Cuba Embargo Affirmative and Negative - Wake 2013

Wake Forest Debate [___User Name___]
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1AC Version 1
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Plan
Plan: The United States federal government should remove the economic embargo against Cuba.
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AD1: US-Cuba Relations

Removing the embargo restores US-Cuba relations now is the key time to prevent permanent isolation Tisdall 13 (Simon, Death of Hugo Chvez brings chance of fresh start for US and Latin America, 3/5/13,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/05/hugo-chavez-dead-us-latin-america/print)
Hugo Chvez's departure furnishes Barack Obama with an opportunity to repair US ties with Venezuela, but also with other Latin American states whose relations with Washington were adversely affected by Chvez's politics of polarisation and the Bush administration's viscerally unintelligent reaction. In particular, the change of leadership in Caracas could unlock the deadlock over Cuba, if the White House can summon the requisite political will. Possibly anticipating a transition, Washington quietly engineered a
diplomatic opening with Caracas last November after a lengthy standoff during which ambassadors were withdrawn. Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, telephoned Nicols Maduro, Venezuela's vice-president and Chvez's preferred successor, and discussed, among other things, the restoration of full diplomatic relations. "According to US officials, the Venezuelan vice-president offered to exchange ambassadors on the occasion of the beginning of President Barack Obama's second term. Jacobson, in turn, is said to have proposed a step-by-step approach to improve bilateral relations, starting with greater co-operation in counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism and energy issues," Andres Oppenheimer reported in the Miami Herald. There is much ground to make up. "Relations between the United States and Venezuela have ranged from difficult to hostile since Chvez took office in 1999 and began to implement what he calls 21st-century socialism," wrote a former US ambassador to Caracas, Charles Shapiro. "Chvez blamed a failed 2002 coup against him on the United States (not true), nationalised US companies, insulted the president of the United States and blamed 'the empire' his term for the United States for every ill In foreign affairs, the government actively supports the Assad regime in Syria, rejects sanctions on Iran and generally opposes the US at every turn." Despite such strains, economic self-interest always prevented a complete rupture. The US remained Venezuela's most important trading partner throughout Chvez's presidency, buying nearly half its oil exports. Caracas is the fourth largest supplier of oil to the US. In fact, the US imports more crude oil annually from Mexico and Venezuela than from the entire Persian Gulf. This shared commerce now provides a formidable
incentive and a launch platform for a fresh start. Whether the opportunity is grasped depends partly on Maduro, a Chvez loyalist but a reputed pragmatist with close ties to Ral Castro in Cuba. Yet it depends even more on Obama, whose first term, after a promising start, ended up perpetuating Washington's historical neglect of Latin America. He now has a chance to do better. The political climate seems propitious. Economic and cultural ties are also strengthening dramatically. Trade between the US and Latin America
grew by 82% between 1998 and 2009. In 2011 alone, exports and imports rose by a massive 20% in both directions. "We do three times more business with Latin America than with China and twice as much business with Colombia [as] with Russia," an Obama official told Julia Sweig of the US Council on Foreign Relations. Latinos now comprise 15% of the US population; the US is the world's second largest Spanish-speaking country (after Mexico). Despite this convergence, high-level US strategic thinking about the region has continued to lag, Sweig argued. "For the last two decades, US domestic politics have too often driven Washington's Latin America agenda whether on issues of trade, immigration, drugs, guns or that perennial political albatross, Cuba, long driven by the supposedly crucial 'Cuban vote' in Florida," she said. Obama
could change this dynamic if he tried and one way to do it would be to unpick the Cuban problem, which continues to colour the way Latin Americans view Washington. "Having won nearly half of the Cuban American vote in Florida in 2012, a gain of 15 percentage points over 2008, Obama can move quickly on Cuba. If he were to do so, he would find a cautious but willing partner in Ral Castro, who needs rapprochement with Washington to advance his own reform agenda," Sweig said. A move by Obama to end travel restrictions and the trade embargo on Cuba would be applauded across the region, explode old stereotypes about gringo oppressors, and help build confidence with Venezuela, the Castro regime's key backer, she suggested.
Recent easing of restrictions is only a first step the plan is critical to normalize economic engagement, five reasons Creamer 11 (Robert, political organizer and strategist for four decades, Changes in U.S. Cuba Policy
Good First Step -- But It's Time to Normalize Relations, 1/18/11, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robertcreamer/changes-in-us-cuba-policy_b_810161.html)
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The changes in U.S. Cuba policy announced Friday by the Obama administration represent a welcome
first step in changing the failed half-century old policy that has sought to bring change in Cuba by isolating the island nation from the United States. The administration announced that within the next two weeks it would make it easier for religious and academic organizations to send delegations to Cuba; return regulations governing people-to-people trips to Cuba to those that pertained during the Clinton Administration; and expand the number of airports that can be used by tour operators as embarkation points to the island. In addition, it expanded the amount of money that can be sent by Americans to ordinary Cuban citizens. Administration spokespeople explained that all of these steps were taken to
strengthen Cuban civil society. They will certainly have that effect. In fact, the
time has come to completely normalize
relations with Cuba, end our economic embargo. Here's why: 1). Our policy of isolating Cuba has failed to bring change to Cuba. Fidel Castro and his successor Raul Castro, have outlasted presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and two
years of the Obama Administration. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting to get a different result. By that definition, the past policy of attempting to isolate Cuba was, to put it charitably, daft. This failed approach to Cuba was originally justified as part of the Cold War policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union. That policy has now outlasted the Soviet Union by over two decades. A shooting war in Vietnam in which almost 50,000 Americans were killed has come and gone. Vietnam is now a reliable U.S. trading partner and favorite tourist destination, but the policy of isolating Cuba -- with which we have never had a violent conflict -- remains. Richard Nixon long ago made peace with China which, though still an officially Communist country, is now one of our most crucial trading partners and holds much of our country's debt. But our policy of isolating relatively tiny Cuba -- just 90 miles from our shore -- continues. Of course one of the reasons for the failure of this ancient policy is that it was long ago abandoned by every other country in the world. Canadians vacation at Cuban resorts. South Americans sell Cuban agricultural products. Our European allies all have friendly relations, but our policy of isolating
Cuba persists. 2). The only real accomplishment of past isolationist policies toward Cuba was to restrict the rights of U.S. citizens. Even after the changes announced Friday, most ordinary Americans are still prevented from traveling to Cuba. It is the only place on earth to which our own government prevents us from traveling. It is the freedom of Americans that is being abridged -- and we should be just as outraged by that limitation on our freedom as we are by a gag order on our freedom of speech or an abridgment of our freedom of religion. What is particularly galling is that past restrictions on our freedom to travel to Cuba have actually helped limit the opening of Cuban society that is its alleged rationale. Want to open up Cuban society? Then engage them in travel and trade. Invite their students to the United States and encourage our students to study in their universities. Encourage cultural exchanges, baseball games, soccer tournaments. The new policy begins to do those things, and it's about time. But to the extent it persists, the policy of isolating Cuba and limiting American travel there not only limits our freedom -- it actually prevents the presumed goal of our policy -- to open up Cuba. 3). By maintaining our economic embargo we penalize the American economy and cost American jobs. Our economic "boycott" does not so much prevent Cuba from getting the things its needs (though it definitely makes the lives of ordinary Cubans more difficult), as it prevents American companies and farmers from selling them American products. Creating American jobs should be our government's number one priority yet the Cuban embargo prevents the sales of American-made products to a customer that would be ready and willing to buy. The result? Other countries sell Cuba the same products and benefit by the creation of jobs in their countries rather than the United States. 4). Our failure to normalize relations with Cuba undermines American interests throughout the world -and particular in Latin America. U.S. policy towards Cuba has been a major sore point with other countries in Latin America, who view it as a vestige of Yankee paternalism toward the entire region. And it is used by those who want to harm America as another piece of anti-American propaganda. Far from isolating Cuba, we have isolated ourselves. Virtually all of America's major allies have normal economic and political relationships with Cuba. Last year, the United Nations General Assembly voted for the seventeenth time -- in seventeen years -- to condemn our economic embargo of Cuba -- this time by a vote of 185 to 3. In December the thirty-three Caribbean and Latin American nations that are members of the Rio Group voted to give Cuba full membership and called on the U.S. to end the embargo. 5). Domestic political support for the embargo -- especially among Cuban Americans in Florida -- has crumbled. The proximate political reason for our past Cuba policy has been the large Cuban American voter block in southern Florida. Many Cuban Americans emigrated here immediately after the Cuban Revolution half a century ago and were virulently anti-Castro. In fact, with the Republican takeover of the House, hard line anti-Cuba Congresswoman Illeana Ros-Lehtinen is now the Chair of the House
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Committee on International Relations. She works with a well organized hard-line lobby, that has raised a large financial war chest to punish Members of Congress who support changing our relations with Cuba. But Ros-Lehtinen and her hard line allies are increasingly isolated in the Cuban American community itself. Polls now show that 67 percent of Cuban Americans support allowing all Americans to travel to Cuba (Bendixen poll: Conducted April 14-16, 2009 -- Cuban Americans only). The Obama Administration's recent announcement of limited changes in Cuban travel policy is overwhelmingly supported by Cuban Americans. A December poll showed a strong majority of Florida voters (67 percent) and Florida's Cuban American voters (59 percent)
support permitting Americans to visit Cuba for limited purposes such as academic exchanges, travel by religious and cultural groups, athletic events and research missions. The same poll showed that Cuba policy is far from the most important issue affecting the votes of Cuban Americans today. In an open-ended question asking Florida Cuban Americans which issues would be most important in determining their vote for President in 2012, the economy was first (45 percent) and jobs was second (13 percent). Less than one percent of Cuban voters mentioned Cuba in any way. When asked if they would be more or less likely to support President Obama if he restored full diplomatic relations, 28 percent of Florida Cuban Americans said it would make them more likely and 29 percent said less likely. In other words, the Cuba issue has ceased to be a factor in determining the votes of the majority of Florida Cuban Americans. In fact, another poll of Cuban Americans taken last November showed 55 percent of Cuban Americans favored lifting the embargo. A
massive array of organizations has welcomed the Administration's new initiatives and support further change. The Catholic Church, both in Cuba and the United States has
repeatedly called for an end to the economic embargo. Friday, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) praised the Administration's actions. The Chairman of the USCCB, Bishop Howard J. Hubbard of Albany, New York, issued a statement that said: These
needed new policies are modest but important steps towards advancing our hopes for a better relationship between our people and the people of Cuba, a relationship which holds great promise of fostering positive and real change in Cuba. Amen to that.
Two impacts: First, is Russia normalized relations with Cuba are necessary to prevent Russian expansionism Stratfor 8 [The Russian Resurgence and the New-Old Front,
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20080915_russian_resurgence_and_new_old_front] Containment requires that United States counter Russian expansionism at every turn, crafting a new coalition wherever Russia attempts to break out of the strategic ring, and if necessary committing direct U.S. forces to the effort. The Korean and Vietnam wars both traumatic periods in American history were manifestations of this effort, as were the Berlin airlift and the backing of Islamist militants in Afghanistan (who incidentally went on to form al Qaeda). The Georgian war in August was simply the first effort by a resurging Russia to pulse out ,
expand its security buffer and, ideally, in the Kremlins plans, break out of the post -Cold War noose that other powers have tied. The Americans (and others) will react as they did during the Cold War: by building coalitions to constrain Russian expansion. In Europe, the challenges will be to keep the Germans on board and to keep NATO cohesive. In the Caucasus, the United States will need to deftly manage its Turkish alliance and find a means of engaging Iran. In China and Japan, economic conflicts will undoubtedly take a backseat to security cooperation. Russia and the United States will struggle in all of these areas, consisting as they do the Russian borderlands. Most of the locations will feel familiar, as Russias near abroad has been Russias near abroad for nearly 300 years. Those locations the Baltics, Austria, Ukraine, Serbia, Turkey, Central Asia and Mongolia that defined Russias conflicts in times gone by will surface again. Such is the tapestry of history: the major powers seekin g advantage in the same places over and over again. The New Old-Front But not all of those fronts are in Eurasia. So long as U.S. power projection puts the Russians on the defensive, it is only a matter of time before something along the cordon cracks and the Russians are either fighting a land war or facing a local insurrection. Russia must keep U.S. efforts dispersed and captured by events as far
away from the Russian periphery as possible preferably where Russian strengths can exploit American weakness. So where is that? Geography dictates that U.S. strength involves coalition building based on mutual interest and long-range
force projection, and internal U.S. harmony is such that Americas intelligence and security agencies have no need to shine. Unlike Russia, the United States does not have large, unruly, resentful, conquered populations to keep in line. In contrast, recall that the multiethnic nature of the Russian state requires a powerful security and intelligence apparatus. No place better reflects Russias intelligence strengths
and Americas intelligence weakness than Latin America. The United States faces no traditional security threats in its
backyard. South America is in essence a hollow continent, populated only on the edges and thus lacking a deep enough hinterland to ever coalesce into a single hegemonic power. Central America and southern Mexico are similarly fractured, primarily due to rugged terrain. Northern Mexico (like Canada) is too economically dependent upon the United States to seriously consider anything more vibrant than ideological hostility toward Washington. Faced with this kind of local competition, the United States simply does not worry too much about the rest of the Western Hemisphere except when someone comes to visit. Stretching back to the time of the Monroe Doctrine, Washingtons Latin American policy has been very simple. The United States does not feel threatened by any local power, but it feels inordinately threatened by any Eastern Hemispheric power that could ally with a local entity. Latin American entities cannot greatly harm American interests themselves, but they can be used as fulcrums by hostile states further abroad to strike at the core of the United States power: its undisputed comman d of North America.
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It is a fairly straightforward exercise to predict where Russian activity will reach its deepest. One only needs to revisit Cold War history. Future Russian efforts can be broken down into three broad categories: naval interdiction, drug facilitation and direct territorial challenge. Naval
Interdiction Naval interdiction represents the longest sustained fear of American policymakers. Among the earliest U.S. foreign efforts after securing the mainland was asserting control over the various waterways used for approaching North America. Key in this American geopolitical imperative is the neutralization of Cuba. All the naval power-projection capabilities in the world mean very little if Cuba is both hostile and serving as a basing ground for an extra-hemispheric power. The U.S. Gulf Coast is not only the heart of the countrys energy industry, but the body of water that allows the United States to function as a unified polity and economy. The Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi river basins all drain to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The economic strength of these basins depends upon access to oceanic shipping. A hostile power in Cuba could fairly easily seal both the Straits of Florida and the Yucatan Channel, reducing the Gulf of Mexico to little more than a lake. Building on the idea of naval interdiction, there is another key asset the Soviets targeted at which the Russians are sure to attempt a reprise: the Panama Canal. For both economic and military reasons, it is enormously convenient to not have to sail around the Americas, especially because U.S. economic and military power is based on maritime power and access. In the Cold War, the Soviets established friendly relations with Nicaragua and arranged for a favorable political evolution on the
Caribbean island of Grenada. Like Cuba, these two locations are of dubious importance by themselves. But take them together and add in a Soviet air base at each location as well as in Cuba and there is a triangle of Soviet airpower that can threaten
access to the Panama Canal. Drug Facilitation The next stage drug facilitation is somewhat trickier. South
America is a wide and varying land with very little to offer Russian interests. Most of the states are commodity providers, much like the Soviet Union was and Russia is today, so they are seen as economic competitors. Politically, they are useful as anti-American bastions, so the Kremlin encourages such behavior whenever possible. But even if every country in South America were run by anti-American governments, it would not overly concern Washington; these states, alone or en masse, lack the ability to threaten American interests in all ways but one. The drug
trade undermines American society from within, generating massive costs for social stability, law enforcement, the health system and trade. During the Cold War, the Soviets dabbled with narcotics producers and smugglers, from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to the highland coca farmers of Bolivia. It is not so much that the Soviets encouraged the drug trade directly, but that they encouraged any group they saw as ideologically useful. STRATFOR expects future Russian involvement in such activities to eclipse those of the past. After the Soviet
fall, many FSB agents were forced to find new means to financially support themselves. (Remember it was not until 1999 that Vladimir Putin took over the Russian government and began treating Russian intelligence like a bona fide state asset again.) The Soviet fall led many FSB agents, who already possessed more than a passing familiarity with things such as smuggling and organized crime, directly into the heart of such activities. Most of those agents are formally or not back in the service of the Russian government, now with a decade of gritty experience on the less savory side of intelligence under their belts. And they now have a deeply personal financial interest in the outcome of future operations. Drug groups do not need cash from the Russians, but they do need weaponry and a touch of
training needs which dovetail perfectly with the Russians strengths. Obviously, Russian state involvement in such
areas will be far from overt; it just does not do to ship weapons to the FARC or to one side of the brewing Bolivian civil war with CNN watching. But this is a challenge the Russians are good at meeting. One of Russias current deputy prime ministers, Igor Sechin, was the USSRs point man for weapons smuggling to much of Latin America and the Middle East. This really is old hat for them. U.S.
Stability Finally, there is the issue of direct threats to U.S. stability, and this point rests solely on Mexico. With more than 100 million people, a growing economy and Atlantic and Pacific ports, Mexico is the only country in the Western Hemisphere that could theoretically (which is hardly to say inevitably) threaten U.S. dominance in North America. During the Cold War, Russian intelligence gave Mexico more than its share of jolts in efforts to cause chronic problems for the United States. In fact, the Mexico City KGB station was, and remains today, the biggest in the world. The Mexico City riots of 1968 were in part Sovietinspired, and while ultimately unsuccessful at overthrowing the Mexican government, they remain a testament to the reach of Soviet
intelligence. The security problems that would be created by the presence of a hostile state the size of Mexico on the southern U.S. border are as obvious as they would be dangerous. As with involvement in drug activities, which incidentally are likely to overlap in Mexico, STRATFOR expects Russia to be particularly active in destabilizing Mexico in the years ahead. But while an anti-American state is still a Russian goal, it is not their only option. The Mexican drug cartels have reached such strength that the Mexican gover nments control over large portions of the country is an open question. Failure of the Mexican state is something that must be considered even before the Russians get involved. And simply doing with the Mexican cartels what the Soviets once did with anti-American militant groups the world over could suffice to tip the balance. In many regards, Mexico as a failed state would be a worse result for Washington than a hostile
united Mexico. A hostile Mexico could be intimidated, sanctioned or even invaded, effectively browbeaten into submission. But a failed Mexico would not restrict the drug trade at all. The border would be chaos, and the implications of that go well beyond drugs. One of the United States largest trading partners could well devolve into a seething anarchy that could not help but leak into the U.S. proper. Whether Mexico becomes staunchly anti-
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American or devolves into the violent chaos of a failed state does not matter much to the Russians. Either
one would threaten the United States with a staggering problem that no amount of resources could quickly or easily fix. And the Russians right now are shopping around for staggering problems with which to threaten the United States. In terms of cost-benefit analysis, all of these options are no-brainers. Threatening naval interdiction simply requires a few jets. Encouraging the drug trade can be
done with a few weapons shipments. Destabilizing a country just requires some creativity. However, countering such activities requires a massive outlay of intelligence and military assets often into areas that are politically and militarily hostile, if not outright inaccessible. In many ways, this is containment in reverse.
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Russian imperialism will result in a US/Russian nuclear war Scaliger 8

(Charles Scaliger, staff writer for the New American, 9/30/2008, Fanning the Flames in Georgia, The New American, p. http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-mainmenu-26/europe-mainmenu-35/394) An American defense of Georgia could risk nuclear war, yet the Bush administration seems determined to turn this brush fire into a Cuban Missile Crisis-like stare-down. Occupying the territory between the Black and Caspian Seas, the rugged Caucasus
Mountains, where Europe and Asia meet, is a rough neighborhood. Home to dozens of different languages belonging to three entirely separate stocks the Indo-European, Altaic, and Caucasian proper and two major world religions, Christianity and Islam, the Caucasus are both a cultural crossroads and a patchwork of religious and ethnic animosities, some of them stretching back centuries. In an area where Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, Dagestanis, Ossetians, Kalmyks, Russians, Kurds, Turks, and many other ethnicities and tribes jockey for control of land and trade routes, conflicts are frequent, often bloody, and almost incomprehensible to those foreign to the region. One of those long-standing conflicts, the rivalry between Georgia and a small autonomous region known as South Ossetia, grabbed headlines in August as a result of a quick and decisive war between Georgia and Russia. The war began when Georgian troops, who had only days earlier participated in an international military exercise that also included roughly 1,000 Americans, invaded South Ossetia and laid siege to Tskhinvali, the regional capital. Russia, long an ally of the South Ossetians (North Ossetia is an autonomous territory or oblast within Russia), counterattacked by land, sea, and air, routing the Georgian military and occupying South Ossetia, another Georgian region with secessionist designs named Abkhazia, and a considerable swath of Georgian territory, including the important Georgian port of Poti on the Black Sea. Western leaders, including George Bush, who have been grooming Georgia's
The war was swiftly cast in the American media as a Soviet-style power play by Moscow, and dire warnings about a second Cold War were the order of the day. But as is so often the case, there is much more than meets the eye to the
president Mikheil Saakashvili for years, responded with self-righteous outrage, demanding a return to the status quo ante. ongoing Georgian conflict, the latest but surely not the last conflagration in the Caucasus. More Than Meets the Eye The Ossetians, descendants of the Alans, a warlike tribe which participated in the invasion of the Roman Empire along with the Vandals and Goths, lived originally along the Don River but were driven south into the Caucasus in the Middle Ages during the Mongol invasion. Their language belongs to the Indo-European stock and is closely related to Iranian and Kurdish. Most Ossetians converted to Christianity, and more than 60 percent of them are Christian today, although there is also a sizable Muslim minority. The land where many Ossetians chose to settle so many centuries ago, Georgia, has one of the oldest cultures on Earth and was, after Armenia, the second country to adopt Christianity as its official religion. Georgia's peculiar Caucasian language has a writing system all its own and literature stretching back many centuries. Because of this, and because of her millennia-long occupancy of a large portion of the central Caucasus, Georgians have long viewed the Ossetians as modern interlopers, trespassers on hallowed Georgian territory and undeserving of independence. By contrast with the Ossetians, the Abkhaz people of Georgia's other breakaway region have been in the Caucasus since time immemorial. Abkhazia, stretching along the northeast coast of the Black Sea, apparently converted to Christianity in the first half of the first millennium A.D., and has been by turns an independent state, a Roman conquest, a principality within the Byzantine Empire, a part of the medieval kingdom of Georgia, and an Ottoman possession. Like Georgia and Ossetia, Abkhazia became a part of the Russian Empire in the first decade of the 19th century, and like them was later absorbed into the Soviet Union as a part of the Soviet Republic of Georgia. When the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s, the newly independent nation of Georgia incorporated the two former Soviet autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgian leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia lost little time asserting control over the two restive regions, launching a war in 1991 against Ossetia, which had been in open revolt for two years. Russia entered the war on the side of the Ossetians, and after more than a year of bitter fighting and several thousand deaths, a cease-fire was signed restoring to Ossetia some measure of the autonomy (but not full independence) that the Georgian parliament had revoked in 1990. Gamsakhurdia, although a genuine Georgian patriot and longtime dissident against the Soviet government, was, like many of his compatriots, unwilling to give any political recognition to Georgia's minorities. "Georgia for Georgians" was a popular slogan at the time of independence, and self-determination on the part of the reviled Ossetians was not to be -contemplated. No sooner had the Ossetian conflict cooled in the summer of 1992 than Georgia invaded Abkhazia with several thousand troops, using the kidnapping of a Georgian government minister as a pretext. The Georgians took the Abkhaz capital Sukhumi with little resistance, but were eventually repulsed and driven from Abkhazia by a large force consisting of Abkhaz militia and sympathetic minorities from all over the Caucasus Circassians, Chechens, Cossacks, Ossetians, and others. The Abkhaz proceeded to expel or kill large numbers of Georgians, in a Balkan-style episode of "ethnic cleansing" little remarked in the West but possibly costing tens of thousands of lives, both Abkhaz and Georgian. Eduard Shevardnadze, former foreign minister of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and sometime president of Georgia, was in Sukhumi at the time and narrowly escaped death. From the early '90s to the present day, an uneasy status quo has held sway in both breakaway republics, with both Georgia and Russia maneuvering for control of the regions. With the ouster of President Shevardnadze in 2003 and the rise of Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgian politics have taken a decidedly pro-American tilt. Georgia sent a very large contingent of troops into Iraq all of whom were speedily evacuated and returned to Georgia, with American help, following the outbreak of the August war and, along with newly assertive Ukraine, applied for NATO membership. At the same time, Georgia has become a transit center for oil from the Caspian Sea. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, completed in 2005, crosses the country en route to the Turkish coast, and the Baku-Supsa pipeline,
, it would seem unwise for America to take sides or otherwise inject its influence, but that is precisely what the Bush government has chosen to do. Vowing to push for
brought online in 1999, ends at the Georgian Black Sea port of Supsa. Given the intractable enmities bound up in the Georgian conflict
Georgian entry into NATO, the Bush administration has leveled a steady barrage of criticism against Moscow for behaving precisely as the United States or any great power is wont to behave in its sphere of influence. "Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people," said President Bush. "Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century.... Russia's government must respect Georgia's territorial integrity and sovereignty." Given recent U.S. military interventions in Haiti and Panama (not to mention Iraq), the Bush administration's moral posturing over Russia's Georgia adventure (in which a number of Russian peacekeepers were killed before Moscow ever launched her counterattack) ring
NATO already commits the United States Armed Forces to defend all sorts of out-of-the-way places of no strategic value to the United States. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, former Soviet republics all, are already members; is America ready to start World War III to defend them? Yet that is precisely what the NATO alliance will require of us, should Russia ever decide to re-annex them, and it will do
hollow, to say the least. Nor is there any basis for defending Georgia's NATO ambitions, at least from an American point of view.
the same vis--vis Georgia, should this trouble-prone Caucasus state ever become a member. The Chief Motive As events stand, the Georgia/South Ossetia War, a brief, inconsequential flare-up in a region where the United States has no business looking for trouble, has
in the Black Sea. At the time of this writing, Russian bombers are in the Western Hemisphere (in Venezuela) for the first time since the Cold War, and the United States is threatening further unspecified measures against Russia for her intransigence. For her part, Russia has withdrawn her military forces from most of Georgia proper, but has kept large garrisons in both breakaway regions and formally recognized the independence of both. In spite of the triviality of the Caucasus flare-up, the powers that be in the West seem bent on antagonizing Russia. Immediately after the Georgian conflict, the Bush administration announced a deal to station missile interceptors ostensibly to defend Europe against Iranian warheads in Poland. Russia responded by sending long-range bombers to Venezuela and threatening to re-militarize Cuba. Defense of Georgia or even of her oil pipelines seems inadequate rationale for potential nuclear war, yet the Bush administration seems determined to turn this regional brush fire into a Cuban Missile Crisis-like international stare-down. The chief motive for the exaggerated hullabaloo is the expansion of NATO, which continues to absorb more nations and redefine its organizational mission almost two decades after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. What was once touted as a military alliance to defend the West and its interests against the communist menace has been reinvented as an all-purpose global military force. NATO led the Western European and American intervention in the various Balkan wars in the 1990s, and NATO forces are now in command of the war in Afghanistan, a conflict far removed from Cold War animosities. "Presumed dead more often than the hero in a melodrama," U.S. Ambassador to NATO R. Nicholas Burns wrote in 2003, "the new NATO keeps on defying the pundits' predictions by adapting itself to a rapidly changing world." Absorption of Georgia, the Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics has become a prime objective of the NATO organization, as NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer made clear in a recent speech in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. "The process of NATO enlargement will continue, with due caution but also with a clear purpose to help create a stable, undivided Europe," Scheffer said. "No other country will have a veto over that process, nor will we allow our strong ties to Georgia to be broken by outside military intervention and pressure." If the purpose
already led to near-naval confrontation between Russia and the United States
America's military was created to protect America and her vital interests, not those of Europe, much less the remote and fractious Caucasus. Yet if the Eurocrats in charge of NATO have their way, Georgia, along with all her Caucasian broils and her blood feud with Russia, will be drawn into the alliance, an event that will make war between Washington and Moscow much more likely than it ever was during the Cold War.
of NATO is now the creation of a "stable, undivided Europe," Americans would do well to wonder why America still belongs to the organization. After all,
US/Russian war causes extinction most probable Bostrom 2

(Nick Bostrom, professor of philosophy - Oxford University, March, 2002, Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards, Journal of Evolution and Technology, p. http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html)

