A.

Interpretation - Its implies ownership

Glossary of English Grammar Terms, 2005 (http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/possessive-
pronoun.html)

Mine, yours, his, hers, its, ours, theirs are the possessive pronouns used to substitute a noun and to show
possession or ownership. EG. This is your disk and that's mine. (Mine substitutes the word disk and shows that
it belongs to me.)

reduce:
REDUCE
Merriam-Webster 2010 [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reduce?show=0&t=1284685494]
re·duce verb \ri-düs, -dyüs\
re·ducedre·duc·ing Definition of REDUCE transitive verb: to diminish in strength or density B. Violation –

BMDs belong to Japan, not china, and the aff doesn’t reduce

C. Topicality is a Voting Issues

1. Predictability – No way predict presence not tied to the agent in the resolution. This invigorates
topic precision and education on US foreign policy.
2. extratopicality: removing an extraneous technology not related to US actual ownership
destroys neg ground
a. forces us to research every sort of miltiary presence in any country
b. destroys topic spec education
c. no resolutional basis - doesn’t meet the US military ownership

3. effects: plan doesn’t result in a direct reduction of military presence

a. can’t get uniqueness from the future - unfair for the neg, no unique links to disads or counterplans
b. limits: limits it down to current policies

2. Ground – Political capital and legitimacy disads depend on a possessive connection to the
United States. It explodes the research burden to anything dealing with the military in that
country.
a

We believe this debate should be about representations of American Empire.

America is crumbling. We have bombed too many wedding parties, maintained too many
aggressive wars, flouted too many international treaties, consumed and borrowed our economy
too far into oblivion to ever lead the free world again. The so-called Pax Americana has been
anything but stabilizing, fueling two endless wars and inflaming anti-american sentiment,
reproducing the violence it was supposed to protect us from. The affirmative is a call to resurrect
the dream. Stopping cooperation on one project will do nothing to alleviate global violence,
which runs structurally deep within American foreign policy, other than satiate our desire to act,
reifying faith in imperial control and digging the trench that separates America from the rest of
the world even deeper.
Chris Hedges, journalist, author, and war correspondent, America’s Wars of Self-Destruction.
November 17th, 2008.
< http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20081117_americas_wars_of_self_destruction/>.
War is a poison. It is a poison that nations and groups must at times ingest to ensure
their survival. But, like any poison, it can kill you just as surely as the disease it is meant
to eradicate. The poison of war courses unchecked through the body politic of the United
States. We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to
wage war. We embrace the dangerous self-delusion that we are on a providential
mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to implant our virtues—which we see as
superior to all other virtues—on others, and that we have a right to do this by force. This
belief has corrupted Republicans and Democrats alike. And if Barack Obama drinks, as it
appears he will, the dark elixir of war and imperial power offered to him by the national
security state, he will accelerate the downward spiral of the American empire.
Obama and those around him embrace the folly of the “war on terror.” They may want to
shift the emphasis of this war to Afghanistan rather than Iraq, but this is a difference in
strategy, not policy. By clinging to Iraq and expanding the war in Afghanistan, the poison
will continue in deadly doses. These wars of occupation are doomed to failure. We
cannot afford them. The rash of home foreclosures, the mounting job losses, the collapse
of banks and the financial services industry, the poverty that is ripping apart the working
class, our crumbling infrastructure and the killing of hapless Afghans in wedding parties
and Iraqis by our iron fragmentation bombs are neatly interwoven. These events form a
perfect circle. The costly forms of death we dispense on one side of the globe are
hollowing us out from the inside at home.
The “war on terror” is an absurd war against a tactic. It posits the idea of perpetual, or
what is now called “generational,” war. It has no discernable end. There is no way to
define victory. It is, in metaphysical terms, a war against evil, and evil, as any good
seminarian can tell you, will always be with us. The most destructive evils, however, are
not those that are externalized. The most destructive are those that are internal. These
hidden evils, often defined as virtues, are unleashed by our hubris, self-delusion and
ignorance. Evil masquerading as good is evil in its deadliest form.
The decline of American empire began long before the current economic meltdown or
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. It
began when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of
production” to an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam War, when the
costs of the war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production
began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country transformed from one that
primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a
lifestyle we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East,
to feed our insatiable demand for cheap oil. The years after World War II, when the
United States accounted for one-third of world exports and half of the world’s
manufacturing, gave way to huge trade imbalances, outsourced jobs, rusting hulks of
abandoned factories, stagnant wages and personal and public debts that most of us
cannot repay.
The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals, but
those who promote the perverted ideology of national security that, as Andrew Bacevich
writes, is “our surrogate religion.” If we continue to believe that we can expand our wars
and go deeper into debt to maintain an unsustainable level of consumption, we will
dynamite the foundations of our society.
“The Big Lies are not the pledge of tax cuts, universal health care, family values
restored, or a world rendered peaceful through forceful demonstrations of American
leadership,” Bacevich writes in “The Limits of Power.” “The Big Lies are the truths that
remain unspoken: that freedom has an underside; that nations, like households, must
ultimately live within their means; that history’s purpose, the subject of so many
confident pronouncements, remains inscrutable. Above all, there is this: Power is finite.
Politicians pass over matters such as these in silence. As a consequence, the absence of
self-awareness that forms such an enduring element of the American character
persists.”
Those clustered around Barack Obama, from Madeline Albright to Hillary Clinton to
Dennis Ross to Colin Powell, have no interest in dismantling the structure of the imperial
presidency or the vast national security state. They will keep these institutions intact and
seek to increase their power. We have a childish belief that Obama will magically save us
from economic free fall, restore our profligate levels of consumption and resurrect our
imperial power. This naïve belief is part of our disconnection with reality. The problems
we face are structural. The old America is not coming back.
The corporate forces that control the state will never permit real reform. This is the
Faustian bargain made between these corporate forces and the Republican and
Democratic parties. We will never, under the current system, achieve energy
independence. Energy independence would devastate the profits of the oil and gas
industry. It would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in weapons contracts, spoil the
financial health of a host of private contractors from Halliburton to Blackwater and
render obsolete the existence of U.S. Central Command.
There are groups and people who seek to do us harm. The attacks of Sept. 11 will not be
the last acts of terrorism on American soil. But the only way to defeat terrorism is to
isolate terrorists within their own societies, to mount cultural and propaganda wars, to
discredit their ideas, to seek concurrence even with those defined as our enemies. Force,
while a part of this battle, is rarely necessary. The 2001 attacks that roused our fury and
unleashed the “war on terror” also unleashed a worldwide revulsion against al-Qaida and
Islamic terrorism, including throughout the Muslim world, where I was working as a
reporter at the time. If we had had the courage to be vulnerable, to build on this
empathy rather than drop explosive ordinance all over the Middle East, we would be far
safer and more secure today. If we had reached out for allies and partners instead of
arrogantly assuming that American military power would restore our sense of
invulnerability and mitigate our collective humiliation, we would have done much to
defeat al-Qaida. But we did not. We demanded that all kneel before us. And in our
ruthless and indiscriminate use of violence and illegal wars of occupation, we resurrected
the very forces that we could, under astute leadership, have marginalized. We forgot
that fighting terrorism is a war of shadows, an intelligence war, not a conventional war.
We forgot that, as strong as we may be militarily, no nation, including us, can survive
isolated and alone.
The American empire, along with our wanton self-indulgence and gluttonous
consumption, has come to an end. We are undergoing a period of profound economic,
political and military decline. We can continue to dance to the tunes of self-delusion,
circling the fire as we chant ridiculous mantras about our greatness, virtue and power, or
we can face the painful reality that has engulfed us. We cannot reverse this decline. It
will happen no matter what we do. But we can, if we break free from our self-delusion,
dismantle our crumbling empire and the national security state with a minimum of
damage to ourselves and others. If we refuse to accept our limitations, if do not face the
changes forced upon us by a bankrupt elite that has grossly mismanaged our economy,
our military and our government, we will barrel forward toward internal and external
collapse. Our self-delusion constitutes our greatest danger. We will either confront reality
or plunge headlong into the minefields that lie before us.

