South China Sea Negative NAUDL CORE FILES 2016-17

South China Sea Negative NAUDL CORE FILES 2016-17

Table of Content

Table of Contents

1nc – Inherency 2

Inherency Ext – Military-Military ties now 3

1nc – SCS Advantage 4-6

Ext – South China Sea Peaceful 7

Ext –Miscalculation Unlikely 8-9

Ext – Economic Interdependence Resolves Conflicts 10

1nc – Military-Military 11-2

Ext – Relations Inevitable 13

Ext – Need Larger Changes 14

1nc – Solvency 15-6

Ext: No engagement 17-8

Ext: Appeasement Turn 19

South China Sea Negative NAUDL CORE FILES 2016-17

Inherency

1nc – Inherency

(__) Military to Military engagement happening now and will continue

Kamphausen & Drun 16 – a. Senior Vice President for Research and Director of the, D.C., office at the National Bureau of Asian Research, b. Bridge Award Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research

[Roy D. Kamphausen & Jessica Drun, Sino-U.S. Military-to-Military Relations, The national bureau of asian research, nbr special report #57 | april 2016, Edited by Travis Tanner and Wang Dong, http://nbr.org/publications/specialreport/pdf/Free/06192016/SR57_US-China_April2016.pdf] doa 5-11-16

Recent Developments Since mil-mil relations were restarted several months after their suspension in January 2010,15 the type and sophistication of ties have markedly increased. New types of cooperation include Chinese participation in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2014 naval exercise, with an invitation to attend RIMPAC 2016; a first-ever naval exercise involving cross-deck helicopter landings (2013); and army-army collective training for disaster management in Hawaii (2014), with follow-on reciprocal humanitarian assistance and disaster relief exercises in Haikou and Seattle in 2015. Significantly, the mechanism for notification of major military activities was strengthened in 2015, and an air annex for the rules of behavior for the safety of maritime and air encounters was completed.16 Moreover, the institution of bilateral army staff talks in June 2015 offers promise of a new mechanism for high-level and strategic dialogue, perhaps taking on more importance with the establishment of a new ground force service in the PLA in January 2016.17 The number of high-level exchanges in both directions are also at or near an all-time high, perhaps epitomized by the fact that before his retirement in September 2015, U.S. chief of naval operations Jonathan Greenert had met with his counterpart, PLA admiral Wu Shengli, five times in the previous three years.18 And perhaps portending well for future relations, the two sides have found ways to continue their bilateral relationship, despite existing tensions. For instance, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), Admiral Harry Harris, visited Beijing in November 2015, just days after the USS Lassen conducted a freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea and held high-level meetings with PLA leadership, including the chief of General Staff, General Fang Fenghui, and the Central Military Commission vice chairman, General Fan Changlong.19 In previous years, such a visit would have been “postponed” at such a point of tension, which suggests a level of maturity or a new learned ability to manage the tensions in bilateral mil-mil relations.

Inherency Ext – Military-Military ties now

(___)

(___) Military- Military ties are strengthening now

Kamphausen & Drun 2016 – Director of the, D.C., office at the National Bureau of Asian Research, & Bridge Award Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research

Both Washington and Beijing have acknowledged the importance of the U.S.-China relationship for maintaining stability in the Asia-Pacific. Indeed, some have argued that it is the most important bilateral relationship for the 21st century.20 To that end, stability in the mil-mil dimension is critical for providing crisis stability between the two militaries—clearly both sides want to avoid military tensions or armed conflict because they recognize that conflict would be disastrous for both countries and catastrophic for the region. In order to achieve this end, the United States and China need to mitigate the likelihood of any strategic miscalculations and establish means of de-escalation if a conflict were to arise. Simply put, an effective mil-mil program could contribute to conflict avoidance. As such, Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping have jointly advocated for a more mature and robust mil-mil relationship between the United States and China. Indeed, at the state visit of President Obama to China in November 2014, the two sides agreed to an agenda of increasing mil-mil confidence-building mechanisms (CBM), including notification of major military activities (with annexes on notification of policy and strategy developments and observation of military exercises) and rules of behavior for the safety of air and maritime encounters (with annexes on terms of reference and rules of behavior for encounters between naval surface vessels).21 When President Xi visited Washington ten months later in September 2015, the CBM agreements were further enhanced, with new annexes on air-to-air safety and crisis communications, and new work was done on the major military activities agreement. Moreover, Presidents Obama and Xi made friendly statements about each side’s contribution to international peacekeeping, suggesting new areas for cooperation.22