A much greater existential risk emerged with the build-up of nuclear arsenals in the US and the USSR. An
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all-out nuclear war was a possibility with both a substantial probability and with consequences that might have been persistent enough to qualify as global and terminal. There was a real worry among those best acquainted with the information available at the time that a nuclear Armageddon would occur and that it might annihilate our species or permanently destroy human civilization.[4] Russia and the US retain large nuclear arsenals that could be used in a future confrontation, either accidentally or deliberately. There is also a risk that other states may one day build up large nuclear arsenals. Note however that a smaller nuclear exchange, between India and Pakistan for instance, is not an existential risk, since it would not destroy or thwart humankinds potential permanently. Such a war might however be a local terminal risk for the cities most likely to be targeted.
Unfortunately, we shall see that nuclear Armageddon and comet or asteroid strikes are mere preludes to the existential risks that we will encounter in the 21st century.
Second, is China US-Cuba relations check Chinese influence in the region Benjamin-Alvadaro 6 (Jonathan, Report for the Cuban Research Institute, Florida International University, PhD,
Professor of Political Science at University of Nebraska at Omaha, Director of the Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence Program at UNO, Treasurer of the American Political Science Association, The Current Status and Future Prospects for Oil Exploration in Cuba: A Special, http://cri.fiu.edu/research/commissioned-reports/oil-cuba-alvarado.pdf)
Additionally, Venezuela remains the fourth largest importer of oil to the United States and one can surmise that the existing trade arrangements between the U.S. and Venezuela will remain intact, the evolution of the Bolivarian revolution under Chavez and a growing Chinese presence in the region notwithstanding. Additionally, pursuing such a path would allow United States policymakers to take advantage of what Cuba has to offer in the following areas: domestic technical capabilities; continuing human capital development; strategic positioning in the Caribbean, and an improved diplomatic stature.
Cuba, by any measure, possesses a largely untapped technical capacity owing to advanced training and education in the core mathematic and scientific areas. This was clearly demonstrated by its attempt to develop a nuclear energy capability in the 1980s and 1990s whereby thousands of Cubans pursued highly technical career paths leaving Cuba with among the highest ratios of scientists and engineers to the general population in all of the Americas. Moreover, the foundation of Cubas vaunted public education system remains intact and increased investment under various scenarios suggests that Cuba will continue to produce a welleducated workforce that will be critical to its future economic vitality. This raises an important consideration that
being the role that Cuba will play in the region in the 21st century. It suffices to say that Cuba remains the strategically important state by virtue of its geographical location alone, in efforts against drug and human trafficking and related national and regional security matters. The extent to which a stable Cuban government has cooperated with the U.S. in drug interdiction efforts in the past suggests that the results from improved diplomatic relations between neighbors would have the effect of improving national security concerns related to terrorist activity, illicit weapons transfers and the like. Ultimately, a successful normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba in these areas may well enhance and stabilize regional relations that could possibly lessen (or at a minimum, balancing) fears of a Chinese incursion in hemispheric affairs. To lessen those fears it may be useful to review the present structure of jointventure projects in the energy sector in Cuba to ascertain the feasibility and possible success of such an undertaking become available to American firms. Moreover, it is interesting to note that U.S. firms in the agriculture sector have successfully negotiated and consummated sales to Cuba totaling more than $1 billion dollars over the past four years under conditions that are less than optimal circumstances but have well-served the commercial interests of all parties involved.
US influence in the region is critical to deter conflict China is trying to displace the US Dowd 12 (Alan, Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, Crisis in the
America's, http://www.ascfusa.org/content_pages/view/crisisinamericas)
Focused on military operations in the Middle East, nuclear threats in Iran and North Korea, and the global threat of terrorism,
U.S. policymakers have neglected a growing challenge right here in the Western Hemisphere: the expanding influence and reach of China. Eyeing energy resources to keep its economy humming, China
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is engaged in a flurry of investing and spending in Latin America. In Costa Rica, China is funding a $1.24-billion
upgrade of the countrys oil refinery; bankrolling an $83 -million soccer stadium; backing infrastructure and telecommunications improvements; and pouring millions into a new police academy. In C olombia, China is planning a massive dry canal to link the countrys Pacific and Atlantic coasts by rail. At either terminus, there will be Chinese ports; in between, there will be Chinese assembly facilities, logistics operations and distribution plants; and on the Pacific side, there will be dedicated berths to ship Colombian coal outbound to China. In mid-January, a Chinese-built oil rig arrived in Cuba to begin drilling in Cubas swath of the Gulf of Mexico. Reuters reports that Spanish, Russian, Malaysian and Norwegian firms will use the rig to extract Cuban oil. For now, China is focusing on onshore oil extraction in Cuba. New offshore discoveries will soon catapult Brazil into a top-five global oil producer. With some 38 billion barrels of recoverable oil off its coast, Brazil expects to pump 4.9 million barrels per day by 2020, as the Washington Times reports, and China has used generous loans to position itself as the prime beneficiary of Brazilian oil. Chinas state-run oil and banking giants have inked technology-transfer, chemical, energy and real-estate deals with Brazil. Plus, as the Times details, China came to the rescue of Brazils main oil company when it sought financing for its ma ssive drilling plans, pouring $10 billion into the project. A study in Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ) adds that Beijing plunked down $3.1 billion for a slice of Brazils vast offshore oil fields. The JFQ study reveals just how deep and wide Beijing is spreading its financial influence in Latin America: $28 billion in loans to Venezuela; a $16.3-billion commitment to develop Venezuelan oil reserves; $1 billion for Ecuadoran oil; $4.4 billion to develop Peruvian mines; $10 billion to help Argentina modernize its rail system; $3.1 billion to purchase Argentinas petroleum company outright. The New York Times adds that Beijing has lent Ecuador $1 billion to build a hydroelectric plant. There is good and bad to Beijings increased interest and investment in t he Western Hemisphere. Investment fuels development, and much of Latin America is happily accelerating development in the economic, trade, technology and infrastructure spheres. But Chinas riches come with strings. For instance, in
exchange for Chinese development funds and loans, Venezuela agreed to increase oil shipments to China from 380,000 barrels per day to one million barrels per day. Its worth noting that the Congressional Research Service has reported concerns in Washington that Hugo Chavez might try to supplant his U.S. market with China. Given that Venezuela pumps an average of 1.5 million barrels of oil per day for the U.S.or about 11 percent of net oil importsthe results would be devastating for the U.S. That brings us to the security dimension of Chinas checkbook diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere. Officials with the U.S. Southern Command conceded as early as 2006 that Beijing had approached every country in our area of responsibility and provided military exchanges, aid or training to Ecuador, Jamaica, Bolivia, Cuba, Chile and Venezuela. The JFQ study adds that China has an important and growing presence in the regions military institutions. Most Latin American nations, including Mexico, send officers to professional military education courses in the PRC. In Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia, Beijing has begun to sell sophisticated hardwaresuch as radars and K-8 and MA-60 aircraft. The JFQ report concludes, ominously, that Chinese defense firms are likely to leverage their experience and a growing track record for their goods to expand their market share in the region, with the secondary consequence being that those purchasers will become more reliant on the associated Chinese logistics, maintenance, and training infrastructures that support those products. Put it all together, and the southern flank of the United States is exposed to a range of new security challenges. To be sure, much of this is a function of Chinas desire to secure oil markets. But theres more at work here than Chinas thirst for oil. Like a global chess match, China is probing Latin America and sending a message that just as Washington has trade and military ties in Chinas neighborhood, China is developing trade and military ties in Americas neighborhood. This is a direct challenge to U.S. primacy in the regiona challenge that must be answered.
First, Washington needs to relearn an obvious truththat Chinas rulers do not share Americas valuesand needs to shape and conduct its China policy in that context. Beijing has no respect for human rights. Recall that in China, an estimated 3-5 million people are rotting away in laogai slave-labor camps, many of them guilty of political dissent or religious activity; democracy activists are rounded up and imprisoned; freedom of speech and religion and assembly do not exist; and internal security forces are given shoot-to-kill orders in dealing with unarmed citizens. Indeed, Beijing viewed the Arab Spring uprisings not as an impetus for political reform, but as reason to launch its harshest crackdown on dissent in at least a decade, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. In short, the ends always justify the means in Beijing. And that makes all the difference when it comes to foreign and defense policy. As Reagan counseled during the Cold War, There is no true international security without respect for human rights. Second, the U.S. must stop taking the Western
Hemisphere for granted, and instead must reengage in its own neighborhood economically, politically and militarily. That means no more allowing trade dealsand the partners counting on themto languish. Plans for a hemispheric free trade zone have faltered and foundered. The trade-expansion agreements with Panama and Colombia were left in limbo for years, before President Obama finally signed them into law in 2011. Reengagement means reviving U.S. diplomacy. The Wall Street Journal reports that due to
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political wrangling in Washington, the State Department position focused on the Western Hemisphere has been staffed by an interim for nearly a year, while six Western Hemisphere ambassadorial posts (Uruguay, Venezuela, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Barbados) remain empty. Reengagement means reversing plans to slash defense spending. The Joint Forces Command noted in 2008 that China has a deep respect for U.S. military power. We cannot overstate how important this has been to keeping the peace. But with the United States in the midst of massive military retrenchment, one wonders how long that reservoir of respect will last. Reengagement also means revitalizing security ties. A good model to follow might be whats happening in Chinas backyard. To
deter China and prevent an accidental war, the U.S. is reviving its security partnerships all across the Asia-Pacific region. Perhaps its time to do the same in Latin America. We should remember that many Latin American countriesfrom Mexico and Panama to Colombia and Chileborder the Pacific. Given Beijings actions, it makes sense to bring these Latin American partners on the Pacific Rim into the alliance of alliances that is already stabilizing the AsiaPacific region. Finally, all of this needs to be part of a revived Monroe Doctrine. Focusing on Chinese encroachment in the Americas, this Monroe Doctrine 2.0 would make it clear to Beijing that the United States welcomes Chinas efforts to conduct trade in the Americas but discourages any claims of controlimplied or explicitby China over territories, properties or facilities in the Americas. In addition,
Washington should make it clear to Beijing that the American people would look unfavorably upon the sale of Chinese arms or the basing of Chinese advisors or military assets in the Western Hemisphere. In short, what it was true in the 19th and 20th centuries must remain true in the 21st: There is room for only one great power in the Western Hemisphere.
Specifically, increased Chinese influence risks war over Taiwan Fergusson 12 (Robbie, Researcher at Royal Society for the Arts, Featured Contributor at International
Business Times, Former Conference & Research Assistant at Security Watch, Former Researcher at University College London, Master of Science, China in the International Arena, The University of Glasgow, The Chinese Challenge to the Monroe Doctrine, http://www.e-ir.info/2012/07/23/doeschinese-growth-in-latin-america-threaten-american-interests/)
Taiwan domestic, or foreign policy? Chinas
goals in the region amount to more than the capture of natural resources. Although the Peoples Republic of China considers resolution of the Taiwan issue to be a domestic issue, it is with some irony that one of Chinas main foreign policy goals is to isolate Taipei internationally. The PRC and the ROC compete directly for international recognition among all the states in the world. . Nowhere is this more evident than in Latin America, where 12 of the 23 nations that still have official diplomatic relations with the ROC reside. The historical background Following the mainland Communist victory in
the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the nationalist Kuomintang retreated to the island of Formosa (Taiwan) where it continued to claim to be the legitimate government of all of China. In June 1950 the United States intervened by placing its 7th fleet in the Taiwan straits to stop a conclusive military resolution to the civil war and slowly the battlefield became primarily political, concerned with legitimacy. When the United Nations was formed in 1945, the Republic of China (ROC) became one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. This gave the ROC a de facto advantage over the PRC in attaining recognition from other nation states; particularly as the diplomatic clout of the hegemonic United States supported its position as the true representative of the Chinese people, until the rapprochement of the 1970s, when the Nixon administration wished to improve ties with the de facto rulers of China in order to exploit the Sino-Soviet split. UN Resolution 2758 granted the China seat to the PRC at the expense of the ROC who were in effect exiled from the organization, and the famous 1972 visit of President Nixon to China further added legitimacy to the communist regime. All this resulted in a thawing of world opinion, and gradually as the durability and permanence of the PRC regime became ingrained, countries began switching their diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. The economics of international recognition In the Americas, the PRC had international recognition and longstanding support from ideological allies such as Cuba. However, the ROC has maintained more diplomatic support in the Americas than any other region,
mainly due to the small nature of the states involved and the importance of Taiwanese aid to their economies. Li notes that from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, roughly 10 percent of Taiwans direct foreign investment (FDI) went to Latin America and the Caribbean, [51] highlighting the concerted effort made in the region. Economic solidarity is increasingly important to the formation of the Taiwan-Latin America relationship, for two reasons. The first is that for Latin American states, the decision of which China to support is less ideological and political than it ever has been; which makes the decision a straight up economic zero-sum choice. The second is that Latin America is home to natural resources which are of great significance to the hungry growing economies of the PRC and the ROC regardless of international recognition. However, while the decision is not political for Latin American countries, for Taiwan, every country which switches its recognition to the PRC damages its legitimacy as a nation state in the international arena. The Table below shows the designation of diplomatic recognition in the region in 2008. Countries
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Recognising the PRC (China)Countries Recognising the ROC (Taiwan)Central AmericaMexico, Costa RicaEl Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, PanamaCaribbeanAntigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, Trinidad & TobagoBelize, Dominican Republic, Haiti, St Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the GrenadinesSouth AmericaArgentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, VenezuelaParaguay On the other hand, for the PRC, every state which withdraws its
support for the ROC takes it one step closer to being in a position where it can resolve the Taiwan issue unilaterally. Subsequently, undermining Taiwan is of the utmost importance to China, and it has taken to outbidding Taiwan in offers of foreign aid, a strategy made possible by the decline in aid from the defunct Soviet
Union, and the West, which is pre occupied with terrorism and th e Middle East. Li notes that the regions leaders have turned to Asia for help to promote trade and financial assistance, and consequently played the PRC and Taiwan against each other . [53] Despite its smaller size, Taiwan has fared remarkably well in this bidding war; focusing its aid investments on infrastructure such as stadiums in St Kitts & Nevis for the Cricket World Cup in 2007. However, even Taiwans economy can be put under strain by the seemingly relentless stream of foreign aid which has brought only debateable and mild gains to the Taiwanese cause. This has contributed to the PRC picking off the few
remaining supporters of the ROC take for example, the Dominican case. In early 2004, Commonwealth of Dominica asked Taipei
for a $58 million aid, which is unrelated to public welfare. The Caribbean nation had relied on Taiwan to develop its agriculture-based economy since 1983. Diplomatic relationship was soon broken after Taipei turned down the request. [54] This incident showcased the fact that in economic terms, the PRC is winning the battle for Latin America. Political strategies of the PRC In political terms too; the PRC is
in an advantageous position, thanks in part again to its position within the UN. While it can be argued that China p rovides incentives
but does not threaten harm to induce countries to defect from recognizing Taiwan, [55] the reality is that the use of force and direct harm are not the only means available to an economic entity as powerful as China. It refuses to maintain official relations with any state
that recognises the ROC; an action which can be quite prohibitive to the country being able to take advantage of the growing Chinese market. Although Domnguez suggests that the PRC has not been punitive toward those states
that still recognize the Republic of China (Taiwan), [56] the legitimacy of this claim has to be brought into question for example in June 1996, China fought the extension of the UN mission in Haiti, to punish the Caribbean nation for its appeal for UN acceptance of Taiwan. [57] This incident showed that China is prepared to use its global clout to play spoiler and apply indirect pressure on countries to adopt its position.
Similarly, Chinas experience with one-party rule has taught it the importance of party-to-party relations in addition to state-to-state relations, further cementing the PRC by establishing a relationship based on goodwill and common understanding. Indeed by the start of 1998 the CCP had established relations with almost all major political
parties in the countries that were Taiwans diplomatic allies in Latin America, [58] further isolating the ROC. The effect on American interests
Were the ROC to be deserted by its remaining allies in Latin America, the USA would be disadvantaged in attempting to maintain the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. A Taiwan that was not recognised by any state from the
Americas, or Europe (with the exception of the Vatican) would not be seen as a genuine sovereign entity whose defence would be more important than the upkeep of good relations between China and the West. As Chinas economic and political position in the world
improves vis--vis both America and Taiwan, so might its ambitions. The U.S.A might find itself in a position where it could no longer withstand the diplomatic pressure to allow the PRC to conclude a settlement on Taiwan, perhaps by force. Global nuclear war Hunkovic 9 American Military University (Lee J., The Chinese-Taiwanese Conflict: Possible Futures of a Confrontation between China, Taiwan and the United States of America, http://www.lamp-method.org/eCommons/Hunkovic.pdf) A war between China, Taiwan and the United States has the potential to escalate into a nuclear conflict and a third world war, therefore, many countries other than the primary actors could be affected by such a conflict, including Japan, both Koreas, Russia, Australia, India and Great Britain, if they were drawn into the war, as well as all other countries in the world that participate in the global economy, in which the United States and China are the two most dominant members.
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AD2: Cuban Economy

Multiple threats to Cubas economy risk collapse during the current transition Morris 11 (Emily, London Metropolitan University UK, FORECASTING CUBAS ECONOMY: 2, 5, AND 20 YEARS,
Presented at the international symposium Cuba Futures: Past and Present, organized by The Cuba Project Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies at The Graduate Center/CUNY, http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/bildn/cuba/cubaforecasting.pdf)
Risks in the short term

Political risks arise from the process of transferring leadership from the old guard to a new generation. Evidently conscious of the hazards, the old guard are seeking to closely manage the generational handover, but their control will diminish. So far signs of dissent within the government have been rare and weak, but in 2011 the
situation will begin to change radically. At the special conference of the PCC that will take place after the sixth PCC congress in April 2011, it seems likely that a new set of leaders will take up their posts. None of them will have the authority of the Castro brothers, and so for the first time for fifty years there is a possibility of the emergence of factionalism. In the TABLE 5. Two year forecast 2010 2011 2012 Real GDP (% growth) 2.1 3.5 4.2 Inflation (year-end, %)a a. This inflation figure is based on an estimated average household cost of living index that takes into account a reduction in the amount of basic goods available at heavily subsidised prices on the ration. The impact of the shift from subsidised consumption to market prices will vary widely between households, with the percentage rise in the cost of living being greater for those at the lower end of the income scale, who spend a higher proportion of their income on basic goods. 6.3 7.2 5.5 Average labour productivity (% growth) 4.2 5.9 4.5 Government spending/GDP ratio (%) 66.5 63.8 60.4 Investment/GDP ratio (%) 10.5 11.1 12.5Forecasting Cubas Economy: 2, 5, and 20 Years 13 context of the rapid changes taking place in the economic sphere, 2012 is likely to be a testing year. Despite its efforts to dampen
expectations, there is a sense among the Cuban public that they should see material benefits from the economic reforms. If these hopes are dashed, the government could face a serious crisis of public confidence. In the economic sphere, there are many hazards arising from the process of transformation. There are risks that monetary growth will outstrip that of supply so that inflationary pressures could build, at a time when the government is losing its power to directly control prices. The extent to which the government will be able to manage the fiscal challenge it has set itself to achieve sufficient savings and raise sufficient tax revenue to maintain welfare provision whilst phasing out the existing apparatus of social protectionwill depend on its ability to respond quickly to difficulties as they arise. A major fiscal crisis would jeopardise the reform process, and hamper the government's ability to respond to social pressures created by the extensive realignment of relative incomes that will result from the changes. External risks are heightened by Cubas lack of access to emergency financing in the case of unanticipated shocks. The largest single risk comes from Cubas high degree of dependency on Venezuela, and in particular on earnings from the export of professional services. Hugo Chvez, on whom the relationship rests, does not face re-election until 2012 but if anything were to befall him before then, the Cuban economy would suffer. The high degree of uncertainty about the global economy also
presents risks, with the recovery in OECD countries fragile and signs of strain within the economies of the growth leaders, China and India. 14 C
Squo reforms are not enough only the plan promotes a successful transition, increased economic ties are key Piccone 13 (Joseph, Brookings Institute Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Foreign Policy, Opening to Havana, 1/17/13,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/01/opening-to-havana)
Under Raul Castro, the Cuban government has continued to undertake a number of important reforms to modernize its economy, lessen its dependence on Hugo Chavezs Venezuela, and allow citizens to make their own decisions about their economic futures. The process of reform, however, is gradual, highly controlled and short on yielding game-changing results that would ignite the economy. Failure to tap new offshore oil and gas fields and agricultural damage from Hurricane Sandy dealt further setbacks. Independent civil society remains confined, repressed and harassed, and strict media and internet controls severely restrict the flow of information. The Castro generation is slowly handing power over to the next generation of party and military leaders who will determine the pace and scope of the reform process. These trends suggest that an inflection point is approaching and that now is the time to try a new paradigm for de-icing the frozen
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conflict. The embargo the most complex and strictest embargo against any country in the world has handcuffed the United States and has prevented it from having any positive influence on the islands developments. It will serve American interests better to learn how to work with the emerging Cuban leaders while simultaneously
ramping up direct U.S. outreach to the Cuban people. I recommend that your administration, led by a special envoy appointed by you and reporting to the secretary of state and the national security advisor, open a discreet dialogue with Havana on a wide range of issues, without preconditions. The aim of the direct bilateral talks would be to resolve outstanding issues around
migration, travel, counterterrorism and counternarcotics, the environment, and trade and investment that are important to protecting U.S. national interests. Outcomes of these talks could include provisions that normalize migration flows, strengthen border security, break down the walls of communication that hinder U.S. ability to understand how Cuba is changing, and help U.S. businesses create new jobs. In the
context of such talks your special envoy would be authorized to signal your administrations willingness to remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, pointing to its assistance to the Colombian peace talks as fresh evidence for the decision. This would remove a
major irritant in U.S.-Cuba relations, allow a greater share of U.S.-sourced components and services in products that enter Cuban commerce, and free up resources to tackle serious threats to the homeland from other sources like Iran. We should also consider authorizing payments for exports to Cuba through financing issued by U.S. banks and granting a general license to allow vessels that have entered Cuban ports to enter U.S. ports without having to wait six months. You can also facilitate technical assistance on market-oriented reforms from international financial institutions by signaling your intent to drop outright opposition to such moves. Under this chapeau of direct talks, your administration can seek a negotiated solution to the thorny issue of U.S. and Cuban citizens serving long prison sentences, thereby catalyzing progress toward removing a major obstacle to improving bilateral relations. You should, in parallel, also take unilateral steps to expand direct contacts with the Cuban people by: authorizing financial and technical assistance to the burgeoning class of small businesses and cooperatives and permitting Americans to donate and trade in goods and services with those that are certified as independent entrepreneurs, artists, farmers, professionals and craftspeople; adding new categories for general licensed travel to Cuba for Americans engaged in services to the independent economic sector, e.g., law, real estate, insurance, accounting, financial services; granting general licenses for other travelers currently authorized only under specific licenses, such as freelance journalists, professional researchers, athletes, and representatives of humanitarian organizations and private foundations; increasing or eliminating the cap on cash and gifts that non- Cuban Americans can send to individuals, independent businesses and families in Cuba; eliminating the daily expenditure cap for U.S. citizens visiting Cuba and removing the prohibition on the use of U.S. credit and bank cards in Cuba; authorizing the reestablishment of ferry services to Cuba; expanding the list of exports licensed for sale to Cuba, including items like school and art supplies, athletic equipment, water and food preparation systems, retail business machines, and telecommunications equipment (currently allowed only as donations). The steps recommended above would give your administration the tools to have a constructive dialogue with the Cuban government based on a set of measures that 1) would engage Cuban leaders in high-level, face-to-face negotiations on matters that directly serve U.S. interests in a secure, stable, prosperous and free Cuba; and 2) allow you to assert executive authority to take unilateral steps that would increase U.S. support to the Cuban people, as mandated by Congress. To take this step, you will have to contend
with negative reactions from a vocal, well-organized minority of members of Congress who increasingly are out of step with their constituents on this issue. Your initiative should be presented as a set of concrete measures to assist the Cuban people, which is well within current congressional mandates, and as a way to break the stalemate in resolving the case of U.S. citizen Alan Gross (his wife is calling for direct negotiations). Those are winnable arguments. But you will need to be prepared for some unhelpful criticism along the way.
Conclusion: Current U.S. policy long ago outlived its usefulness and is counterproductive to advancing the goal of helping the Cuban people. Instead it gives Cuban officials the ability to demonize the United States in the
eyes of Cubans, other Latin Americans and the rest of the world, which annually condemns the embargo at the United Nations. At this rate, given hardening attitudes in the region against U.S. policy, the Cuba problem may even torpedo your next presidential Summit of the Americas in Panama in 2015. It is time for a new approach: an initiative to test the willingness of the Cuban
government to engage constructively alongside an effort to empower the Cuban people.
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We access multiple internal links to Cuban economic recovery

CETIM 3 (Centre Europe Tiers Monde, independent research and political organization working at the UN, THE EFFECTS OF THE US EMBARGO AGAINST CUBA AND THE REASONS OF THE URGENT NEED TO LIFT IT, http://www.cetim.ch/oldsite/2003/03js04w4.htm)
The harmful economic effects of the embargo

From an official Cuban source, the direct economic damages caused to Cuba by the US embargo since its institution would exceed 70 billion dollars. The damages include: 1) the loss of earnings due to the obstacles to the development of services and exportations (tourism, air transport, sugar, nickel; 2) the losses registered as a result of the geographic reorientation of the commercial flows, (additional costs of freight, stocking and commercialization at the purchasing of the goods); 3) the impact of the limitation imposed on the growth of the national production of goods and services (limited access to technologies, lack of access to spare parts and hence early retirement of equipment, forced restructuring of firms, serious difficulties sustained by the sectors of sugar, electricity, transportation, agriculture); 4) the monetary and financial restrictions (impossibility to renegotiate the external debt, interdiction of access to the dollar, unfavourable impact of the variation of the exchange rates on trade, "riskcountry", additional cost of financing due to US opposition to the integration of Cuba into the international financial institutions); 5) the pernicious effects of the incentive to emigration, including illegal emigration (loss of human resources and talents generated by the Cuban educational system); 6) social damages affecting the population (concerning food, health, education, culture, sport). ! If it affects negatively all the sectors, the embargo directly impedes - besides the exportations - the driving forces of the Cuban economic recovery, at the top of which are tourism, foreign direct investments (FDI) and currency transfers. Many European subsidiaries of US firms had recently to break off negotiations for the management of hotels, because their lawyers
anticipated that the contracts would be sanctioned under the provisions of the "Helms-Burton law". In addition, the buy-out by US groups of European cruising societies, which moored their vessels in Cuba, cancelled the projects in 2002-03.
The obstacles imposed by the United States, in violation of the Chicago Convention on civil aviation, to the sale or the rental of planes, to the supply of kerosene and to access to new technologies (e-reservation, radio-localization), will lead to a loss of 150 million dollars in 2003. The impact on the FDI is also very unfavourable. The institutes of promotion of FDI in Cuba
received more than 500 projects of cooperation from US companies, but none of them could be realized - not even in the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry, where Cuba has a very attractive potential. The transfer of currencies from the United States is limited (less than 100 dollars a month per family) and some European banks had to restrain their commitment under the pressure of the US which let them know that indemnities would be required if the credits were maintained. In Cuba, the embargo penalizes the activities of the bank and
finance, insurance, petrol, chemical products, construction, infrastructures and transports, shipyard, agriculture and fishing, electronics and computing, but also for the export sectors (where the US property prevailed before 1959), such as those of sugar, whose recovery is impeded by the interdiction of access to the fist international stock exchange of raw materials (New York), of nickel, tobacco, rum.
Cuban instability collapse causes Latin American instability and terror attacks Gorrell 5 (Tim, Lieutenant Colonel, CUBA: THE NEXT UNANTICIPATED ANTICIPATED
STRATEGIC CRISIS? 3/18/5, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA433074) Regardless of the succession, under the current U.S. policy, Cubas problems of a post Castro transformation only worsen. In addition to Cubans on the island, there will be those in exile who will return claiming authority. And there are remnants of the dissident community within Cuba who will attempt to exercise similar authority. A power vacuum or absence of order will create the conditions for instability and civil war. Whether Raul or another successor from within the current government can hold power is debatable. However, that individual will nonetheless extend the current policies for an indefinite period, which will only compound the Cuban situation. When Cuba finally collapses anarchy is a strong possibility if the U.S. maintains the wait and see approach. The U.S. then must deal with an unstable country 90 miles off its coast. In the midst of this chaos, thousands will flee the island. During the Mariel boatlift in 1980 125,000 fled the island.26 Many were criminals; this time the number could be several

policy, the
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hundred thousand fleeing to the U.S., creating a refugee crisis. Equally important, by adhering to a negative containment
U.S. may be creating its next series of transnational criminal problems. Cuba is along the axis of the drugactions have shown that its stance on drugs is more than hollow rhetoric as indicated by its increasing seizure of drugs
trafficking flow into the U.S. from Columbia. The Castro government as a matter of policy does not support the drug trade. In fact, Cubas 7.5 tons in 1995, 8.8 tons in 1999, and 13 tons in 2000.27 While there may be individuals within the government and outside who engage in drug trafficking and a percentage of drugs entering the U.S. may pass through Cuba, the
Cuban government is not the path of least resistance for the flow of drugs. If there were no Cuban restraints, the flow of drugs to the U.S. could be greatly facilitated by a Cuba base of operation and accelerate considerably. In the midst of an unstable Cuba, the opportunity for radical fundamentalist groups to operate in the region increases. If these groups can export terrorist activity from Cuba to the U.S. or throughout the hemisphere then the war against this extremism gets more complicated. Such activity could increase direct attacks and disrupt the economies, threatening the stability of the fragile democracies that are budding throughout the region. In light of a failed state in the region, the U.S. may be forced to deploy military forces to Cuba, creating the conditions for another insurgency. The ramifications of this action could very well fuel greater anti-American sentiment throughout the Americas. A proactive policy now can mitigate these potential future problems.
U.S. domestic political support is also turning against the current negative policy. The Cuban American population in the U.S. totals 1,241,685 or 3.5% of the population.28 Most of these exiles reside in Florida; their influence has been a factor in determining the margin of victory in the past two presidential elections. But this election strategy may be flawed, because recent polls of Cuban Americans reflect a decline for President Bush based on his policy crackdown. There is a clear softening in the Cuban-American community with regard to sanctions. Younger Cuban Americans do not necessarily subscribe to the hard-line approach. These changes signal an opportunity for a new approach to U.S.-Cuban relations. (Table 1) The time has come to look realistically at the Cuban issue. Castro will rule until he dies. The only issue is what happens then? The
U.S. can little afford to be distracted by a failed state 90 miles off its coast. The administration, given the present state of world affairs, does not have the luxury or the resources to pursue the traditional American model of crisis management. The President and other government and military leaders have warned that the GWOT will be long and protracted. These warnings were sounded when the administration did not anticipate operations in Iraq consuming so many military, diplomatic and economic resources. There is justifiable concern that Africa and the Caucasus region are potential hot spots for terrorist activity, so these areas should be secure. North Korea will continue to be an unpredictable crisis in waiting. We also cannot ignore China. What if China resorts to aggression to resolve the Taiwan situation? Will the U.S. go to war over Taiwan? Additionally, Iran could conceivably be the next target for U.S. preemptive action. These are known and potential situations that could easily require all or many of the elements of national power to resolve. In view of such global issues, can the U.S. afford to sustain the status quo and simply let the Cuban situation play out? The U.S. is at a crossroads: should the policies of the past 40 years remain in effect with vigor? Or
should the U.S. pursue a new approach to Cuba in an effort to facilitate a manageable transition to post-Castro Cuba?
That causes nuclear war and extinction Manwaring 5 adjunct professor of international politics at Dickinson
(Max G., Retired U.S. Army colonel, Venezuelas Hugo Chvez, Bolivarian Socialism, and Asymmetric Warfare, October 2005, pg. PUB628.pdf)
President Chvez also understands that the process leading to state failure is the most dangerous longterm security challenge facing the global community today. The argument in general is that failing and failed state status is the breeding ground for instability, criminality, insurgency, regional conflict, and terrorism. These conditions breed massive humanitarian disasters and major refugee flows. They can host evil networks of all kinds, whether they involve criminal business enterprise, narco-trafficking, or some form of ideological crusade such as Bolivarianismo. More specifically, these conditions spawn all kinds of things people in general do not like such as murder, kidnapping, corruption, intimidation, and destruction of infrastructure. These means of coercion and persuasion can spawn further human rights violations, torture, poverty, starvation, disease, the recruitment and use of child soldiers, trafficking in women and body parts, trafficking and proliferation of conventional weapons systems and WMD, genocide, ethnic cleansing, warlordism, and criminal anarchy. At the same time, these actions are usually unconfined and spill over into regional syndromes of poverty, destabilization, and conflict.62 Perus Sendero Luminoso calls violent and destructive activities that facilitate the processes of state failure armed propaganda. Drug cartels operating throughout the Andean Ridge of South America and
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elsewhere call these activities business incentives. Chvez considers these actions to be steps that must be taken to bring about the political conditions necessary to establish Latin American socialism for the 21st century.63 Thus, in addition to helping to provide wider latitude to further their tactical and operational objectives, state and nonstate actors strategic efforts are aimed at progressively lessening a targeted regimes credibility and capability in terms of its ability and willingness to govern and develop its national territory and society. Chvezs intent is to focus his primary attack politically and psychologically on selected Latin American governments ability and right to govern. In that context, he understands that popular perceptions of corruption, disenfranchisement, poverty, and lack of upward mobility limit the right and the ability of a given regime to conduct the business of the state. Until a given populace generally perceives that its government is dealing with these and other basic issues of political, economic, and social injustice fairly and effectively, instability and the threat of subverting or destroying such a government are real.64 But failing and failed states simply do not go away. Virtually anyone can take advantage of such an unstable situation. The tendency is that the best motivated and best armed organization on the scene will control that instability. As a consequence, failing and failed states become dysfunctional states, rogue states, criminal states, narco-states, or new peoples democracies. In connection with the creation of new peoples democracies, one can rest assured that Chvez and his Bolivarian populist allies will be available to provide money, arms, and leadership at any given opportunity. And, of course, the longer dysfunctional, rogue, criminal, and narco-states and peoples democracies persist, the more they and their associated problems endanger global security, peace, and prosperity.65
Bioterror attacks would target the US Bryan 1 (Anthony T. Bryan, director of the North-South Centers Caribbean Program, 10-21-2001. CFR, Terrorism, Porous Borders, and
Homeland Security: The Case for U.S.-Caribbean Cooperation, p. http://www.cfr.org/publication/4844/terrorism_porous_borders_and%20_homeland_%20security.html)
Terrorist acts can take place anywhere. The Caribbean is no exception. Already the linkages between drug trafficking and terrorism are clear in countries like Colombia and Peru, and such connections have similar potential in the Caribbean. The security of major industrial complexes in some Caribbean countries is vital. Petroleum refineries and major industrial estates in Trinidad, which host more than 100 companies that produce the majority of the worlds methanol, ammonium sulphate, and 40 percent of U.S. imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), are vulnerable targets. Unfortunately, as experience has shown in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, terrorists are likely to strike at U.S. and European interests in Caribbean countries. Security issues become even more critical when one considers the possible use of Caribbean countries by terrorists as bases from which to attack the United States. An airliner hijacked after departure
from an airport in the northern Caribbean or the Bahamas can be flying over South Florida in less than an hour. Terrorists can sabotage or seize control of a cruise ship after the vessel leaves a Caribbean port. Moreover, terrorists with false passports and visas issued in the Caribbean may be able to move easily through passport controls in Canada or the United States. (To help counter this possibility, some countries have suspended "economic citizenship" programs to ensure that known terrorists have not been inadvertently granted such citizenship.) Again, Caribbean
countries are as vulnerable as anywhere else to the clandestine manufacture and deployment of biological weapons within national borders.
Extinction
STEINBRUNER 97 - Brookings senior fellow and chair in international security, vice chair of the committee on international security and arms control of the National Academy of Sciences (John D. Steinbruner, Winter 1997, Foreign Policy, Biological weapons: a plague upon all houses, n109 p85(12), infotrac) Although human pathogens are often lumped with nuclear explosives and lethal chemicals as potential weapons of mass destruction, there is an obvious, fundamentally important difference: Pathogens are alive, weapons are not. Nuclear and chemical weapons do not reproduce themselves and do not
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independently engage in adaptive behavior; pathogens do both of these things. That deceptively simple observation has immense implications. The use of a manufactured weapon is a singular event. Most of the damage occurs immediately. The aftereffects, whatever they may be, decay rapidly over time and distance in a reasonably predictable manner. Even before a nuclear warhead is detonated, for instance, it is possible to estimate the extent of the subsequent damage and the likely level of radioactive fallout. Such predictability is an essential component for tactical military planning. The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely controlled. For most potential biological agents, the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens - ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use - the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit.
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Blocks
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Relations Advantage
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Plan Solves / Embargo Key

Lifting the embargo against economic engagement solves relations, Cubas economy, and democratic stability
Whiting 13 (Ashley, LEEHG Institute for Foreign Policy, Policy Recommendation to Lift the Cuban Embargo, 1/30/13,
http://www.leehg.org/?p=467)
The United States embargo against Cuba has failed to fulfill its purpose even half a century after its implementation. Although the Cold War ended over twenty years ago, the United States still utilizes this outdated mindset in their relations towards Cuba. The Cuban embargo is one of the last relics of the Cold War era, and it is time to move forward in terms of foreign policy. During a time when containment was the overruling policy of foreign affairs, imposing an embargo against Cuba was rational diplomacy. In todays times though, using failed and outdated tactics against Cuba will not yield the results that the United States desires. The time has come
to reform relations with Cuba. The Cuban embargo should be lifted due to the sanctions ineffectiveness, the correlation between wealth and democracy, the benefits of free trade, and the disapproval by the international community. Before entering into the core arguments against the embargo, it is important to
understand the history of U.S.-Cuban relations. The embargo was implemented in 1960, during the height of the Cold War, when the Cuban government nationalized U.S. businesses on their land. The Castro regime has still not paid their reparations, and most likely will not do so anytime soon. With the rising communist government, the support from the Soviet Union, and the looming danger of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the embargo was a highly reasonable decision at that time. Although U.S.S.R.-Cuban relations troubled the U.S. fifty years ago, this relationship is no longer an issue. The Helms-Burton act, implemented during the Clinton Administration, strengthened the sanctions but allowed for humanitarian aid. Although critics of the embargo hoped that President Obama would ease these trade restrictions in 2009, the President has openly stated that he shall continue the embargo until Cuba shows signs of democratization. One of the core arguments against the embargo is that the sanctions have failed to spread democracy to Cuba. Although economic sanctions provide an attractive alternative to full-scale military intervention against an antagonistic nation, they often prove to be ineffective. According to research by Abel Escriba-Folch and Joseph Wright in their publication, Dealing with Tyranny: International Sanctions and the Survival of Authoritarian Rulers, a sanction will fail if it is unsuccessful at affecting the citizens in a leaders support coalition. This concept correlates perfectly with the core arguments of the rational political ambition theory. A leaders support coalition is the percentage o f people which a leader must satisfy in order to remain in office. If a leader wants to maintain power, then domestic policies must be focused on satisfying the winning coalition. Considering this hypothesis, dictators will value private goods due to the small size of their winning coalition, whereas democratic leaders will distribute more public goods due to the large size of their winning coalition.[5] Although research shows that sanctions are more effective against other democracies, the United States generally imposes sanctions against authoritarian governments. These sanctions may be used to destabilize a totalitarian state, or to simply demonstrate disapproval. Unintentionally, sanctions against dictatorships generally harm those citizens outside of the electorate. These citizens cannot choose their leaders, but they still face the extreme consequences of their governments policies. If a sanction fails to negatively alter the support coalitions loyalty, then the leader shall remain in office. Some studies suggest that imposed sanctions strengthen a dictatorship since the leader must reinforce oppression in response to rising foreign pressure. If this is true, then one could argue that the embargo strengthens the Castro regime more than Cubas chances of democratization.[5] Considering the correlation between wealth and democracy, lifting the embargo can serve as a beneficial strategy in democratizing Cuba. Research from Freedom House and GDP measurements have demonstrated a strong correlation between a states economic growth and level of democracy. Considering the gruesome fate that generally awaits a dictator after leaving office, it is predictable for totalitarian leaders to avoid implementing democratic reforms. Since the United States cannot force Castro to reform, the U.S. must take a different approach.
By strengthening the Cuban middle class, the U.S. can indirectly push Cuba further down the path of democratization. One well-known hypothesis, created by political sociologist Seymour Martin
Lipset, states that, The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain a democracy.[3] Various examples in history have supported this hypothesis, such as with the prosperity of South Korea. A
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once autocratic nation, South Korea has flourished after decades of industrialization and urbanization. A strong
middle class is the core of a democracy, since economic stability allows for more political participation.
Increased economic inequality may not directly decrease democratic stability, but an impoverished population certainty will. If the majority of a population lacks the necessary resources to fulfill their basic needs, then the probability of them participating in politics is quite low. Without such opportunities, these oppressed people can only change their government in the form of a revolution. Even so, revolutions are rare, unpredictable, chaotic, and catastrophic to those directly involved. When considering basic macroeconomic ideas, free trade is theoretically preferable over pure self-reliance. In this age of globalization, the increased rise of economic interdependency must not be ignored. If each country produces that which they have a comparative advantage in, then all states can capitalize on their own prosperity. A tariff on trade generally helps those companies that cannot compete, but such restrictions defeat the purpose of comparative advantage. Even the concept of free trade between international markets injures communism at its core. Lifting the trade embargo shall not only stimulate the United States
economy, but shall also improve the living conditions of the Cuban population. By opening up the markets in Cuba, the country may slowly move towards capitalist ideals. [4] The Cuban embargo has become
increasingly unpopular through the eyes of the public. The international community overwhelmingly condemns the Cuban embargo, with the U.N. General Assembly member states voting 186-2 against the embargo in 2011.[2] Critics of the embargo argue that the United States uses a double standard towards foreign policy with Cuba. The U.S. does not always trade with other capitalist democracies. China is a communist country, and is also one of the United States most important trading partners. Saudi Arabia is commonly defined as a di ctatorship, yet the U.S. receives oil and other valued resources from this state. In the long run, Castros communism shall eventually crumble. However, the Cuban embargo has not helped this process of democratization. The embargo has failed at destabilizing the Castro regime, and succeeded in unintentionally harming the civilian population. These sanctions
are ineffective since they have failed at directly harming Castros support coalition. The lack of a strong middle class decreases Cubas chances of democratizing, and enables Castro to continue his oppression.
Instead of coercing Castro into making top-down democratic reforms, the U nited States can stimulate the Cuban economy and encourage reform from the bottom-up. From a more liberal viewpoint, free trade shall benefit the United States economy since it may allow a new source of income and a wider access of resources. All things considered, the United States should lift this failed embargo and take a new approach in influencing the domestic politics of Cuba.
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Engagement Key
Increased economic engagement is uniquely key
Piccone 13 (Joseph, Brookings Institute Senior Fellow and Deputy Director, Foreign Policy, Opening to Havana, 1/17/13,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/01/opening-to-havana)
Your second term presents a rare opportunity to turn the page of history from an outdated Cold War approach to Cuba to a new era of constructive engagement that will encourage a process of reform already underway on the island. Cuba is changing, slowly but surely, as it struggles to adapt its outdated economic model to the 21st century while preserving one-party rule. Reforms that empower Cuban citizens to open their own businesses, buy and sell property, hire employees, own cell phones, and travel off the island offer new opportunities for engagement. Recommendation: You can break free of the straitjacket of the embargo by asserting your executive authority to facilitate trade, travel and communications with the Cuban people. This will help establish your legacy of rising above historical grievances, advance U.S. interests in a stable, prosperous and democratic
Cuba, and pave the way for greater U.S. leadership in the region.
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Now Key
Now is the key time both economic and political issues align Tisdall 13 (Simon, 4/8/13, Time for U.S. and Cuba to kiss and make up, http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/08/opinion/opinionsimon-tisdall-cuba)
But Obama's approach is the antithesis of the politics of hate and division. He broke that mold last year, making big gains among the Cuban American electorate. This result suggested the polarized ethnicallybased politics of the past may be breaking down, said Julia Sweig of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations in a recent article in The National Interest. "Having won nearly half of the Cuban American vote in Florida in 2012, a gain of 15 percentage points over 2008, Obama can move quickly on Cuba. If he were to do so, he would find a cautious but willing partner in Ral Castro, who needs rapprochement with Washington to advance his own reform agenda," Sweig said. Little wonder Republicans like RosLehtinen are worried. If things go on like this, they could lose a large piece of their political raison d'etre. There are other reasons for believing the time is right for Obama to end the Cuba stalemate. The recent death of Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's influential president, has robbed Havana of a strong supporter, both political and financial. Chavez was not interested in a rapprochement with the U.S., either by Cuba or Venezuela. His revolutionary beliefs did not allow for an accommodation with the American "imperialists." His successors may not take so militant a line, especially given that Venezuela continues to trade heavily with the U.S., a privilege not allowed Cuba. The so-called "pink tide" that has brought several left-wing leaders to power in Latin America in the past decade is not exactly on the ebb, but the hostility countries such as Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia felt towards the Bush administration has abated. In fact, according to Sweig's article, U.S. business with Latin America as a whole is booming, up 20% in 2011. The U.S. imports more crude oil from Venezuela and Mexico than from the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. The U.S. does three times more business with Latin America than with China. The standoff over Cuba is an obstacle to advancing U.S. interests and business in Latin American countries, and vice versa. The continuation of the embargo has left the U.S. almost totally isolated at the United Nations, and at sharp odds with its major allies, including Britain and the EU. But more importantly, the continued ostracism of Cuba's people -- for they, not the Havana government, are the biggest losers -- is unfair, unkind and unnecessary. If the U.S. wants full democracy in Cuba, then it should open up fully to ordinary Cubans. Tear down the artificial walls that separate the people of the two countries and, as Mao Zedong once said, let a hundred flowers bloom.
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AT Russia Impact D
Furthermore, this is the only scenario for global conflict all other conflicts are contained locally ROZZOFF 2009 (Rick, Manager of STOP NATO International, February 27, Baltic Sea: Flash Point for NATO-Russia Conflict, http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/baltic-sea-flash-point-for-natorussia-conflict/, accessed January 28, 2010, JN) The world has been on edge for a decade now and a form of numbing has set in with many of its inhabitants; a permanent
condition of war apprehension and alert has settled over others, particularly those in areas likely to be directly affected. Over the past six
years the worst and most immediate fears have centered on the prospects of three major regional conflicts, all of which are fraught with the danger of eventual escalation into nuclear exchanges. The three are a renewed and intensified Indian-Pakistani conflict, an
outbreak of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula and an attack by the U.S., Israel or both in unison against Iran. The first would affect neighbors both in possession of nuclear weapons and a combined population of 1,320,000,000. The second could set Northeast Asia afire with China and Russia, both having borders with North Korea, inevitably being pulled into the vortex. The last could lead to an explosion in the Persian Gulf and throughout the Middle East, with the potential of spilling over into the Caspian Sea Basin, Central and South Asia, the Caucasus and
even the Balkans, as the U.S. and NATO have strategic air bases in Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan and, at least for the time being, Kyrgyzstan that would be employed in any major assault on Iran, and the latter would retaliate against both land- and sea-based threats as best it could. In the event that any of the three scenarios reached the level of what in a humane and sensible world would be
considered the unthinkable the use of nuclear weapons the cataclysmic consequences both for the respective regions involved and for the world would be incalculable. Theoretically, though, all three nightmare models could be
geographically contained. There is a fourth spot on the map, however, where most any spark could ignite a powder keg that would draw in and pit against each other the worlds two major nuclear powers and immediately and ipso facto develop into a world conflict. That area is the Baltic Sea region. In 2003, months before NATO would grant full membership to the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Russian Defense Minister at the time, Sergei Ivanov, warned that such a development would entail the deployment of NATO, including American, warplanes a three-minute flight away from St. Petersburg, Russias second
largest city. And just that occurred. NATO air patrols began in 2004 on a three month rotational basis and U.S. warplanes just completed their
second deployment on January 4 of this year. Had history occurred otherwise and Soviet warplanes alternated with those of fellow Warsaw Pact nations in patrolling over, say, the St. Lawrence Seaway or the Atlantic Coast off Nova S cotia, official Washingtons response wouldnt be hard to imagine or long in coming. A 2005 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council confirmed that the U.S. maintained 480 nuclear bombs in Europe, hosted by six NATO allies, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey. More recent estimates indicate that over 350 American nuclear weapons remain in Europe to the present time. If the six above-mentioned nations continue to host nuclear arms, what would new NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the first and third currently governed by former U.S. citizens, president Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Valdas Adamkus, respectively deny the Pentagon? In the interim between the
accession of the three Baltic states and former Soviet republics into NATO and now, the Alliance as a whole and the U.S. in particular have expanded their permanent military presence within all three nations: Estonia and Latvia which both border the main body of Russia and Lithuania which abuts the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
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Cuba Economy Advantage
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Collapse Now / Plan Solves***