The specter of Chinese challenge is a fantasy that fuels a needlessly

aggressive and expanding war machine- all their impacts are pentagon
constructions- don’t trust the aff.
Fred Kaplan, Slate War Columnist with PhD in Political Science. May 26th, 2006.
The China Syndrome. http://www.slate.com/id/2141966/.
Every day and night, hundreds of Air Force generals and Navy admirals must thank their lucky stars for China.
Without the specter of a rising Chinese military, there would be no rationale for such a large fleet of American
nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, or for a new generation of stealth combat fighters—no rationale for
about a quarter of the Pentagon's budget. In Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Quadrennial Defense
Review, released this past February, the looming Chinese threat is the explicit justification for all the big-ticket
weapons systems that have nothing to do with fighting terrorists or insurgents.
But is the threat real? In each of the last four years, Congress has required the Defense Department to issue a
report titled Military Power of the People's Republic of China. The latest edition, issued this week,
starts out ominously, but as you read through its 50 double-columned pages, you gradually realize that claims of
emerging Chinese superpower are way overblown.
The Chinese are hardly sluggish when it comes to modernizing their military. According to the report, they've
been boosting their military budget by double-digit percentages every year for the past decade. They've been
expanding their arsenals of missiles, aircraft, air-defense weapons, surface ships, and submarines. They have
expanded especially aggressively near the Taiwan Strait, to the point where the balance of forces with Taiwan is
now "shifting in the mainland's favor." They're studying the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are shifting their
doctrine to focus on joint operations, "network-centric warfare," and offensive maneuvers.

