Claire McKinney
Scenario 2: Terrorism Affirmatives
So your aff claims to avert terrorism in some way. Unlike last year, where people could claim not to stop terrorism, but rather could diminish its impact through public health measures, this year, the aff can either claim to remove a target for terrorism (which, while true, is probably going to be less likely- terrorists striking US troops doesn’t carry near the risk of a massive retaliation as an attack on US soil) or can claim to remove the reason for terrorism: the presence of US troops that degrade the territorial sovereignty or religious sanctity of a particular region. The relationship between realism and terrorism is a little more complicated than the relationship between realism and multinational institutions. There are several reasons for this. First, realism is a theory of state interaction and thus does not have a theory of terrorism or how to stop it. Realism’s state-centrism is either the result of or precludes the consideration of non-state actors having any definitive effect on the international system. This does not preclude the influence of terrorists in the state’s calculation to engage in violence, but it does mean that a theory of realism has nothing to say about terrorists. This is good for the aff who reads realism to answer the kritik, insofar as you do not have the same problems as the alliance-centric advantages. However, the presence of terrorism could undermine the claim that the world is realist, which would severely compromise realism as offense against the kritik.
There are two primary reasons the rise of international terrorism challenges the assumptions of realism. The first is the constitution of balance of power. According to realism, a state’s material properties determine its absolute power in the system. Material properties include economic success, military materiel including troops and weapons, and amount of territory. States, according to realism, will not initiate a war with a state that has more relative power than it has, because it is almost assured to lose and thus greatly increases the risk of its death. The problem with terrorism is that if it is a pervasive phenomenon, this calculation no longer holds and there is no promise of international security. Terrorists are never materially superior to its state targets. Traditional means of risk calculation make no sense against terrorist because there is no fear of state death and in some circumstances, notably, suicide terrorism, no fear of individual death. Furthermore, the weakest states in the system now become the most threatening because the weakest states are often the ones who cannot exercise sovereign control, which allows for terrorist cells to operate with immunity. Realism cannot explain these developments nor create predictions of how states will act given these conditions. The presence of terrorism means realism is neither inevitable nor an accurate theory of the world.
Second, and this is hinted at above, terrorists are often irrational actors. Suicide terrorism is irrational because someone annihilates the possibility of enjoying any of the benefits accrued by one’s actions. Let me note here that rationalism in this sense and in realism is economic rationalism, that is, based on rational choice theory. Rational choice theory makes very thin assumptions about individuals: they are utility maximizers (that is, they engage in cost-benefit analysis in order determine their action) and they have ordered and fixed preferences (that is, they prefer A to B to C, and will always prefer that as long as conditions remain the same). While in one sense, suicide terrorists could be rational (they believe they will receive a reward in the afterlife that they would not receive without martyrdom that outweighs the amount of life they forego by killing themselves), in a material sense, they are irrational because their political achievements on earth will never be enjoyed by them. Just as a state did not fear state death would absolutely disturb the predictions of realism, so to does an irrational non-state actor absolutely destroy the ability of a state to act qua other states based on the assumption of rationality. This is why the war in Afghanistan is so intractable. It is absolutely irrational, under realism, for the United States to stay in Afghanistan; the risk of the state being a threat to the US is near zero. However, because there are irrational non-state actors within Afghanistan that could use a failed state to cover illegal activities, the United States must stay to protect its security.
A famous footnote in Meershemier’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics summarizes the improbability for realism to actually explain or predict action within the system of international relations which is magnified by the presence of terrorism. From Meersheimer: “My theory ultimately argues that great powers behave offensively toward each other because that is the best way for them to guarantee their security in an anarchic world. The assumption here, however, is that there are many reasons besides security for why a state might behave aggressively toward another state. In fact, it is uncertainty about whether those non-security causes of war are at play, or might come into play, that pushes great powers to worry about their survival and thus act offensively. Security concerns alone cannot cause great powers to act aggressively. The possibility that at least one state might be motivated by non-security calculations is a necessary condition for offensive realism, as well as any structural theory of international politics that predicts security competition.” (414, emphasis mine) That is, the fact the some state is not motivated by security (and thus is ultimately irrational because it threatens it sown existence) is necessary for the theory to work. To state it more theoretically, the theory relies both on its assumptions to be true and not true in order to function. This means that realism, as an answer to the kritik, merely confirms that the world cannot be predicted or controlled by rational intervention.