High risk for Cuban economic collapse now is the key time, only the plan solves
Morris 11 (Emily, London Metropolitan University UK, FORECASTING CUBAS ECONOMY: 2, 5, AND 20 YEARS,
Presented at the international symposium Cuba Futures: Past and Present, organized by The Cuba Project Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies at The Graduate Center/CUNY, http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/bildn/cuba/cubaforecasting.pdf)
Risks in the medium term Five years is a very long time in politics, and with the near certainty of both a generational transition and a deep and disruptive overhaul of the system of economic management and structure of relative prices, forecasting is particularly hazardous. The one-party political system will be severely tested. If the government were to collapse, the range of possible scenarios would be huge: the economy might collapse in to chaos and hyperinflation amidst violent conflict, or enjoy a US financed boom, depending on the circumstances. However, It is worth noting that, as ever, the probability of government collapse remains smaller than is estimated by those hoping for a political transition. If it were not, the exercise of forecasting a survival scenario would perhaps be a futile one. Forecasting Cubas Economy: 2, 5, and 20 Years 21 Even in the absence of political collapse, there remain substantial risks of economic instability and weakness. The reform process, which includes the removal of subsidies and extensive realignment of relative prices and incomes, will create inflationary pressures that will be hard to contain. The forecast of a steady rise in average productivity is derived from an expectation that the positive impact of the introduction of market signals and improvement in incentives will outweigh the disruption costs. The slow rate of average real income growth would imply continued pressure on the government to maintain subsidies for basic goods and extend welfare provision to households struggling to adapt to the new conditions, draining fiscal resources and increasing the temptation to raise taxes on productive activity to levels that discourage innovation and enterprise, or push activity back from the formal economy to the informal sector. If Cubas reform wave were to coincide with deteriorating external conditions, rather than the
relatively benign scenario presented in the EIUs global assumptions, the political and economic risks would be greater. The danger of upsets in the global economy remains heightened by concerns about high debt levels and sluggish growth in the EU and Europe, and inflated asset prices among the rapidly-growing economies of the developing world. A deterioration in global conditions might feed through to Cuban economic performance through collapse in the nickel price or surge in oil or food prices, or a sudden contraction in tourist arrivals. The single event
that would have the greatest negative impact on Cubas economic prospects, however, would be the replacement of Hugo Chvez with a hostile regime in Venezuela, particularly if this were to coincide with high international oil prices. A similar degree of shock, but on the positive side, would arise from
the lifting of the US travel ban, opening of the US market to Cuban exports or removal of restrictions on US and multilateral financial flows to Cuba.
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Plan K2 Cuban Reforms

Increasing US ties by removing the embargo is critical to Cubas transition
CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February 2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032)
Repealing Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions that limit the Executive Branchs authority over Cuba policy.
Over time, U.S. policies toward Communist countries with poor human rights records and histories of adversarial relationssuch as China and Vietnamhave evolved toward diplomatic normalization and economic engagement. Policymakers in both parties have rightly judged that engagement, rather than isolation, better serves U.S. national interests and lends greater credibility to calls for political and economic reform. The Cuba Study Group believes the most effective way to break the deadlock of allor-nothing conditionality and remedy the ineffectiveness of current U.S. policy is by de-codifying the embargo against Cuba through the repeal of Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions that limit the Executive Branchs authority over Cuban policy.xviii Repealing Helm-Burton and related statutory provisions would shift the primary focus of U.S. Cuba policy away from the regime and toward empowering Cuban people. It would also enhance the leverage of the United States to promote a multilateral approach toward Cuba, as well as embolden reformers, democracy advocates and private entrepreneurs inside the island to press their government for greater change. www.CubaStudyGroup.org 8 Decodifying the embargo would allow the Executive Branch the flexibility to use the entire range of foreign policy tools at its disposaldiplomatic, economic, political, legal and culturalto incentivize change in Cuba. The President would be free to adopt more efficient, targeted policies necessary for pressuring the Cuban leadership to respect human rights and implement political reforms, while simultaneously empowering all other sectors of society to pursue their economic wellbeing and become the authors of their own futures.xix Repealing Helms-Burton
would also free civil society development and assistance programs to be implemented outside of a contentious sanctions framework. Repealing the extraterritorial provisions of Helms-Burton would allow the United States greater
leverage in persuading the international community, especially key regional partners, to adopt a multilateral and targeted approach toward focusing on the advancement of human rights in Cuba. This would fundamentally transform the international dynamic that has long helped the Cuban government stifle dissent, since its efforts to isolate critics at home would increasingly lead to its own isolation from the international community. While it is difficult to prove a direct causal connection between economic reforms and an open society, modern history has taught us that it is increasingly difficult for dictatorial governments to maintain political control the more prosperity their people enjoy.xx Repealing
Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions would allow the U.S. the ability to efficiently promote and provide direct support to Cubas private sector. Such support would empower a greater plurality within Cuban society, including government reformers, democracy advocates, Cuban entrepreneurs and society as a whole by increasing their access to the resources and expertise of the worlds most prosperous private sector (and largest Cuban diaspora), located a mere 90 miles from Cubas shores. In turn, this would enhance the relative power of Cuban society to that of the state, while stripping the latter of its preferred scapegoat for its oppressive practices and economic blunders. U.S. policy should also seek to incentivize the Cuban government to end state monopolies on economic activities and allow greater private participation in the economy. The Cuba Study Group believes that any forthcoming congressional review of current legislation
relating to Cuba, such as a review of the Cuban Adjustment Act, must require a review of the totality of the legislative framework codified in HelmsBurton and related statutory provisions so that the United States may finally develop a coherent policy toward the Island. The U.S. should pursue this course of action independent of actions taken by the Cuban government so as not to place the reigns of U.S. policy in the hands of Cuban proponents of the status quo.
Removes the biggest crutch of Cuban economic dependency

CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February 2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032)
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The primary consequences of Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions have been to isolate the United States from Cuba and to serve as a political scapegoat for the Cuban governments many failures. It has become a Great Crutch to all sides of the Cuba debate. First, for ordinary Cubans, their struggle has fallen hostage to an international dispute between their government and the United States, which they see themselves as powerless to affect. For the Cuban leadership, it has become easier to blame the embargo than to adopt the difficult reforms needed to fix their economy. Lastly, for defenders of the status-quo within the Cuban-American community, it has become easier to wait for the United States to solve our national problem rather than engage in the difficult and necessary processes of reconciliation and reunification. Helms-Burton indiscriminately impacts all sectors of Cuban society, including democracy advocates and private entrepreneurs, causing disproportionate economic damage to the most vulnerable segments of the population. Conditioning our policy of resource denial on sweeping political reforms has only served to strengthen the Cuban government. The scarce resources available in an authoritarian Cuba have been and continue to be allocated primarily based on political priorities, thereby increasing the states relative power and its ability to control its citizens. The majority of American voters, Cuban-Americans and Cuban democracy advocates in the Island have rejected isolation as an element of U.S. policy toward Cuba and have called on the U.S. government to implement a policy of greater contact and exchange with Cuban society.ii As Cuba undergoes a slow and uncertain process of reforms, the continued existence of blanket U.S. sanctions only hinders the types of political reforms that Helms-Burton demands. Instead of maintaining a rigid policy that ties our hands and obsesses over hurting the Cuban leadership, U.S. policymakers should adopt a results-oriented policy that focuses primarily on empowering the Cuban people while simultaneously pressing the Cuban government to cease its repressive practices and respect fundamental human www.CubaStudyGroup.org 3 rights. Repealing Helms-Burton would also free civil society development and assistance programs to be implemented outside of a contentious sanctions framework. Furthermore, the Cuba Study Group believes that any forthcoming congressional review of current legislation relating to Cuba, such as a review of the Cuban Adjustment Act, must require a review of the totality of the legislative framework codified in Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions so that the United States may finally develop a coherent policy toward the Island.
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Remittances Internal
Remittances are key removing the embargo solves
Jorge 2k (Dr. Antonio, Professor of Political Economy at Florida International University, "The U.S. Embargo and the Failure
of the Cuban Economy" (2000).Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies Occasional Papers.Paper 28. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/iccaspapers/28)
In fact, the only reason why the Cuban economy has not utterly collapsed is because of the hefty remittances it continues to receive from various sources. The two main ones originate from Cuban exiles and non-governmental organizations in the United States. Annual income flows from the former on the order of US$800 million in-kind and cash, on top of other aid by philanthropic organizations worth a few hundred million dollars, should serve to dispose of the purely humanitarian objections to the embargo. Additionally, Cuba has succeeded in persuading some European and Latin American countries, as well as Japan and Canada, to finance its cumulative level of external indebtedness, mainly in the form of short-term commercial credit. These credits have allowed Cuba to run exceptionally high and growing deficits in its commercial balance during the 1990s. This situation, however, seems to be coming to an end, as non-performing loans keep on accumulating and as Cuba proves unable to repay principal or interest on them.
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Trade Deficit Internal

Plan boosts trade to Cuba Copeland 11 (Cassandra, Division of Economics and Business Administration, Oglethorpe University, The History and
Potential of Trade between Cuba and the US, Journal of Economics and Business, 2011, http://www.auburn.edu/~thomph1/cubahistory.pdf)
Relaxed travel and financial restrictions would increase trade. Florida has advanced in trade negotiations and operations but the product trade mix may favor other states. Positive effects on manufacturing are possible for major US exports including transport equipment and chemicals. There will be limited import competition in manufacturing until investment in Cuba improves infrastructure, machinery, and equipment to take advantage of cheaper labor. The Castro regime has emphasized social services including education, the 95% literacy rate suggesting potential for 13 quick growth. Any competition would be in labor intensive products. The US has already adjusted to such imports from Mexico in NAFTA and from Asia in the WTO. Trade with Cuba provides the opportunity for increased demand for US business services including engineering, construction, shipping, transport, banking, finance, insurance, and consulting. Tourism is expected to become a major industry, with Cuba already claiming interest in promoting multi-destination Caribbean tourism. Increased political pressure to liberalize trade can be expected as more US firms and workers become aware of the potential gains. Most Cubans in Miami now favor diplomatic relations with Cuba as well as limited trade according to the Institute for Public Opinion Research (2007). The US International Trade Commission conservatively estimates the embargo costs the US $1.2 billion annually in lost export revenue, not a huge amount but focused on particular industries and regions. The embargo costs the Southeastern US in particular. There remains little rationale for the embargo as it failed to reach any political objective and strengthened Castro. The Helms-Burton Act is also inconsistent with US policy that maintained relations with former communist adversaries. The Act pushes the limits of international agreements and procedures of the WTO as pointed out by Lisio (1996). Figure 12 shows the US was Cubas major trading partner before the embargo, a historical pattern poised to return with a lifted embargo. * Figure 12 * 4. Conclusion Cuba is poised to integrate into the regional economy including the US Southeast and the Caribbean. Except for protectionism, Cuba would have been a US state and the economic history of the region would have taken a different track. The embargo of the last half century is an economic tragedy that has suppressed development in the region encompassing the US Southeast. The 14 present look at history suggests trade and investment between the US and Cuba will return to substantial levels
with a lifted embargo.
Trade deficit is key to Cubas economy

of the Cuban Economy" (2000).Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies Occasional Papers.Paper 28. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/iccaspapers/28)
A telling indication of the lack of competitiveness of the Cuban economy is the fact that the magnitude of the steadily escalating annual deficits in foreign trade (nearly US$2 billion at the close of the 1990s) comes close to the total value of commodities exported by the country. At the same time, a sustained increase in the level of imported goods without a corresponding growth in the GSP point to the internal inefficiency of the economy. Otherwise, the disastrous performance of Cubas economy has been abundantly documented and does not bear detailed repetition. Enormous subsidies to both manufacturing and agricultural enterprises including, in the case of the latter, over two-thirds of the non-sugar cane growing, so-called basic units of agricultural production (BUAP/UBPC) and practically all those
Wake Forest Debate [___User Name___] dedicated to the cultivation of sugar cane constitute unexceptionable testimony to the overall insolvency of the economy. 14
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EXT Bioterror Impact

Bioterror risk is high and neg takeouts are wrong qualified experts confirm.
Deutch 5 (John Deutch, qualified inside this piece of evidence, is now at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Meeting the Bioterrorism Challenge: Testimony before U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Subcommittee on Bioterrorism and Public Health Preparedness -- May 11, 2005 -- http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/deutch/policy/72MeetingBioterroism2005.pdf) I base my views on my experience as Director of Central Intelligence and Deputy Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton administration, as a member of President George H.W. Bushs Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, as chairman of the Commission on the Organization of the Government to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction, and from the mid-seventies, my service on many Defense Science Board and other government advisory committees, that addressed various aspects of the weapons of mass destruction threat. My
views align closely with most who have studied the threat of bioterrorist and our biodefense preparedness. At the
World Economic Conference this January I served on a panel with Majority Leader Frist, a member of this subcommittee, that addressed bioterrorism and I believe our views on this important subject are quite similar. My assessment of the threat is as follows: o Terrorist groups with international reach, such as al Qaeda, have shown interest in biological weapons. The
technology for producing biological agents and dispersal mechanisms is well known and easily within the capacity of terrorist organizations. Thus the threat is real. o We are fortunate that the United States, our allies, and our deployed military forces have not yet been subject to a large-scale biological attack. The likelihood of an attack, our vulnerability to an attack, and the need to prevent catastrophic consequences, means that biodefense deserves to be a national priority. o Despite the many warning, and some progress by the
various involved government agencies, including Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health, (NIH), and the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS), our territory, citizens, agriculture and
livestock remain unacceptably vulnerable to a catastrophic biological agent attack. State and local government
cannot possibly deal with these events without significant technical and financial help from the federal government. o In the near term, the agents of greatest concern are anthrax and smallpox. In the longer term, it is entirely possible that new classes of pathogens
will be developed based on modern molecular biology and biotechnology techniques that will be more virulent and more difficult to detect and to treat. o To my knowledge, no comprehensive multi-year program plan exists that integrates the efforts of the
various agencies required to improve our nations biodefense posture.
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Impact Korea War

Gorrell says Latin American instability spills over to Korea Korean war goes nuclear
STRATFOR 10 (International Think Tank, North Korea, South Korea: The Military Balance on the Peninsula, http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20100526_north_korea_south_korea_military_balance_peninsula, May 26, 2010) So the real issue is the potential for escalation or an accident that could precipitate escalation that would be beyond the control of Pyongyang or Seoul. With both sides on high alert, both adhering to their own national (and contradictory) definitions of where disputed boundaries lie and with rules of engagement loosened, the potential for sudden and rapid escalation is quite real. Indeed, North Koreas navy, though sizable on paper, is largely a hollow shell of old, laid-up vessels. What remains are small fast attack craft and submarines mostly Sang-O Shark class boats and midget submersibles. These vessels are best employed in the cluttered littoral environment to bring asymmetric tactics to bear not unlike those Iran has prepared for use in the Strait of Hormuz. These kinds of vessels and tactics including, especially, the deployment of naval mines are poorly controlled when dispersed in a crisis and are often impossible to recall. For nearly 40 years, tensions on the Korean Peninsula were managed within the context of the wider Cold War. During that time it was feared that a second Korean War could all too easily escalate into and a thermonuclear World War III, so both Pyongyang and Seoul were being heavily managed from their respective corners. In fact, USFK was long designed to ensure that South Korea could not independently provoke that war and drag the Americans into it, which for much of the Cold War period was of far greater concern to Washington than North Korea attacking southward. Today, those constraints no longer exist. There are certainly still constraints neither the United States nor China wants war on the peninsula. But current tensions are quickly escalating to a level unprecedented in the post-Cold War period, and the constraints that do exist have never been tested in the way they might be if the situation escalates much further.
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Impact Africa War

Gorrell says Latin American instability spills over to Africa Great power war Glick 7 - Senior Middle East Fellow Center for Security Policy (Caroline, Condis African
Holiday, 12-12, http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/home.aspx?sid=56&categoryid=56&subcategoryid=90&newsid= 11568) The Horn of Africa is a dangerous and strategically vital place. Small wars, which rage continuously, can easily escalate into big wars. Local conflicts have regional and global aspects. All of the conflicts in this tinderbox, which controls shipping lanes from the Indian Ocean into the Red Sea, can potentially give rise to regional, and indeed global conflagrations between competing regional actors and global powers. The Horn of Africa includes the states of Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Kenya.
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Impact Caucus War

Gorrell says Latin American instability triggers wars in the caucus Central Asia war would trigger WWIII
F. William Engdhal, Global Research Associate, 10/11/08, The Caucasus Washington Risks nuclear war by miscalculation http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9790 So far, each step in the Caucasus drama has put the conflict on a yet higher plane of danger. The next step will no longer be just about the Caucasus, or even Europe. In 1914 it was the "Guns of August" that initiated the Great War. This time the Guns of August 2008 could be the detonator of World War III and a nuclear holocaust of unspeakable horror. Nuclear Primacy: the larger strategic danger Most in the West are unaware how dangerous the conflict over two tiny provinces in a remote part of Eurasia has become. What is left out of most all media coverage is the strategic military security context of the Caucasus dispute. Since the end of the Cold War in the beginning of the 1990s NATO and most directly Washington have systematically pursued what military strategists call Nuclear Primacy. Put simply, if one of two opposing nuclear powers is able to first develop an operational anti-missile defense, even primitive, that can dramatically weaken a potential counter-strike by the opposing sides nuclear arsenal, the side with missile defense has "won" the nuclear war. As mad as this sounds, it has been explicit Pentagon policy through the last three Presidents from father Bush in 1990, to Clinton and most aggressively, George W. Bush. This is the issue where Russia has drawn a deep line in the sand, understandably so. The forceful US effort to push Georgia as well as Ukraine into NATO would present Russia with the spectre of NATO literally coming to its doorstep, a military threat that is aggressive in the extreme, and untenable for Russian national security. This is what gives the seemingly obscure fight over two provinces the size of Luxemburg the potential to become the 1914 Sarajevo trigger to a new nuclear war by miscalculation. The trigger for such a war is not Georgias right to annex South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Rather, it is US insistence on pushing NATO and its missile defense right up to Russias door.
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Obama Credibility Add-on

Plan boosts Obamas credibility key to resolve multiple foreign policy conflicts Dickerson 10 (Lieutenant Colonel Sergio M. Dickerson, "United States Security Strategy Towards Cuba," Strategy
Research Project, www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA518053)
Conclusion Today, 20 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall its time to chip away at the diplomatic wall that still remains between U.S. and Cuba. As we seek a new foreign policy with Cuba it is imperative that we take into consideration that distrust will characterize negotiations with the Cuban government . On the other hand, consider that loosening or lifting the embargo could also be mutually beneficial . Cubas need and Americas surplus capability to provide goods and services could be profitable and eventually addictive to Cuba. Under these conditions, diplomacy has a better chance to flourish. If the Cuban model succeeds President Obama will be seen as a true leader for multilateralism. Success in Cuba could afford the international momentum and credibility to solve other seemingly wicked problems like the Middle East and Kashmir. President Obama could leverage this international reputation with other rogue nations like Iran and North Korea who might associate their plight with Cuba. 35 The U.S. could begin to lead again and reverse its perceived decline in the greater global order bringing true peace for years to come.
Impact is multiple scenarios for global war Coes 11 (Ben Coes 11, former speechwriter in the George H.W. Bush administration, managed Mitt Romneys successful
campaign for Massachusetts Governor in 2002 & author, The disease of a weak president, The Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/30/the-disease-of-a-weak-president/)
The disease of a weak president usually begins with the Achilles heel all politicians are born with the desire to be popular. It leads to pandering to different audiences, people and countries and creates a sloppy, incoherent set of policies. Ironically, it ultimately results in that very politician losing the trust and respect of friends and foes alike. In the case of Israel, those of us who are strong supporters can at least take comfort in the knowledge that Tel Aviv will do whatever is necessary to protect itself from potential threats from its unfriendly neighbors. While it would be preferable for the Israelis to be able to count on the United States, in both word and deed, the fact is right now they stand alone. Obama and his foreign policy team have undercut the Israelis in a multitude of ways. Despite this, I wouldnt bet against the soldiers of Shin Bet, Shayetet 13 and the Israeli Defense Forces. But Obamas weakness could in other places have implications far, far worse than anything that might ultimately occur in Israel. The triangular plot of land that connects Pakistan, India and China is held together with much more fragility and is built upon a truly foreboding foundation of religious hatreds, radicalism, resource envy and nuclear weapons. If you can only worry about preventing one foreign policy disaster, worry about this one. Here are a few unsettling facts to think about: First, Pakistan and India have fought three wars since the British de-colonized and left the region in 1947. All three wars occurred before the two countries had nuclear weapons. Both countries now possess hundreds of nuclear weapons, enough to wipe each other off the map many times over. Second, Pakistan is 97% Muslim. It is a question of when not if Pakistan elects a radical Islamist in the mold of Ayatollah Khomeini as its president. Make no mistake, it will happen, and when it does the world will have a far greater concern than Ali Khamenei or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a single nuclear device. Third, China sits at the northern border of both India and Pakistan. China is strategically aligned with Pakistan. Most concerning, China covets Indias natural resources. Over the
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years, it has slowly inched its way into the northern tier of India-controlled Kashmir Territory, appropriating land and resources and drawing little notice from the outside world. In my book, Coup DEtat, I consider this tinderbox of colliding forces in Pakistan, India and China as a thriller writer. But thriller writers have the luxury of solving problems by imagining solutions on the page. In my book, when Pakistan elects a radical Islamist who then starts a war with India and introduces nuclear weapons to the theater, America steps in and removes the Pakistani leader through a coup dtat. I wish it was that simple. The more complicated and difficult truth is that we, as Americans, must take sides. We must be willing to be unpopular in certain places. Most important, we must be ready and willing to threaten our military might on behalf of our allies. And our allies are Israel and India. There are many threats out there Islamic radicalism, Chinese technology espionage, global debt and half a dozen other things that smarter people than me are no doubt worrying about. But the single greatest threat to America is none of these. The single greatest threat facing America and our allies is a weak U.S. president. It doesnt have to be this way. President Obama could if he chose develop a backbone and lead. Alternatively, America could elect a new president. It has to be one or the other. The status quo is simply not an option.
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Case Blocks
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AT Embargo Good
The embargo has failed and is out of date Lloyd 11 (Delia, Ten Reasons to Lift the Cuba Embargo,
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/08/24/ten-reasons-to-lift-the-cuba-embargo/)
4. It's out of date. To argue that U.S.-Cuban policy is an anachronism is putting it mildly. In an international climate marked by cooperation on issues ranging from terrorism to global financial crises, holding on to this last vestige of the Cold War foreign policy no longer makes sense. (Bear in mind that the young people now entering college were not even alive when Czechoslovakia existed.) Sure, there's still tension between the United States and Russia. But the recent renegotiation of the START agreement on nuclear proliferation reinforces the notion that the Cold War is no longer the dominant prism for understanding that bilateral relationship, much less the Cuban-American one. 5. It doesn't work. Of course, if the embargo were the last outpost of Cold War politics and it produced results, that might be an argument for continuing it. But scholars and analysts of economic sanctions have repeatedly questioned the efficacy of economic statecraft against rogue states unless and until there's been regime change. And that's because, as one scholar put it, "interfering with the market (whether using sanctions, aid, or other government policies) has real economic costs, and we rarely know enough about how the target economy works or how to manipulate the political incentives of the target government to achieve our goals." 6. It's counter-productive. Isolating Cuba has been more than ineffective. It's also provided the Castro brothers with a convenient political scapegoat for the country's ongoing economic problems, rather than drawing attention to their own mismanagement. Moreover, in banning the shipment of informationtechnology products, the United States has effectively assisted the Cuban government in shutting out information from the outside world, yet another potential catalyst for democratization.
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AT Democracy Turn
Diplomatic strategies through engagement solve better than the embargo CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February 2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032) Seventeen years after its enactment, the Helms-Burton Actwhich further codified the sanctions framework commonly referred to as the U.S. embargo against Cuba and conditions its suspension on the existence of a transition or democratic government in Cubahas proven to be a counterproductive policy that has failed to achieve its stated purposes in an increasingly interconnected world. Helms-Burton has failed to advance the cause of freedom and prosperity for the Cuban people, to encourage free and democratic elections in Cuba, to secure international sanctions against the Cuban government, or to advance the national security interests of the United States.1 It provides a policy framework for U.S. support to the Cuban people in response to the formation of a transition government in Cuba; yet, the allor-nothing nature of its conditions for suspension undermine that very framework by effectively placing control over changes to embargo sanctions in the hands of the current Cuban leadership. Simply stated, it is an archaic policy that hinders the ability of the United States to respond swiftly, intelligently and in a nuanced way to developments on the island. Worst of all, the failures of Helms-Burton have more recently produced a tragic paradox: Policies once designed to promote democratization through isolation are now stifling civil society, including an emerging class of private entrepreneurs and democracy advocates whose rise represents the best hope for a free and open society in Cuba in more than 50 years.
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AT T: Increase
WM reoving embargo is a pre-requisite to economic engagement Ribas 10 (Joseph, The Cuban Embargo: Why US Sanctions Fail and
What to do About it, Volume 2 Issue 1 RURJ Spring 2010, http://scholarship.rollins.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=rurj)
Simply ending the embargo in favor of engagement would be a leap in policy action, a leap that ought not be taken without first exploring other options. In taking the route of engagement, specifically economic engagement, it would be inconvenient, if not virtually impossible, to reattain an embargo policy.
Counter-interpretation: economic engagement includes the removal of barriers to economic incentives solves their limits disad Haas 2k (Richard, President of CFR, Terms of Engagement: Alternatives to Punitive Policies,
Survival;, vol. 42, no. 2, Summer 2000, pp. xxxx, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/articles/2000/6/summer%20haass/2000survival.pdf) Architects of engagement strategies can choose from a wide variety of incentives. Economic engagement might offer tangible incentives such as export credits, investment insurance or promotion, access to technology, loans and economic aid.3 Other equally useful economic incentives involve the removal of penalties such as trade embargoes, investment bans or high tariffs, which have impeded economic relations between the United States and the target country. Facilitated entry into the economic global arena and the institutions that govern it rank among the most potent incentives in todays global market.
Prefer our interpretation 1) Ground: the neg gets more ground to read disads or counterplans based off specific parts of the embargo on top of generics based off increasing economic engagement 2) Education: the embargo is at the core of the past 50 years of literature on Cuba in-depth research on all aspects of the embargo is a pre-requisite to policy discussions about engagement 3) Limits: only our interpretation limits Cuba AFFs to engagement restricted in the current embargo their interpretation expands the topic to include new forms of engagement
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Default to reasonability: all of the AFF advantages are predicated on increased economic engagement narrow interpretations of economic engagement are flawed Haas 2k (Richard, President of CFR, Terms of Engagement: Alternatives to Punitive Policies,
Survival;, vol. 42, no. 2, Summer 2000, pp. xxxx, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/articles/2000/6/summer%20haass/2000survival.pdf) While policy-makers should give greater consideration to the idea of engagement, incentives will be applicable only in a limited set of circumstances. In addition, unlike other foreign-policy tools, engagement is open to charges of appeasement from its critics. Sceptics have also argued that engagement strategies can invite problems of moral hazard, where a cash-strapped regime watching America buy out North Koreas nuclear programme may be inspired to embark on its own endeavour in the hopes of later selling it to the US. Moreover, as a strategy which often depends on reciprocal actions between the US and the target country, engagement is likely to involve even higher risks and uncertainties than other foreign-policy strategies. But both the promises and the risks suggest the urgent need for a considered analysis of the strategy of engagement. Guidelines need to be formulated, drawing on instances where the US and Europe have previously used incentives rather than employed penalties alone in dealing with recalcitrant regimes. Two critical questions must be asked: when should policy makers consider engagement; and how should engagement strategies be managed in order to maximise the chances of success? Once these guidelines are formulated, they can be used to assess recent US policy towards many problem states. American relations with China, Cuba, Iran, Libya and North Korea are of particular interest, either for the promises that alternative strategies of engagement may hold or as examples of ongoing attempts at engagement.
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EXT T: Increase
Sanctions preclude engagement Fisk 98 (Daniel, Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs National Security Council, HOW SANCTIONS CAN
AFFECT U.S. POLICY INTERESTS, http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1998_h/h980603df.htm)
In discussing "sanctions" there are several levels that should be kept in mind. First, there are private trade and investment activities. These involve activities which do not rely on U.S. subsidies, but which may be subject to negotiated agreements (e.g., GATT, NAFTA). These, then, are further divided into activities which may entail a legal entitlement and activities in which a government does not interfere with the ability of its own citizens to engage in economic pursuits. In these cases, the United States can dictate whether its nationals can or cannot engage in all or certain economic activities with another nation. And there will be obligations that other nations will deem it appropriate, if not essential, that the United States respect: for instance, benefits extended by the United States as part of the GATT or NAFTA.
Removing sanctions increases engagement Thornton 12 ("U.S. Conditionally Suspends Two Key Economic Sanctions Against Burma", 7/17/12,
http://www.skadden.com/insights/us-conditionally-suspends-two-key-economic-sanctions-against-burma)
On July 11, 2012, the U.S. Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued general licenses General License Nos. 16 and 17 that substantially lift two key features of the U.S. economic sanctions against Burma (Myanmar): the ban on new investment in Burma by U.S. persons and the ban on exportation of financial services to Burma. These general licenses implement President Obamas announcement in May 2012 that the U.S. government would increase economic engagement with Burma. The general licenses are in line with similar steps undertaken in the European Union, Canada and Australia to lift their own sanctions with respect to Burma. As a result, there may be new opportunities for many companies to enter Burmese markets.
Default to reasonability narrow interpretations are flawed policy, economic engagement includes the AFF, prefer federal sources USDS 9 (What is Total Economic Engagement? http://2001-2009.state.gov/e/eeb/92986.htm)
Total Economic Engagement seeks to integrate and coordinate all U.S. economic instruments and programs into our regional and country strategies. The Bureau of Economic, Energy and Business Affairs (EEB) broad cross-section of economic disciplines, interagency contacts, and expertise in such areas as trade, finance, energy, development, transportation, and telecommunications help ensure this coordination. EEB is actively involved in the entire range of international economic issues affecting
Americas security and well-being. Our priorities extend from securing reliable, sustainable energy supplies to increasing market access for U.S. goods and services. Protection of American interests, such as intellectual property rights, fair play in international business, and shutting down terrorist access to financial networks, is not only part of our work, it is the foundation on which our efforts rest. But promoting U.S. economic and security interests is not a short-term endeavor; dealing creatively with emerging markets and alleviating poverty are priorities that are even more important in the era of rapid globalization than they were in the wake of World War II. To quote Franklin D. Roosevelt: True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independenc e. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. Poverty and political unrest walk hand -in-hand, and too many countries economic situations offer little hope to their citizens. However, the economic landscape does not need to remain dormant. We believe, the crop of economic security, individual prosperity and political stability can be grown through total economic engagement. Total economic engagement looks beyond the current practice of using financial development assistance as the only ox at the plow. We know that developing countries own the keys to their own economic success. Just as democracy relies on the educated and active common man, so a healthy economy rests on the liberated individual. Ronald Reagan summed it up well: We who live in free mar ket societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is a llowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success Only then can societies remain economically alive,

dynamic, progressive, and free. Our goal, therefore, must be the creation of the right conditions for individual economic gr owth and success. We
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must cultivate conditions for private sector growth, investment and trade. This cannot be accomplished through Official Development Assistance (ODA) funds alone. Foreign assistance must support a developing countrys own effort to improve their economic climate. Total economic engagement is putting all of the players to the same plow. EEB is harnessing trade and economic policy formation, proper governance, and ODA activities together. The bureau also integrates the American individual. Working with U.S. citizen-partners participating in developing economies abroad is a key element of total economic engagement. An accurate accounting of a nations total engagement must include economic policies as well as, trade, remittances, and foreign direct investment. In these areas, the U.S. leads the world in total economic engagement with the developing world. The private donations of American citizens, military emergency aid and peacekeeping and government assistance provide the primary sources for development financing.
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AT XO CP
Congress has absolute authority legislation tie executive powers
CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February 2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032) The U.S. embargo toward Cuba is a collection of prohibitions, restrictions and sanctions derived from several laws that has been in effect for more than 50 years. Taken together and compounded with the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, they result in the most severe set of sanctions and restrictions applied against any current adversary of the United States. This collection of sanctions was first codified into law by the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 (Torricelli), severely tightened by the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996 (HelmsBurton), and modified by the Trade Sanctions and Reform Act of 2000 (TSRA), thus transferring almost absolute authority over U.S. policy toward Cuba from the Executive Branch to the U.S. Congress. The codification of the U.S. embargo
against Cuba has failed to accomplish its objectives, as stated in Helms-Burton, of causing regime change and restoring democracy in Cuba. Continuing to ignore this obvious truth is not only counterproductive to the interests of the United States, but also increasingly damaging to Cuban civil society, including the more than 400,000 Cubans now working as licensed private entrepreneurs, because it places the burden of sanctions squarely on their shoulders to bear. At a time when Cuba seems headed toward a path of change and reforms, albeit slower than desired, and a real d ebate seems to be emerging within Cubas elite regarding its future, the inflexibility of U.S. policy has the ironic effect o f hurting and delaying the very changes it seeks to produce by severely limiting Cubas ability to implement major economic reforms and strengthening the
statutory provisions in Torricelli and TSRA deny the United States the flexibility to address dynamic conditions in Cuba in a strategic and proactive way. They effectively tie the Presidents hands in
hand of the reactionaries, rather than the reformers, within the Cuban government. Moreover, Helms-Burton and related
responding to developments on the Island, placing the impetus for taking advantage of the processes of change in Cuba in hands of hard-liners among Cubas ruling elites, whose interests are best served by the perpetuation of the embargo.
This makes case a DA to the CP prefer comparative examples

CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February 2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032) Beyond failing to advance its stated objectives, the most counterproductive aspect of Helms-Burton is that it codifies U.S. embargo sanctions toward Cuba, and conditions the suspension of any and all such sanctions on congressional recognition of a transition government in Cuba. This is counterproductive in two ways. First, it hinders the United States ability to respond rapidly and strategically to developments on the Island as they occur. For example, if the Executive Branch wishes to increase assistance to the 400,000 private entrepreneurs currently operating small businesses in Cuba, it can only do so in a limited way through its licensing authority. Second, it creates a dynamic of all-ornothing conditionality that effectively places U.S. policy in the hands of the Cuban government, making it easier for Cuban officials to resist political reform and dictate the degree of American influence on the Island.
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AT PTX DA
No opposition recent actions prove Wood 10 (Roberta, Senators confident on votes to lift Cuba travel ban,
http://www.peoplesworld.org/senators-confident-on-votes-to-lift-cuba-travel-ban/)
There are enough votes in the U.S. Senate to lift the travel ban that now bars U.S. citizens from traveling to Cuba, according to a joint statement this month from Republican Mike Enzi, Wyo., and Democrat Byron Dorgan, N.D., who are co-sponsors of the Senate version of the legislation. "It makes no sense to punish the American people by restricting their right to travel simply because our country is trying to punish the Cuban government, said Dorgan. "Just as has been our policy with China, Vietnam and other communist countries, we should allow Americans to travel freely to Cuba." The expression of optimism from the two senators followed the passage in the House Agriculture Committee of HR 4645. The bill deals not only with travel restrictions, but barriers to trade as well. It appears that it is the impact on trade that is creating the strongest pressure on representatives from agricultural states to remove barriers to trade with Cuba. Before the 50-year-old embargo, that country was the seventh biggest customer for U.S. exports. For example, Wyoming's entire congressional delegation has signed on in support of the proposed legislation. With a population of only about half a million, Wyoming is a small state, but with two senators and a member of Congress, it wields disproportionate voting power. "This bill is a common-sense step that rights agriculture policies which in the past have made it difficult for farmers and producers to sell their products in Cuba," said Wyoming Rep. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican. "Wyoming's farmers and ranchers cannot afford to lose any opportunities during these challenging economic times," she added. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has made this legislation a high priority, warning congressional reps that it will monitor their votes for its "scoring" of their support for business. Currently food exports to Cuba are not banned, but restrictions under the 2000 Trade Sanctions Reform Act (TSRA) make trade convoluted and costly. The normal procedure for international trade is for payments to be made directly from the bank of the purchaser to that of the seller. The payment is typically made just before unloading the goods at the purchaser's port. However, TSRA does not allow Cuba-bound food and medical supplies even to leave U.S. ports until payment is received. And receiving that payment is not easy. TSRA requires that the payment from the Cuban bank go to a bank in a third country (which, being a bank, charges a fee of course) before going to the U.S. bank of the supplier. With that extra cost, time and red tape, U.S. goods are less appealing to their potential Cuban customer than those of their competitors in the world market, U.S. business people complain. John J. Wilson, representing Dairy Farmers of America, testified before the House Agricultural Committee in favor of expanding agricultural trade to Cuba. "Cuba is a market where we should be a natural preferred seller due to our strong proximity advantanges," he stated," but regulatory hurdles imposed by our own government have thwarted our ability to best supply this market." Wilson cited a 2009 study that found that doing away with all financing and travel restrictions on U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba would have boosted 2008 dairy sales to that country from $13 million to between $39 and $87 million, increasing U.S. market share from 6 percent to between 18 and 42 percent.
Recent demographic shifts prove

Armario 12 (Christine, 12/9/12, Cuba Travel Restrictions May Loosen As Cuban-American Resistance Slackens, Analysts
Say, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/09/cuban-americans-may-be-re_n_2267374.html)
At the same time, Florida's Cuban-American legislative delegation, which has taken a hard-line approach against easing travel restrictions, is changing. Analysts point to two developments in particular: the election of Garcia, who served in the Obama administration as the Energy Department's director of the Office of Minority Economic Impact, as well as Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a Cuban-American
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who has strongly supported a tough Cuba policy, finishing her term as head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Julia Sweig, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Garcia's election in particular will strengthen the view in Washington that the potential political risk of easing economic penalties against Cuba "has been diminished substantially, if it ever existed." Another factor that could influence Cuba policy is the emergence of leaders such as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a Cuban-American who has objected to Obama's Cuba travel expansion. Rubio has said he will not support lifting the embargo until the Castro brothers _retired leader Fidel and current President Raul are gone, and Cuba releases all political prisoners and respects basic civil rights. "Every U.S.-Cuba policy decision should be guided by the simple test of whether it helps free political prisoners, stops the daily repression and paves the way for the people to express their will through free and fair elections," Rubio said. Tim Ashby, a former Commerce Department official and lawyer who counsels companies on Cuba law and trade, predicts that Republican Cuban-American legislators who argue against easing travel restrictions may change their tune if the politics favor Democrats. Of Rubio, he said: "If he sees the younger CubanAmericans moving toward the Democrats he may adopt a different approach."
Plan solves the link Lloyd 11 (Delia, Ten Reasons to Lift the Cuba Embargo,
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/08/24/ten-reasons-to-lift-the-cuba-embargo/)
It's good politics. Supporters of the trade embargo -- like Cuban-American Sen. Robert Menendez (DN.J.) -- have long argued that easing the restrictions would only reward Castro for the regime's ongoing repression of political dissidents. We need to keep up the economic pressure on Cuba, so this logic goes, in order to keep pressure on the regime to do something about human rights. But there's a long-standing empirical relationship between trade and democracy. The usual logic put forth to explain this relationship is that trade creates an economically independent and politically aware middle class, which, in turn, presses for political reform. It's not clear that this argument actually holds up when subjected to close causal scrutiny (although the reverse does seem to be true -- i.e., democratic reform creates pressure for trade liberalization). Still, it's difficult to disagree with the proposition that by enabling visiting scholars and religious groups to stay in Cuba for up to two years (as the presidential order would allow) rather than a matter of weeks (as is currently the case) we'd be helping, not hurting, democracy in Cuba. First, easing the current travel restrictions would allow for far deeper linkages between non-governmental organizations from both countries, which some see as a powerful mechanism for democratic reform. Second, because American visitors would be staying on the island longer, scholars and activists alike would gain much better insight into where the pressure points for democracy actually exist.
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AT China DA
Turn China likes the plan
Xinhua 12 (U.S. embargo brings huge sufferings to Cuban people: China, 11/14/12,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-11/14/c_131971998.htm)
The economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States on Cuba has brought "huge sufferings" to its people, said a Chinese UN envoy here on Tuesday. Wang Min, China's deputy permanent representative to the UN, made the remarks while addressing the UN General Assembly on voting a resolution, which calls for an end of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. The resolution, which condemns the U.S. blockade of Cuba and urges Washington to end its half-century embargo against the Caribbean island country, was approved by the 193-nation Assembly with 188 votes for, three against and two abstentions. China voted for the resolution. This is the 21st year in a row that the UN General Assembly has adopted the resolution by an overwhelming majority of votes to condemn the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Wang said the embargo has caused shortage of commodities and dealt a heavy blow to Cuba's economy. It also stands as the major stumbling block for Cuba's economic development and social progress. "Such embargo has brought huge sufferings to the Cuban people and violated their fundamental human rights including the rights to food, health and education as well as their rights to survival and development," he said. The Chinese diplomat noted that one of the most prominent features of the embargo in the last year has been "interference with Cuba's international financial transactions". "This has not only hit Cuba's economy hard, but also affected the normal economic, commercial and financial interactions between other countries and Cuba and hence impairing the interests and sovereignty of third countries," Wang said. Moreover, the call of the international community is getting louder and louder, demanding that the U.S. government change its policy towards Cuba, lift embargo and normalize its relations with Cuba, he said. China and Cuba have maintained normal economic, trade and personnel exchanges, Wang said, stressing that the friendly and mutually-beneficial cooperation in various fields between the two countries has been growing. "China hopes that the U.S. will follow the purpose and principles of the UN Charter and the relevant General Assembly resolutions and terminate its embargo against Cuba as soon as possible," he said. "China also hopes that the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba will constantly improve so as to promote the stability and development in Latin America and the Caribbean region."
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AT K
Continued embargo empowers Cuban repression against its own people, promoting inequality and disposability
CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February 2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032) Helms-Burton has failed to advance the cause of freedom and prosperity for the Cuban people. This is not surprising, since never in modern history has there been a democratic transition in a country under a unilateral sanctions framework as broad and severe as the one codified in Helms-Burton. Its blanket sanctions lack ethical or moral consideration since they indiscriminately impact all levels of Cuban society, from senior Cuban officials to democracy advocates and private entrepreneurs. While it is no secret that Cuban government policies are primarily to blame for the Islands economic crisis, their impact has only been exacerbated and made disproportionately greater among the most vulnerable segments of the population by the blanket sanctions codified under Helms-Burton. In addition, these sanctions deny Cuba access to the international financial institutions it would need to implement the type of macroeconomic reforms that U.S. policy has sought for more than 50 years. Helms-Burton preconditions the lifting of its blanket sanctions on sweeping political change in Cuba. In practice, this waiting game has strengthened the relative power of the Cuban government vis--vis the Cuban people while simultaneously giving the former a convenient scapegoat for its oppressive practices and economic blunders. Cuban blogger and democracy advocate Yoani Sanchez best illustrated the impact of the waiting game enabled by Helms-Burton when she wrote: The five decade prolongation of the blockade [as the embargo is referred to in Cuba] has allowed every setback weve suffered to be explained as stemming from it, justified by its effects...To make matters worse, the economic fence has helped to fuel the idea of a place besieged, where dissent comes to be equated with an act of treason. The exterior blockade has strengthened the interior blockade.ix Former political prisoner and independent economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe agrees, writing that Helms-Burtons blanket sanctions have only served to give the Cuban government an alibi to declare Cuba a fortress under siege, to justify repression and to (pass) the blame for the economic disaster in Cuba.x Conditioning our policy of resource denial on sweeping political reforms strengthens the Cuban state because the scarce resources available in an authoritarian Cuba have been and will continue to be allocated primarily based on political priorities, thereby increasing the states relative power and its ability to control its citizens. History has shown that the negative effects of such isolation can be long lasting and counterproductive to change. During the Cold War, U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe was not based on isolation or resource denial. Indeed, an analysis of these transitions reveals an extraordinary correlation between the degree of openness toward former communist countries and the success of their transitions to democracies and market economies.xi
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Case Neg
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1NC Cuba Economy

Turn plan strengthens the regime, kills the economy, and undermines US influence in the region Suchlicki 13 (Jaime, Emilio Bacardi Moreau Distinguished Professor and Director, Institute for
Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami, What Ifthe U.S. Ended the Cuba Travel Ban and the Embargo? 2/26/13, http://interamericansecuritywatch.com/what-if-the-u-s-ended-the-cubatravel-ban-and-the-embargo/)
Lifting the ban for U.S. tourists to travel to Cuba would be a major concession totally out of proportion to recent changes in the island. If the U.S. were to lift the travel ban without major reforms in Cuba, there would be significant implications: Money from American tourists would flow into businesses owned by the Castro government thus strengthening state enterprises. The tourist industry is controlled by the military and General Raul Castro, Fidels brother. American tourists will have limited contact with Cubans. Most Cuban resorts are built in isolated areas, are off limits to the average Cuban, and are controlled by Cubas efficient security apparatus. Most Americans dont speak Spanish, have but limited contact with ordinary Cubans, and are not interested in visiting the island to subvert its regime. Law 88 enacted in 1999 prohibits Cubans from receiving publications from tourists. Penalties include jail terms. While providing the Castro government with much needed dollars, the economic impact of tourism on the Cuban population would be limited. Dollars will trickle down to the Cuban poor in only small quantities, while state and foreign enterprises will benefit most. Tourist dollars would be spent on products, i.e., rum, tobacco, etc., produced by state enterprises, and tourists would stay in hotels owned partially or wholly by the Cuban government. The principal airline shuffling tourists around the island, Gaviota, is owned and operated by the Cuban military. The assumption that the Cuban leadership would allow U.S. tourists or businesses to subvert the revolution and influence internal developments is at best nave. As we have seen in other circumstances, U.S. travelers to Cuba could be subject to harassment and imprisonment. Over the past decades hundred of thousands of Canadian, European and Latin American tourists have visited the island. Cuba is not more democratic today. If anything, Cuba is more totalitarian, with the state and its control apparatus having been strengthened as a result of the influx of tourist dollars. As occurred in the mid-1990s, an infusion of American tourist dollars will provide the regime with a further disincentive to adopt deeper economic reforms. Cubas limited economic reforms were enacted in the early 1990s, when the islands economic contraction was at its worst. Once the economy began to stabilize by 1996 as a result of foreign tourism and investments, and exile remittances, the earlier reforms were halted or rescinded by Castro. Lifting the travel ban without major concessions from Cuba would send the wrong message to the enemies of the United States: that a foreign leader can seize U.S. properties without compensation; allow the use of his territory for the introduction of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States; espouse terrorism and anti-U.S. causes throughout the world; and eventually the United States will forget and forgive, and reward him with tourism, investments and economic aid. Since the Ford/Carter era, U.S. policy toward Latin America has emphasized democracy, human rights and constitutional government. Under President Reagan the U.S. intervened in Grenada, under President Bush, Sr. the U.S. intervened in Panama and under President Clinton the U.S. landed marines in Haiti, all to restore democracy to those countries. The U.S. has prevented military coups in the region and supported the will of the people in free elections. U.S. policy has not been uniformly applied throughout the world, yet it is U.S. policy in the region. Cuba is part of Latin America. While no one is advocating military intervention, normalization of relations with a military dictatorship in Cuba will send the wrong message to the rest of the continent. Once American tourists begin to visit Cuba, Castro would probably restrict travel by Cuban-Americans. For the Castro regime, Cuban-Americans represent a far more subversive group because of their ability to speak to friends and relatives on the island, and to influence their views on the Castro regime and on the United
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States. Indeed, the return of Cuban exiles in 1979-80 precipitated the mass exodus of Cubans from Mariel in 1980. A large influx of American tourists into Cuba would have a dislocating effect on the economies of smaller Caribbean islands such as Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and even Florida, highly dependent on tourism for their well-being. Careful planning must take place, lest we create significant hardships and social problems in these countries. If the embargo is lifted, limited trade with, and investments in Cuba would develop. Yet there are significant implications.
Cant solve structural economic deficiencies Jorge 2k (Dr. Antonio, Professor of Political Economy at Florida International University, "The U.S. Embargo and the
Failure of the Cuban Economy" (2000).Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies Occasional Papers.Paper 28. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/iccaspapers/28)
Under the real world of Castroism, however, the answer must be a terse one: none. The embargo has not harmed the Cuban economy. Cooperation between the United States and Cuba would have been impossible from the very beginning of the Revolution for legal, political, ideological, strategic, and economic reasons, not to mention others of a philosophical or moral character. In other words, it was in the past, and continues to be at present, contrary to the United States national interest and to its fundamental foreign policy orientation and objectives to lift the embargo under Castros conditions: that is, without a firm commitment to the political democratization and market reforms that his regime has stubbornly opposed for the last 40 years. However, if, purely for the sake of an intellectual exercise, we were to assume that the embargo had never existed, its nonexistence would have had no effect whatsoever on the Cuban economy. Castro simply would have squandered U.S. instead of Soviet resources. Given Castros objectives and policies, the ultimate result for the Cuban economy could not have been any different, regardless of who had financed his Revolution.
Latin America impacts are empirically denied Hartzell 2000 (Caroline A., 4/1/2000, Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies Latin American Essays, Latin America's
civil wars: conflict resolution and institutional change. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-28765765_ITM)
Latin America has been the site of fourteen civil wars during the post-World War II era, thirteen of which now have ended. Although not as civil war-prone as some other areas of the world, Latin America has endured some extremely violent and destabilizing intrastate conflicts. (2) The region's experiences with civil wars and their resolution thus may prove instructive for other parts of the world in which such conflicts continue to rage. By examining Latin America's civil
wars in some depth not only might we better understand the circumstances under which such conflicts are ended but also the institutional outcomes to which they give rise. More specifically, this paper focuses on the following central questions regarding Latin America's civil wars: Has the resolution of these conflicts produced significant institutional change in the countries in which they were fought? What is the nature of the institutional change that has taken place in the wake of these civil wars? What are the factors that are responsible for shaping post-war institutional change?
No impact to bioweapons Easterbrook 3 (Gregg Easterbrook, senior fellow at The New Republic, July 2003, Wired, Were All Gonna Die!
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday.html?pg=2&topic=&topic_set= 3. Germ warfare!Like chemical agents, biological weapons have never lived up to their billing in popular culture. Consider the 1995 medical thriller Outbreak, in which a highly contagious virus takes out entire towns. The reality is quite different .
Weaponized smallpox escaped from a Soviet laboratory in Aralsk, Kazakhstan, in 1971; three people died, no epidemic followed. In 1979, weapons-grade anthrax got out of a Soviet facility in Sverdlovsk (now called Ekaterinburg); 68 died, no epidemic. The loss of life was tragic, but no greater than could have been caused by a single conventional bomb. In 1989, workers at a US government facility near Washington were accidentally exposed to Ebola virus. They walked around the community and hung out with family and friends for

several
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days before the mistake was discovered. No one died. The fact is, evolution has spent millions of years conditioning mammals to resist germs. Consider the Black Plague. It was the worst known pathogen in history, loose in a Middle Ages society of poor public health, awful sanitation, and no antibiotics. Yet it didnt kill off humanity. Most people who were caught in the epidemic survived. Any superbug introduced into todays Western world would encounter top-notch public health, excellent sanitation, and an array of medicines specifically engineered to kill bioagents. Perhaps
one day some aspiring Dr. Evil will invent a bug that bypasses the immune system. Because it is possible some novel superdisease could be invented, or that existing pathogens like smallpox could be genetically altered to make them more virulent (two-thirds of those who contract natural smallpox survive), biological agents are a legitimate concern. They may turn increasingly troublesome as time passes and knowledge of biotechnology becomes harder to control, allowing individuals or small groups to cook up nasty germs as readily as they can buy guns today. But no superplague has ever come close to wiping out humanity before, and it seems unlikely to happen in the future.
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EXT Regime Turn

Ending the embargo without massive concessions will fail Suchlicki 13 (Jaime, Emilio Bacardi Moreau Distinguished Professor and Director, Institute for
Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami, What Ifthe U.S. Ended the Cuba Travel Ban and the Embargo? 2/26/13, http://interamericansecuritywatch.com/what-if-the-u-s-ended-the-cubatravel-ban-and-the-embargo/) Trade All trade with Cuba is done with state owned businesses. Since Cuba has very little credit and is a major debtor nation, the U.S. and its businesses would have to provide credits to Cuban enterprises. There is a long history of Cuba defaulting on loans. Cuba is not likely to buy a substantial amount of products in the U.S. In the past few years, Cuba purchased several hundred million dollars of food in the U.S. That amount is now down to $170 million per year. Cuba can buy in any other country and it is not likely to abandon its relationship with China, Russia, Venezuela, and Iran to become a major trading partner of the U.S. Cuba has very little to sell in the U.S. Nickel, one of Cubas major exports, is controlled by the Canadians and exported primarily to Canada. Cuba has decimated its sugar industry and there is no appetite in the U.S. for more sugar. Cigars and rum are important Cuban exports. Yet, cigar production is mostly committed to the European market. Cuban rum could become an important export, competing with Puerto Rican and other Caribbean rums. Investments In Cuba, foreign investors cannot partner with private Cuban citizens. They can only invest in the island through minority joint ventures with the government and its state enterprises. The dominant enterprise in the Cuban economy is the Grupo GAESA, controlled by the Cuban military. Most investments are done through or with GAESA. Therefore, American companies willing to invest in Cuba will have to partner mostly with the Cuban military. Cuba ranks 176 out of 177 countries in the world in terms of economic freedom. Outshined only by North Korea. It ranks as one of the most unattractive investments next to Iran, Zimbabwe, Libya, Mali, etc. Foreign investors cannot hire, fire, or pay workers directly. They must go through the Cuban government employment agency which selects the workers. Investors pay the government in dollars or euros and the government pays the workers a meager 10% in Cuban pesos. Corruption is pervasive, undermining equity and respect for the rule of law. Cuba does not have an independent/transparent legal system. All judges are appointed by the State and all lawyers are licensed by the State. In the last few years, European investors have had over $1 billion arbitrarily frozen by the government and several investments have been confiscated. Cubas Law 77 allows the State to expropriate foreign-invested assets for reason of public utility or social interest. In the last year, the CEOs of three companies with extensive dealings with the Cuban government were arrested without charges. (1) Conclusions If the travel ban is lifted unilaterally now or the embargo is ended by the U.S., what will the U.S. government have to negotiate with a future regime in Cuba and to encourage changes in the island? These policies could be an important bargaining chip with a future regime willing to provide concessions in the area of political and economic freedoms. The travel ban and the embargo should be lifted as a result of negotiations between the U.S. and a Cuban government willing to provide meaningful and irreversible political and economic concessions or when there is a democratic government in place in the island.
Increases the regimes power and turns case Jorge 2k (Dr. Antonio, Professor of Political Economy at Florida International University, "The U.S. Embargo and the
Failure of the Cuban Economy" (2000).Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies Occasional Papers.Paper 28.

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/iccaspapers/28)
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Let us ask one final time: Who would benefit from the abrogation of the legislation enabling the U.S. embargo on Cuba? Unquestionably, such a move would be greatly advantageous to Castros personal purposes and would also favor those who seek to obtain commercial gains from doing business in Cuba, heedless of the costs of their unbridled ambition to the Cuban people. What would constitute a gross deception, however, would be to advance the claim, as some do, that such a policy change would contribute to Cubas freedom or to its economic development. No doubt, Cuba after Castro will experience very serious difficulties in resuming its process of economic development and rejoining the world economy. Nothing short of a complete ideological turnaround and wholesale restructuring of its political, social, and economic systems would allow the country to begin to face the arduous tasks lying ahead. The Cuban nation has suffered enormously under Castro. The reconstruction process will inevitably be costly and laborious. The last thing the Cuban people need is to be visited by another plague. Spare them the sanctimonious chicanery and knavery of those who abuse and misuse the market for their own greed. Piatas and mafias are not the way to build free and prosperous societies. Vide Nicaragua and Russia. Let Cuba not follow suit.
Castro influence is the problem, not the embargo Jorge 2k (Dr. Antonio, Professor of Political Economy at Florida International University, "The U.S. Embargo and the
Failure of the Cuban Economy" (2000).Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies Occasional Papers.Paper 28. http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/iccaspapers/28)
It follows, from all of the above, that a lifting of the embargo at this time would only serve the purpose of facilitating to Castro desperately needed resources, mainly in the form of credit lines extended by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the InterAmerican Development Bank, and also by private banking and other financial institutions. This financial influx would serve to strengthen his 40-year stranglehold on the Cuban people. Furthermore, to those who believe that greater contacts between the United States and Cuba would further the cause of democratization, it should be pointed out that such hopes definitely have not been validated by the experience of Marxist societies from the inception of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, which followed the stage of War Communism, up to the last efforts at reforming socialism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. In these countries, trade, foreign investment, and loans led hermetic lives of their own, oblivious to and unaffected by the rest of society. There is no historical precedent for drawing hope from the Cuban experience. As a matter of fact, it could be realistically argued that the opposite has happened. As the Cuban regime succeeds in solidifying itself, as a result of the legitimacy conferred upon it by other nations and by an augmented flow of resources, its repressive proclivities have increased in parallel fashion. Trade and investment with totalitarian states have not weakened or eroded those states; rather, the contrary has always been the case. Castros regime is certainly no exception to the rule and, in fact, categorically confirms it. Only pressure has led Castro temporarily to implement some timid reforms that he subsequently has either partly rescinded or revoked altogether. Cuba has established for all to see a system of apartheid which is openly and vigorously enforced between foreigners and Cuban nationals.
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EXT LA War Defense

Instabilitys inevitabledrug trafficking Grudgings 9 (Stuart, Rueters, Latin America ex-leaders urge reform of US drug war,
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN11358345) RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 11 (Reuters) - The
war against drugs is failing and the U.S. government should break with "prohibition" policies that have achieved little more than cram its prisons and stoke violence, three former Latin American presidents said on Wednesday. The respected former presidents urged the United States and Latin American governments to move away from jailing drug users to debate the legalization of marijuana and place more emphasis on the treatment of addicts. Former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria said there was no meaningful debate over drugs
policy in the United States, despite a broad consensus that current policies had failed. "The problem today in the U.S. is that narco-trafficking is a crime and so any politician is fearful of talking about narco-trafficking or talking about policies because they will be called soft," he said. Gaviria has joined with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo to try to change the debate on drugs in Latin America, where trafficking gangs have killed tens of thousands of people and weakened
democracies through corruption. From Mexico's gang wars to the drug-funded FARC guerrilla group in Colombia and daily shoot-outs between gangs and police in Rio de Janeiro's shantytowns, much of the region is scarred by drug violence and many believe U.S. policies have failed. A United Nations meeting in Vienna
next month will frame international drugs policy for the next 10 years, and the three former presidents, whose group is called the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, said it is time for change. They pointed to falling street prices for cocaine and still high levels of consumption in the United States despite decades of policies focused on punishing users and cutting supplies from Latin American countries such as Colombia. 'PREJUDICES, FEARS' The presidents' commission released a report calling on governments to refocus policies toward treating users, move toward decriminalizing marijuana, and invest more in education campaigns. It said current policies were rooted in "prejudices, fears and ideological visions" that inhibited debate. Even as the group met in Rio on Wednesday, police arrested 51 people in a major operation in the city and other states against a suspected drug smuggling ring that sent cocaine to Europe and brought back synthetic drugs like Ecstasy.
Organized crime has flourished around drugs and is now threatening the stability of Mexico, where a spiraling war between rival gangs killed more than 5,700 people last year. Cardoso, one of Latin America's most respected figures, said U.S. leadership was essential to break the cycle of drug-related crime and violence. "It will be almost impossible to solve Mexico's problems and other countries' problems without a more ample, comprehensive set of policies from the U.S. government," he said. Despite winning power on broad promises of change, drugs policy featured little in
U.S. President Barack Obama's election campaign and there are few indications that he will embark on a major overhaul. Gaviria said Washington appeared increasingly isolated in its repressive approach as Latin America and Europe move toward treating drug abuse as a health problem rather than a crime. (Editing by Raymond Colitt and Kieran Murray)
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EXT Bioweps Defense

Cant disperse bioweapons Smithson 5 (Amy E., PhD, project director for biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center. Likelihood of Terrorists Acquiring
and Using Chemical or Biological Weapons. http://www.stimson.org/cbw/?SN=CB2001121259]
Terrorists cannot count on just filling the delivery system with agent, pointing the device, and flipping the switch to activate it. Facets that must be deciphered include the concentration of agent in the delivery system, the ways in which the delivery system degrades the potency of the agent , and the right dosage to incapacitate or kill human or animal targets. For open-air delivery, the meteorological conditions must be taken into account. Biological agents have extreme sensitivity to sunlight, humidity, pollutants in the atmosphere, temperature, and even exposure to oxygen, all of which can kill the microbes. Biological
agents can be dispersed in either dry or wet forms. Using a dry agent can boost effectiveness because drying and milling the agent can make the particles very fine, a key factor since particles must range between 1 to 10 ten microns, ideally to 1 to 5, to be breathed into the lungs. Drying
an agent, however, is done through a complex and challenging process that requires a sophistication of equipment and know-how that terrorist organizations are unlikely to possess. The alternative is to develop a wet slurry, which is much easier to produce but a great deal harder to disperse effectively. Wet slurries can clog sprayers and
undergo mechanical stresses that can kill 95 percent or more of the microorganisms.
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EXT Korea War Defense

Zero risk of Korean conflict Rowland 10 (Ashley Rowland, Stars and Stripes, Despite threats, war not likely in Korea, experts say,
http://www.stripes.com/news/despite-threats-war-not-likely-in-korea-experts-say-1.127344?localLinksEnabled=false, December 3, 2010)
Despite increasingly belligerent threats to respond swiftly and strongly to military attacks, analysts say there is one thing both North Korea and South Korea want to avoid: an escalation into war. The latest promise to retaliate with violence
came Friday, when South Koreas defense minister-to-be said during a confirmation hearing that he supports airstrikes against North Korea in the case of future provocations from the communist country. In case the enemy attacks our territory and people again, we will thoroughly retaliate to ensure that the enemy cannot provoke again, Kim Kwan -jin said, according to The Associated Press. The hearing was a formality because South Koreas National Assembly does not have the power to reject South Korean president Lee Myung -baks appointment. Kims comments came 10 days after North Korea bombarded South Koreas Yeonpyeong island near the maritime border, killing two marines a nd two civilians the first North Korean attack against civilians since the Korean War. South Korea responded by firing 80 rounds, less than half of the 170 fired by North Korea. It was the second deadly provocation from the North this year. In March, a North Korean torpedo sank the South Korean warship Cheonan, killing 46 sailors, although North Korea has denied involvement in the incident. The South launched a series of military exercises, some with U.S. participation, intended to show its military strength following the attack. John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, said South Korea is using textbook posturing to deter another attack by emphasizing that it is tough and firm. But its hard to predict
how the South would respond to another attack. The country usually errs on the side of restraint, he said. I
think theyre trying to send a very clear signal to North Korea: Dont push us again, Delury said. For all of the criticism of the initial South Korean response that it was too weak, in the end I think people dont want another hot conflict. I think the strategy is to
rattle the sabers a bit to prevent another incident. Meanwhile, Yonhap News reported Friday that North Korea recently added
multiple-launch rockets that are capable of hitting Seoul, located about 31 miles from the border. The report was based on comments from an unnamed South Korean military source who said the North now has 5,200 multiple-launch rockets. A spokesman for South Koreas Joint Chiefs of Staff would not comment on the accuracy of the report because of the sensitivity of the information. Experts say it is a question of
when not if North Korea will launch another attack. But those experts doubt the situation will escalate into full-scale war. I think that its certainly possible, but I think that what North Korea wants, as well as South Korea, is to
contain this, said Bruce Bechtol, author of Defiant Failed State: The North Korean Threat to International Security and an associate professor of political science at Angelo State University in Texas. He said North Korea typically launches small, surprise attacks that
can be contained not ones that are likely to escalate. Delury said both Koreas want to avoid war, and North Koreas leaders have a particular interest in avoiding conflict they know the first people to be hit in a full-scale fight would be the elites. Past 50 years disproves escalation White 10 Masters in journalism from Columbia and IR degree from the London School of Economics, editor for Business Insider and
formerly wrote for MSNBC (3/26, Gregory, Business Insider, The Long, Long History Of False Starts Of War Between South And N orth Korea, http://www.businessinsider.com/were-calling-it-this-is-not-the-start-the-restart-of-the-korean-war-2010-3) History suggests that this sinking of a South Korean naval vessel off the coast of the country will not be the
restart of the Korean conflict. Since the end of open conflict between North and South Korea, the North has consistently acted in an aggressive manner towards its neighbor. During the 1960s, North Korea conducted military operations into the south, culminating in 1968 when 600 of these raids were reported. In the 1970s, North Korea tried to assassinate key members of the South Korean government, in an attempt to push the crisis forward. In 1999, two North Korean naval ships were blown up killing 30. In 2002, a sea battle killed and unspecified amount of North Koreans and 5 South Koreans. In November 2009, two military vessels exchanged fire (via HuffPo). In January 2010, North Korea launched 30 shells into the country's no sail zone. This time won't be different. Little will happen.
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EXT Africa War Defense

Africa wont escalate Barrett 5 [Robert, MA in Conflict Analysis and Management, Jun 1, Understanding the Challenges of African Democratization through
Conflict Analysis, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=726162] This is a problem, as Western nations may be increasingly wary of intervening in Africa hotspots after experiencing firsthand the unpredictable and unforgiving nature of societal warfare in both Somalia and Rwanda. On a costbenefit basis, the West continues to be somewhat
reluctant to get to get involved in Africas dirty wars, evidenced by its political hesitation when discussing ongoing
sanguinary grassroots conflicts in Africa. Even as the world apologizes for bearing witness to the Rwandan genocide without having intervened, the United States, recently using the label genocide in the context of the Sudanese conflict (in September of 2004), has on ly proclaimed sanctions against Sudan, while dismissing any suggestions at actual intervention (Giry, 2005). Part of the problem is that traditional
military and diplomatic approaches at separating combatants and enforcing ceasefires have yielded little in Africa. No powerful nations want to get embroiled in conflicts they cannot win especially those conflicts in which the intervening nation has very little interest.
No draw-in Taire 4 (Morenike, Vanguard (Nigeria), Global News Wire Asia Africa Intelligence Wire, 4-9-2004)
Defining our role may not have to be as difficult as it might first seem. In the first instance, in spite of Libya feat in WMD technology, borrowed and invented, and despite the feat of others who, like Libya, has flirted and romanced with terrorism in the past, it is unlikely that Africa
would be in a position to involve itself in any conflicts with any States outside its own shores. [It] She does not have the technology, and might have trouble summoning the collective will. And so while America grapples with impending energy troubles or rumours of it and Europe battles with the European Union, Africa battles with hunger, and pretty much everything else that has ceased to be of any significance to anyone in the first world. It was Sting, appropriately enough,
whod coined the lyrics and sang the song: We have just one world, but we live in different ones. Indeed, we do. Unfortunately, we live, also, in perpetual danger of being sucked into the faster, more complicated vortex of the worlds of others. We can no longer be calm, cool and collected.
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1NC Relations
Multiple alt causes Lee 13 (Brianna, Senior Production Editor at CFR, U.S.-Cuba Relations, Updated: 1/31/13,
http://www.cfr.org/cuba/us-cuba-relations/p11113#p5)
What is the main obstacle in U.S.-Cuban relations?

A fundamental incompatibility of political views stands in the way of improving U.S.-Cuban relations, experts say. While experts say the United States wants regime change, "the most important objective of the Cuban government is to remain in power at all costs," says Felix Martin, an assistant professor at Florida International University's Cuban Research Institute. Fidel Castro has been an inspiration for Latin American leftists such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez and Bolivian President Evo Morales, who have challenged U.S. policy in the region.
What are the issues preventing normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations?

