of Roquentins nausea: yes, he is indeed naive to
expect the word root to correspond to the brute facticity of the root, but his nausea is not causeless or meaningless. Whereas the
practitioner of the new novel would only be too happy to read Roquentins symptom as a pseudo-problem and exile it from
discourse, Spanos is willing to tarry with the nothingness of the symptom. For Spanos, the symptom speaks

ontologically and not epistemologically, that is, it speaks in the name of Being rather than in the name of
an anthropocentric will to knowledge . There are more things than are dreamed of in our philosophy, and just because
language cannot name it, this does not mean that it does not exist or is a nescient nothing. Spanos signs on to the thesis that
there is joy in the de-struction of Adamic naming, but the project is projective and therefore does not stop there. A language of
Being is not and cannot be available to the being of Language. Whereas Derrida remains a staunch dualist, the Heideggerian
Spanos cares primarily for Being, and it is in the name of that originary care that he valorizes epistemology. The trap that Spanos
has to avoid is the trap of numinous authenticity. The unveiling of Being does not reveal a proper or normative

something but instead testifies to the having been covered . The opening up of that space as the Open, if it is to
be done ontologically, has to be done namelessly. The opened up space is not to be signed, possessed, or invested in by the
hegemonic imprimatur of any political regime. (The superb ambivalent ending of Richs poem is relevant here again.) Spanoss

argument is that self-reflexive deconstructions within the realm of the political are not far-reaching for the
simple reason that they leave the structure of the political intact. Counterhegemonic or parrhesiastic
articulations of truth and meaning have the obligation to step through and beyond the political and
into the site of ontology . There is no Spanos without the possibility of a projective, futural,
phenomenological affirmation.
What is the affirmation based on? Not language but ontology . Spanos is at his most lucid when he carefully
differentiates ontological difference from the Derridean diffrance that in the ultimate analysis is an epistemic effect of language.
Even as he participates in the thesis of the linguistic constitutedness of the human, Spanos resists the temptation to grant language
absolute sovereignty. The negativity in de-structive hermeneutics is not the negativity of Theodor Adornos negative dialectics, or the
negativity of the AdornoMax Horkheimer critique of the Enlightenment. Negativity in Spanosian epistemology is a
Keatsian negative capability that enables the projective affirmation of Being . Instead of reaching the thesis that
the autonomization of epistemology gets rid of or demystifies being; rather than claim that the primordial and originary temporality
has been successfully replaced, without remainder or residue by the dangerous supplemental order of language; instead of avowing
that a hegemonic anthropocentric historicity is the measure, one of Spanoss favorite phrases, of the worlding of the word, Spanos
believes in negative capability, on behalf of Being. He literally believes, however anomalous or anachronistic that may
sound to deconstructive ears. In todays terms, he is a thinker of and with deep ecology. To hear Spanos again: And it is precisely
this negatively capable emphasis on letting (being) be (in opposition to the Ahabian will to power over being) that characterizes the
errant measure of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and in another way, A. R. Ammons, and those postmodern, primarily American
poets who, following Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, have done and are doing the most important destructive work in
poetry.9

Spanoss remarkable projective and futural optimism rests on the nothing, the nothing that
philosophical thought has made a nothing of. If the political can be conceived of both as something and
as a something that understands itself as a nonexemplary manifestation of the nothing, then
and only then is there a chance that politics can be performed ethically and ontologically , that is,
politics can be undone as a zero-sum game .10 To put it simply, if the ontological site is turned
hegemonically into a sovereign political home , monopolized in our own times by the ideology of
nationalism, then inevitably there will be the attendant problem of noncitizens, immigrants and exiles,
guest workers and a range of precarious visa holders, and other abject bodies mandated to be
included by exclusion. The ontological critique shows up the hubris of the political as such
omnihistorically . The ontological critique cares in the name of the nothing ; and this texture of care
will enable a relational universality to come rather than a universality that is forced into the morphology
of one centrism or another. Moreover, the ontological critique needs the category of temporality, for, without
temporality, there can be no contingency, and without contingency, the hegemonic historicity of the
political usurps the place of the real. Moreover, this entire undertaking needs some sort of a hors-texte, a constitutive
outside that has not already been textualized.