South China Sea Negative NAUDL CORE FILES 2016-17

South China Sea Advantage

1nc – SCS Advantage (1/3)

1. South China Sea will remain peaceful – interdependence, desire to avoid war, accidents and miscalculation are unlikely to escalate

Kim 16 - Assistant Professor at the Institute of International Studies, Bradley University [Kim, Jihyun. "Possible Future of the Contest in the South China Sea." The Chinese Journal of International Politics (2016)] doa 5-11-16

In this research, China’s rise per se is not considered to pose a threat to regional security or directly challenge America’s interests in Asia. Also, the peace-inducing aspects of China’s relations with its neighbours and the United States, in line with pragmatic realism, would continue to prevail over the conflict-producing ones in the foreseeable future.6 As aptly pointed out by Richard Rosecrance, however, ‘there is as yet no clear answer as to how’ the United States and the rest of the world will take the rise in China’s power and astutely react to it.7 What’s more, whether their shared interests would continue to be a foundation for cooperation and self-restraint in both the medium and the longer term is not predetermined, hence this call for the states to choose ‘the right policy’, one that has ‘more cooperative than conflictual elements to it, thereby avoiding the doom-and-gloom scenario that too many of today’s analysts portray’.8 Among other issues, China’s territorial disputes with its neighbours are considered as constituting a potential source of its dissatisfaction, of the breakdown of the status quo, and even of war. Nonetheless, one cannot automatically assume that China will indeed adopt an unequivocally expansionist stance in the future, given that taking such a measure would be unrewarding, as the potential political, diplomatic, military, and economic costs of controversial territorial expansion far outweigh any benefits to be gained from it.9 In other words, a cost-benefit analysis makes conflict over territory less than desirable, and gives China greater incentive to maximize its interests other than through blatant territorial expansion. Besides, it is hard to imagine a war scenario between China on the one side and the United States (and its Asian allies and friends) on the other, bearing in mind the absence of any intense ideological competition between them, as well as their complex interdependence, which tends to have ‘the pacific effects induced by the condition of mutual assured destruction’ as regards economic damage and security costs.10 As Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye assert, complex interdependence refers to a situation in which a number of countries and their fortunes are inextricably connected through multiple channels and various issue linkages. This is how increases in economic and other types of interdependence facilitate cooperation among states; thus military force as a policy tool is less likely to be ‘used by governments towards one another’.11 China’s intensifying relations with its Southeast Asian neighbours as well as with the United States in the realm of economics and other issue areas appear to approximate this ideal type of international system.

1nc – SCS Advantage (2/3)

2. Miscalculation is highly unlikely

Stashwick 9 – 25 – 15 - graduate studies in international relations at the University of Chicago, Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve

[Steven Stashwick, South China Sea: Conflict Escalation and ‘Miscalculation’ Myths, http://thediplomat.com/2015/09/south-china-sea-conflict-escalation-and-miscalculation-myths/] doa 4-20-16