Experts say these issues include: Human rights violations. In March 2003, the Cuban government arrested seventy-five dissidents and journalists, sentencing them to prison terms of up to twenty-eight years on charges of conspiring with the United States to overthrow the state. The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a Havana-based nongovernmental group, reports that the government has in recent years resorted to other tactics besides prison --such as firings from state jobs and intimidation on the street-- to silence opposition figures. A 2005 UN Human Rights Commission vote condemned Cuba's human rights record, but the country was elected to the new UN Human Rights Council in 2006. Guantanamo Bay. Cuba indicated after 9/11 that it would not object if the United States brought prisoners to Guantanamo Bay. However, experts such as Sweig say Cuban officials have since seized on the U.S. prison camp--where hundreds of terror suspects have been detained--as a "symbol of solidarity" with the rest of the world against the United States. Although Obama ordered Guantanamo to be closed by January 22, 2010, the facility remains open as of January 2013, and many analysts say it is likely to stay in operation for an extended period. Cuban exile community. The Cuban-American community in southern Florida traditionally has heavily influenced U.S. policy with Cuba. Both political parties fear alienating a strong voting bloc in an important swing state in presidential elections.
Proves relations are resilient Haven 13 (Paul, Under the radar, Cuba and U.S. often work together, 4/13/13,
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/national/under-the-radar-cuba-and-us-often-work-together/nXK7Q/)
Cuba and the United States may be longtime enemies with a bucket list of grievances, but the fast return of a Florida couple who fled U.S. authorities with their two kidnapped children in tow shows the Cold War enemies are capable of remarkable cooperation on many issues. Indeed, diplomats and observers on both sides of the Florida Straits say American and Cuban law enforcement officers, scientists, disaster relief workers, Coast Guard officials and other experts work together on a daily basis, and invariably express professional admiration for each other. I dont think the story has been told, but there is a real warmth in just the sort of day-to-day relations between U.S. and Cuban government officials, said Dan Whittle, who frequently brings scientific groups to the island in his role as Cuba program director for the Environmental Defense Fund. Nearly every time I talk to American officials they say they were
impressed by their Cuban counterparts. There really is a high level of mutual respect. Almost none of these technical -level interactions make the headlines, but examples are endless. Just last week, Cubas top environmental official Ulises Fernandez and several island oil experts attended a conference in New York of the International Association of Drilling Contractors after the State Department expedited their visas. And in March, Cubas leading weatherman, Jose Rubiera, traveled to North Carolina on a fast-track visa to give a talk about hurricane evacuation procedures. Last years Hurricane Sandy, which slammed Cubas eastern city of Santiago before devastating the northeastern United S tates, was a cruel
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reminder that nature cares not about mans political squabbles. The American government maintains a Coast Guard representativ e in Cuba, and the two countries work together to interdict suspicious boats. A U.S. diplomat involved in the process said security officials on both sides are on a first-name basis, and that the Cubans happily accept FBI and Coast Guard baseball caps as gifts. He and other diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss bilateral issues publicly, but all said they had noticed a thaw in daily interactions that belies the subzero temperatures that characterize official relations. The two countries have been at odds since shortly after Fidel Castros rebels marched into Havana in January 1959 and began to set up a Communist state. More recently, the countries have been locked in confrontation over the fate of jailed American contractor Alan Gross, who the Cubans want to exchange for five of their intelligence agents sentenced to long jail terms in the U.S. Angry barbs between Havana and Washington on issues such as democracy, human rights and sovereignty are still the norm, and even delivering each others mail is a challenge. The countries, separated by just 90 miles of warm Caribbe an seas, long ago ended direct service. But Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat, said Cuba has in recent years taken a pragmatic approach, more often than not cooperating on drug enforcement and judicial issues, something he hoped would one day lead to better ties. It is important to highlight that in judicial matters there is a willingness to cooperate and that could open a path to other types of cooperation, he said, citi ng the Hakkens as a case in point. Cuba is believed to harbor dozens of American fugitives from the 1960s and 1970s, many of them veterans of domestic militant groups like the Black Panthers. But Havana has clearly shown in recent years that it has no interest in becoming a refuge for common criminals deporting suspected murderers, child molesters and kidnappers who were foolish enough to think they would be beyond U.S. law enforcements reach. Joshua Michael Hakken is accused of kidnapping his young sons from the custody of his in-laws and then sailing with them and his wife to Havana. Cuba promptly informed the State Department of the Hakkens weekend arrival, and worked with U.S. officials to send t he family home swiftly. Both sides praised the joint effort. We would like to express our appreciation to the Cuban
authorities for their extensive cooperation to resolve this dangerous situation quickly, the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, which Washington maintains instead of an embassy, said in a statement.
<INSERT CHINA/RUSSIA DA> OR: No China war Goldstein 11 - Professor and Director of the China Maritime Studies Institute @ US Naval War College [Dr. Lyle J. Goldstein,
Resetting the USChina Security Relationship, Survival | vol. 53 no. 2 | AprilMay 2011 | pp. 89116 Weighed in the aggregate, Chinas
rise remains a peaceful process, and the record to date should engender significant confidence . Beijing has not resorted to a significant use of force against another state in more than three decades . Its deployments of troops as UN peacekeepers to hot spots such as Lebanon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have played a helpful role, as have the counter-piracy operations of its fleet in the Gulf of Aden. When dealing with weak and occasionally unstable states on its borders, such as Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, Beijing has not resorted to military intervention, nor even flexed its military muscles to gain advantage. Chinese maritime claims, whether in the South or the East China seas, are generally being enforced by unarmed patrol cutters , a clear signal that Beijing does not seek escalation to a major crisis on these matters. Contrary to the perception that Chinas senior military officers are all irreconcilable hawks, one influential Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) admiral recently said in an interview, with reference to lessons learned from recent border negotiations on Chinas periphery: If there are never any concessions or compromises, there is simply no possibility of reaching a breakthrough in border negotiations.2 pg. 90
No risk of US-Russia War

Ball 5 (Desmond, Professor Strategic Defense Studies Centre at Australian National University, The Probabilities of On the Beach
Assessing Armageddon Scenarios in the 21st Century, May, http://www.manningclark.org.au/papers/se05_ball.html) The prospects
of a nuclear war between the United States and Russia must now be deemed fairly remote. There are now no geostrategic issues that warrant nuclear competition and no inclination in either Washington or Moscow to provoke such issues. US and Russian strategic forces have been taken off day-to-day alert and their ICBMs de-targeted, greatly reducing the possibilities of war by accident, inadvertence or miscalculation. On the other hand, while the US-Russia strategic competition is in abeyance, there are
several aspects of current US nuclear weapons policy which are profoundly disturbing. In December 2001 President George W. Bush officially announced that the United States was withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972, one of the mainstays of
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strategic nuclear arms control during the Cold War, with effect from June 2002, and was proceeding to develop and deploy an extensive range of both theatre missile defence and national missile defence (NMD) systems. The first anti-missile missile in the NMD system, designed initially to defend against limited missile attacks from China and North Korea, was installed at Fort Greely in Alaska in July 2004. The initial system, consisting of sixteen interceptor missiles at Fort Greely and four at Vandenberg Air Force in California, is expected to be operational by the end of 2005. The Bush Administration is also considering withdrawal from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and resuming nuclear testing. (The last US nuclear test was on 23 September 1992). In particular, some key Administration officials believe that testing is necessary to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons, including low-yield, bunkerbusting, earth-penetrating weapons specifically designed to destroy very hard and deeply buried targets (such as underground command and control centres and leadership bunkers).
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EXT Alt Causes

Alan Gross and detention controversies alone outweigh the AFF Ross 13 (Oakland, 4/27/13, U.S. gives Cuba cold shoulder over prisoners and their suffering families,
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/04/27/us_gives_cuba_cold_shoulder_over_prisoners_and_their_suffering _families.html)
Behold the core configuration of Cuba-U.S. relations in the early years of the third millennium: a tale of five Cuban convicts plus one yanqui detainee. The gringo in this story is a 63-year-old American by the name of Alan Gross, who is currently doing time in a Cuban jail. Put them together, and what youve got is possibly the main obstacle to progress on what may well be the most bizarrely dysfunctional bilateral relationship in the world, a state of bitter enmity that has alternately fumed and flared for more than 50 years, pitting Washington and Havana in what some regard as the final battleground of the Cold War. The Cold War, of course, is over and ideological disagreement no longer has much to do with the stubborn antipathy that continues to dominate U.S.-Cuba relations. Even the experts seem stymied by the remarkable and seemingly illogical persistence of the dispute. There is no explanation, says Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington-based think-tank. This is the war without end the war against Cuba. To some degree, that war can now be reduced to a conflict over prisoners five Cubans and one American. Where the Cubans are concerned, time is fast running out. The real fear is that the United States is essentially destroying the prospects of these families to have children, says Birns. The inability to have children confronts all of them. It is certainly staring Adriana Perez straight in the face, as she travels the
world trying to drum up support for her husband and his four comrades. In fact, her hopes for children may already be moot. H eres the story so far. Dispatched to south Florida in the 1990s, the five Cuban men were on a long-term clandestine mission no one denies that but they were not spies in the conventional sense, according to their defenders. They were not interested in undermining the U.S. government or its institutions. Instead, they spent their time monitoring the activities of radical Cuban-American groups fiercely opposed to the government of Fidel Castro and not averse to violence. Later, Havana offered to share its intelligence with the U.S. government. That was a mistake. Instead of saying gracias, compaeros, American authorities responded by arresting the five Cubans and charging them with a raft of espionage-related crimes. Lawyers for the five sought to move the trial out of Miami, with its volatile anti-Castro community, but those efforts were rebuffed. That was quite shocking, says Birns. In south Florida, its hard to imagine you could get an impartial jury. Impartial or not, the Miami jurors subsequently convicted the defendants on all counts, and the men were sentenced in 2001 to sometimes astoundingly long prison terms, most notably the sentence meted out to the husband of Adriana Perez. With one exception Rene Gonzalez, who was released from a federal prison in 2011 but is still serving three years of parole the Cubans have remained behind bars ever since. In spite of this, they have not lost their optimism that they will return to Cuba, said Perez, who hasnt seen her husband since the 1990s and not for lack of trying. On at least 10 occasions, she has sought a U.S. visa in order to visit Hernndez in jail, only to be turned down each time. This past week, she called on a highly sympathetic Toronto audience to step up their efforts to win the release o f the five. I ask each one of you, when you leave here, to think, What
would I do if it was my son or brother or father who was in jail? she said. U.S. President Barack Obama is not going to give freedom to the five spontaneously or because he is a good person. Whats needed, she said, is political pressure. That pressure could take many different forms, but it seems unlikely they will include a prisoner exchange, although the Cubans have earnestly sought one. Cue Alan Gross, a possibly somewhat naive American who was arrested in Havana in 2009, while working on a pro-democracy project funded by the United States Agency for International Development, a contract that involved providing electronic communications equipment to the islands minuscule Jewish community. For that activity, the Cubans arrested the American and put him on trial. He is now serving a 15-year sentence for crimes against the Cuban state. Havana has left no doubt that it would agree to a swap Grosss freedom in return for the release of some or all of the five. But Washington says no. The U.S. position is these are not comparable detainees, says Christopher Sabatini, policy director at the Council of the Americas, a research and analysis forum based in New York. I dont think the United States is going to budge on this. As a result, the two neighbours remain suspended in the same state of mutual hostility and diplomatic paralysis that has prevailed for almost as long as Cuba has been governed by someone named Castro.
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EXT China War Defense

No war or escalation- nuclear primacy prevents Ross 5 Robert S., Staff Writer for the National Interest, Fall, (Assessing the China Threat. The National Interest. Lexis)
At the strategic level, after decades of research and testing, China is preparing to deploy solid-fuel ballistic missiles that can target U.S. allies in East Asia and may be nearing completion of an intercontinental ballistic missile that can target the continental United States. It is also making advances in development of its next-generation submarine-launched ballistic missiles. None of these developments should come as a surprise; U.S. intelligence has been following these programs since their inception. Moreover, these programs should not be considered a
challenge to U.S. military superiority. Once these weapons are fully operational, perhaps by the end of the decade, China will have a more credible minimal second-strike capability. Despite recent Chinese bravado, not only is it hard to imagine a scenario in which China would use nuclear weapons in response to conventional hostilities, but U.S. retaliatory capabilities would make Chinese first-use suicidal. Continued modernization of its nuclear forces and massive quantitative superiority over China give the U nited S tates a far more robust deterrent posture vis-a -vis China than it ever possessed vis-a -vis the Soviet Union. Similarly, overwhelming U.S. nuclear superiority provides greater strategic security for our East Asian allies than U.S. nuclear capabilities ever provided for our European allies during the Cold War.
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EXT Russia War Defense

Deterrence checks
Turner 2 (Admiral Stansfield, Former Director Central Intelligence Agency, Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Winter / Spring, 26
Fletcher F. World Aff. 115, Lexis) There are, of course, other centrals question to be considered: Would Russian psychology differ from American and would Russian society be willing to accept large numbers of nuclear detonations on their soil in order to perpetrate a nuclear war against the United States? These are difficult questions to answer. The more pertinent concern, however, is that this is an issue of life or death. No
head of state could contemplate plunging the world into nuclear conflict without considering both the mortal threat to his or her citizens, and also the likelihood of his or her own death, underground shelters notwithstanding. The presumption that heads of state prefer to live than to die gives us one benchmark. Another is the Cuban missile crisis, in which both Leonid Khruschev and President Kennedy quite visibly backed away from the prospect of very limited nuclear war. Finally, Russias economy, being about the size of Belgiums, is so small that its leaders would be well aware that recovery, even from a small nuclear attack, would be a very lengthy process. In terms of nuclear detonation threats, the United States must consider
Russian deterrence as very close to its own.
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EXT Balkans War Defense

Balkans conflict wont escalate. Bandow 99 [Doug, Senior Fellow of the CATO Institute, Mar 10, The U.S. Role in Kosovo,
http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-db031099.html]
Most important, it would put U.S. troops at risk without any serious, let alone vital, American interest at stake. To paraphrase German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single healthy American rifleman. Yugoslavia obviously poses no direct
threat to the U.S. or any U.S. ally.
Some argue that there are indirect dangers: failing to act risks another continental, if not global, conflict. Contended former German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel: "Everything must be done to insure that another awful conflagration does not explode in Europe." It is a paranoid fantasy to imagine Serbia alone inaugurating such a conflict, however. Serbian legions will not be marching on Ankara, Athens, or Tirana, let alone Berlin, Moscow, or Paris. Only if other states joined in could the war become a serious one. This was, of course, the same argument used for Western intervention in Bosnia. Yet the Yugoslavian civil war, running from Slovenia through Bosnia, lasted longer than World War I without expanding beyond Yugoslavia. The lesson is obvious: it is better for surrounding states to remain aloof rather than to intervene in ethnic strife, thereby building firebreaks to rather than transmission belts for war. Even if the conflict in Kosovo spilled over into Albania and Macedonia, no major power would join
the conflict, in stark contrast to World War I. The worst case would be a Greco-Turkish war, but both countries have made clear both privately and publicly that neither is interested in intervening in the Balkans. In fact, violence in Kosovo is the least likely spark for such a conflict. Should Ankara and Athens exchange blows, it is far more likely to occur over the Aegean islands, Cyprus, or
territorial sea claims. Moreover, as noted earlier, NATO's intervention on behalf of the KLA would only energize advocates of a greater Albania. The most important point, however, is that any resulting instability is a European, not an American, problem. The U.S. has a vital interest in preventing a hostile hegemonic power from dominating Europe. Washington does not have even a minor interest in preventing Europe from having to deal with the detritus in the Balkans left over from the Cold War. Instability on the periphery of Europe has other consequences-economic and cultural, for instance--but they are minimal. To call this a vital interest, as does the administration, suggests that it is incapable of setting priorities.
International community solves the impact Wolff 6 (Stefan, PhD & German political scientist, Ethnic Conflict, p. 138]
This link of prevention,
management, and settlement is part of the reason why the international community has, in the western Balkans, and it contains important lessons. Success crucially depended on a number of factorsa developed institutional framework and a set of policies that enable decisions to be made quickly, to provide adequate funds and personnel, and to cooperate and coordinate activities are some of them. Another factor is the effectiveness of the policies employed: in the western Balkans, for example, EUimposed conditionality is so much more effective vis--vis countries where the promise of closer association with, and potential accession to, the EU is credible and where both political elites and the general public are ready to make compromises in
since the end of the Kosovo conflict, been more successful order to attain what many believe to be a panacea for all their problems. This leverage often does not exist elsewhere because there is no clear long-term commitment to a particular country or region, but rather an ad hoc and often belated response to an emerging crisis, a lack familiarity with, and sensitivity towards, the situation on the ground and no credible intelligence sources. Comparing the situation in Macedonia with that in Bosnia and Herzegovina or Rwanda in the early 1990s illustrates this point.
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1NC XO CP
TEXT: The Executive Office off the President should increase economic engagement with Cuba. The President has large authority to increase economic engagement with Cuba solves the AFF
Ashby 13 (Dr. Tim, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW AT THE COUNCIL ON HEMISPHERIC AFFAIRS, 3/29/13,
Preserving Stability in Cuba After Normalizing Relations with the United States The Importance of Trading with State-Owned Enterprises, http://www.coha.org/preserving-stability-in-cuba-timothy-ashby/)
At the request of the U.S. Congress, the General Accounting Office (GAO) conducted detailed reviews of the frameworks for seven key statutes that govern Cuban sanctions. [11] The resulting reports concluded that (i) the president still maintains broad discretion to make additional modifications to Cuban sanctions; and (ii) prior measures, implemented by the executive branch have had the effect of easing specific restrictions of the Cuba sanctions and have been consistent with statutory mandates as well as within the discretionary authority of the president. [12] Some legal scholars assert that absence of such explicit statutory provisions in other areas suggests that Congress did not intend to prohibit the executive branch from issuing general or specific licenses to authorize certain transactions with Cuba when such licenses are deemed to be appropriate and consistent with U.S. policies. [13] Although a complex variet y of federal statutes have re-stated the regulatory prohibition on importation of Cuban goods under 31 C.F.R. 515.204, enabling legislation to codify the restriction, has not been passed. For example, 22 U.S.C. 6040(a) notes that 31 C.F.R. 515.204 prohibits the importation of goods from Cuba, but does not codify or expressly prohibit such activity, and 22 U.S.C. 7028 acknowledges that Congress did not attempt to alter any prohibitions on the importation of goods from Cuba under 31 C.F.R. 515.204. [14] The complete dismantling of the Cuban economic embargo will undoubtedly require congressional legislation; however, the president has broad powers to modify policy towards Cuba, particularly in an emergency situation that could affect U.S. national security. [15] For example, imports of Cuban origin goods are prohibited under the Cuban Asset Control Regulations (CACRS) except as specifically authorized by the Secretary of the Treasury by means of regulations, rulings, instructions, licenses or otherwise. [16] Such authority could allow the president to argue for the modification of 31 C.F.R. 204s complete prohibition on the importation of Cuban goods by stating that Cuban exports to the United States help the Cuban people by creating employment and thereby maintaining the islands social stability. Considering the domestic political constituency and the political obduracy of U.S. Congress, a more realistic presidential rationale for allowing Cuban imports from all types of enterprises could be the protection of U.S. borders during an era of grave concerns about homeland security. Some policy analysts suggest that bilateral trade with Cuba should be restricted to businesses and individuals engaged in certifiably independent (i.e. non-state) economic activity. [17] While wellintentioned, such a policy would likely have a negligible impact on Cubas economic development and fails to recognize that commercial enterprises that the U.S. government would classify as SOEs are actually co-ops or other types of quasi-independent entities that are in the early stages of privatization. Restrictions such as this also fail to address larger national and regional security concerns which are the primary responsibility of the president. Although ultimately the Cuban people must freely choose their own political and economic systems, President Obama should be seen as having legal authority to support the transition taking place on the island by opening U.S. markets to Cuban imports. Normalized bilateral trade will benefit the Cuban people and help to provide economic and social stability that is in turn vital to U.S. national and regional security. Such trade must include both the islands small, yet growing, private sector and State-Owned Enterprises. In this regard, it would be both unfair and strategically unwise to treat Cuba differently from its stated models, China and Vietnam.
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2NC Solvency
CP solves relations and economic ties while avoiding congressional action heres a laundry list of specific provisions under his authority
CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February 2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032) While we wait for Congress to act, the Executive Branch should exercise its licensing authority to further safeguard the flow of contacts and resources into the Island, encourage independent economic and political activity, and further empower the Cuban people. To that end, the Cuba Study Group proposes that the President pursue the following measures:xxi i) Modify Remittance and Export Limitations: Increase the $3,000 limit on remittances that can be carried to Cuba by authorized travelers and expand the types of goods that travelers may legally take to Cuba to support micro entrepreneurs. Fewer limitations in these areas will make it easier for U.S. travelers to provide seed capital and in-kind contributions for start-ups. ii) Authorize Travel by General License for NGOs and Allow Them to Open Cuban Bank Accounts: Regulations enacted on January 28, 2011 allow U.S. full- and part-time university staff to travel to Cuba by general license. These regulations also allow U.S.-based academic institutions to open accounts in Cuban banks with funds to support their educational programs in Cuba. A similar license for foundations and NGOs whose mission involves support for micro and small businesses would also help support this growing segment of civil society. iii) Establish New Licenses for the Provision of Services to Cuban Private Entrepreneurs: The President could build on existing authorizations that allow U.S. persons and institutions to pay individual Cuban scholars, musicians and artists for their work. New licenses could extend to additional groups, such as artisans or farmers, and authorize a greater scope of activities such as recording, publication, distribution, etc. iv) Authorize Imports of Certain Goods and Services to Businesses and Individuals Engaged in Certifiably Independent Economic Activity in Cuba: The President could authorize the importation of limited types of Cuban-origin goods and services under general or specific licenses, particularly when such authorizations could be justified as providing support for the Cuban people or democratic change in Cuba. For example, the President could authorize imports from private producers or allow U.S. persons to directly engage and hire Cuban professionals. v) Authorize Export and Sale of Goods and Services to Businesses and Individuals Engaged in Certifiably Independent Economic Activity in Cuba: Amend existing licensing policy to establish a presumption of approval for specific items deemed to support the U.S.-stated policy goal of promoting independent economic activity on the Island. Since 2000, legislation has allowed the export of a broad range of agricultural products and a limited range of medicines and medical devices. This should be expanded to include other inputs in demand by independent businesses, includingbut not limited togood such as art supplies, food preparation equipment, bookkeeping materials, and basic electronic equipment and software required for retail sales and business administration. vi) Authorize the Sale of Telecommunications Hardware in Cuba: Current U.S. regulations, as amended by the Obama administration in 2009, allow for donations of some telecommunications equipment, thereby recognizing that these goods by themselves do not violate the embargo. The next step should be to allow for the sales of those same goods inside the Island. Along with those provisions, changes should also allow for the provision of general travel licenses for research, marketing and sale of those goods. vii) Authorize the Reestablishment of Ferry Services to Cuba: Current U.S. regulations allow both aircraft and vessels to serve Cuba as an exception to the U.S. embargo against the Island.xxii The use of
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chartered aircrafts to transport Cuban-Americans and other licensed U.S. travelers to and from Cuba has long been authorized by the U.S. Department of Treasury. The next step should be to reestablish safe and secure chartered ferry services to transport the same categories of passengers to and from Cuba. Ferry service offers an affordable alternative to airline travel to Cuba and would allow an increase in the amount of goods that Cuban-Americans and other licensed travelers may legally take to Cuba to support their families and micro entrepreneurs. viii)Simplify the Provision of Controlled Commodities, such as Computers and Laptopsxxiii: Direct the Department of Commerce to provide more detailed guidance for individuals to determine whether or not controlled commodities, such as laptops and printers, qualify under the general export waiver. ix) Allow Licensed U.S. Travelers Access to U.S.-Issued Debit, Credit, and Pre-Paid Cards and Other Financial Services While on Authorized Travel in Cuba: Currently, U.S. travelers to Cuba have no access to U.S. bank accounts, credit cards, debit cards or other basic financial services. With few exceptions, U.S. travelers are forced to carry cash with them to Cuba. Allowing U.S. travelers access to electronic payment systems would help ensure their safety and security while being on the Island. Moreover, authorizing new electronic payment systems would facilitate the Administrations goal of promoting people-to-people contacts and facilitating private economic activity by safeguarding the transfer of money from U.S. residents to relatives and independent entrepreneurs on the island. x) Review Cubas Designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism: Cubas status on the State Departments list of state sponsors of terrorism has been subject to debate for more than a decade. The President should order a comprehensive, apolitical review to determine whether this designation reflects the reality of Cuba today.www.CubaStudyGroup.org 10 xi) Develop an expanded bilateral agenda with a range of specific topics of mutual interest: Agenda should include topics such as the resolution of property claims to help foster an environment of dialogue, problemsolving and trust building thereby helping to set the stage for an eventual normalization of relations.
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1AC Version X
My partner and I stand in opposition to the economic embargo against Cuba imposed by the United States federal government. The embargo is based on a flawed justification of labeling Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism despite contradicting evidence within the intelligence community Williams 13 (Carol, Political calculus keeps Cuba on U.S. list of terror sponsors, 5/3/13,
http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-cuba-us-terror-list-20130502,0,2494970.story)
Cubas communist leadership was quick to send condolences to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings and to reiterate to Washington that it rejects and condemns unequivocally all acts of terrorism. Once a key supplier of arms and training to leftist rebels in Latin America, the Castro regime long ago disentangled itself from the Cold War-era confrontations. Havana now hosts peace talks between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that it once supported and the U.S.-allied government the
insurgents battled for years. Havana still gives refuge to a few fugitive radicals from the Black Panthers and Basque insurgents, and two years ago a Cuban court convicted 64-year-old development specialist Alan Gross on spying charges for attempting to install satellite equipment without government permission. But nothing
that Cuba has done suggests its government is plotting harm against Americans, national security experts say. And they criticize as counterproductive the State Departments decision, disclosed this week, to keep Cuba on its list of state sponsors of terrorism. We ought to reserve that term for nations that actually use the apparatus of statehood to support the targeting of U.S.
interests and civilians, said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at the Department of Homeland Security and now writing and lecturing on national security in the Boston area. Yes, Cuba does a lot of bad things that we dont like, but it doesnt rise to anything on the level of a terrorist threat. On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the administration has no current plans to remove Cuba from the list to be released later this month. The island nation that has been under a U.S. trade and t ravel embargo since shortly after revolutionary leader Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 is in the company of only Iran, Syria and Sudan in being branded with the state sponsor label. Kayyem laments the diluting of the terrorist designation based on political or ideological disputes. We work with a lot of countries we dont like, but the imprimatur of terrorism has a ring to it in a way that can be harmful to us, she said. Collaboration
between the United States and Cuba on emergency planning to respond to the mutual threats posed by hurricanes, oil spills and refugee crises are complicated by the set of trade and financial restrictions that comes along with the state sponsor censure, Kayyem said. There are some real operational impediments when we
have a system that begins with no rather than why not? she said of the legally encumbered contacts between Hav ana and Washington. Politicians who have pushed for a continued hard line against Cuba cheered their victory in getting the Obama administration to keep Cuba on the list. U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a South Florida Republican whose efforts to isolate and punish the Castro regime have been a central plank of her election strategy throughout her 24 years in Congress, hailed the State Department decision as reaffirming the threat th at the Castro regime represents. Arash Aramesh, a national security analyst at Stanford Law School, blamed the continued branding of Cuba as a terrorism sponsor on politicians pandering for a certain political base. He also said President Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry have failed to make a priority of removing the impediment to better relations with Cuba. As much as Id like to see the Castro re gime gone and an open and free Cuba, it takes away from the State Departments credibility when they include countries on the list that arent even close to threatening Americans, Aramesh said. Political considerations also factor into excluding countries from the state sponsor l ist, he said, pointing to Pakistan as a prime example. Although Islamabad very clearly supports terrorist and insurgent organizations, he said, the U.S. gov ernment has long refused to provoke its ally in the region with the official censure. The decision to retain Cuba on the list surprised some observers of the long-contentious relationship between Havana and Washington. Since Fidel Castro retired five years ago and handed the reins of power to his younger brother, Raul, modest economic reforms have been tackled and the government has r evoked the practice of requiring Cubans to get exit visas before they could leave their country for foreign travel. There was talk early in Obamas first term of easing the 51 -year-old embargo, and Kerry, though still in the Senate then, wrote a commentary for the Tampa Bay Tribune in 2009 in which he deemed the security threat from Cuba a faint shadow. He called then for freer travel between the two countries and an end to the U.S. policy of isolating Cuba that has manifestly failed for nearly 50 years. The political clout of the Cuban American community in South Florida and more recently Havanas refusal to release Gross have kept any warming between the Cold War adversaries at bay. Its a matter of political priorities
and trade-offs, Aramesh said. He noted that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last year exercised her discretion to get the
Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq, or MEK, removed from the governments list of designated terrorist organizations. That move was