That's what you get from the first half of the report. In the second half, you see that it adds up to
diddly.
Take the budget. China officially says it's spending $35 billion on its military, a 14.7 percent increase over last
year's budget, amounting to 1.5 percent of its gross national product. (The U.S. military budget is nearly 15
times as large and amounts to 4 percent of our GNP; Japan's and South Korea's defense budgets are larger than
China's, too.) The report says that China's growth "sustains a trend that has persisted since the 1990s of defense
budget growth rates exceeding economic growth"—but read on—"although the growth of defense
expenditures has lagged behind the growth in overall government expenditures over the
same period of time." (Emphasis mine.)
In other words, by the report's admission, the military is not the Chinese government's No. 1
priority. (For more on the budget figures, click here.)
More to the point, let's look at what the Chinese have bought. It's a surprise to read that the balance of power
with Taiwan is now "shifting in the mainland's favor." For decades, the widespread calculation has been that
China could overwhelm Taiwan if it wanted to—just as the Soviet Union could have overwhelmed West Berlin
or North Korea could have captured Seoul—but that it's been deterred from doing so out of a reluctance to spark
a large-scale war.
The report states: "In the near term, China's military buildup appears focused on preparing for Taiwan Strait
contingencies, including the possibility of U.S. intervention." It claims that in the long term, the Chinese aim to
widen their area of military control throughout Asia. But the report later makes clear that the People's
Liberation Army, as China's military is formally called, is doing nothing of the sort.
It states that "Chinese military theorists" are exploring "the role of information technology as a force multiplier,
enabling PLA forces to conduct relatively limited military operations with precision at greater distances from
China's borders. However, in practice," the report continues, "the PLA remains untested. The lack of
operational experience hampers outside assessment." Military theorists are also thinking about "devising a
robust 'out of area' offensive capability to provide effective support for joint operations." However, again in
reality, the PLA "faces a persistent lack of inter-service cooperation and a lack of actual experience in joint
operations." The language in its official studies of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "suggest(s) China continues
to be surprised at the rapid pace of change in military warfare." In other words, Chinese officers realize they're
not playing in the big leagues.
Read as far as Page 30, and you see that not just China's capabilities but also its ambitions are far from
expansive. "At present," the report states, "China's concept for sea-denial appears limited to sea-control in
water surrounding Taiwan and its immediate periphery. If China were to shift to a broader 'sea-control'
strategy"—in other words, if it were seeking a military presence farther away from its shores—"the principal
indicators would include development of an aircraft carrier, development of robust, deep-water anti-submarine-
warfare capabilities, development of a true area anti-aircraft warfare capability, acquisition of large numbers of
nuclear attack submarines," etc., etc. The point is: The Chinese aren't doing—they're not even close
to doing—any of those things.
The report notes that Chinese naval officers began to "discuss" aircraft carriers in the late 1970s. In 1998 and
2000, they bought two Soviet carriers. However, neither was turned into a weapons platform. Instead, they were
used as (these are the report's words) "floating military theme parks." The report notes that some analysts think
China might have a single aircraft carrier by 2015, but others think they won't until 2020 or later.
Finally, Page 40, the next-to-last page of text, contains an eye-opening sidebar that calls into question the
report's very premise:
China does not yet possess the military capability to accomplish with confidence its
political objectives on the island [Taiwan], particularly when confronted with outside intervention.
Beijing is also deterred by the potential political and economic repercussions of any use of force against
Taiwan. China's leaders recognize that a war could severely retard economic development. Taiwan is China's
single largest source of foreign direct investment. An extended campaign would wreck Taiwan's economic
infrastructure.
Nor, this sidebar states, does China seem physically able to pull off an invasion of Taiwan, even if it wanted:
"According to the Intelligence Community, China would have difficulty protecting its vital sea lanes of
communication while simultaneously supporting blockade or invasion operations." This is the case, quite apart
from the "virtual certainty of U.S. intervention, and Japanese interests, in any conflict in the Taiwan Strait."
If you're worried about the independence of Taiwan, this report suggests that China's buildup is worth careful
monitoring and a modest response. If you're worried that the Chinese military might dominate
Asia, the report suggests you should relax.
It's an old, recurring story, this business of latching on to China as a rationale for big weapons or budgets that
would otherwise be baseless. Back in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered his Secretary of Defense,
Robert McNamara, to build some kind of anti-ballistic-missile system. McNamara was opposed to an ABM
system. He'd recently ordered a study that concluded an ABM would be futile because the Soviets could counter
our defensive missiles by just slightly increasing the number of their offensive missiles. But an order was an
order, so McNamara gave a speech in which he outlined all the reasons an ABM was a bad idea—then
concluded that we needed to build one anyway to defend against an attack by Red China.
Paul Warnke, at the time an assistant secretary of defense, walked into McNamara's office later that day and
asked, "China bomb, Bob?" Warnke told me, many years later, that McNamara looked down at his desk,
shuffled some papers, and muttered, "What else am I going to blame it on?"
Their motivation for withdrawal – that current presence is not effective at reproducing the global order –
maintains the logic of legitimation that justified BMD’s in the first place
Hardt and Negri 04 (*Michael, Professor of Literature and Italian, Duke University, Ph.D in Comparative Literature, University
of Washington, and *Antonio, Former professor in State Theory, Padua University, Multitude, 30, jbh)
Violence is legitimated most effectively today, it seems to us, not on any a priori framework, moral or legal, but only a posteriori,
based on its results. It might seem that the violence of the strong is automatically
legitimated and the violence of the weak immediately labeled terrorism, but
the logic of legitimation has more to do with the effects of the violence.
The reinforcement or reestablishment of the current global order is what
retroactively legitimates the use of violence. In the span of just over a decade we
have seen the complete shift among these forms of legitimation. The first
 Gulf War was legitimated on the basis of international law, since it was aimed officially at
restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait. The NATO intervention in Kosovo, by contrast, sought
legitimation on moral humanitarian grounds. The second Gulf War, a preemptive war,
calls for legitimation primarily on the basis of its results. 46 A military
and/or police power will be granted legitimacy as long and only as long as
it is effective in rectifying global disorders—not necessarily bringing peace
but maintaining order. By this logic a power such as the U.S. military can
exercise violence that may or may not be legal or moral and as long as
that violence results in the reproduction of imperial order it will be
legitimated. As soon as the violence ceases to bring order, however, or as
soon as it fails to preserve the security of the present global order, the
legitimation will be removed. This is a most precarious and unstable form
of legitimation.