Finally, a word about retaliation. Even if a terrorist attack were nuclear, chemical, or biological, presuming that the attack itself did not cause extinction or the destruction of the United States’ entire population, anything but conventional retaliation would probably be irrational under realism. A nuclear attack on Afghanistan would not destroy the material capability of Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda is not territorially bound. And a nuclear attack anywhere in the earth would probably cause massive balancing against the United States, which would overall diminish its relative power in the international system, which would destroy its regional hegemony.
Now that there is some sense as to why realism does not play well with your advantages, you are probably wondering what effect it has against the kritik. I will lay out the most common was (I think) of answering the kritik and how realism diminishes the capacity of either one as a winning strategy.
The Perm
The perm has definitely become an ascendant strategy in answer the kritik nowadays. The reason why is complex, but there are a few features of how people think of the kritik currently that make the perm so viable. First, kritik debates have caved into the notion that they need an alternative that does something besides engage in criticism. This is good for the aff because as soon as the negative takes a positive stance about reconstructing the world, the affirmative can make arguments as to why its action is compatible with those positive visions of the world that, ostensibly, resolve the link debate. On this year’s topic, where the aff’s action is essentially negative (remove military or police presence), the affirmative can very easily recast its action as a reversal of the sort of adventurism the negative’s kritik assumes. Second, kritik debaters are often less versed in the specifics of the aff’s scenarios and the intricacies of international relations and American Foreign Policy. This means that the aff can often articulate a net benefit to the permutation (but in THIS case, we HAVE to ACT!) better than the negative can articulate a specific link with an impact to the aff’s specific mechanism (sure, constructions of terrorism are bad, but Al Qaeda is real, right?). Third, kritik debaters have become willing to spot the affirmative their impacts and fiat, which means that the perm has this weird status as combining a theoretical worldview (the kritik) with a possibly incompatible policy action (the aff), but the two worlds never seem to interact in any robust sense. Even if none of these conditions hold in any given round, many affs are still likely to see the perm as their preferred first option. But if you read realism, you have made the negative’s job in winning the perm extremely easy.
First, realism generates philosophical mutual exclusivity. While the aff might subscribe to a worldview that is incompatible with the kritik, that must be proven by the negative. Most affirmatives speak about the world without making their assumptions explicit. This benefits the affirmative that wants to permute because their 1AC could be compatible with many different assumptions about how the world works. But as soon as the affirmative reads realism, they have destroyed this strategic ambiguity. Now, in the world where the aff read realism, all the negative has to prove is that realism is incompatible with the kritik. They can concede that the aff is realist and then win realism can’t coexist with the alternative. The pragmatics of the plan become of secondary importance in this scenario. Furthermore, the above discussion about how realism disproves the aff’s impact claims also means that the negative can create a strategic double bind for the aff; either the aff is realist, which means it cannot solve its advantages (defense, I know, but it’s an important defensive argument when weighing the K versus the advantages), or it is realist, in which case, the aff links (offense).
Second, if the affirmative reads realism, the negative no longer has to win specific links to the aff. If the negative wins that realism makes bad predictions about the world and believing in realism leads to more violence, then you have given the negative grounds to win a new kritik that implicates all the rest of your answers to the kritik. If the aff also reads predictions good, now the negative can say that realism deforms prediction such that we get the Iraq War. If you say threats are real, the negative can say that the only real threat to the US under realism is a rising power and the only rising power is China, so you don’t have any advantages; furthermore, the historically most often way to deal with a rising power is preemptive war, so your impact is inevitable. And if you say realism is inevitable, this becomes a new link to the kritik because you are so indebted to a single ontological and epistemological viewpoint that you foreclose any alternatives, which is why rejecting the aff is a prerequisite for any alternatives to form.
There is a scenario where you would want to read realism, and that is if you just planning to impact turn the kritik, in which case, granting the aff new links is not a problem. If this is your strategy, realism can be a handy tool. If not, it is more of a liability than an aid.
The Fourth and last post in this series will discuss possible alternative theories of international relations that do a better job of conforming with the 1AC and a permutation-based strategy against the kritik.
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