motivated by the hopes of some in Congress that the group could be aided and encouraged to eventually challenge the Tehran regime.
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Its a question of how much political cost you want to incur or how much political capital you want to spend, Aramesh said. President Obama has decided not to reach out to Cuba, that he has more important foreign policy battles elsewhere.
This causes serial policy failure and undermines all aspects of US foreign policy Byman 8 (Daniel, Brookings Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, The Changing Nature of
State Sponsorship of Terrorism, http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2008/05/terrorism-byman)
The U.S. approach toward state sponsorship of terrorism rests on a flawed understanding
of the problem and an even more flawed policy response. The U.S. Department of States current formal list of state sponsors includes Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. But Cuba and North Korea have done almost nothing in this area in recent years, and Sudan has changed its ways enough that elsewhere the Bush administration credits Sudan as a strong partner in the War on Terror. Of those on the list, only Syria and Iran remain problems, and in both cases their involvement in traditional international terrorism is down considerably from their peaks in the 1980s. What seems like a brilliant policy success, however, is really an artifact of bad list management, because much of the problem of state sponsorship today involves countries that are not on the list at all. Pakistan has long aided a range of terrorist groups fighting against India in Kashmir and is a major sponsor of Taliban forces fighting the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan. Hugo Chavezs government in Venezuela is a major supporter of the FARC. And several other governments, such as those in Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian territories, create problems by deliberately looking the other way when their citizens back terrorist groups. These new state sponsors are actually more dangerous to the United States and its interests than the remaining traditional state sponsors, because some of them are tied to Sunni jihadist groups such as alQaida currently the greatest terrorist threat facing the United States. The nightmare of a terrorist group acquiring nuclear weapons is far more likely to involve Pakistan than it is Iran or North Korea. The new state sponsors can also be harder to deal with than the old ones, not least because they often have a more complicated relationship with terrorists. In many cases, the government in question does not actively train or arm the terrorist group, but rather lets it act with relative impunity an approach that, in practice, allows the government to claim ignorance or incapacity. Thus it can be hard to distinguish between Yemens willful inaction and cases like Jordan, where terrorist cells also operate but do so despite a fierce regime counterterrorism campaign. Many of the new sponsors are also U.S. allies. And some cooperate, albeit fitfully, with the U.S. war on terrorism even as they surreptitiously allow terrorists to operate from their soil. Because of this complexity, the answer to the problem does not lie only in updating the State Departments state sponsorship list to reflect current relationships swapping out Cuba for Venezuela, say, or replacing North Korea with Pakistan. The very concept of a binary list, with countries either on it or off, is flawed and often does more harm to U.S. interests than good. Once a country is listed it is hard to remove even if it does not support terrorism (as Sudan has found out),and the list provides little incentive for partial or incomplete counterterrorism cooperation (which is all several countries are realistically likely to give).
Such discourse is not neutral, the current economic embargo against Cuba represents the epitome of a specific rhetorical strategy of American Exceptionalism this logic sanitizes violence against foreign terrorist states to protect morally superior American interests Grosscup 2k (Beau, IR Professor at Cal State University, Chico, Terrorism-at-a-Distance: The Imagery That Serves US
Power, GLOBAL DIALOGUE; Volume 2, Number 4, Autumn 2000)
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For nearly two centuries the rationalisation system of American foreign policy was based on the moral constructs of American benevolence and the uniqueness of the American social and political experiment. From the late 1960s, a politicised image of terrorism was added to that system. The product of a closed system of discourse dominated by researchers and security analysts with close ties to government and private institutionslabelled the terrorism industry by Edward Herman and Gerry OSullivanthis image encourages Americans to view terrorism as the most dastardly of evil deeds. More to the point, it portrays the terrorist as an enemy of the Western establishment, somebody who stands in
the way of the realization of Western aims.1 This jingoistic imagery has been highly effective in rallying public support fo r US foreign policy for nearly three decades.2 Initially, American policy makers took advantage of terrorisms pejorative connotations to undermine public suppo rt for various anti-colonial nationalist movements by linking them, and them alone, to the terrorist label. The Palestine Liberation Organisation in the Middle East, the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, the African National Congress in South Africa and Namibias South West African Peoples Organisation were all affected by this effor t. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration and its terrorism industry experts insisted that anyone opposed to Western, in particular American, interests was a Soviet-sponsored terrorist. Restricted to this jingoistic analysis, Americans rallied behind the administrations revitalised Cold War agenda
against an evil Soviet empire and its international terrorist network. The same is true in the postCold War era. Terrorism industry experts, who continue to monopolise the terrorism discourse, argue that rogue state, Islamic, narco and ad hoc terrorism are central components of a New World Disorder threatening the American way of life. Their efforts have not been in vain. During the Persian Gulf War, linking Saddam Hussein to anti-American terrorism heightened American support for the slaughter of Iraqi military and civilians, much as linking Manuel Noriega with narco-terrorism rallied public support for the illegal invasion of Panama in 1989. Terrorism imagery also produced public acquiescence in American military interventions in Somalia and Haiti, interventions which were presented as humanitarian missions. In the mid-1990s, revitalised images of Iranian-backed Islamic terrorism dominated foreign policy discussions of the threats to American initiatives in the Middle East and beyond. By the end of the 1990s, the evil terrorism of Osama bin Laden and Slobodan Milosevic provided rationales for the humanitarian use of American air power. Essential to the success of the jingoistic concept of terrorism
is a carefully constructed imagery labelled here terrorism-at-a-distance. Two assertions combine to produce this imagery. The first contends that terrorism occurs over there, that it is a product of foreign cultures and a sinister act of foreign adversaries whose treachery victimises Americans who live in or travel to far-off lands. The second, reinforcing the first, is the warning that although Americans have been spared the horrors of contemporary terrorism at home, our luck is running out, our day is coming. It is only a matter of time before Americas global pursuit of freedom and democracy and its open society make enemies of foreign terrorists and draw them to the United States, both as a land of exile and as a potential target of terrorist actions. Thus, unless preventative foreign and domestic policy measures are taken, the
stage is set for the victimisation of America. The Foreign-Policy Factor Richard Falk argues that the concept of terrorism has been useful in sanitising US foreign policy: This process is aided by locating terrorism in the foreign other, a process that can build on the racist convenience of non-Western challenges.3 Locating terrorism in the foreign other has been a consistent theme of American expert analysis of contemporary terrorism. In its Cold War construction, terrorism was the work of the Soviet Union, both in its own actions (Afghanistan) and via its control and/or sponsorship of foreign states, namely Cuba, Libya, Syria, East Germany, North Korea, Nicaragua and Iran. The Soviets were said to be behind the non-state terrorism of the PLO, the Baader Meinhof gang, the IRA, ANC, Swapo and individuals such as Carlos, Abu Nidal and Mehmet Ali Agca. Despite the demise of the Soviet Union, terrorism has not disappeared, and the terrorism-at-a-distance thesis continues to underlie American analysis. State-sponsored terrorism is now the work of foreign rogue states (retitled states of concern by the Clinton administration in June 2000), namely Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and North Korea. The centre of the international terrorist network, allegedly headquartered in Moscow during the Cold War, is said to have moved three times, initially to Baghdad in August 1990, then after the Persian Gulf War to Tehran. In August 1998, President Clinton informed the world that under Osama bin Laden, the international
terrorist network was now headquartered in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. Non-state terrorism is described as multifaceted, complex and foreign-based. Among its agents are leftist groups newly orphaned by the demise of their Soviet parent. In the postCold War climate they frantically search the political landscape for foster parents to supply them with the materials of terrorism. Even more dangerous to the American-led new world order are the dual foreign threats of Islamic terrorism and narco-terrorism. Islam is portrayed as a monolithic menace and a universal threat to Western civilisation in general and to the United States in particular. This contemporary consensus about Islam is built upon historical images of Islamic militancy, of an Islamic mentality, of Islamic fundamentalism or the Shia penchant for martyrdom, all of which helped provoke the fervently hostile Western response t o the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. Commenting on the media coverage of that crisis, Edward Said writes: We were back to the old bas ics. Iranians were reduced to fundamentalist screwballs by Bob Ingle in the Atlanta Constitution, Claire Sterling in the Washington Post argued that the Iran story was an aspect of Fright Decade I while Bill Green on the same pages of the Washington Post wrote of the Iranian obscenity aimed directly at the heart of American nationalism and self-esteem.4 In the 1990s, the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, the New York World Trade Center bombing, the HamasHizbollah challenge to the US-sponsored Middle East peace process, and the terrorism tied to Osama bin Laden and his fundamentalist colleagues have re-ignited the fires of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States. New Forms of Terrorism A by-product of the Cold War, narco-terrorism, too, has survived the end of the Soviet Union. According to terrorism industry experts, its growing presence is connected to central features of the emerging political order. First, with the loss of Soviet support, the modern terrorist, in need of financial resources, seeks to gain huge profits from illegal activities. How else, American terrorism experts ask, but through the sale of drugs could terrorists afford the costly weapons of mass destruction they ardently desire? Second, the politically constructed image of the lawless rogue state directly supports former Secretary of State George Shultzs claim that drug tra fficking requires an environment of lawlessness and corruption to enhance the production and marketing of illicit drugs. Conversely, the insidious imagery of narco-terrorism exaggerates the nature of the threat, providing the American architects of the new world order with the pret ext for intervention in the affairs of the designated rogue regimes in direct violation of the right to national sovereignty. Although the United States is the major market for insidious drugs, the plague of narco-terrorism is located exclusively in th e foreign other. Its origins are found
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either in the Islamic fundamentalist regimes of Iran, Iraq and Libya, or in the drug cartels of South America, Asia and the Middle East. In August 1995, terrorism industry experts discovered a new form of foreign-instigated terrorism threatening America and its friends. In this decentralised or ad hoc model, specialist guerrillas are brought t ogether to commit a specific terrorist act and then quickly returned to their country of refuge. The new modus operandi is allegedly followed by Muslim extremist groups and possibly by those who bombed the World Trade Center. It is a new operational design in which there are no clear patterns, associations or the traditional cell structure used by terrorist organisations in the past. Ad hoc terrorism is difficult to counter and even to analyse as it involves general guidelines coming from religi ous leaders, rather than precise commands. Terrorism industry experts say the new model has probably been seen in Argentina, the United Kingdom, Egypt, France, Algeria and Israel.
American Jingoism Firmly established in Cold War and postCold War constructs, the imagery of terrorism-at-a-distance serves the US national security establishment by reinforcing American ethnocentricity and jingoism. First,
insisting that terrorism is the dastardly deed of foreigners strengthens the high moral opinion American citizens hold of themselves, their society and their benevolent role in the world. Armed with this view and believing US foreign policy to occupy the firmest of moral ground, Americans see their nations adventures abroad as beyond reproach, deserving support with vigour and righteous indignation. In this bip artisan, jingoistic climate, the assessments of foreign policy analysts, particularly terrorism experts, are held in high esteem as moral truths and as making moral sense. Typical of these moral truths is a distinction made by revered terrorism expert Brian Jenkins. Jenkins argues it is morally
defensible to drop American bombs on Iraqi cities from twenty thousand feet, or to lob sixteen-inch shells for six months into Druse and Shiite towns in Lebanon from the battleship New Jersey. Yet the suicidal car bomb terrorist who killed 241 marines in Beirut committed a cowardly and morally indefensible deed. Typical also was the climate of official and public moral outrage evident in February 1996 when Cuba shot down two private planes belonging to Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban-American anti-Castro organisation. Despite diplomatic objections by the Cuban government, the groups planes had been violating Cuban airspace and dropping anti-communist leaflets over Havana for nearly a year. Yet for most Americans, Cubas status as a state sponsor of terrorism (a US State Department designation) and the alleged innocence of the humanitarian Brothers to the Rescue overrode Cubas claims to sovereignty and national self-determination. As a result, the crimes of the Brothers were sanitised, while the intensified US embargo and the UN censure of Cuba captured the moral high ground. Second, the imagery of terrorism-at-a-distance connects with American views about foreigners, the inferiority of their culture and the danger they pose to the American way of life. The construction of a heightened foreign threat to Americans at home and abroad permits US policy makers to pursue means and measures that would otherwise be highly controversial with the full approval of most Americans.
The historical impact is the justification of over 200 million deaths over the last century; more than all other forms of deadly conflict combined Jackson 8 (Richard, Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, The Ghosts of State Terror:
Knowledge, Politics and Terrorism Studies, http://humansecuritygateway.com/documents/ISA_theghostsofstateterror.pdf)
*Footnote 41: A conservative estimate of state-instigated mass murder, forcible starvations and genocide against civilians suggests that states have been responsible for 170-200 millions deaths in the twentieth century alone more than all other forms of deadly conflict, including war, combined. A second important criticism that can be levelled at the field for upholding its silences on state terrorism is that by any empirical measure, states have engaged in far more terrorism than non-state terrorists, and their terrorism has been far more serious and destructive. This is not surprising, as states possess far more destructive power than non-state actors and the use of terrorism can become institutionalised in permanent state structures. In addition, there is a great deal of evidence of Western state involvement in terrorism. As a very crude comparison, non-state terrorism is responsible for between a few hundred and a few thousand deaths annually over the entire world, depending upon which data set or measures are employed. By contrast, states have killed, tortured, and intimidated hundreds of millions of people41 over the past century or so, and a great many states continue to do so today in places like Colombia, Haiti, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Uzbekistan,42 Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya, Tibet, North Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sudan, and elsewhere. Many of these states regularly employ extensive state torture, extra-judicial killings, disappearances, collective punishments, and daily forms of violent intimidation to terrorise opponents and enforce compliance to the state; human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch provide meticulous and continual documentation of these violations. The point is that even if only a small fraction of these murders and acts of civilian-directed violence can be clearly identified as acts of state
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terrorism, they would still vastly outnumber the annual acts of non-state terrorism. Similarly, Western involvement in terrorism has a long but generally ignored history, which includes: the extensive use of official terror by Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, the U.S. and other colonial powers as a form of governance and social control in numerous countries throughout the colonial period;43 the terror bombings of civilians during World War II; U.S. and Western support and sanctuary for a range of right-wing insurgent groups during the cold war such as anti-Castro groups, the Contras, Unita, the Mujahideen, and others groups which regularly committed terrorist acts including planting car bombs in
markets, kidnappings, assassinations, civilian massacres, and blowing up civilian airliners;44 Israels extensive use of stat e terrorism in the form of torture, assassination, and collective punishments against Palestinian populations in surrounding countries and within the occupied territories; Israeli sponsorship of Christian militia groups in Lebanon who engaged in numerous acts of terror during the 1980s, including the notorious Sabra and Shatilla refugee camp massacres; U.S. tolerance of Irish Republican terrorist activity in the U.S.;45 U.S. and Western support for systematic state terror by numerous right-wing regimes across the world, perhaps most notoriously El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran;46 U.S. use of terrorism during counterinsurgency operations such as Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, and in counterrevolutionary campaigns in Latin America such as Operation Condor;47 British support for Loyalist terrorism in Northern Ireland48 and var ious other Islamist groups in Libya and Bosnia, among others;49 Spanish state terror during the socalled dirty war against ETA;50 French terror in Algeria and against Greenpeace in the Rainbow Warrior bombing; Italian state sponsorship of right-wing terrorists who carried out so-called black flag operations, such as terrorist bombings, designed to implicate left wing groups from the late 1960s to the early 1980s; Western support for Afghan51 and Somali warlords today; the provision of continuing sanctuary to anti-Castro terrorists,52 former Latin American state terrorists,53 and various Asian anti-communist terrorist groups54 in the U.S. today; toleration and support for Pakistan, despite its continued sponsorship of Kashmiri terrorist groups;55 continuing U.S. and Western support for Colombian state terrorism;56the extensive use of, and sponsorship of, torture and extraordinary rendition57 in the war on terror today; the toleration (or passive sponsorship) of death squad activity in occupied Iraq today;58 among many other examples.
Specifically, it ignores the ways and which the US has empirically sponsored terrorism against Cuba Chomsky 91 (Noam, International Terrorism: Image and Reality
Noam Chomsky, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm)
International terrorism is, of course, not an invention of the 1980s. In the previous two decades, its major victims were Cuba and Lebanon. Anti-Cuban terrorism was directed by a secret Special Group established in November 1961 under the code name "Mongoose," involving 400 Americans, 2,000 Cubans, a private navy of fast boats, and a $50 million annual budget, run in part by a Miami CIA station functioning in violation of the Neutrality Act and, presumably, the law banning CIA operations in the United States.20 These operations included bombing of hotels and industrial installations, sinking of fishing boats, poisoning of crops and livestock, contamination of sugar exports, etc. Not all of these actions were
specifically authorized by the CIA, but no such considerations absolve official enemies. Several of these terrorist operations took place at the time of the Cuban missile crisis of October-November 1962. In the weeks before, Raymond Garthoff reports, a Cuban terrorist group operating from Florida with US government authorization carried out "a daring speedboat strafing attack on a Cuban seaside hotel near Havana where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans;" and shortly after, attacked British and Cuban cargo ships and again raided Cuba, among other actions that were stepped up in early October. At one of the tensest moments of the missile
crisis, on November 8, a terrorist team dispatched from the United States blew up a Cuban industrial facility after the Mongoose operations had been officially suspended. Fidel Castro alleged that 400 workers had been killed in this operation, guided by "photographs taken by spying planes." This terrorist act, which might have set off a global nuclear war, evoked little comment when it was revealed. Attempts to assassinate Castro and other terror continued immediately after the crisis terminated, and were escalated by Nixon in 1969.21 Such operations continued after the Nixon years. In 1976, for example, two Cuban fishing vessels were
attacked in April by boats from Miami, the main center of anti-Cuban terrorism worldwide. A few weeks later, the Cuban embassy in Portugal was bombed with two killed. In July, the Cuban mission to the UN in New York was bombed and there were bombings aimed at Cuban targets in the Caribbean and Colombia, along with the attempted bombing of a pro-Cuban meeting at the Academy of Music in New York. In August, two officials of the Cuban embassy in Argentina were kidnapped and Cubana airlines offices in Panama were bombed. The Cuban embassy in Venezuela was fired upon in October and the embassy in Madrid was bombed in November. In October, CIA-trained Cuban exiles bombed a Cubana civilian airliner, killing all 73 aboard, including Cuba's gold-medal-winning international fencing team. One of the agents of this terrorist operation, Bay of Pigs veteran Luis Posada Carriles, was sprung from the Venezuelan jail where he was held for the bombing; he mysteriously escaped and found his way to El Salvador, where he was put to work at the Ilopango military airbase to help organize the US terrorist operations in Nicaragua. The CIA attributed 89 terrorist operations in the US and the Caribbean area for 1969-79 to
Cuban exile groups, and the major one, OMEGA 7, was identified by the FBI as the most dangerous terrorist group operating in the US
during much of the 1970s.22 Cuba figures heavily in scholarly work on international terrorism. Walter Laqueur's standard work (see note 1)

contains many innuendos about Cuban sponsorship of terrorism,
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though little evidence. There is not a word, however, on the terrorist operations against Cuba. He writes that in "recent decades... the more oppressive regimes are not only free from terror, they have helped to launch it against more permissive societies." The intended meaning is that the United States, a "permissive society," is one of the victims of international terrorism, while Cuba, an "oppressive regime," is one of the agents. To establish the conclusion it is necessary to suppress the fact that the US has undeniably launched major terrorist attacks against Cuba and is relatively free from terror itself; and if there is a case to be made against Cuba, Laqueur has signally failed to present it.
Secondly, it is used to mask the forces of domestic terrorism targeting every ethnic, racial, sexual, and class-based divide Grosscup 2k (Beau, IR Professor at Cal State University, Chico, Terrorism-at-a-Distance: The Imagery That Serves US
Power, GLOBAL DIALOGUE; Volume 2, Number 4, Autumn 2000)
A second method of masking the social reality of domestic terrorism is to dismiss the daily violence against American racial minorities, homosexuals, women, the anti-nuclear movement, environmentalists and the family-planning community as unrelated to the problem of terrorism. This task is accomplished in two ways. First, such violence is designated as unconnected to any political constituency,
conspiracy or movement. It thus fails to meet the definitional criteria of terrorism utilised in the FBI surveys of domestic terrorism. In the words of former FBI director William Webster, it is not true terrorism and so is unworthy of FBI investigative priority. Second, without the
terrorism label to give it the necessary glamour, the violence is judged by the media to be regrettable and unfortunate, yet undeserving of a high profile or sustained coverage. In short, officially and unofficially relegated to secondary status, the daily terrorism against some Americans by other Americans remains below the surface of public awareness. Meanwhile, the officially designated terrorist event, defined as unique, foreign inspired and
gravely urgent, receives extensive, often live, media coverage along with official government high-priority security status. This approach was epitomised in the media and government frenzy surrounding the new millennium and the Y2K issue, in which events were cancelled, security arrangements limited public assess and suspected terrorists were questioned, detained or arrested, often without cause. The social reality
of terrorism in America is very different from that conveyed by the prevailing imagery. On the FBIs own definition of domestic terrorism, if applied without prejudice or political convenience, it becomes clear that in the 1990s (as in the 1970s and 1980s) various American constituencies fell victim to terrorism on a daily basis. Family-planning facilities and their staff have been the victims of nearly thirty years of sometimes lethal violence. Attacks on homosexuals and lesbians by skinheads and neo-Nazi groups saw a sharp rise in the 1990s. These attacks fit the definition of terrorism, yet they remain shrouded in official silence, ignored by large segments of the American public or treated as acts of individual revenge with no particular political motive or organised social agenda behind them. Officially categorised as hate crimes, violence by Americans against Americans based on race, sexual preference, gender or religion continues unabated. The early 1980s saw a series of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi attacks on members of the African American community, including sniper-fire murders and woundings, knifings, beatings and police shootings. The attacks led African American leaders to conclude there was a national racist conspiracy organised
by whites against Americas African American population. The charge fell on deaf ears at the FBI until the mid -1980s, when the bravado and violence of right-wing terrorists could no longer be ignored. By the end of the 1980s, the FBI had quietly prosecuted for acts of terrorism more than seventy-five members of such right-wing groups as the Order, the Aryan Nations, the Sheriffs Posse Comitatus and the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord. Yet, it took six years (19906) and the burning of fifty-seven black churches throughout the southern United States before Congress held a one-day hearing on the violence and President Bill Clinton called for an investigation into the possibility of a racial conspiracy. None of the church burnings was included in the FBIs 19905 annual reports on domestic terrorism. As twenty-seven churches burned in the first seven months of 1996 alone, the FBI still refused to treat the fires as cases of terrorism. In June 1997 the National Church Arson Task Force reported that there was no evidence of a national conspiracy. This finding would appear to vindicate the FBIs refusal to treat the church arson s as terrorism. But on its own definition a conspiracy of two is required for terrorism, not proof of a national conspiracy. Likewise, in the
1990s numerous reports indicated that violence and the wholesale terrorising of women because they are women, Jews because they are Jews, Arabs because they are Arabs, Asians because they are Asians and Muslims because they are Muslims was on the increase throughout the United States. In addition, as the twentieth century drew to a close, the mask that has hidden official terrorism, the use of
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terror as an instrument for the policing of citizens, particularly in Americas great cities, was be ing shorn. As the scholarship of Mike Davis and Christian Parenti reveals, official terrorism is just as insidious today as the well-documented terrorism by local, state and federal officials during the glory days of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow.8 Their findings are corroborated by investigations and convictions of police officers for race- and gender-based violence in many American cities, notably New York and Los Angeles. Yet the FBI says terrorism, especially official terrorism, is virtually absent from American soil. In masking the epidemic of domestic terrorism, the FBI and its like-minded colleagues in the national security establishment have approached terrorism from a posture of political convenience and with a behaviour pattern that is best described as consistently inconsistent.
This discursive criticism is a pre-requisite to policy analysis prefer our comprehensive method: revealing these structures is critical to understanding the consequences of economic engagement Jackson 8 (Richard, Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, The Ghosts of State Terror:
As stated above, the analytical approach employed in this study falls broadly under the mantle of discourse analysis.4 A form of critical theorising, discourse analysis aims primarily to illustrate and describe the relationship between textual and social and political processes. In particular, it is concerned with the politics of representation the manifest political or ideological consequences of adopting one mode of representation over another. In this case, I am concerned with the ways in which state terrorism is represented or not represented, which is itself a kind of representation as a subject within the field of terrorism studies. Although discourse theorising is employed within a range of different epistemological paradigms poststructuralist,
postmodernist, feminist, and social constructivist it is predicated on a shared set of theoretical commitments. Broadly speaking, these include:5 an understanding of language as constitutive or productive of meaning; an understanding of discourse as structures of signification which construct social realities, particularly in terms of defining subjects and establishing their relational positions within a system of signification;6 an understanding of discourse as being productive of subjects authorised to speak and act, legitimate forms of knowledge and political practices and importantly, common sense within particular social groups and historical settings; an
understanding of discourse as necessarily exclusionary and silencing of other modes of representation; and an understanding of discourse as historically and culturally contingent, inter-textual, open-ended, requiring continuous articulation and re- articulation and therefore, open to destabilisation and counter-hegemonic struggle. On this epistemological foundation and adopting an interpretive logic rather than a causal logic, the discourse analytic technique employed in this paper proceeded in two main stages. The first stage entailed an examination of a large number of texts from within the terrorism studies field.7 As such, the primary units of analysis or data for this research were more than 100 mainstream academic books, articles in the main terrorism studies and international relations journals, conference papers presented at ISA and APSA, and reports and websites from think-tanks and research institutions. Each text was examined
initially to see if it contained the terms state terrorism or state terror. Texts that did contain these term s were then examined to see how they were constructed as a discursive formation and subject of knowledge, how they were deployed within broader narratives, and how state terrorism was positioned as a subject in relation to non-state terrorism. Employing a grounded theory approach, the analysis was considered complete when the addition of new texts did not yield any new insights or categories. The second stage of the research involved subjecting the findings of the textual analysis to both a first and second order critique. A first order or immanent critique uses a discourses internal
contradictions, mistakes, misconceptions, and omissions to criticise it on its own terms and expose the events and perspectives that the discourse fails to acknowledge or address. The point of this form of internal critique is not necessarily to establish the correct or real truth of the subject beyond doubt, but rather to destabilise dominant interpretations and demonstrate the inherently contested and political nature of the discourse. A second order critique entails reflecting on the broader political and ethical consequences the ideological effects of the representations and more importantly in this case, the silences, enabled by the discourse. Specifically, it involves an exploration of the ways in which the discourse functions as a symbolic technology8 that can be wielded by particular elites and institutions, to: structure the primary subject positions, accepted knowledge, commonsense and legitimate policy
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responses to the actors and events being described; exclude and de-legitimise alternative knowledge and practice; naturalise a particular political and social order; and construct and sustain a hegemonic regime of truth. A range of specific discourse analytic techniques are useful in second order critique: genealogical analysis, predicate
analysis, narrative analysis, and deconstructive analysis.9 It is crucial to recognise that discourses are significant not just for what they say but also for what they do not say; the silences in a discourse can be as important, or even more important at times, than what is openly stated. This is because silence can function ideologically in any number of ways. For example, silence can be a deliberate means of distraction or misdirection from uncomfortable subjects or contrasting viewpoints, the suppression or de-legitimisation of alternative forms of knowledge or values, the tacit endorsement of particular kinds of practices, setting the boundaries of legitimate knowledge, or as a kind of disciplining process directed against certain actors among others. In other words, the silences within a text often function as an exercise in power; revealing and interrogating those silences therefore, is an important part of first and second order critique. Lastly, it is important to note that when we examine a discourse as a broad form of knowledge and practice, it is never completely uniform, coherent, or consistent; it always has porous borders and often contains multiple exceptions, inconsistencies, and contradictions by different speakers and texts. Many of the terrorism scholars discussed in this paper for example, upon a close reading of their individual texts, often express more nuanced arguments than are necessarily presented here. The
important point is not that each text or scholar can be characterised in the same uniform way, or even that these scholars agree on a broad set of knowledge claims. It is rather, that taken together as a broader discourse and a body of work that has political and cultural currency, the narratives and forms of the discourse function to construct and maintain a specific understanding of, and approach to, terrorism and state terrorism and that this knowledge has certain political and social effects.
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Rogue State Add-on

Cubas exclusion from economic engagement relies upon being codified as a rogue state Saunders 6 (Elizabeth, Yale University Professor of Poly Sci, Setting Boundaries: Can International Society Exclude
Rogue States? International Studies Review (2006) 8, 2353, http://home.gwu.edu/~esaunder/roguestates.pdf)
Within the international system, one function of power is the ability to dene which issues delineate the boundaries of a particular international societyFin a sense, the ability to set the international agenda (for a reexamination of the concept of power and its various forms, see Barnett and Duvall 2005). Powerful statesFor in the case of a unipolar system, the most powerful stateFhave the ability to put forward new ideas, to dene (or redene) international society, and to exclude those states that do not comply. In the case of the idea of a so-called rogue state, since the end of the Cold War the United States has promoted the notion that rogues are states that seek weapons of mass destruction and support terrorism. The ideas that originate within statesFrather than simply from the international or structural levelFare thus crucial. StatesFor state elitesFcan try to act as norm entrepreneurs (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998), attempting to get their ideas accepted and shared so that they become the basis of a new norm. If a state has sufcient power, these ideas may become prominent even in the face of resistance by other great powers, and they may ultimately dene the criteria for inclusion in international society. Thus, international society can be exclusionary depending on how ideas are selected, promoted, received, and shared. Though aspects of the rogue state designation can be traced to the Cold War period, the concept of a rogue state as a locus of major threats emerged as a prominent feature of US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. The most commonly invoked criteria for dening rogues are state support for terrorism and attempts to obtain WMD, though during the Cold War these two criteria were not merged into one designation of threatening states. Robert Litwak (2000:53) locates the origins of the rogue state idea in the Reagan administration, in the creation of the State Departments ofcial list of countries that sponsored terrorism in accordance with the Export Administration Act of 1979. During the Cold War,
however, pursuit of WMD was not a criterion for exclusion. In the 1970s, some political scientists (Betts 1977; Harkavy 1981) referred to states such as Israel, South Africa, Taiwan, and South Korea that sought nuclear weapons as pariah states. Except for South Africa, these states were US allies surrounded by hostile states. In this period, the term pariah described a condition certain disparate states fo und themselves in rather than an active policy designating them as outcasts. Although it appears in the Congressional Record as early as 1987, when Representative Pete Stark called Iran a rogue, it was not until the post -Cold War era that the rogue state label gained widespread currency within the United States. According to Michael Klare (1995:chapters 12), the idea of rogues as a class of threats arose in the post -Cold War search for a new strategic vision. It was cemented in a central place on the policy agenda in the wake of the rst Gulf War amo ng members of the George H.W. Bush administration. According to this view, rogues provided a way to justify post -Cold War defense budgets by lling in what Senator Sam Nunn (quoted in Klare 1995:14) called a threat blank. The rogue state designation became ofcial policy during the Clinton administration. In 1994, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake (1994:45) referred in a Foreign Affairs article to recalcitrant, outlaw, and backlash states. Rogue quickly became the adjective of choice. As Figure 1 illustrates, the term appeared only once in the Congressional Record in 1987, but it peaked at 77 mentions in 1999. In June 2000, however, the US State Department formally changed its designation f rom rogue states to states of concern because, as State Department spokesman 26 Setting BoundariesRichard Boucher (2000) put it, a single description, one size ts all, doesnt really t any more. The incoming Bush administration quickly returned to the rogue state label (see, for example, Vice President Cheney quoted in Lemann 2001:60). After September 11, President Bush pushed the language even further, designating Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an axis of evil. Do all these shifts in terminology matter? On one level, th ey do (Litwak 2001). The 2000 shift from rogue states to states of concern was a deliberate attempt by the Clinton administration to tone down its rhetor ic at a time when relations with Iran and North Korea seemed relatively promising. Furthermore, the list of rogues did contain inconsistencies, notably in states that did not make the listFsuch as Pakistan, a WMD proliferator that had, it is now apparent, ties to many of the other rogues (Sanger and Broad 2004). Yet, on another level, the various incarnations of the rogue state label do reect a common theme that transcends semantics. As Litwak (2000:7) notes, with the exception of Cuba the designation is rooted in tangible external behavior
of concern. The element of externally threatening behavior is a constant feature of all the rogue state variants. Thus, despite the changes in rhetoric since the end of the Cold War, there has been remarkable agreement within the
United States government about the nature of new threats. As Jacques Hymans (2004:33, emphasis in original) points out in an analysis of the Bush administrations 2002 National Security Strategy, even though many foreign policy elites criticized the Strategys doctr ine of preemptive war, overwhelmingly these elitesFeven political opponents of the Bush administrationFdid not criticize the threat assessment that underlies the doctrine.
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And, excluding others from our moral community necessitates global warfare and ecological destruction for the sake of security
Burke, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of New South Wales, 07 (Anthony, War as a Way of Being: Lebanon, 2006, Theory and Event, 10:21, Muse) The problem here lies with the confidence in being -- of 'human beings as we know them' -- which ultimately fails to escape a Schmittian architecture and thus eternally exacerbates (indeed reifies) antagonisms. Yet we know from the work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly that exchanging an ontology of being for one of becoming, where the boundaries and nature of the self contain new possibilities through agonistic relation to others, provides a less destructive and violent way of acknowledging and dealing with conflict and difference.85 My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87 What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves
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remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more. When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.90
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AT FW
We defend an advocacy statement in the direction of the resolution as a point of stasis for a discussion about the topic solves all their offense Only the AFF allows for this discussion of the topic Haas 2k (Richard, President of CFR, Terms of Engagement: Alternatives to Punitive Policies,
Survival;, vol. 42, no. 2, Summer 2000, pp. xxxx, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/articles/2000/6/summer%20haass/2000survival.pdf) Cuba Although the peaceful transition of Cuba to a democratic, market-oriented country remains the ultimate goal of the US, the context in which this aim can be pursued has altered significantly. When stringent US sanctions were placed on Cuba in 1962, Cuba posed a threat to the US as an outpost of communism in the Western hemisphere and an ardent exporter of revolution to its neighbours. However, almost 40 years later and in the wake of the Cold War, Cubas importance has dwindled and its ability to promote radical politics among its democratising neighbours has evaporated almost entirely. Not only has much of the rationale for isolating Cuba collapsed, but US policy towards the country in particular the imposition of secondary sanctions has created tensions with Americas European allies that outweigh Cubas importance. Finally, Americas sanctions-dominated policy towards Cuba demands re-evaluation because it is warping the message that the United States sends to potentially moderating rogue regimes elsewhere. Cuba remains on the terrorism list (a grouping of countries designated by the US as state sponsors of terrorism), even in the absence of a Cuban-sponsored terrorist act for many years. This discrepancy signals to others on the terrorism list that their renouncement of terrorism will not necessarily free them from the designation or from the many sanctions associated with it.
This focus on state-centric topical discussions sustains dominant conceptions of terrorism by silencing alternative perspectives we have a moral imperative to reject their interpretation Jackson 8 (Richard, Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, The Ghosts of State Terror:
The purpose of a first order critique is not necessarily to establish the full and final truth about terrorism and the role of states. Rather, first order critique aims to destabilise dominant understandings and accepted knowledge, expose the biases and imbalances in the field, and suggest that other ways of understanding, conceptualising, and studying the subject other ways of knowing are possible. In this case, I have attempted to destabilise dominant understandings of terrorism as solely an activity of non-state actors and reveal how states, including Western democratic states currently involved in fighting a war on terrorism, regularly employ the tactic of terrorism themselves. This critique destabilises the dominant knowledge and practice of terrorism scholars who primarily focus on examples of non-state terrorism as an object of study or limit their analysis of state sponsors of terrorism to non-Western states. This kind of critical destabilisation is crucial for opening up the space needed to ask new kinds of questions and seek new forms of knowledge, and for promoting particular kinds of normative projects, including those that extend beyond the project of national security. In contrast to first order critique, second order critique involves the adoption of a critical standpoint outside of the discourse. In this case, based on an understanding of discourse as socially productive or constitutive, and
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fully cognisant of the knowledge-power nexus, a second order critique attempts to expose the political functions and ideological consequences of the particular forms of representation enunciated by the discourse. In this case, we want to try and understand what some of the political effects and consequences of the silences of state terrorism are. A number of such effects can be identified. First, the discourse naturalises a particular understanding of what terrorism is, namely, a form of illegitimate non-state violence. Such an understanding of terrorism functions to restrict the scholarly viewpoint to one set of actors and to particular kinds of actions, and functions to distract and obscure other actors and actions which should be named and studied as terrorism. It also narrows the possibilities for understanding terrorism within alternative paradigms, such as from the perspective of gender terrorism.59 In other words, it has a restrictive and distorting effect within the field of knowledge which gives the impression that terrorism studies is more of a narrow extension of counter-insurgency or national security studies than an open and inclusive domain of research into all forms and aspects of terrorism.60 In addition, the broader academic, social, and cultural influence of terrorism studies (through the authority and legitimacy provided by terrorism experts to the media and as policy advisers, for example), means that this restrictive viewpoint is diffused to the broader society, which in turn generates its own ideological effects. Specifically, the distorted focus on non-state terrorism functions to reify state perspectives and priorities, and reinforce a state-centric, problem-solving paradigm of politics in which terrorism is viewed as an identifiable social or individual problem in need of solving by the state, and not as a practice of state power, for example. From this perspective, it functions to maintain the legitimacy of state uses of violence and delegitimize all forms of non-state violence, which has its own ideological effects and is problematic in a number of obvious ways. This fundamental belief in the instrumental rationality of political violence as an effective and legitimate tool of statecraft is open to a great many criticisms, not least that it provides the normative basis from which non-state terrorist groups frequently justify their own (often well-intentioned) violence.61 There is from this viewpoint an ethical imperative to try and undermine the widespread acceptance that political violence is a mostly legitimate and effective option in resolving conflict for either state or non-state actors. Political violence is in fact, a moral and physical disaster in the vast majority of cases. From an ethical-normative perspective, such a restricted understanding of terrorism also functions to obscure and silence the voices and perspectives of those who live in conditions of daily terror from the random and arbitrary violence of their own governments, some of whom are supported by Western states. At the present juncture, it also functions to silence the voices of those who experience Western policies directly, as in those tortured in the war on terror, and indirectly, as in those suffering under Western-supported regimes as a form of terrorism. That is, it deflects and diverts attention from the much greater state terrorism which blights the lives of tens of millions of people around the world today. Related to these broader normative and ideological effects, the treatment of state terrorism within the discourse the silences on it and the narrow construction of statesponsored terrorism also functions to position state terrorism (should it even exist within the dominant framework) as seemingly less important than non-state terrorism, and as confined to the actions that states take in support of non-state terrorism.
Our method is pre-requisite to preventing topical policy failure thats Byman and Jackson focusing solely on policy solutions leads to blowback and turns the case
BILGIN 4 - Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University (Pinar, Regional Security in the Middle East p. 203-207)
Chapter 6 began by presenting a critical security perspective on thinking about the future. Here I utilised Beck's argument r egarding 'threats to the future to make two interrelated points. First,
it was argued that it is only by thinking and writing about the future that one could raise actors' awareness as to 'threats to the future', what future outcomes may result, and what needs to be done in order to prevent them. Second, the chapter suggested that, as knowledge about the future both shapes and constrains practices, thereby helping constitute the future, an uncritical adoption
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of existing "knowledge produced by prevailing discourses - those that have been complicit in perpetuating regional insecurity in the Middle East -could in itself be construed as a 'threat to the future'
Indeed, given the conception of theory .adopted by students of critical approaches to security (that theory is constitutive of the 'reality' it seeks to explain) it is vital that its proponents do not limit their thinking to 'desired' futures, but also criticise existing knowledge about the future that informs actors' practices in an often unthinking manner. The latter task was taken up in the following section of the chapter, which looked at other plausible futures and their potential practical implications within the Middle Eastern context. These were globalisation, fragmentation, 'clash of civilizations' and democratic peace. It was argued that those who present the future of world politics as one of increasing globalisation treat the search for regional security as a side effect of increasing liberalisation and integration of production and finance As a result, these approaches sideline issues such as the perpetuation of global inequality by the very, same processes. The chapter further
state building, democratisation and security maintenance in one part of the world depends (to a certain extent) on keeping other parts of the world non-democratic and insecure. The literature on globalisafion as well as democratic peace neglects issues such as the emphasis US policy-makers have put on encouraging 'low-intensity democracies' in the Middle East or the issue of arms transfers between North America, Western Europe and the Middle East.
argued that both approaches gloss over the stuctural relationships between different parts of the world, and how This chapter also looked at Huntington's vision of he future as a 'clash of cvilizations, and that of Kaplan as coming anarc hy. It was argued that Kaplan's
'problem-solvng' approach to world politics, by overlooking the ways in which human agency has been complicit in creating the dynamics he has identified, has failed to see how human agency may again intervene to alter them.
Huntingtons thesis was criticized for adopting a similar fatalistic attitude (as well as his failure to understand the fluid character of civlisations and the porous nature of the boundaries between them). It was argued that both fai1 to reflect upon the potential
constitutive effects of their own theorisizing. Following an evaluation of other futures, Chapter 6 turned to the theme of 'desired' futures, and presented a preliminary inquiry into whether there exists a potential for the creation of a security community in the Middle East. Adopting the three-tier framework developed by Adler and Barnett as a checklist to assess the potential for the creation of a security community, the chapter pointed to the conditions that could indeed be viewed as conducive for such a development to take place. It was further argued that the very same conditions that could be viewed as propelling regional actors to look towards each other (such as the end of the Cold War, interaction of world markets and global warming) could also be viewed as pushing them further apart from each other. In order for such factors to propel regional actors to towards each other, as Adler and Barnett expect them to do, actors would need to be presented with an alternative reading of their situation- a reading informed by an alternative conception of security, which shows them as victims of regional securityrather than each other. The chapter noted that this would require the security community approach developed by Adler and Barnett to be reworked from a critical perspective by adopting a broadened and deepened conception of security and by paying more attention to the agency of non-state actors and the mutually constitutive relationship between theory and practice. Part Ill, therefore, tried to further the aims of the book by presenting critical perspective on thinking about the futures of regional security, and a critique of other plausible future scenarios. Part III also considered whether unfulfilled potential exists in the Middle East for a security community to be created. Drawing upon the argument developed in Parts I and II, which sought to point to unfulfilled potential in regional politics, it was argued that there indeed is some potential in terms of material and human resources that could be tapped to create a security community in this of all regions. Indeed, even the very act of investigating the potential for the creation of a security community constitutes a first step towards its creation by way of pointing to unfulfilled potential immanent in regional politics and emphasising the problems that would have to be addressed on the way. A security community may be formed by community-minded agents who agree to pool their resources to address security problems by adopting cooperative security practices. The creation of a security community does not require the pre-existence of physical, linguistic or cultural ties among potential members. ~ Deutsch and his colleagues emphasised, security communities may have humble origins. Actors' willingness to work together to form a community may constitute the necessary conditions initially required to form a security community. Getting the potential members to
Non-state actors such as intellectuals, who are in a mutually interactive relationship with social movements, could also play crucial roles in helping construct identities that cross physical and psychological borders. Emphasising the mutually interactive relationship between intellectuals and social movements should not be taken to suggest that the only way for intellectuals to make a change is to get directly involved in political action. They can also intervene by prodding a critique of the existing situation, calling
view regional insecurity itself rather than each other as the threats to their security, in turn, could generate this willingness.
attention to what future outcomes may result if necessary action is not taken at present, and by pointing to potential for change immanent in regional politics.
Students of security could help create the political space for alternative agents of security to take action by presenting appropriate critiques. It should be emphasised however that such thinking should be anchored in the potential immanent in world politics.. The hope is that non-state actors (who may or may not be aware of their potential to make a change) may constitute themselves as agents of security, when presented with an alternative reading of their situation. Thinking about the future becomes even more crucial once theory is conceptualised as constitutive of the 'reality' it seeks to respond to. In other words, our ideas about the future - our conjectures and prognoses -have a self-constitutive potential. What the students of Cold
War Security Studies
consider as a more 'realistic' picture of the future becomes 'real' through
practice , albeit under circumstances inherited from the past. Thinking about what a 'desired' future would look like is significant for the very same reason; that is, in order to be able to turn it into a 'reality' through adopting emancipatory practices. For, having a~ vision of a ..... 'desired' future empowers people(s) in the present. Presenting pictures of what a 'desired' future might look like, and pointing to the security community approach as the start of a path that
could
take us from an insecure past to a more secure future is not to suggest that the creation of a security community is the most likely outcome. On the contrary, the dyanics pointed to throughout the book indicate that there exists a potential for descent into chaos if no action is taken to prevent militarisation and fragmentation of societies, and the marginalisation of peoples as well as economies in an increasingly globalizing world. However, these dynamics exist as threats to the future' to use Beck's terminology; and only by thinking and writing about them that can one mobilise preventive action to be taken ill file present. Viewed as such, critical approaches present not an 'optimistic', but a more 'realistic' picture of the future. Considering how the 'realism' of Cold War Security Studies failed not only when judged by its own standards, by failing to provide an adequate explanation of the world 'out there', but also when judged by the standards of Critical approaches, as it was argued, it could be concluded that there is a need for more 'realistic' approaches to regional security in theory and practice. The foregoing suggests three broad conclusions. First, Cold War Security Studies did not present file 'realistic' picture it purported to provide. On the contrary, the pro-status quo leanings of the Cold War security discourse failed to allow for (let alone foresee) changes such as the end of the Cold War, dissolution of some states and integration of some others. Second, notwithstanding the important inroads critical approaches to security made in file post-Cold War era, much traditionalist thinking remains and maintains its grip over the security practices of many actors. Third,
critical approaches offer a fuller or more adequate picture of security in different parts of the world (including the Middle East). Cold War Security Studies is limited not only because of its narrow (military-focused), pro-status quo and state-centific (if not statist) approach to security in theory and practice, but also because of its objectivist conception of theory and the theory/practice relationship that obscured the mutually constitutive relationship between them. Students of critical approaches have sought to challenge Cold War Security Studies, its claim to knowledge and its hold over securitypractices by pointing to the mutually constitutive relationship between theory and practice anal revealing how the Cold War security discourse has been complicit in constituting (in)security in different parts of the world. The ways in which the Cold War security discourse helped constitute the 'Middle East' by way of representing it as a region, and contributed to regional insecurity in the Middle East by shaping security practices, is exemplative of the argument that 'theories do not leave the world untouched'.
The implication of these conclusions for practice is that becoming aware of the 'politics behind the geographical specification of politics' and exploring the relationship between (inventing) regions and (conceptions and practices of) security helps reveal the role human agency has played in the past and could play in the
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future. An alternative approach to security, that of critical approaches to security, could inform alternative (emancipatory) practices thereby helping constitute a new region in the form of a security community. It should be noted, however, that to argue that 'everything is socially constructed' or that 'all approaches have normative concerns embedded in them' is a significant first step that does not by itself help one adopt emancipatory practices. As practices shaped by the Cold War
long as people rely on traditional security discourse - which remains prevalent in the post-Cold War era - they help constitute a 'reality' in line with the tenets of 'realist' Cold War Security Studies. This is why seeking to address evolving crises through traditional practices whilst leaving a critical security perspective to be adopted for the long-term will not work. For, traditionalist thinking and practices, by helping shape the 'reality' 'out there', foreclose the political space necessary for emancipatory practices to be adopted by multiple actors at numerous levels. Hence the need for the adoption of a critical perspective that emphasises the roles human agency has played in the past and could play in the future in shaping what human beings choose to call 'reality'. Generating such an awareness of the potentialities of human agency could enable one to begin thinking differently about regional security in different parts of the world whilst remaining sensitive to regional actors' multiple and contending conceptions of security, what they view as referent(s) and how they think security should be sought in different parts of the world. After decades of statist, military-focused and zero-sum thinking and practices that privileged the security of some whilst marginalising the security of others, the time has come for all those interested in security in the Middle East to decide whether they want to be agents of a world view that produces more of the same, thereby contributing towards a 'threat to the future', or of alternative futures that try to address the multiple dimensions of regional insecurity. The choice is not one between presenting a more 'optimistic' or
'pessimistic' vision of the future, but between stumbling into the future expecting more of the same, or stepping into a future equipped with a perspective that not only has a conception of a 'desired' futu#e but is also cognisant of 'threats to the future .
Attaching yourself to government action bad Affirmative form of governmental action precludes personal change killing political activism. Turns the aff and makes violence inevitable
KAPPELER 95 (Susanne, Associate Professor at Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The
politics of personal behavior) that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of collective
We are the war does not mean irresponsibility, where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal respo nsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal. On the
the object is precisely to analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective assumption of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence , our own power and our own responsibility leading to the well-known illusion of our apparent powerlessness and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens even more so than those of other nations have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina or Somalia since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgment, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in
contrary, what Beck calls organized irresponsibility, upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institution ally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences.
It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot do anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defense? Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if
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I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as virtually no possibilities: what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own actions I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like I want to stop this war, I want military intervention, I want to stop this backlash, or I want a moral revolution. We are this war, however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our non-comprehension: our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the
ideological current of prefabricated arguments

one for refugees, one of our own and one for the others.
or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we are the war in our unconscious cruelty towards you, our tolerance of the fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I dont our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and
We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let
them grow inside us, that is , in the way we shape our feelings, our relationships, our values according to the structures and the values of war and violence.
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AT Epistemology Not First