We control the internal link to war and extinction- Warfare happens when states believe their
vulnerability can be assuaged, and their military deployments are predictably effective. This
happens through ideological mystification- military intervention is never stabilizing because it
cannot map out nor control the socio-political realities of its object- every US war of occupation
proves our argument.
Anthony Burke, Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations. 2007.Theory and
Event. “Ontologies of War.”
 This essay develops a theory about the causes of war -- and thus aims to generate
lines of action and critique for peace -- that cuts beneath analyses based either on a given
sequence of events, threats, insecurities and political manipulation, or the play of institutional,
economic or political interests (the 'military-industrial complex'). Such factors are important to
be sure, and should not be discounted, but they flow over a deeper bedrock of modern reason
that has not only come to form a powerful structure of common sense but the apparently solid
ground of the real itself. In this light, the two 'existential' and 'rationalist' discourses of war-
making and justification mobilised in the Lebanon war are more than merely arguments,
rhetorics or even discourses. Certainly they mobilise forms of knowledge and power together;
providing political leaderships, media, citizens, bureaucracies and military forces with organising
systems of belief, action, analysis and rationale. But they run deeper than that. They are truth-systems of the most powerful and
fundamental kind that we have in modernity: ontologies, statements about truth and being which claim a rarefied privilege to state what is and how it must be
maintained as it is.
 I am thinking of ontology in both its senses: ontology as both a statement about the nature and ideality of being (in this case political being, that of the nation-
state), and as a statement of epistemological truth and certainty, of methods and processes of arriving at certainty (in this case, the development and application of
strategic knowledge for the use of armed force, and the creation and maintenance of geopolitical order, security and national survival). These derive from the
classical idea of ontology as a speculative or positivistic inquiry into the fundamental nature of truth, of being, or of some phenomenon; the desire for a solid
metaphysical account of things inaugurated by Aristotle, an account of 'being qua being and its essential attributes'.17 In contrast, drawing on Foucauldian theorising
about truth and power, I see ontology as a particularly powerful claim to truth itself: a claim to the status of an underlying systemic foundation for truth, identity,
existence and action; one that is not essential or timeless, but is thoroughly historical and contingent, that is deployed and mobilised in a fraught and conflictual
socio-political context of some kind. In short, ontology is the 'politics of truth'18 in its most sweeping and powerful form.
 I see such a drive for ontological certainty and completion as particularly problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, when it takes the form of the existential
and rationalist ontologies of war, it amounts to a hard and exclusivist claim: a drive for ideational hegemony and closure that limits debate
and questioning, that confines it within the boundaries of a particular, closed system of logic, one that is grounded in the truth of being, in the truth of truth as such.
generates
The second is its intimate relation with violence: the dual ontologies represent a simultaneously social and conceptual structure that
violence. Here we are witness to an epistemology of violence (strategy) joined to an ontology of
violence (the national security state). When we consider their relation to war, the two ontologies
are especially dangerous because each alone (and doubly in combination) tends both to quicken
the resort to war and to lead to its escalation either in scale and duration, or in unintended
effects. In such a context violence is not so much a tool that can be picked up and used on
occasion, at limited cost and with limited impact -- it permeates being.
 This essay describes firstly the ontology of the national security state (by way of the
political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt and G. W. F. Hegel) and secondly the
rationalist ontology of strategy (by way of the geopolitical thought of Henry Kissinger), showing
how they crystallise into a mutually reinforcing system of support and justification,
especially in the thought of Clausewitz. This creates both a profound ethical and pragmatic
problem. The ethical problem arises because of their militaristic force -- they embody
and reinforce a norm of war -- and because they enact what Martin Heidegger calls an
'enframing' image of technology and being in which humans are merely utilitarian
instruments for use, control and destruction, and force -- in the words of one famous Cold
War strategist -- can be thought of as a 'power to hurt'.19 The pragmatic problem arises
because force so often produces neither the linear system of effects imagined in
strategic theory nor anything we could meaningfully call security, but rather turns in
upon itself in a nihilistic spiral of pain and destruction. In the era of a 'war on terror'
dominantly conceived in Schmittian and Clausewitzian terms,20 the arguments of Hannah Arendt
(that violence collapses ends into means) and Emmanuel Levinas (that 'every war employs arms
that turn against those that wield them') take on added significance. Neither, however, explored
what occurs when war and being are made to coincide, other than Levinas' intriguing comment
that in war persons 'play roles in which they no longer recognises themselves, making them
betray not only commitments but their own substance'. 21

The alternative is to do nothing.

Violence sustains itself through a constant reiteration of sovereignty and control. A