The threat of “miscalculation” is again in vogue. What was once a preoccupation of accidental war theorists has resurfaced in discussions about maritime disputes in Southeast Asia and Sino-U.S. relations. During the Cold War, policymakers and scholars worried about nuclear annihilation sparked by misinterpreted warnings, rogue officers, technical glitches in command and control systems, or a lower-level confrontation spiraling out of control. Absent the Cold War’s looming nuclear threat, today’s oft-repeated concerns focus on “miscalculation” causing a local or tactical-level incident between individual ships or aircraft (harassment, collision, interdiction, and so on) to lead to broader military confrontation. Some variation of this theme has been featured in public remarks by former U.S. Defense Secretaries Gates, Panetta, Hagel, and current Defense Secretary Carter, as well as Commanders of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and the U.S. Pacific Command, and was a topic of policymaker discussion going back at least to the 1996 Taiwan Strait incident. These concerns are likewise found in too many op-eds, reports, interviews, commentaries, and articles to count (see also here, here, here, and here, etc.) However, while history shows that strategic miscalculations can lead states to war, or dangerously close to it, evidence does not support the worry that miscalculation may cause a local or tactical-level incident to spiral out of control. To understand the risks associated with miscalculation, we must distinguish between miscalculation at the strategic level and miscalculation stemming from a localized incident between naval or air forces. At the strategic level – that is, a nation’s a priori willingness to escalate a conflict and use military force to achieve its objectives – no country starts a war expecting to lose. Yet, “most wars…end in the defeat of at least one nation which had expected victory,” implying all wars result from some degree of strategic miscalculation. That may be a plausible danger in Southeast Asia, but a distinct one. Instead, much of the discourse about localized maritime incidents in the South China Sea conflates strategic and local miscalculation risks, focusing on the latter’s potential to lead to a wider conflict. This concern over local miscalculation nonetheless reflects a longstanding view of the danger “incidents at sea” poses to peace stretching back to the Cold War. Both U.S. and Soviet leaderships were concerned that an incident between “peppery young ship captains” could “lead people to shoot at each other with results that might…be impossible to control,” in the words of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations in the 1970s. Back then, the U.S. and Soviets were openly adversarial and serious incidents between their ships and aircraft were almost commonplace. Yet despite explicit mutual, strategic, and existential antagonism between the U.S. and U.S.SR, none of the hundreds of maritime incidents that occurred over the four decades of the Cold War escalated into anything beyond a short diplomatic crisis. It is possible that they avoided a nuclear spiral in these incidents through diligent diplomacy and luck. But more likely, it suggests that this type of maritime incident is insufficient on its own to lead to the worst-case scenarios envisioned.

1nc – SCS Advantage (3/3)

3. No impact to economic decline – prefer new data

Drezner 2014 - professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University

[Daniel W. DREZNER, “The System Worked: Global Economic Governance during the Great Recession,” World Politics, Vol. 66, No. 1 (January 2014), p. 123-164]

The final significant outcome addresses a dog that hasn't barked: the effect of the Great Recession on cross-border conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.42 They voiced genuine concern that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict—whether through greater internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict. Violence in the Middle East, border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the disruptions of the Occupy movement fueled impressions of a surge in global public disorder. The aggregate data suggest otherwise, however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has concluded that "the average level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007."43 Interstate violence in particular has declined since the start of the financial crisis, as have military expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has not triggered any increase in violent conflict, as Lotta Themner and Peter Wallensteen conclude: "[T]he pattern is one of relative stability when we consider the trend for the past five years."44 The secular decline in violence that started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed. Rogers Brubaker observes that "the crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist nationalism or ethnic exclusion that might have been expected."43

4. Economic interdependence checks conflict

Ikenberry 14 - Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and George Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College

[G. John , “From Hegemony to the Balance of Power: The Rise of China and American Grand Strategy in East Asia”, International Journal of Korean Unification Studies Vol. 23, No. 2, 41–63]

Finally, the United States and China are not simply poised on a geopolitical playing field. The two countries also occupy key positions in the world economy, the world environment, and the world society. In all these areas, China and the United States are increasingly interdependent. They are not simply pitted in zero-sum geopolitical competition. They are also tied together in deep and complex interdependent ways. In various areas related to the world economy, global warming, transnational crime, energy security, and so forth, they cannot realize their objectives without the help of the other. These are problems of economic and security interdependence. These circumstances of interdependence create incentives for the two countries to bargain and moderate disputes. They cannot be secure and stable alone; they can only be secure and stable together. To the extent that this is true, the two countries will find powerful reasons not to go all the way down the path to balance of power rivalry and security competition. They will grudgingly look for ways to moderate and manage their contest for supremacy.