History on our side ----- rise of positivism as a reactionary epistemic belief proves that epistemology shapes policy and research KURKI 11 (Milja, Lecturer in International Relations Theory, The Department of International Politics, The University of Wales Aberystwyth, The Limitations of the Critical Edge: Reflections on Critical and Philosophical IR Scholarship Today,Millenium: Journal of International Studies) Philosophical reflection is about gaining understanding of how knowledge is generated and structured and what its relationship is to its producer, their social context and society at large. It is about understanding the role and structure of scientific or social knowledge: how it is constructed; what objects exist in its purview; and why and how we do (or do not) come to know our objects in specific ways. This might seem a rather abstract interest; and indeed, for many, meta-theoretical or philosophy of science research remains a rather abstract theoretical sub -field narrowly engaged in detailed debates on epistemology, causation or prediction. Philosophically informed IR research can, however, be much more than this. Indeed, for many of its promulgators, philosophical research has arguably been a very politically and socially important , as well as potentially influential, field of study. While most philosophically inclined analysts acknowledge that meta-theory is not everything in IR, most argue it is of crucial significance in the discipline.8 This is because it shapes in crucial ways how we come to understand the world, evaluate claims about it and, indeed, interact with it. Depending on whether we are a positivist or a
post-structuralist, we seek different kinds of data, ask different kinds of questions and come to engage with actors differently i n international politics (which is also conceived of in different ways). 9 To use Patrick Jacksons language: philosophic al wagers matter. 10 Philosophical research is not only of significance in IR scholarship, of course. It is worth remembering that some of the most well-known philosophers of science had at the heart of their inquiries questions of values and politics. Thus, Popper and Kuhn, for example, were socially and politically driven philosophers of science; and sought through their philosophical frameworks to influence the interaction of scientific practice and societal power structures. 11 The same stands for logical positivists in the social sciences. Biersteker describes this well:
European and American scholars embraced logical positivist, scientific behavioralism in the post-war era in part as a reaction against fascism, militarism, and communism. They were reacting against totalizing ideologies and sought a less overtly politicized philosophical basis for their research. Their liberalism stressed
toleration for everything except totalizing ideologies, and their logical positivist scientific approaches provided what they viewed as a less politicized methodology for the conduct of social research. 12
Murphys detailed study of the rise of behaviouralist peace studies confirms the same; the rise, in a specific context, of a specific type of meta-theoretical argumentation, which is deployed to a social and, in fact, political effect in order to criticise recent social dynamics and to change the world in a preferable direction. 13 There is, even when it is sidestepped by scientists or philosophers themselves (as in the case of behaviouralists), a politics to the
philosophy of science, in the sense that meta-theoretical concerns are tied up with concrete social and political debates and struggles and specific normative and political visions of both science and society, even if in indirect ways. 14 This political edge of philosophical debate has not been absent in IR scholarship, and arguably it was precisely the politi cal role of philosophies of science that critical international theory was invented to deal with. It is important to bear in mind that when
meta-theory emerged as an important sphere of study within IR theorising in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was moved to the centre ground of IR research by a selection of key critical thinkers who politicised this area. Cox, Ashley, Ashley and Walker, Hoffman, Linklater and Steve Smith, 15 for example, argued vehemently in favour of the necessity for IR to consider its philosophy of science underpinnings because of the political effects that epistemological and ontological decisions IR theorists make have on their concrete research and resultant policy proposals. Indeed, in a famous line, Steve Smith called his epistemological work the most political of his career. 16
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AT DC Not First
Our discursive engagement comes firstpolicy outcomes directly reflect discursive power relations by establishing what are acceptable forms of knowledge Jackson, 6 (Richard, Centre for International Politics, University of Manchester, Religion, Politics and Terrorism: A Critical
Analysis of Narratives of Islamic Terrorism, Centre for International Politics Working Paper Series; No. 21, October 2006, JD)
The methodological approach I employ in this study falls broadly under the mantle of critical discourse analysis.4 This approach is at once both a technique for analysing specific texts or speech acts and a way of understanding the relationship between discourse and social and political phenomena.5 Discourses are related sets of ideas,
expressed in various kinds of written and spoken texts, and employing a distinct arrangement of vocabularies, rules, symbols, labels, assumptions, narratives and forms of social action. In particular, labels
and narratives are critical to the analysis of political discourse. Labels are the linguistic terms employed to describe agents or actors, acts, behaviour, scenes, qualities or purposes within the public vocabulary. Narratives are the stories that provide coherence and consistency to the scenes, characters and themes that guide the moral conduct of a society and which provide meaning to the lives of the communitys members. They function to select, interpret and reframe past events, and to structure the relationships between different sets of labels.6 Discourses function
ideologically by dictating what it is possible to say or not say about a certain subject, what counts as normal, what is seen as commonsense and what can be accepted as legitimate knowledge. This is not to
say that discourses are completely uniform and coherent or that they always remain consistent there are often exceptions, inconsistencies and contradictions by different speakers and texts.7 It is however, to stress that
discourses are never neutral or objective; they are always an exercise in social power the power to ascribe right and wrong, knowledge and falsehood, and the limits of the reasonable. They set the parameters of debate and establish the boundaries for possible action. In the public policy context discourses establish the limits, possibilities and interests of policy formulation. I am not suggesting that interests play no role in the formulation of policy; however, interests themselves are discursively constructed and reflect other discourses and narratives of national security, threats, identities, values, relationships and the like.8 This is crucial for when we come to consider the public policy outcomes of the Islamic terrorism discourse. It is also important to note that discourses do not emerge from a vacuum, nor do they operate unidirectionally; rather, they build upon, and are co-constituted by, existing social-cultural discourses and narratives which shape them in decisive ways. In this sense, discourses have discernible histories
or genealogies; they build upon the discursive foundations laid down by previous texts and respond to pre-existing discursive opportunity structures. Over time, as layers of discourse and practice are laid down and
compacted, social lithification can create deeply embedded, hard discursive structures which are resistant to change or challenge.9 In many ways, the Islamic terrorism discourse, laid down in countless academic, governmental and popular texts over many decades, is an example of an institutionally and culturally embedded, hard discourse.
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AT Empiricism
We dont reject empiricism, we use their selective definitions within empiricism to criticize the role of western states in terrorism Jackson 8 (Richard, Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, The Ghosts of State Terror:
In addition to this silence on the broader subject of state terrorism, we can detect a series of other silences. In particular, there is within the terrorism literature virtually no mention or discussion of Western state terrorism, the terror of strategic bombing, the terror of democratic state torture, Western sponsorship of mostly right-wing terrorist groups, Israeli state terrorism, and the terrorism of Western allies during the Cold War and the war on terror among others. At present, there is an ongoing silence on the terrorism of state-sponsored death squads in Iraq, the terrorism of Western-backed warlords in Afghanistan, and the state terror of Western allies such as Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and the like. In large part, the silence on state terrorism in the discourse is due to the frequent practice by terrorism scholars of defining terrorism exclusively as a form of non-state violence, thereby excluding states a priori from being able to employ terrorism at all. Bruce Hoffman, for example, argues that terrorism involves violence
perpetrated by a subnational group or nonstate entity.29 This is in keeping with the U.S. State Departments highly influe ntial definition of terrorism, a definition employed by a significant proportion of terroris m scholars today, which conceives of terrorism as premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetuated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.30 For scholars who adopt this definition, terrorism is both largely indistinguishable from insurgency, militancy, guerrilla warfare, and the like, and more importantly, states are a priori and by definition excluded as actors who can practice terrorism. For these scholars, state violence that is intended to cause terror and intimidate may be described as repression, oppression, human rights abuses, war crimes and the like, but never as acts of terrorism. A related strategy has been to
try and exclude state terrorism from research by arguing that even if state terrorism does exist, state terror is qualitatively different from (nonstate) terrorism because it has different aims, different means, and it is employed by an actor which has the legitimate right to use violence and who is bound by established rules and norms relating to the use of such violence. Bruce Hoffman
for example, makes the terrorterrorism distinction, arguing that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between the two types of violence.31 This approach characterises a number of key terrorism scholars, including the paradoxical figure Walter Laqueur, whose work subsequently treats state terrorism as largely irrelevant to the study of terrorism as a phenomenon. Such treatment within the field functions in part to make state terrorism appear as less significant or important than non-state terrorism.In sum , a discourse analysis of the
terrorism studies field demonstrates that as a subject of discussion and analysis, state terrorism appears most often as a powerful and notable silence, but also at times as a ghostly, indistinct outline. Within that broader silence, moreover, there are other silences too, most notably on cases of Western involvement in and practices of terrorism. Critical Reflections on the Ghosts of State Terror The relative silence on state terrorism within the
broader terrorism studies discourse is susceptible to both a first and second order critique. A first order critique reveals that the discourse is predicated on a number of highly problematic and contestable set of assumptions and knowledge practices, while a second order critique exposes the ways in which the discourse functions politically to naturalise and legitimise particular forms of knowledge and political practices.
First Order Critique Employing the same social scientific modes of analysis, terminology, and empirical categories used by terrorism studies scholars, there are a number of important
criticisms to be made against the silence on state terrorism within the broader terrorism studies discourse. In the first place, the actor-based definition of terrorism which excludes states from employing terrorism is not only intellectually untenable, it is absurd. Given that terrorism is a violent tactic in the same way that ambushes are a tactic, it makes no sense to argue that certain actors are precluded by their identity from employing the tactic of terrorism (or ambushes). A bomb planted in a public place where civilians are likely to be randomly killed and that is aimed at causing widespread terror in an audience is an act of terrorism regardless of whether it is planted by non-state actors or agents acting on behalf of the state.
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AT Security Good
Commitment to economic security is the prime justification for global violence and authoritarianism ----- turns the case NEOCLEOUS 8 - Professor of Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University (Mark, Critique of Security. Pg. 95-102)
In other words, the
new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection between economic and national security: the commitment to the former was simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa. As the doctrine of national security was being born, the major player on the international stage would aim to use perhaps its most important power of all its economic strength in order to re-order the world. And this re-ordering was conducted through the idea of economic security.99 Despite the fact that economic security would never be formally dened beyond economic order or economic well-being,100 the signicant conceptual consistency between economic security and liberal order-building also had a strategic ideological role. By playing on notions of economic well-being, economic security seemed to emphasise economic and thus human needs over military ones. The reshaping of global capital, international order and the exercise of state power could thus look decidedly liberal and humanitarian. This appearance helped co-opt the liberal Left into the process and, of course, played on individual desire for personal security by using notions such as personal freedom and social equality.101 Marx and Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world according to its own interests. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.102 In the second half of the twentieth century this ability to batter down all Chinese walls would still rest heavily on the l ogic of capital, but would also come about in
the concept economic security had moved from connoting insurance policies for working people to the desire to shape the world in a capitalist fashion and back again. In fact, it has constantly shifted between these registers ever since, being used for the constant reshaping of world order and resulting in a comprehensive level of intervention and policing all over the globe. Global order has come to be fabricated and administered according to a security doctrine underpinned by the logic of
part under the guise of security. The whole world became a garden to be cultivated to be recast according to the logic of security. In the space of fteen years capital accumulation and a bourgeois conception of order. By incorporating within it a particular vision of economic order, the concept of national security implies the interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic, political and military factors that more or less any development anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in general and Americas core interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be recas t around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole
Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global intervention, fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy formations in an ambitious and frequently violent strategy . Here lies the Janus-faced character of American foreign policy.103 One face is the good liberal cop: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money and help around the globe when problems emerge, so that the worlds nations are shown how they can alleviate their misery and perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the bad liberal cop: should one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or violent revolution to address its own social problems in ways that conict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then the authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the liberal moment becomes the moment of violence. This Janus-faced character has
international order as capital not only nestled, settled and established connections, but also secured everywhere. meant that through the mandate of security the US, as the national security state par excellence, has seen t to eithe r overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads
one CIA agent commented in 1991,there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries, adding that every covert operation has been rationalized in terms of U.S. national security.105 These would include interventions
of nations those rogue or outlaw states on the wrong side of history.104 Extrapolating the gures as best we can, in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up are the 60 or more countries identied as the bases of terror cells by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The methods us ed have varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal security making the economy scream via controls, inter ventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations. But a
wide range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing; subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIAs Health Alteration Committee whose mandate was to incapacitate foreign ofcials; drugtrafcking;107 and the sponsorship of terror groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly,
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some plain old fascist groups and parties have been co-opted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi
collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism owed into Latin America was because of the ideology of national security.108 Concomitantly, national security has meant a policy of non intervention where satisfactory security partnerships could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the ve Central Asian republics that emerged with the bre ak-up of the USSR, and China. Either
way, the whole world was to be included in the newsecure global liberal order. The
result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in Angola which led to the
deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this: Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and guring out how many people have been killed in
we come up with a gure of six million people killed and this is a minimum gure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War,
the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difcult. But, adding them up as best we can, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola the operation I was part of and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.109 Note that the six million is a minimum gure, that he omits to mentio n rather a lot of other interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench of history. All of this has been more than conrmed by events in the twenty rst century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which bec ame the basis of the ofcial National Security Strategy of the United States in September of that year, President Bush reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it. While much has been made about the supposedly new doctrine of preemption in the early twenty -rst century,
the policy of preemption has a long history as part of national security doctrine. The United States has long maintained the option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufcient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act
pre emptively.110 In other words, the security policy of the worlds only superpower in its current war on terror is still underpinned by a notion of liberal order-
Security Strategy concerns itself with a single sustainable model for national success based on political and economic liberty, with whole sections devoted to the security benets of economic liberty, and the benets to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111 Economic security (that is, capitalist accumulation) in the guise of national security is now used as the justication for all kinds of intervention, still conducted where necessary in alliance with fascists, gangsters and drug cartels , and the proliferation of national security type regimes has been the result. So while the national security state was in one sense a structural bi-product of the USs place in global capitalism, it was also vital to the fabrication of an international order founded on the power of capital. National security, in effect, became the perfect strategic tool for landscaping the human garden.112 This was to also have huge domestic consequences, as the idea of containment would also come to reshape the American social order, helping fabricate a security apparatus intimately bound up with national identity and thus the politics of loyalty.
building based on a certain vision of economic order. The National
And, excluding others from our moral community necessitates global warfare and ecological destruction for the sake of security
Burke, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of New South Wales, 07 (Anthony, War as a Way of Being: Lebanon, 2006, Theory and Event, 10:21, Muse) The problem here lies with the confidence in being -- of 'human beings as we know them' -- which ultimately fails to escape a Schmittian architecture and thus eternally exacerbates (indeed reifies) antagonisms. Yet we know from the work of Deleuze and especially William Connolly that exchanging an ontology of being for one of becoming, where the boundaries and nature of the self contain new possibilities through agonistic relation to others, provides a less destructive and violent way of acknowledging and dealing with conflict and difference.85 My argument here, whilst normatively sympathetic to Kant's moral demand for the eventual abolition of war, militates against excessive optimism.86 Even as I am arguing that war is not an enduring historical or anthropological feature, or a neutral and rational instrument of policy -- that it is rather the product of hegemonic forms of knowledge about political action and community -- my analysis does suggest some sobering conclusions about its power as an idea and formation. Neither the progressive flow of history nor the pacific tendencies of an international society of republican states will save us. The violent ontologies I have described here in fact dominate the conceptual and policy frameworks of modern republican states and have come, against everything Kant hoped for, to stand in for progress, modernity and reason. Indeed what Heidegger argues, I think with some credibility, is that the enframing world view has come to stand in for being itself. Enframing, argues Heidegger, 'does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is...it drives out every other possibility of
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revealing...the rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.'87 What I take from Heidegger's argument -- one that I have sought to extend by analysing the militaristic power of modern ontologies of political existence and security -- is a view that the challenge is posed not merely by a few varieties of weapon, government, technology or policy, but by an overarching system of thinking and understanding that lays claim to our entire space of truth and existence. Many of the most destructive features of contemporary modernity -- militarism, repression, coercive diplomacy, covert intervention, geopolitics, economic exploitation and ecological destruction -- derive not merely from particular choices by policymakers based on their particular interests, but from calculative, 'empirical' discourses of scientific and political truth rooted in powerful enlightenment images of being. Confined within such an epistemological and cultural universe, policymakers' choices become necessities, their actions become inevitabilities, and humans suffer and die. Viewed in this light, 'rationality' is the name we give the chain of reasoning which builds one structure of truth on another until a course of action, however violent or dangerous, becomes preordained through that reasoning's very operation and existence. It creates both discursive constraints -- available choices may simply not be seen as credible or legitimate -- and material constraints that derive from the mutually reinforcing cascade of discourses and events which then preordain militarism and violence as necessary policy responses, however ineffective, dysfunctional or chaotic. The force of my own and Heidegger's analysis does, admittedly, tend towards a deterministic fatalism. On my part this is quite deliberate; it is important to allow this possible conclusion to weigh on us. Large sections of modern societies -- especially parts of the media, political leaderships and national security institutions -- are utterly trapped within the Clausewitzian paradigm, within the instrumental utilitarianism of 'enframing' and the stark ontology of the friend and enemy. They are certainly tremendously aggressive and energetic in continually stating and reinstating its force. But is there a way out? Is there no possibility of agency and choice? Is this not the key normative problem I raised at the outset, of how the modern ontologies of war efface agency, causality and responsibility from decision making; the responsibility that comes with having choices and making decisions, with exercising power? (In this I am much closer to Connolly than Foucault, in Connolly's insistence that, even in the face of the anonymous power of discourse to produce and limit subjects, selves remain capable of agency and thus incur responsibilities.88) There seems no point in following Heidegger in seeking a more 'primal truth' of being -- that is to reinstate ontology and obscure its worldly manifestations and consequences from critique. However we can, while refusing Heidegger's unworldly89 nostalgia, appreciate that he was searching for a way out of the modern system of calculation; that he was searching for a 'questioning', 'free relationship' to technology that would not be immediately recaptured by the strategic, calculating vision of enframing. Yet his path out is somewhat chimerical -- his faith in 'art' and the older Greek attitudes of 'responsibility and indebtedness' offer us valuable clues to the kind of sensibility needed, but little more. When we consider the problem of policy, the force of this analysis suggests that choice and agency can be all too often limited; they can remain confined (sometimes quite wilfully) within the overarching strategic and security paradigms. Or, more hopefully, policy choices could aim to bring into being a more enduringly inclusive, cosmopolitan and peaceful logic of the political. But this cannot be done without seizing alternatives from outside the space of enframing and utilitarian strategic thought, by being aware of its presence and weight and activating a very different concept of existence, security and action.90
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AT Realism
Realism fails to understand complex questions regarding state terrorism Saunders 6 (Elizabeth, Yale University Professor of Poly Sci, Setting Boundaries: Can International Society Exclude
Rogue States? International Studies Review (2006) 8, 2353, http://home.gwu.edu/~esaunder/roguestates.pdf)
A particularly stark picture emerges from neorealism, which focuses on the structure of the international system. According to Kenneth Waltz (1979:97), the anarchic nature of the international system constrains all states to behave in the same wayFstates are functionally undifferentiated and are distinguished ELIZABETH N. SAUNDERS 29primarily by their greater or lesser capabilities for performing similar tasks. Given that the international system is anarchic, states must act according to the principle of selfhelp. As Stephen Brooks (1997:450) has put it, in neorealist theory states are shaped by the mere possibility of conict. Given that all states behave according to the same logic of self-help and that all states must be viewed with suspicion, there is either no such thing as a rogue state or, put differently, all states are potential rogues. There is no role for shared ideas, rules, or norms in this model; anarchy accounts for the character of the system. For Waltz, there is no higher form of international organization beyond the system and, therefore, no such thing as international society. The question of whether the United States, as the dominant state in the system, gets to dene international society is largely irrelevant for Waltz (2000), who continued to predict a decade after the Cold War ended that unipolarity would eventually give way to a balance of power and multipolarity. Those realists, like Waltz, who focus on the structure of the international system and the distribution of material power within it, might reasonably ask if the shift in US policy toward rogue states is the product of the end of the Cold War. During the 1990s, however, as the rogue state debate took a prominent place on the policy agenda, much of the debate going on among realists centered on unipolarity and whether another great power or coalition would emerge to balance US hegemony (see, among others, Mearsheimer 1990; Layne 1993; Wohlforth 1999). Of course, rogues did not have a major place on the research agenda of other mainstream theories either, and realists did weigh in once the invasion of Iraq became the center of debate (Mearsheimer and Walt 2003a, 2003b; see also Jervis 2003:380385 for a discussion of how realist arguments relate to the Bush Doctrine). But realists have continued to emphasize great power military competition (Mearsheimer 2001), which makes their approach particularly unsuitable for the question of rogue states in the Third World (for an exception, see Lieber 1998). Interestingly, Waltz does not mention rogue states at all in his 2000 article, does not refer to Iraq or Iran by name, and only mentions North Korea twice in passing. He does not discuss terrorism and mentions nuclear proliferation largely in the context of Japan.
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AT Neolib K
Continued embargo empowers Cuban repression against its own people, promoting inequality and disposability
CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February
2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032) Helms-Burton has failed to advance the cause of freedom and prosperity for the Cuban people. This is not surprising, since never in modern history has there been a democratic transition in a country under a unilateral sanctions framework as broad and severe as the one codified in Helms-Burton. Its blanket sanctions lack ethical or moral consideration since they indiscriminately impact all levels of Cuban society, from senior Cuban officials to democracy advocates and private entrepreneurs. While it is no secret that Cuban government policies are primarily to blame for the Islands economic crisis, their impact has only been exacerbated and made disproportionately greater among the most vulnerable segments of the population by the blanket sanctions codified under Helms-Burton. In addition, these sanctions deny Cuba access to the international financial institutions it would need to implement the type of macroeconomic reforms that U.S. policy has sought for more than 50 years. Helms-Burton preconditions the lifting of its blanket sanctions on sweeping political change in Cuba. In practice, this waiting game has strengthened the relative power of the Cuban government vis--vis the Cuban people while simultaneously giving the former a convenient scapegoat for its oppressive practices and economic blunders. Cuban blogger and democracy advocate Yoani Sanchez best illustrated the impact of the waiting game enabled by Helms-Burton when she wrote: The five decade prolongation of the blockade [as the embargo is referred to in Cuba] has allowed every setback weve suffered to be explained as stemming from it, justified by its effects...To make matters worse, the economic fence has helped to fuel the idea of a place besieged, where dissent comes to be equated with an act of treason. The exterior blockade has strengthened the interior blockade.ix Former political prisoner and independent economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe agrees, writing that Helms-Burtons blanket sanctions have only served to give the Cuban government an alibi to declare Cuba a fortress under siege, to justify repression and to (pass) the blame for the economic disaster in Cuba.x Conditioning our policy of resource denial on sweeping political reforms strengthens the Cuban state because the scarce resources available in an authoritarian Cuba have been and will continue to be allocated primarily based on political priorities, thereby increasing the states relative power and its ability to control its citizens. History has shown that the negative effects of such isolation can be long lasting and counterproductive to change. During the Cold War, U.S. policy toward Eastern Europe was not based on isolation or resource denial. Indeed, an analysis of these transitions reveals an extraordinary correlation between the degree of openness toward former communist countries and the success of their transitions to democracies and market economies.xi
Increasing US ties by removing the embargo is critical to allow for dissent

CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February
2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032)
Repealing Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions that limit the Executive Branchs authority over Cuba policy.
Over time, U.S. policies toward Communist countries with poor human rights records and histories of adversarial relationssuch as China and Vietnamhave evolved toward diplomatic normalization and economic engagement. Policymakers in both parties have rightly judged that engagement, rather than
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isolation, better serves U.S. national interests and lends greater credibility to calls for political and economic reform. The Cuba Study Group believes the most effective way to break the deadlock of allor-nothing conditionality and remedy the ineffectiveness of current U.S. policy is by de-codifying the embargo against Cuba through the repeal of Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions that limit the Executive Branchs authority over Cuban policy.xviii Repealing Helm-Burton and related statutory provisions would shift the primary focus of U.S. Cuba policy away from the regime and toward empowering Cuban people. It would also enhance the leverage of the United States to promote a multilateral approach toward Cuba, as well as embolden reformers, democracy advocates and private entrepreneurs inside the island to press their government for greater change. www.CubaStudyGroup.org 8 Decodifying the embargo would allow the Executive Branch the flexibility to use the entire range of foreign policy tools at its disposaldiplomatic, economic, political, legal and culturalto incentivize change in Cuba. The President would be free to adopt more efficient, targeted policies necessary for pressuring the Cuban leadership to respect human rights and implement political reforms, while simultaneously empowering all other sectors of society to pursue their economic wellbeing and become the authors of their own futures.xix Repealing Helms-Burton
would also free civil society development and assistance programs to be implemented outside of a contentious sanctions framework. Repealing the extraterritorial provisions of Helms-Burton would allow the United States greater
leverage in persuading the international community, especially key regional partners, to adopt a multilateral and targeted approach toward focusing on the advancement of human rights in Cuba. This would fundamentally transform the international dynamic that has long helped the Cuban government stifle dissent, since its efforts to isolate critics at home would increasingly lead to its own isolation from the international community. While it is difficult to prove a direct causal connection between economic reforms and an open society, modern history has taught us that it is increasingly difficult for dictatorial governments to maintain political control the more prosperity their people enjoy.xx Repealing
Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions would allow the U.S. the ability to efficiently promote and provide direct support to Cubas private sector. Such support would empower a greater plurality within Cuban society, including government reformers, democracy advocates, Cuban entrepreneurs and society as a whole by increasing their access to the resources and expertise of the worlds most prosperous private sector (and largest Cuban diaspora), located a mere 90 miles from Cubas shores. In turn, this would enhance the relative power of Cuban society to that of the state, while stripping the latter of its preferred scapegoat for its oppressive practices and economic blunders. U.S. policy should also seek to incentivize the Cuban government to end state monopolies on economic activities and allow greater private participation in the economy. The Cuba Study Group believes that any forthcoming congressional review of current legislation
relating to Cuba, such as a review of the Cuban Adjustment Act, must require a review of the totality of the legislative framework codified in HelmsBurton and related statutory provisions so that the United States may finally develop a coherent policy toward the Island. The U.S. should pursue this course of action independent of actions taken by the Cuban government so as not to place the reigns of U.S. policy in the hands of Cuban proponents of the status quo.
The embargo creates dependency, not US economic engagement: only opposing the embargo removes state oppression
CSG 13 (Cuba Study Group, Restoring Executive Authority Over U.S. Policy Toward Cuba February 2013, http://www.cubastudygroup.org/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=45d8f827-174c-4d43-aa2fef7794831032) The primary consequences of Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions have been to isolate the United States from Cuba and to serve as a political scapegoat for the Cuban governments many failures. It has become a Great Crutch to all sides of the Cuba debate. First, for ordinary Cubans, their struggle has fallen hostage to an international dispute between their government and the United States, which they see themselves as powerless to affect. For the Cuban leadership, it has become easier to blame the embargo than to adopt the difficult reforms needed to fix their economy. Lastly, for defenders of the status-quo within the Cuban-American community, it has become easier to wait for the United States to solve our national problem rather than engage in the difficult and necessary processes of reconciliation and reunification. Helms-Burton indiscriminately impacts all sectors of Cuban society, including democracy advocates and private entrepreneurs, causing disproportionate economic damage to the most vulnerable segments of the population. Conditioning our policy of resource denial on sweeping political reforms has only served to strengthen the Cuban government. The scarce resources available in an authoritarian Cuba have been and continue to be allocated primarily based on political priorities, thereby
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increasing the states relative power and its ability to control its citizens. The majority of American voters, Cuban-Americans and Cuban democracy advocates in the Island have rejected isolation as an element of U.S. policy toward Cuba and have called on the U.S. government to implement a policy of greater contact and exchange with Cuban society.ii As Cuba undergoes a slow and uncertain process of reforms, the continued existence of blanket U.S. sanctions only hinders the types of political reforms that Helms-Burton demands. Instead of maintaining a rigid policy that ties our hands and obsesses over hurting the Cuban leadership, U.S. policymakers should adopt a results-oriented policy that focuses primarily on empowering the Cuban people while simultaneously pressing the Cuban government to cease its repressive practices and respect fundamental human www.CubaStudyGroup.org 3 rights. Repealing Helms-Burton would also free civil society development and assistance programs to be implemented outside of a contentious sanctions framework. Furthermore, the Cuba Study Group believes that any forthcoming congressional review of current legislation relating to Cuba, such as a review of the Cuban Adjustment Act, must require a review of the totality of the legislative framework codified in Helms-Burton and related statutory provisions so that the United States may finally develop a coherent policy toward the Island.
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EXT Western Silence