refusal to act enforces the realization that fueling the war machine cannot protect us,
and endangers global populations who we are inevitably dependent on. Either we
acknowledge our humble membership in an interdependent international sphere, or our
isolating hubris will guarantee nuclear extinction.
Judith Butler, professor of comparative literature at Berkeley, Frames of War. 2009. P. 178-4.
State violence often articulates itself through the positing of the sovereign subject. The sovereign subject poses as precisely not the
one who is impinged upon by others, precisely not the one whose permanent and irreversible injurability forms the condition and
horizon of its actions. Such a sovereign position not only denies its own constitutive injurability but tries to relocate injurability in the other
as an effect of doing injury to that other and exposing that other as by definition, injurable. If the violent act is among other things, a way of relocating
the capacity to be violated (always) elsewhere, it produces the appearance that the subject who enacts violence is impermeable to
violence, The accomplishment of this appearance becomes one aim of violence; one locates injurability with the other by
injuring the other and then taking the sign of injury as the truth of the other. The specific moralization of this scene takes
place when the violence is "justified" as "legitimate" and even "virtuous," even though its primary
purpose is to secure an impossible effect of mastery, inviolability, and impermeability through destructive
means. To avow injurability does not in any way guarantee a politics of non-violence, But what may well make a difference would be the
consideration of precarious life, and so too injurability, as a generalized condition, rather than as a differential way of marking a cultural identity, that is, a
recurrent or timeless feature of a cultural subject who is persecuted or injured by definition and irregardless of historical circumstance. In the first instance, the
"subject" proves to be counter-productive for understanding a shared condition of precariousness and interdependency. In the second instance, the "subject" is re-
installed and becomes defined by its injury (past) and injurability (present and future).'' If a particular subject considers her- or himself to be by definition
injured or indeed persecuted, then whatever acts of violence such a subject commits cannot register as "doing injury," since the subject who does them is
by definition, precluded from doing anything but suffering injury. As a result, the production of the subject on the basis of its injured status then produces a permanent
ground for legitimating (and disavowing) its own violent actions. As much as the sovereign subject disavows his injurability, relocating it in the other as a
permanent repository, so the persecuted subject can disavow his own violent acts, since no empirical act can refute the a priori presumption of victimization. If
non-violence has the opportunity to emerge here, it would take its departure not from a recognition of the injurability of all
peoples (however true that might be), but from an understanding of the possibilities of one's own violent actions in relation to
those lives to which one is bound, including those whom one never chose and never knew, and so those whose relation to me precedes the stipulations
of contract. Those others make a claim upon me, but what are the conditions under which I can hear or respond to their claims? It is not enough to say,
in Levinasian vein, that the claim is made upon me prior to my knowing and as an inaugurating instance of my coming into being. That may be
formally true, but its truth is of no use to me when I lack the conditions for responsiveness that allow me to apprehend it in the midst of this social and
political life. Those "conditions" include not just my private resources, but the various mediating forms and frames that make responsiveness possible. In
other words, the claim upon me takes place, when it takes place, through the senses, which arc crafted in part through various forms of media: the social
organization of sound and voice, of image and text, of tactility and smell. If the claim of the other upon me is to reach me, it must be mediated in
some way, which means that our very capacity to respond with non-violence (to act against a certain violent act, or to defer to
the "non-act" in the face of violent provocation) depends upon the frames by which the world is given and by
which the domain of appearance is circumscribed. The claim to non-violence does not merely interpellate me as an
individual person who must decide one way or another. If the claim is registered , it reveals me less as an "ego" than as a
being bound up with others in inextricable and irreversible ways, existing in a generalized condition of
precariousness and interdependency, affectively driven and crafted by those whose effects on me I never chose, The
injunction to non-violence always presupposes that there is some field of beings in relation to whom non violence ought to be
the appropriate bearing. Because that field is invariably circumscribed, non-violence can only make its appeal by
differentiating between those against whom violence ought not to be waged and those who are simply not covered" by the
injunction itself . For the injunction to non-violence to make sense, it is first necessary to overcome
the presumption of this very differential—a schematic and non-theorized inegalitarianism—that
operates throughout perceptual life. If the injunction to non-violence is to avoid becoming meaningless, it must be allied with a critical
intervention apropos the norms that differentiate between those lives that count as livable and grievable and those that do not. Only on the condition that lives are
grievable (construed within the future anterior) does the call to non-violence avoid complicity with forms of epistemic inegalitarianism. The desire to commit
violence is thus always attended by the anxiety of having violence returned, since all the potential actors in the scene are equally vulnerable, Even when such an insight
follows from a eakula don of the consequences of a violent act, it testifies to an ontological interrelation that is prior to any calculation. Precariousness is not the
effect of a certain strategy, but the generalized condition for any strategy whatsoever. A certain apprehension of equality thus follows from
this invariably shared condition , one that is most difficult to hold fast in thought: non-violence is derived from
the apprehension of equality in the midst of precariousness. For this purpose, we do not need to know in advance
what "a life" will be, but only to find and support those modes of representation and appearance that allow the claim of life to
be made and heard (in this way, media and survival are linked ). Ethics is less a calculation than something that follows
from being addressed and addressable in sustainable ways, which means, at a global level, there can be no ethics without a sustained practice of
translation—between languages, but also between forms of media.'1. The ethical question of whether or not to do violence emerges only in
relation to the "you" who figures as the potential object of my injury. But if there is no "you," or the "you" cannot be heard or
seen, then there is no ethical relation. One can lose the "you" through the exclusive postures of sovereignty and
persecution alike, especially when neither admits to being implicated in the position of the other. Indeed, one effect of such modes of
sovereignty is precisely to "lose the you." Non-violence thus would seem to require a struggle over the domain of appearance and
the senses, asking how best to organize media in order to overcome the differential ways through which grievability is allocated
and a life is regarded as a life worth living on indeed, as a living life. It is also to struggle against those notions of the
political subject that assume that permeability and injurability can be monopolized at one site and fully
refused at another. No subject has a monopoly on "being persecuted" or "being persecuting," even when thickly sedimented histories
(densely compounded forms of iteration) have produced that ontological effect. If no claim to radical impermeability is finally acceptable as true, then no claim
to radical persecutabiliry is finally acceptable either, To call into question this frame by which injurability is falsely and
unequally distributed is precisely to call into question one of the dominant frames sustaining the current
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in the Middle East. The claim of non-violence not only requires that the conditions
are in place for the claim to he heard and registered (there can be no "claim" without its mode of presentation), but that anger and
rage also find a way of articulating that claim in a way that might be registered by others, In this sense, non-violence is not
a peaceful state, but a social and political struggle to make rage articulate and effective—the carefully
crafted "fuck you." In effect, one has to come up against violence to practice non-violence they are bound together, and tensely so); but, it bears
repeating, the violence one is up against does not issue exclusively from the outside. What we call aggression and rage can move in the direction of nullifying the
other; but if who we "are" is precisely a shared precariousness, then we risk our own nullification. This happens not because we are discrete subjects
calculating in relation to one another, but because, prior to any calculation, we are already constituted through ties that bind and unbind in specific and
consequential ways. Ontologically, the forming and un-forming of such bonds is prior to any question of the subject and is, in fact, the social and affective
condition of subjectivity. It is also a condition that installs a dynamic ambivalence at the heart of psychic life. To say that we have "needs" is thus to say that
who we "are" involves an invariable and reiterated struggle of dependency and separation, and does not merely designate a stage of childhood to be
surmounted. It is not just "one's own" struggle or the apparent struggle of "another' but precisely the dehiscence at the basis of the "we," the condition under
which we are passionately bound together: ragefully, desirously, murderously, lovingly. To walk the line is, yes, to live the line, the
impasse of rage and fear, and to find a mode of conduct that does not seek to resolve the anxiety of
that position too quickly through a decision. It is, of course, fine to decide on nonviolence, but decision cannot finally be the
ground for the struggle for nonviolence. Decision fortifies the deciding "I," sometimes at the expense of relationality itself. So the
problem is not really about how the subject should act, but about what a refusal to act might look
like when it issues from the apprehension of a generalized condition of precariousness or, in other
words, of the radically egalitarian character of grievability. Even the "refusal to act" does not quite capture the
forms of stalled action or stoppage that can, for instance, constitute the non violent operation of the strike . There are other
ways of conceiving the blocking of those reiterated actions that reproduce the taken-for-granted effects of war in daily life. To
paralyze the infrastructure that allows armies to reproduce themselves is a matter of dismantling
military machinery as well as resisting conscription. When the norms of violence are reiterated without
end and without interruption, non-violence seeks to stop the iteration or to redirect it in ways that counter
its driving aims. When that iteration continues in the name of "progress," civilizational or otherwise, it=.\_3 makes sense to heed Walter Benjamin's
trenchant remark that "Perhaps revolutions are nothing other than human beings on the train of progress
reaching for the emergency brake."" To reach for the brake is an "act," but it is one that seeks to forestall the apparent
inexorability of a reiterated set of acts that postures as the motor of history itself. Maybe the "act" in its singularity and heroism is overrated: it
loses sight of the iterable process in which a critical intervention is needed, and it can become the very means by which the "subject" is produced at the expense of a
relational social ontology. Of course, relationality is no utopian term, but a framework (the work of a new frame) for the consideration of those affects invariably
articulated within the political field: fear and rage, desire and loss, love and hatred, to name a few. All this is just another way of saying that it is most difficult
when in a state of pain to stay responsive to the equal claim of the other for shelter, for conditions of livability and grievability. And yet, this vexed domain is the site
of a necessary struggle, a struggle to stay responsive to a vicissitude of equality that is enormously difficult to affirm, that has vet to be theorised by the
defenders of egalitarianism, and that figures in a fugitive way in the affective and perceptual dimensions of theory. Under such circumstances, when
acting reproduces the subject at the expense of another, not to act is, after all, a way of comporting
oneself so as to break with the closed circle of reflexivity, a way of ceding to the ties that bind and
unbind, a way of registering and demanding equality affectively. It is even a mode of resistance,
especially when it refuses and breaks the frames by which war is wrought time and again.

