Claire McKinney
As already alluded to in the introduction of the first blog post, the problem with using realism to answer the kritik is that while it does, and often successfully, undermine the foundational assumptions of the kritik, it does the same thing to the affirmative and makes other offense against the kritik untenable. In this post, I’ll outline a couple scenarios where it undermines the affirmative, then a scenario where it undermines the capacity to answer the kritik strategically. Again, this is not to suggest that no affirmative should ever read realism good. There are scenarios where the affirmative is realist (such as an off-shore balancing affirmative focused on averting great power war) where realism is a strategic and offensive strategy against the security kritik. The purpose of this post is to disabuse debaters of the notion that just because the affirmative talks about war, the best strategy to answer the security kritik is realism. In most instances, this is actually a bad strategy.
Scenario 1: Security Alliance Affirmatives
As discussed in the first blog post, any affirmative that argues something about why the collapse of a security alliance, such as NATO or JASA, not to mention the collapse of any other international institution, such as the UN, WTO, trade pacts, etc, causes global nuclear annihilation is making claims contrary to realism’s position. Realism is highly individualist in that it argues that states are not constructed by outside forces but rather are independent actors who are behaviorally constrained by the structural form of international relations but are not constitutively changed by the form of international relations. To simplify, for offensive realists, security institutions are created and maintained because states, materially pre-determined actors, find it in their interest to do so. However, as soon as their interests dictate that these alliances are constraining, rather than maximizing their power, they will abandon the alliance. The alliance itself has no effect on the material determinants of a state’s power.
This means two things for your security alliance advantage. Either A) both states understand that the collapse of the security alliance would diminish their power, in which case, the danger to the alliance is a chimera (Witness, for instance, the political career of Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who broke his campaign promise to move the Okinawa base. Hatoyama campaigned on a strong condemnation of the military relationship with the United States, but in the end refused to take any material action to endanger that relationship. This could be read by realists as a confirmation that maintaining a military alliance with the US is more important to Japan than mollifying domestic political pressure because Japan can only maximize its power by maintaining its alliance with the United States). Or B) The security alliance has outgrown its utility for at least one power, and so because states are individualist and act in order to maximize their power, they will leave the alliance regardless. This is probably truest for the United States in most of these alliances. But, and this is important, because the United States is a hegemon and because the international sphere is an anarchic, the alliance has no effect on constraining United States action in the first place. One could probably make a stronger claim that security alliances have no effect on constraining other states either because what they are really constrained by is fear of being taken over by the regional hegemon. Regardless, the security alliance’s survival probably has little to nothing to do with your affirmative. Either there is no impact or you don’t solve because of realism.
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More of the "Strategic Diagnosis" will appear tomorrow...
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