And, case
THE AFFIRMATIVE’S REPRESENTATION OF A FUTURE NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE MASKS THE ONGOING EXTERMINATION OF THE
PERIPHERY, EMBODIED IN THE NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE’S TARGETTING OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES. THIS FANTASY OF NUCLEAR
EXTINCTION CREATES A DISCURSIVE HIERARCHY OF RECOGNIZABLE VIOLENCE, A FANTASY ALL TOO OFTEN PERPETUATED BY
NUCLEAR CRITICS THEMSELVES.

KATO, DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I, 1993 [MASAHIDE, “NUCLEAR GLOBALISM:
TRAVERSING ROCKETS, SATELLITES, AND NUCLEAR WAR VIA THE STRATEGIC GAZE,” ALTERNATIVES 18 (1993), 339-360]
Nuclear War Imagined and Nuclear War as Real

The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation into the last vestige of
relatively autonomous space in the periphery under late capitalism is propelled not only
by the desire for incorporating every fabric of the society into the division of labor but
also by the desire for "pure" destruction/extermination of the periphery." The penetration of
capital into the social fabric and the destruction of nature and preexisting social organizations by capital are not separable. However,
what we have " witnessed in the phase of late capitalism is a rapid intensification of the
destruction and extermination of the periphery. In this context, capital is no longer interested in incorporating
some parts of the periphery into the international division of labor. The emergence of such "pure" destruction/ extermination of
the periphery can be explained, at least partially, by another problematic of late capitalism formulated by Ernest Mandel: the mass
the latest phase of capitalism distinguishes itself from
production of the means of destruction.' Particularly,
the earlier phases in its production of the "ultimate means of destruction/extermination,
i.e., nuclear weapons
Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and
became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of
The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived
destruction can be historically contextualized.
and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical
threshold, whose meaning is relevant .only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear
catastrophe is confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet
how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of
"nuclear testing" since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924
nuclear explosions have occurred on earth. The major perpetrators of nuclear warfare
are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192
times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times). The primary targets of
warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of
Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars
against the Marshall Islands (66. times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian
Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the
Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12
times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36
times). Moreover although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests" in this article, if we are to expand the notion of
nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle
(particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan
and the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and other
Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear war, albeit
undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and 'Indigenous Nations. The dismal
consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention,." or the "nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World
produced by the First World have taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. Thus, from the
 the nuclear catastrophe has never been the
perspectives- of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations,
"unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing
nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have
been, subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe.by rendering them as mere
preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear
explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the
First World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear
warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart
Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of "nuclear testing" in
the Pacific:
Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere ... were global in effect The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas
of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning
our planet and going into battle against nature itself.

the problematic
Although Firth's book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of "nuclear testing" in the Pacific,
division/distinction between the "nuclear explosions" and the nuclear war is kept intact.
The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the subject ("we")
is located higher than the "real" of nuclear warfare in terms of discursive value. This
ideological division/hierarchization is the very vehicle through which the history and the
ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations by
means of nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized. The discursive
containment/obliteration of the "real" of nuclear warfare has been accomplished, ironic
as it may sound, by nuclear criticism. Nuclear criticism, with its firm commitment to
global discourse, has established the unshakable authority of the imagery of nuclear
catastrophe over the real nuclear catastrophe happening in the Fourth World and
Indigenous Nations almost on a daily basis.
And, russia relations

Russia isn’t a threat, and there’s virtually NO RISK that Russia would attack the U.S.
Graham, 07 (Thomas Graham served as the senior advisor on Russia on the U.S. National Security Council staff 2002-2007. “The Dialectics of Strength
and Weakness,” Russia in Global Affairs. № 2, July - September 2007, http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/numbers/20/1129.html)

An astute historian of Russia, Martin Malia, wrote several years ago that “Russia has at different times been demonized or divinized by Western opinion less because of
her real role in Europe than because of the fears and frustrations, or hopes and aspirations, generated within European society by its own domestic problems.” Such is
the case today. To be sure, mounting Western concerns about Russia are a consequence of Russian policies that appear to undermine Western interests, but they are also
Ironically, this growing fear and distrust of Russia
a reflection of declining confidence in our own abilities and the efficacy of our own policies.
come at a time when Russia is arguably less threatening to the West, and the United States in particular, than it has
been at any time since the end of the Second World War. Russia does not champion a totalitarian ideology
intent on our destruction, its military poses no threat to sweep across Europe, its economic growth depends on
constructive commercial relations with Europe, and its strategic arsenal – while still capable of annihilating the
United States – is under more reliable control than it has been in the past fifteen years and the threat of a
strategic strike approaches zero probability. Political gridlock in key Western countries, however, precludes the creativity, risk-taking,
and subtlety needed to advance our interests on issues over which we are at odds with Russia while laying the basis for more constructive long-term relations with
Russia.

Low risk of US-Russian accidental war - - improved communications and safeguards

check.
Ford, 08 - former US rep for Nuclear Nonprolif, former deputy asst sec. of state, Director of Center for Tech & Global Security at Hudson
Inst.
Dr. Christopher Ford is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Technology and Global Security at the Hudson Institute in Washington. D.C. He previously served as U.S. Special
Representative for Nuclear Nonproliferation, and as a Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. “Dilemmas of Nuclear Force “De-Alerting”” Presented to the International Peace Institute
Policy Forum, New York (October 7, 2008). http://www.hudson.org/files/documents/De-Alerting%20FINAL2%20%282%29.pdf

The United States and Russia have also worked for years to improve communications, reduce
misunderstandings, and develop ways to lessen the risk of inadvertent launch or other errors in their strategic
relationship. Most readers will be familiar with the Direct Communications Link (the famous “hotline”) established in 1963.27 In 1971, however,
Washington and Moscow also signed an agreement establishing basic procedures to increase mutual consultation
and notification regarding relatively innocent but potentially alarming activities – thereby reducing the risk of
accidental nuclear war. Since 1987, the two parties have also operated securely-linked 24-hour communications
28

centers – the U.S. node of which is the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) operated by the State Department29 – which specialize in transmitting such things
as the notifications required under arms control treaties. Pursuant to a 1988 memorandum, NRRC transmittals, which go directly to the Russian Ministry of Defense,
include ballistic missile launch notifications. This link also proved useful to help prevent strategic tensions after the terrorist assault of September 11, 2001 – at which
point U.S. officials used the NRRC to reassure their Russian counterparts that the sudden American security alert in the wake of the Manhattan and Pentagon attacks
was not in any way an indication of impending U.S. belligerence vis-à-vis Russia.

Chinese threats are grounded in US primacy’s demand of securitization versus a vague

other—this logic creates a self fulfilling cycle of endless intervention
Chengxin Pan, Department of Political Science and International Relations at Australian National University. Alternatives 29, 2004. Pages 310-313.

Winthrop, governor of the British-settled Massachusetts Bay Colony, described the Puritan mission as a moral beacon for
In 1630, John
the world: "For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies [eyes] of all people are uppon us." Couched in a
highly metaphoric manner, the "city on the hill" message greatly galvanized the imagination of early European settlers in North America who had desperately
needed some kind of certainty and assurance in the face of many initial difficulties and disappointments in the "New World." Surely there have been
numerous U.S. constructions of "what we are," but this sense of "manifest destiny," discursively repeated and
reconstructe{d time and again by leading U.S. politicians, social commentators, the popular press, and numerous school
textbooks, has since become a pivotal part of U.S. self-consciousness. In 1992, Colin Powell, then chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote:
America is a remarkable nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a nation that "cannot escape history" because we are "the
last best hope of earth." The president said that his administration and Congress held the "power and . . . responsibility" to ensure that the hope America
promised would be fulfilled. Today . . . America is still the last best hope of earth, and we still hold the power and bear the responsibility for its remaining so.
This sentiment was echoed by Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, who once called the United States "the indispensable
nation" and maintained that "we stand tall and hence see further than other nations." More recently, speaking of the U.S. role in the
current war on terrorism. Vice President Dick Cheney said: "Only we can rally the world in a task of this complexity against an enemy so elusive and so
resourceful. The United States and only the United States can see this effort through to victory." It is worth adding that Cheney, along with several other
senior officials in the present Bush administration, is a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, a project designed to ensure U.S.
security and global dominance in the twenty-first century.
Needless to say, the United States is not unique in ethnocentric thinking. For centuries, China had assumed it was the
center of the world. But what distinguishes U.S. from Chinese ethnocentric self-identities is that while the latter was
based largely on the Confucian legacy, the former is sanctioned by more powerful regimes of truth, such as Christianity
and modern science. For the early English Puritans, America was part of a divine plan and the settlers were the Chosen People
blessed by covenant with God. With the advent of the scientific age, U.S. exceptionalism began taking on a secular,
scientific dimension. Charles Darwin once argued that "the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results
of natural selection."
The United States has since been construed as the manifestation of the law of nature, with its ideas and institutions described not as historically
particular but as truly universal. For example, in his second inaugural address in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared that U.S. principles
were "not the principles of a province or of a single continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the
principles of a liberated mankind." In short, "The US is Utopia achieved." It represents the "End of History."
What does this U.S. self-knowledge have to do with the way in which it comes to know others in general and China
in particular? To put it simply, this self-knowledge is always a powerful analytical framework within which other societies
are to be known. By envisioning a linear process of historical development with itself at its apex, the United States
places other nations on a common evolutionary slope and sees them as inevitably traveling toward the end of history
that is the United States. For example, as a vast, ancient nation on the other side of the Pacific, China is frequently taken as a mirror
image of the U.S. self. As Michael Hunt points out,
we imagine ourselves locked in a special relationship with the Chinese, whose apparent moderation and pragmatism mirror our own most prized attributes and
validate our own longings for a world made over in our own image. If China with its old and radically different culture can be won, where can we not prevail?
Yet, in a world of diversity, contingency, and unpredictability, which is irreducible to universal sameness or
absolute certainty, this kind of U.S. knowledge of others often proves frustratingly elusive. In this context, rather than
questioning the validity of their own universalist assumptions, the people of the United States believe that those who are
different should be held responsible for the lack of universal sameness. Indeed, because "we" are universal, those who
refuse or who are unable to become like "us" are no longer just "others," but are by definition the negation of
universality, or the other. In this way, the other is always built into this universalized "American" self. Just as "Primitive ... is a
category, not an object, of Western thought," so the threat of the other is not some kind of "external reality" discovered by U.S.
strategic analysts, but a ready-made category of thought within this particular way of U.S. self-imagination.

[Continues….]
 [Pan ‘4 Continues….]
there is always a need for the United States to find a specific other to fill into the totalized category of otherness.
Consequently,
In the early days of American history, it was Europe, or the "Old World," that was invoked as its primary other, threatening to corrupt
the "New World." Shortly after World War II, in the eyes of U.S. strategists, the Soviet Union emerged as a major deviance
from, hence an archenemy of, their universal path toward progress via the free market and liberal democracy. And after
the demise of the Soviet Union, the vacancy of other was to be filled by China, the "best candidate" the United States
could find in the post-Cold War, unipolar world. Not until the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington had China's candidature
been suspended, to be replaced by international terrorism in general and Saddam's Iraq in particular.
At first glance, as the "China threat" literature has told us, China seems to fall perfectly into the "threat" category, particularly
given its growing power. However, China's power as such does not speak for itself in terms of an emerging threat. By
any reasonable measure, China remains a largely poor country edged with only a sliver of affluence along its coastal
areas. Nor is China's sheer size a self-evident confirmation of the "China threat" thesis, as other countries like India,
Brazil, and Australia are almost as big as China. Instead, China as a "threat" has much to do with the particular mode
of U.S. self-imagination. As Steve Chan notes:
China is an object of attention not only because of its huge size, ancient legacy, or current or projected relative national power. . . . The importance of
China has to do with perceptions, especially those regarding the potential that Beijing will become an example, source,
or model that contradicts Western liberalism as the reigning paradigm. In an era of supposed universalizing
cosmopolitanism, China demonstrates the potency and persistence of nationalism, and embodies an alternative to
Western and especially U.S. conceptions of democracy and capitalism. China is a reminder that history is not close to an
end.
Certainly, I do not deny China's potential for strategic misbehavior in the global context, nor do I claim the "essential peacefulness" of Chinese culture."
Having said that, my main point here is that there is no such thing as "Chinese reality" that can automatically speak for itself, for
example, as a "threat." Rather, the "China threat" is essentially a specifically social meaning given to China by its U.S.
observers, a meaning that cannot be disconnected from the dominant U.S. self-construction. Thus, to fully understand
the U.S. "China threat" argument, it is essential to recognize its autobiographical nature.