Dominant discourse on state terrorism silences scholarship on questions of western involvement this discourse is directly responsible for Cubas inclusion as a state sponsor Jackson 8 (Richard, Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, The Ghosts of State Terror:
Importantly, a discourse analysis of these texts reveals that there are other forms of silence within them, in particular, a deep and pervasive silence on Western democratic state terrorism and Israeli state terrorism. It is also important to note that a great many more such introductory texts do not give any systematic attention to state terrorism at all.18 There is one more ghostly outline of state terrorism within the broader field, namely, a small but growing literature on socalled state sponsored terrorism. I have analysed aspects of this literature in more detail elsewhere.19 Within these texts, one of the most common narratives is that terrorist groups depend upon significant state support to survive and active sponsors provide a range of positive and permissive forms of assistance. Gus Martins popular textbook for example, suggests that the state sponsorship of terrorism frequently consists of: ideological support, financial support, military support, operational support, initiating terrorist attacks, or direct involvement in terrorist attacks.20 Additionally, it is commonly argued that weak, totalitarian, or socalled rogue states are predisposed to sponsoring terrorism because: [F]or aggressive regimes, state terrorism in the international domain is advantageous in several respects: State terrorism is inexpensive Even poor nations can strike at and injure a prosperous adversary State terrorism has limited consequences. State assisters that are clever can distance themselves from culpability for a terrorist incident and thereby escape possible reprisals or other penalties. State terrorism can be successful. Weaker states can raise the stakes beyond what a stronger adversary is willing to bear [and] successfully destabilize an adversary through the use of a proxy movement.21 In fact, much of the state sponsorship literature is devoted to analysing and describing those states viewed as the main sponsors of terrorism, the groups they support, and the kinds of assistance they provide. The state sponsors identified in the literature more often than not coincide with the U.S. State Departments annual list of state sponsors of international terrorism, which typically includes countries with which the U.S. has previously had serious conflicts, such as Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Libya, and Iraq.
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Case Neg
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1NC FW
A. The ballots sole purpose is to answer the resolutional question: Is the outcome of the enactment of a topical plan better than the status quo or a competitive policy option? They violate this by claiming advantages independent of the plan. Its a voting issue. Definitional support --1. Resolved before a colon reflects a legislative forum Army Officer School 04
(5-12, # 12, Punctuation The Colon and Semicolon, http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)
The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the
list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A formal resolution, after
the word "resolved:" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.
2. United States Federal Government should means the debate is solely about the outcome of a policy established by governmental means Ericson 03
(Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debaters Guide, Third Edition, p. 4) The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---The United States in The United States should adopt a policy of free trade. Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb shouldthe first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
B. Reasons to prefer: 1. Predictable limits --- the grammar of the resolution is based upon enacting a policy. They justify arbitrarily changing the question of the debate to an infinite number of potential frameworks, ensuring the Aff always wins. Grammar is the only predictable basis for
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determining meaning; its the foundation for how words interact. Ignoring it justifies changing the focus of the debate, mooting the resolution altogether. 2. Ground --- advantages that arent linked to the outcome of the plan are impossible to negate. They can claim critical arguments outweigh disads linked to the plan or shift their advocacy to avoid impact-turns. 3. Plan-focus --- critical frameworks change the role of the ballot from a yes/no question about the desirability of the plan to something else. This undermines the singular logical purpose of debate: the search for the best policy. Logical policymaking is the biggest educational impact --- any other learning is worthless because it cant be applied to the real world.
D. Topicality is a voting issue for fairness and outweighs all other issues because without it, debate is impossible
Shively 2K
(Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science Texas A&M U., Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p. 181-2) The requirements given thus far are primarily negative. The ambiguists must say "no" to-they must reject and limit-some ideas and actions. In what follows, we will also find that they must say "yes" to some things. In particular, they must say "yes" to the idea of rational persuasion. This means, first, that they must recognize the role of agreement in political contest, or the basic accord that is necessary to discord. The mistake that the ambiguists make here is a common one. The mistake is in thinking that agreement marks the end of contest-that consensus kills debate. But this is true only if the agreement is perfect-if there is nothing at all left to question or contest. In most cases, however, our agreements are highly imperfect. We agree on some matters but not on others, on generalities but not on specifics, on principles but not on their applications, and so on. And this kind of limited agreement is the starting condition of contest and debate. As John Courtney Murray writes: We hold certain truths; therefore we can argue about them. It seems to have been one of the corruptions of intelligence by positivism to assume that argument ends when agreement is reached. In a basic sense, the reverse is true. There can be no argument except on the premise, and within a context, of agreement. (Murray 1960, 10) In other words, we cannot argue
about something if we are not communicating: if we cannot agree on the topic and terms of argument or if we have utterly different ideas about what counts as evidence or good argument. At the very least, we must agree about what it is that is being debated before we can debate it. For instance, one cannot have an argument about euthanasia with someone who thinks euthanasia is a musical group. One cannot successfully stage a sit-in if one's target audience simply thinks everyone is resting or if those doing the sitting have no complaints. Nor can one demonstrate resistance to a policy if no one knows that it is a policy. In other words, contest is meaningless if there is a lack of agreement or communication about what is being contested. Resisters, demonstrators, and debaters must have some shared ideas about the subject and/or the terms of their disagreements. The participants and the target of a sit-in must share an understanding of the complaint at hand. And a demonstrator's audience must know what is being resisted. In short, the contesting of an idea presumes some agreement about what that idea is and how one might go about intelligibly contesting it. In other words, contestation rests on some basic agreement or harmony. Continued page 184
But, again, the response to the ambiguist must be that the practice of questioning and undermining rules, like all other social practices, needs a certain order. The subversive needs rules to protect subversion.
And when we look more closely at the rules protective of subversion, we find that they are roughly the rules of argument discussed above. In fact, the rules of argument are roughly the rules of democracy or civility: the delineation of boundaries necessary to protect speech and action from violence, manipulation, and other forms of tyranny.
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2NC FW: Fairness

Our framework narrows the topics of debate to a finite set of political potentialities. Expanding beyond this makes an infinite number of philosophical beliefs germane. Lutz 2K
(Donald, Professor of Political Science U Houston, Political Theory and Partisan Politics, p. 39-40) Aristotle notes in the Politics that political theory simultaneously proceeds at three levels discourse about the ideal, about the best possible in the real world, and about existing political systems. Put another way, comprehensive political theory must ask several different kinds of questions that are linked, yet distinguishable. In order to
understand the interlocking set of questions that political theory can ask, imagine a continuum stretching from left to right. At the end, to the right is an ideal form of government, a perfectly wrought construct produced by the imagination. At the other end is the perfect dystopia, the most perfectly wretched system that the human imagination can produce. Stretching between these two extremes is an infinite set of possibilities,
merging into one another, that describe the logical possibilities created by the characteristics defining the end points. For example, a political system defined primarily by equality would have a perfectly inegalitarian system described at the other end, and the possible states of being between them would vary primarily in the extent to which they embodied equality. An ideal defined primarily by liberty would create a different set of possibilities between the extremes. Of course, visions of the ideal often are inevitably more complex than these single-value examples indicate, but it is also true that in order to imagine an ideal state of affairs a kind of simplification is almost always required since normal states of affairs invariably present themselves to human consciousness as complicated, opaque, and to a significant extent indeterminate. A non-ironic reading of Platos republic leads one to conclude that the creation of these visions of the ideal characterizes political philosophy. This is not the case. Any person can generate a vision of the ideal. One job of political philosophy is to ask the question Is this ideal worth pursuing? Before the question can be pursued, however, the ideal state of affairs must be clarified, especially with respect to conceptual precision and the logical relationship between the propositions that describe the ideal. This pre-theoretical analysis raises the vision of the ideal from the mundane to a level where true philosophical analysis and the careful comparison with existing systems can proceed fruitfully. The process of pre-theoretical analysis, probably because it works on clarifying ideas that most capture the human imagination, too often looks to some like the entire enterprise of political philosophy. However, the value of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus concept of the General Will, for example, lies not in its formal logical implications, nor in its compelling hold on the imagination, but on the power and clarity it lends to an analysis and comparison of the actual political systems. Among other things it allows him to show that anyone who wishes to pursue a state of affairs closer to that summer up in the concept of the General Will must successfully develop a civil religion. To the extent politicians believe
theorists who tell them that pre-theoretical clarification of language describing an ideal is the essence and sum total of political philosophy, to that extent they will properly conclude that political philosophers have little to tell them, since politics is the realm of the possible not the realm of logical clarity. However,
once the ideal is clarified, the political philosopher will begin to articulate and assess the reasons why we might want to pursue such an ideal. At this point, analysis leaves the realm of pure logic and enters the realm of the logic of human longing, aspiration, and anxiety. The analysis is now limited by the interior parameters of the human heart (more properly the human psyche) to which the theorist must appeal. Unlike the clarification stage where
anything that is logical is possible, there are now define limits on where logical can take us. Appeals to self-destruction, less happiness rather than more, psychic isolation, enslavement, loss of identity, a preference for the lives of mollusks over that of humans, to name just a few ,possibilities, are doomed to failure. The theorist cannot appeal to such values if she or he is to attract an audience of politicians. Much
political theory involves the careful, competitive analysis of what a given ideal state of affairs entails, and as Plato shows in his dialogues the discussion between the philosopher and the politician will quickly terminate if he or she cannot convincingly demonstrate the connection between the political ideal being developed and natural human passions. In this way, the politician can be educated by the possibilities that the political theorist can articulate, just as the political theorist can be educated by the relative success the normative analysis has in setting the Hook of interest among nonpolitical theorists. This realm of discourse, dominated by the logic of humanly worthwhile
goals, requires that the theorist carefully observe the responses of others in order not to be seduced by
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what is merely logical as opposed to what is humanly rational. Moral discourse conditioned by the ideal, if it
is to e successful, requires the political theorist to be fearless in pursuing normative logic, but it also requires the theorist to have enough humility to remember that, if a non-theorist cannot be led toward an idea, the fault may well lie in the theory, not in the moral vision of the non-theorist.
Impact --- ground is key to fairness --- without it, we couldnt possibly prepare to compete. Their framework is skewed against the Neg from the beginning. This also turns the case because debate becomes meaningless and produces political strategies wedded to violence. Shively 2K
(Ruth Lessl, Assistant Prof Political Science Texas A&M U., Partisan Politics and Political Theory, p. 182) The point may seem trite, as surely the ambiguists would agree that basic terms must be shared before they can be resisted and problematized. In fact, they are often very candid about this seeming paradox in their approach: the paradoxical or "parasitic" need of the subversive for an order to subvert. But admitting the paradox is not helpful if, as usually happens here, its implications are ignored; or if the only implication drawn is that order or harmony is an unhappy fixture of human life. For what the paradox should tell us is that some kinds of harmonies or orders are, in fact, good for resistance; and some ought to be fully supported. As such, it should counsel against the kind of careless rhetoric that lumps all orders or harmonies together as arbitrary and inhumane. Clearly some basic accord about the terms of contest is a necessary ground for all further contest . It may be that if the ambiguists wish to remain full-fledged ambiguists, they cannot admit to these implications, for to open the door to some agreements or reasons as good and some orders as helpful or necessary, is to open the door to some sort of rationalism. Perhaps they might just continue to insist that this initial condition is ironic, but that the irony should not stand in the way of the real business of subversion. Yet difficulties remain. For agreement is not simply the
initial condition, but the continuing ground, for contest. If we are to successfully communicate our disagreements, we cannot simply agree on basic terms and then proceed to debate without attention to further agreements. For debate and contest are forms of dialogue: that is, they are activities premised on the building of progressive agreements. Imagine, for instance, that two people are having an argument about the issue of gun
control. As noted earlier, in any argument, certain initial agreements will be needed just to begin the discussion. At the very least, the two discussants must agree on basic terms: for example, they must have some shared sense of what gun control is about; what is at issue in arguing about it; what facts are being contested, and so on. They must also agreeand they do so simply by entering into debatethat they will not use violence or threats in making their cases and that they are willing to listen to, and to be persuaded by, good arguments. Such agreements are simply implicit in the act of argumentation.
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2NC FW: ED
Utility --- policy education is more specific than critical literature thats too abstract to describe specific state actions and highly relevant to current events, requiring research and attentiveness to contemporary affairs Henderson 90
(Bill, Professor of Communication University of Northern Iowa, A Proposal for Co -Mingling Value and Policy Debate, Argumentation & Advocacy, Vol. 27, Issue 1, Summer) Students need competitive experience engaging in policy controversy. Policy debates are significantly different from those of fact or value. Since all debate topics are complex, students need to learn how to debate all types of topics: fact, value, and policy. Policy debates entail a greater number of variables than debates about values or facts because policy topics have issues of both value and fact embedded within them. By definition, then, policy topics are more complex. For example, responding to a policy question regarding the appropriate U.S. military response to the Persian Gulf crisis in 1991 (or to any policy question, for that matter) entails issues which are value- or fact-oriented. Many debate coaches may wish to restrict academic debaters to less complex topics during the students' careers. Until students are able to respond to more complex issues, coaches may encourage them to focus on questions of value. For example, students may be directed toward the question of the value of U.S. military responses in the Persian Gulf crisis of 1991. That question entails a large number of propositions of fact. These coaches believe that the resulting discussions can frequently inform and instruct students in the gentle art of persuasion far better than could questions of policy. However, many coaches claim policy questions are embedded within value questions. That's clearly true. We might argue, for example, about the value of military responses; however, our arguments might be based on specific applications of military policy. The point is, in my view, that students need to learn how to argue in both arenas; policy topics provide a central focus of argument which is often not developed in value argument. Since policy argument is an inherent part of decision-making, some of an argumentation student's time ought to be spent learning how to argue policy. In this way, students can learn to develop policy proposals, analyze the benefits and costs, and develop cases for or against those policy proposals. Unfortunately, many collegiate debaters do not have sufficient opportunity to engage in policy argumentation.
Biggest educational impact --- learning is useless if its not connected to the real world Strait and Wallace 07
(L. Paul, USC and Brett, George Mason U., The Scope of Negative Fiat and the Logic of Decision Making, Policy Cures? Health Assistance to Africa, Debaters Research Guide, p. A2) More to the point, debate certainly helps teach a lot of skills, yet we believe that the way policy debate participation encourages you to think is the most valuable educational benefit, because how someone makes decisions determines how they will employ the rest of their abilities, including the research and communication skills that debate builds. Plenty of debate theory articles have explained either the value of debate, or the way in which alternate actor strategies are detrimental to real-world education, but none so far have attempted to tie these concepts together. We will now explain how decision-making skill development is the foremost value of policy debate and how this benefit is the decision-rule to resolving all theoretical discussions about negative fiat. Why debate? Some do it for scholarships, some do it for social purposes, and many just believe it is fun. These are certainly all relevant considerations when making the decision to join the debate team, but as debate the orists they arent the focus of our concern. Our concern is finding a framework for debate that educates the largest quantity of students with the highest quality of skills, while at the same time preserving competitive equity. The ability to make decisions deriving from discussions, argumentation or debate, is the key skill. It is the one thing every single one of us will do every day of our lives besides breathing. Decision-making transcends boundaries between categories of learning learning like policy education and kritik education, it makes irrelevant considerations of whether we will eventually be policymakers, and it transcends questions of what substantive content a debate round should contain. The implication for this analysis is that the critical thinking and argumentative skills offered by real-world decisionmaking are comparatively greater than any educational disadvantage weighed against them. It is the skills we
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learn, not the content of our arguments, that can best improve all of our lives. While policy comparison skills are going to be learned through debate in one way or another, those skills are useless if they are not grounded in the kind of logic actually used to make decisions. The academic studies and research supporting this position are numerous. Richard Fulkerson (1996) explains that argumentation is the chief cognitive activity by which a democracy, a field of study, a corporation, or a committee functions. . . And it is vitally important that high school and college students learn both to argue well and to critique the arguments of others (p. 16). Stuart Yeh (1998) comes to the conclusion that debate allows even cultural minority students to identify an issue, consider different views, form and defend a viewpoint, and consider and respond to counterargumentsThe ability to write effective arguments influences grades, academic success, and preparation for college and employment (p. 49). Certainly, these are all reasons why debate and argumentation themselves are valuable, so why is real world decision-making critical to argumentative thinking? Although people might occasionally think about problems from the position of an ideal decisionmaker (c.f. Ulrich, 1981, quoted in Korcok, 2001), in debate we should be concerned with what type of argumentative thinking is the most relevant to real-world intelligence and the decisions that people make every day in their lives, not academic trivialities. It is precisely because it is rooted in real-world logic that argumentative thinking has value. Deanna Kuhns research in Thinking as Argument explains this by stating that no other kind of thinking matters more-or contributes more to the quality and fulfillment of peoples lives, both individually and collectively (p. 156).
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1NC Case
Reps dont solve reality, and arguing that representations determine reality destroys effective political action Jarvis, 2k (Darryl, lecturer in IR at the University of Sydney, International relations and the challenge of
postmodernism, 2000, p. 189First, the project of subversive-deconstructive postmodernism can be seen as contrary to the discipline of International Relations as a social sci-ence designed not so much to generate knowledge as to disparage knowl-edge spawned through Enlightenment thinking and the precepts of rationality and science. At its most elemental, it is a project of disruption and an attack upon the "complacency" of knowledge generated in modernist quarters. Not that this is all bad. There is much good to come from a shakeup of the academy, from a reexamination of our ontological, episte-mological, and axiological foundations and from the types of practices that ensue from certain modes of conceptualization and analysis. Pointing out silences and omissions from the dominant discourse is always fruitful and necessary, but, arguably, also accomplished under theories and paradigms and from critical quarters that are not necessarily postrnodern and which do not seek to "undo" all knowledge simply on the basis of imperfection. Modernist discourse is not unreflective, can make autonomous corrections, engage in revisionist history, identify injustices, crimes of exclusion, and extend representation to groups that were otherwise not previously repre-sented (think of liberalism or socialism for example!). This, after all, is why we understand modernity to be progressive and history a forward-moving narrative that is self-effusive. More importantly, given the self-defeating contradictions endemic to subversive-deconstructive postmodernism, especially its specious relativism, it
requires no great mind to postulate that the use of modernist/rationalist/Enlightenment discourse will better make the case for a progressive politics of ever greater inclusion, representation, and jus-tice for all than will sloganistic calls for us to "think otherwise." The sim-ple and myopic assumption that social change can be engineered through linguistic policing of politically incorrect words, concepts and opinions, is surely one of the more politically lame (idealist) suggestions to come from armchair theorists in the last fifty years. By the same token, the suggestion that we engage in revisionism of the sort that would "undo" modernist knowledge so that we might start again free of silences, oppressions, and inequalities also smacks of an intelligentsia so idealist as to be unconnected to the world in which they live. The critical skills of subversive postmod-ernists,
constrained perhaps by the success of the West, of Western capi-talism, if not liberal democracy, as the legitimate form of representation, and having tried unsuccessfully through revolution and political uprising to dethrone it previously, have turned to the citadel of our communal identities and attacked not parliaments, nor forms of social-political-economic organization, but language, communication, and the basis of Enlightenment knowledge that otherwise enables us to live, work, and communicate as social beings. Clever though this is, it is not in the end compatible with the project of theory knowledge and takes us further away from an understanding of our world. Its greatest contribution is to cele-brate the loss of certainty, where, argues John O'Neill, "men (sic) are no longer sure of their ruling knowledge and are unable to mobilize sufficient legitimation for the master-narratives of truth and justice." To suppose, however, that we should rejoice collectively at the prospects of a specious relativism and a multifarious perspectivism, and that absent any further
constructive endeavor, the great questions and problems of our time will be answered or solved by this speaks of an intellectual poverty now famed perversely as the search for "thinking space."26
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The AFF has it backwards: opposing the embargo means supporting the regime turns the entire 1AC Suchlicki 13 (Jaime, Emilio Bacardi Moreau Distinguished Professor and Director, Institute for
Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami, What Ifthe U.S. Ended the Cuba Travel Ban and the Embargo? 2/26/13, http://interamericansecuritywatch.com/what-if-the-u-s-ended-the-cubatravel-ban-and-the-embargo/)
Lifting the ban for U.S. tourists to travel to Cuba would be a major concession totally out of proportion to recent changes in the island. If the U.S. were to lift the travel ban without major reforms in Cuba, there would be significant implications: Money from American tourists would flow into businesses owned by the Castro government thus strengthening state enterprises. The tourist industry is controlled by the military and General Raul Castro, Fidels brother. American tourists will have limited contact with Cubans. Most Cuban resorts are built in isolated areas, are off limits to the average Cuban, and are controlled by Cubas efficient security apparatus. Most Americans dont speak Spanish, have but limited contact with ordinary Cubans, and are not interested in visiting the island to subvert its regime. Law 88 enacted in 1999 prohibits Cubans from receiving publications from tourists. Penalties include jail terms. While providing the Castro government with much needed dollars, the economic impact of tourism on the Cuban population would be limited. Dollars will trickle down to the Cuban poor in only small quantities, while state and foreign enterprises will benefit most. Tourist dollars would be spent on products, i.e., rum, tobacco, etc., produced by state enterprises, and tourists would stay in hotels owned partially or wholly by the Cuban government. The principal airline shuffling tourists around the island, Gaviota, is owned and operated by the Cuban military. The assumption that the Cuban leadership would allow U.S. tourists or businesses to subvert the revolution and influence internal developments is at best nave. As we have seen in other circumstances, U.S. travelers to Cuba could be subject to harassment and imprisonment. Over the past decades hundred of thousands of Canadian, European and Latin American tourists have visited the island. Cuba is not more democratic today. If anything, Cuba is more totalitarian, with the state and its control apparatus having been strengthened as a result of the influx of tourist dollars. As occurred in the mid-1990s, an infusion of American tourist dollars will provide the regime with a further disincentive to adopt deeper economic reforms. Cubas limited economic reforms were enacted in the early 1990s, when the islands economic contraction was at its worst. Once the economy began to stabilize by 1996 as a result of foreign tourism and investments, and exile remittances, the earlier reforms were halted or rescinded by Castro. Lifting the travel ban without major concessions from Cuba would send the wrong message to the enemies of the United States: that a foreign leader can seize U.S. properties without compensation; allow the use of his territory for the introduction of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States; espouse terrorism and anti-U.S. causes throughout the world; and eventually the United States will forget and forgive, and reward him with tourism, investments and economic aid. Since the Ford/Carter era, U.S. policy toward Latin America has emphasized democracy, human rights and constitutional government. Under President Reagan the U.S. intervened in Grenada, under President Bush, Sr. the U.S. intervened in Panama and under President Clinton the U.S. landed marines in Haiti, all to restore democracy to those countries. The U.S. has prevented military coups in the region and supported the will of the people in free elections. U.S. policy has not been uniformly applied throughout the world, yet it is U.S. policy in the region. Cuba is part of Latin America. While no one is advocating military intervention, normalization of relations with a military dictatorship in Cuba will send the wrong message to the rest of the continent. Once American tourists begin to visit Cuba, Castro would probably restrict travel by Cuban-Americans. For the Castro regime, Cuban-Americans represent a far more subversive group because of their ability to speak to friends and relatives on the island, and to influence their views on the Castro regime and on the United States. Indeed, the return of Cuban exiles in 1979-80 precipitated the mass exodus of Cubans from Mariel in 1980. A large influx of American tourists into Cuba would have a dislocating effect on the economies of smaller Caribbean islands such as Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and
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even Florida, highly dependent on tourism for their well-being. Careful planning must take place, lest we create significant hardships and social problems in these countries. If the embargo is lifted, limited trade with, and investments in Cuba would develop. Yet there are significant implications.
Opposing the embargo creates American-led dependency on neoliberalism Haron 13 (Carleigh, Trinity College, Colonial Trajectory As a Determinant of Economic Development in Cuba and Puerto
Rico: A Comparison, http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1295&context=theses)
A critical moment of the Cuban Revolution was the transition from a populist nationalism movement into a full-fledged Marxist Leninist revolution. In the first year of the revolutionary state, the government abolished the obvious excesses of the Batista regimethe bureaucratic structure, the army, Castro improved working wages and civil services and implemented some land reforms.105 In 1960 the government expropriated U.S. property to the state. This is when ideological tensions started to shift. The U.S. government reacted by sponsoring the Bay of Pigs invasion and enacting an embargo of Cuban products. The Cuban government answered the American aggression by proclaiming the revolution a socialist revolution. Clearly, the populist nationalism ideology did not suffice, and the government turned to a more radical ideology. A month later, Castro announced that it was officially Marxist Leninist. The majority of Cubans supported the ideological transition. The enormous imperial sugar plantation economy neglected a large amount of workers that were desperate for improved conditions and ready to support radical ideologies. Besides agricultural workers, other Cubans were disillusioned by the corruption of American infiltration and ready to support the new ideologies because they were anti-American and created something distinctly Cuban. Barlow suggests that this is what made the Cuban revolution so successful: its attempt to forcefully break with the past traditions and institutions of imperialism.106
Turns and outweighs their discursive methodology Goodman in 9, James, Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, Rethinking Insecurity War and Violence, edited by
Grenfell and James, http://www.scribd.com/doc/68230825/4/Global-capitalism-and-the-production-of-insecurity The shrouding of Guernica is symbolic of a deep contradiction in the
US mission to secure the globe, making it safe for markets and democracy. On the one hand, there is the abstract appeal to universal security and the material abstraction of military
technology; on the other is the concrete eect in terms of human suering and the absolute insecurity of warfare. In this respect we may say that the pursuit of security necessarily produces insecurity; but insecurity for whom? Action to address insecurity is double-sided as it
denes whose freedom is to be protected, and whose freedom is to be lim-ited. Security is both a freeing from (danger) and a constraint or limitation imposed upon it (Dillon 1996: 122). In broader terms, this realm of secur-ity
of bounded freedom constitutes society. Within this realm, the sin of security, as Dillon puts it, is the failure to feel i nsecure. That insecurity is required to protect security is neatly exemplied in the US detention center for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, which declares itself Honor-bound to Defend Freedom. In capitalist societies insecurity is systemic. Capitalism literally produces insecurity. The opportunity to prot and the risk of loss is capitalisms life-blood. Capitalist security hinges on private property, on having rather than not having and on the security that possessions provide. As wealth is stratied, so is security and wit h the concentration of property ownership comes the concentration of security. Here the question of pursuing security is profoundly political. When security is de ned by the
powerful, making safe tends to serve the status quo. When security is dened by the sub-ordinated, it tends to challenge the social order. Removing sources of insecurity for the subordinated means removing the means to dominate, and under capitalism this means removing the inalienable right to private property. With deepening capi talist relations, systemic insecurities are intensied. The process of commodication and nancialization has gained global reach, deepening the integration of livelihoods and living environments into a universal cash nexus (Rupert 2003). Societies as a result become ever-more vulnerable to volatile ows of liquid assets, rendering them radically insecure. This globalization of insecurity is deeply stratied, with sharpening divides between those suering under it and those proting from it. Indeed, globalizing capitalism is best understood as a system displacing
insecurity from rich to poor across the globe. Such systemic insecurity is socially con-centrated at the collision between living environments and
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marketization, and profoundly exacerbates social divides, including contributing to the feminization of poverty. It is spatially concentrated in a growing range of poorer and vulnerable states, but, as argued here, the side-eects of systemic insecurity rebound on the center. There is
increasing anxiety amongst domi-nant states about vulnerability to refugee ows, to the contagion of nan-cial instability, to cross-border environmental crises, to subversive information ows, to transnational political violence, to ows of laundered money, to illicit drugs and arms ows. Reecting this, there are increasingly intensive eorts to secure external borders and escalating interventions against failed or rogue states on the periphery. Against this backdrop, the US-led War on Terror and Powell s eorts at the UN become symptomatic of a broader geopolitics of insecurity where the center strikes out to secure itself against an increasingly insecure periphery. Overall, we may perceive three elements in this production of global inse-curity. First, intensive commodication and nancialization generate sys-temic insecurity. Secondly, systemic insecurity is displaced to the social and spatial margins. Thirdly, the resulting side-eects generate militarist inter-ventions from the center, to impose order by command. The chapter
explores each of these three elements after rst charting insecurity dilemmas in the War on Terror.
Preventing potential crises is goodstops them from happening Kurasawa, Associate Professor of Sociology, York University in Toronto, Canada, 04 Fuyuki, Constellations, Vol. 11, No. 4,
Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight, http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Kurasawa%20Articles/Constellations%20Article.pdf, last accessed 11.19.10 [RG] Rather than bemoaning the contemporary preeminence of a dystopian imaginary, I am claiming that it can enable a novel form of transnational socio-political action, a manifestation of globalization from below that can be termed preventive foresight. We should not reduce the latter to a formal principle regulating international relations or an ensemble of policy prescriptions for official players on the world stage, since it is, just as significantly, a mode of ethico-political practice enacted by participants in the emerging realm of global civil society. In other words, what I want to underscore is the work of farsightedness, the social processes through which civic associations are simultaneously constituting and putting into practice a sense of responsibility for the future by attempting to prevent global catastrophes. Although the labor of preventive foresight takes place in varying political and socio-cultural settings and with different degrees of institutional support and access to symbolic and material resources it is underpinned by three distinctive features: dialogism, publicity, and transnationalism.In the first instance, preventive foresight is an intersubjective or dialogical process of address, recognition, and response between two parties in global civil society: the warners, who anticipate and send out word of possible perils, and the audiences being warned, those who heed their interlocutors messages by demanding that governments and/or international organizations take measures t o steer away from disaster. Secondly, the work of farsightedness derives its effectiveness and legitimacy from public debate and deliberation. This is not to say that a fully fledged global public sphere is already in existence, since transnational strong publics with decisional power in the formal-institutional realm are currently embryonic at best. Rather, in this context, publicity signifies that weak publics with distinct yet occasionally overlapping constituencies are coalescing around struggles to avoid specific global catastrophes.4 Hence, despite having little direct decision-making capacity, the environmental and peace movements, humanitarian NGOs, and other similar globally-oriented civic associations are becoming significant actors involved in public opinion formation. Groups like these are active in disseminating information and alerting citizens about looming catastrophes, lobbying states and multilateral organizations from the inside and pressuring them from the outside, as well as fostering public participation in debates about the future.This brings us to the transnational character of preventive foresight, which is most explicit in the now commonplace observation that we live in an interdependent world because of the globalization of the perils that humankind faces (nuclear annihilation, global warming, terrorism, genocide, AIDS and SARS epidemics, and so on); individuals and groups from far-flung parts of the planet are being brought together into risk communities that transcend geographical borders.5 Moreover, due to dense media and information flows, knowledge of impeding catastrophes can instantaneously reach the four corners of the earth sometimes well before individuals in one place experience the actual consequences of a crisis originating in another. My contention is that civic associations are engaging in dialogical, public, and transnational forms of ethico-political action that contribute to the creation of a fledgling global civil society existing below the official and institutionalized architecture of international relations.6 The work of preventive foresight consists of forging ties between citizens ; participating in the circulation of flows of claims, images, and information across borders; promoting an ethos of farsighted cosmopolitanism; and forming and mobilizing weak publics that debate and struggle against possible catastrophes. Over the past few decades, states and international organizations have frequently been content to follow the lead of globally- minded civil society actors, who have been instrumental in placing on the public agenda a host of pivotal issues (such as nuclear war, ecological pollution, species extinction, genetic engineering, and mass human rights violations). To my mind, this strongly indicates that if prevention of global crises is to eventually rival the assertion of short-term and narrowly defined rationales (national interest, profit, bureaucratic self-preservation, etc.), weak publics must begin by convincing or compelling official representatives and multilateral organizations to act differently; only then will farsightedness be in a position to move up and become institutionalized.
war, ecological pollution, species extinction, genetic engineering, and mass human rights violations).
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2NC Reps Not 1st

Arguing that language determines reality is reductionist and simplisticthere are too many alternate factors that are more importantlanguage is a trivial factor in constructing reality Rodwell, 05 (Jonathan, PhD student at Manchester Met. researching U.S. Foreign Policy, 49th parallel, Spring,
Trendy but empty: A Response to Richard Jackson, http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/rodwell1.htm) However, having said that, the problem is Jacksons own theoretical underpinning, his own justification for the importance of language. If he was merely proposing that the understanding of language as one of many causal factors is important that would be fine. But he is not. The epistemological and theoretical framework of his argument means the ONLY thing we should look at is language and this is the problem.[ii] Rather than being a fairly simple, but nonetheless valid, argument, because of the theoretical justification it actually becomes an almost nonsensical. My response is roughly laid out in four parts. Firstly I will argue that such methodology, in isolation, is fundamentally reductionist with a theoretical underpinning that does not conceal this simplicity. Secondly, that a strict use of post-structural discourse analysis results in an epistemological cul-de-sac in which the writer cannot actually say anything. Moreover the reader has no
reason to accept anything that has been written. The result is at best an explanation that remains as equally valid as any other possible interpretation and at worse a work that retains no critical force whatsoever. Thirdly, possible arguments in response to this charge; that such approaches provide a more acceptable explanation than others are, in effect, both a tacit acceptance of the poverty of force within the approach and of the complete lack of understanding of the identifiable effects of the real world around us; thus highlighting the contradictions within post-structural claims to be moving
beyond traditional causality, re-affirming that rather than pursuing a post-structural approach we should continue to employ the traditional methodologies within History, Politics and International Relations. Finally as a consequence of these limitations I will argue that the post-structural call for intertextuals must be practiced rather than merely preached and that an understanding and utilisation of all possible theoretical approaches must be maintained if academic writing is to remain useful rather than self-contained and narrative. Ultimately I conclude that whilst undeniably of some value post-structural ap+proaches are at best a footnote in our understanding .
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2NC Regime Turn

Ending the embargo without massive concessions will fail Suchlicki 13 (Jaime, Emilio Bacardi Moreau Distinguished Professor and Director, Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami, What Ifthe U.S. Ended the Cuba Travel Ban and the Embargo? 2/26/13, http://interamericansecuritywatch.com/what-if-the-u-s-ended-the-cuba-travel-banand-the-embargo/) Trade All trade with Cuba is done with state owned businesses. Since Cuba has very little credit and is a major debtor nation, the U.S. and its businesses would have to provide credits to Cuban enterprises. There is a long history of Cuba defaulting on loans. Cuba is not likely to buy a substantial amount of products in the U.S. In the past few years, Cuba purchased several hundred million dollars of food in the U.S. That amount is now down to $170 million per year. Cuba can buy in any other country and it is not likely to abandon its relationship with China, Russia, Venezuela, and Iran to become a major trading partner of the U.S. Cuba has very little to sell in the U.S. Nickel, one of Cubas major exports, is controlled by the Canadians and exported primarily to Canada. Cuba has decimated its sugar industry and there is no appetite in the U.S. for more sugar. Cigars and rum are important Cuban exports. Yet, cigar production is mostly committed to the European market. Cuban rum could become an important export, competing with Puerto Rican and other Caribbean rums. Investments In Cuba, foreign investors cannot partner with private Cuban citizens. They can only invest in the island through minority joint ventures with the government and its state enterprises. The dominant enterprise in the Cuban economy is the Grupo GAESA, controlled by the Cuban military. Most investments are done through or with GAESA. Therefore, American companies willing to invest in Cuba will have to partner mostly with the Cuban military. Cuba ranks 176 out of 177 countries in the world in terms of economic freedom. Outshined only by North Korea. It ranks as one of the most unattractive investments next to Iran, Zimbabwe, Libya, Mali, etc. Foreign investors cannot hire, fire, or pay workers directly. They must go through the Cuban government employment agency which selects the workers. Investors pay the government in dollars or euros and the government pays the workers a meager 10% in Cuban pesos. Corruption is pervasive, undermining equity and respect for the rule of law. Cuba does not have an independent/transparent legal system. All judges are appointed by the State and all lawyers are licensed by the State. In the last few years, European investors have had over $1 billion arbitrarily frozen by the government and several investments have been confiscated. Cubas Law 77 allows the State to expropriate foreign-invested assets for reason of public utility or social interest. In the last year, the CEOs of three companies with extensive dealings with the Cuban government were arrested without charges. (1) Conclusions If the travel ban is lifted unilaterally now or the embargo is ended by the U.S., what will the U.S. government have to negotiate with a future regime in Cuba and to encourage changes in the island? These policies could be an important bargaining chip with a future regime willing to provide concessions in the area of political and economic freedoms. The travel ban and the embargo should be lifted as a result of negotiations between the U.S. and a Cuban government willing to provide meaningful and irreversible political and economic concessions or when there is a democratic government in place in the island.
Increases the regimes power and turns case

of the Cuban Economy" (2000).Institute for Cuban & Cuban-American Studies Occasional Papers.Paper 28.

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/iccaspapers/28)
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Let us ask one final time: Who would benefit from the abrogation of the legislation enabling the U.S. embargo on Cuba? Unquestionably, such a move would be greatly advantageous to Castros personal purposes and would also favor those who seek to obtain commercial gains from doing business in Cuba, heedless of the costs of their unbridled ambition to the Cuban people. What would constitute a gross deception, however, would be to advance the claim, as some do, that such a policy change would contribute to Cubas freedom or to its economic development. No doubt, Cuba after Castro will experience very serious difficulties in resuming its process of economic development and rejoining the world economy. Nothing short of a complete ideological turnaround and wholesale restructuring of its political, social, and economic systems would allow the country to begin to face the arduous tasks lying ahead. The Cuban nation has suffered enormously under Castro. The reconstruction process will inevitably be costly and laborious. The last thing the Cuban people need is to be visited by another plague. Spare them the sanctimonious chicanery and knavery of those who abuse and misuse the market for their own greed. Piatas and mafias are not the way to build free and prosperous societies. Vide Nicaragua and Russia. Let Cuba not follow suit.
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2NC Neolib
Opposing the embargo locks Cuba into neoliberalism, turns the entire 1AC empirically proven Gonzalez 3 (Carmen G., Assistant Professor, Seattle University School of Law, Summer 2003,
SEASONS OF RESISTANCE: SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SECURITY IN CUBA, p. 729-33) Notwithstanding these problems, the greatest challenge to the agricultural development strategy adopted by the Cuban government in the aftermath of the Special Period is likely to be external the renewal of trade relations with the United States. From the colonial era through the beginning of the Special Period, economic development in Cuba has been constrained by Cubas relationship with a series of primary trading partners. Cubas export-oriented sugar monoculture and its reliance on imports to satisfy domestic food needs was imposed by the Spanish colonizers, reinforced by the United States, and maintained during the Soviet era. It was not until the collapse of the socialist trading bloc and the strengthening of the U.S. embargo that Cuba was able to embark upon a radically different development path. Cuba was able to transform its agricultural development model as a consequence of the political and economic autonomy occasioned by its relative economic isolation, including its exclusion from major international financial and trade institutions. Paradoxically, while the U.S. embargo subjected Cuba to immense economic hardship, it also gave the Cuban government free rein to
adopt agricultural policies that ran counter to the prevailing neoliberal model and that protected Cuban farmers against ruinous competition from highly subsidized agricultural producers in the United States and the European Union. Due to U.S. pressure, Cuba was excluded from regional and international financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank.n413 Cuba also failed to reach full membership in any regional trade association and was barred from the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). However, as U.S. agribusiness clamors to ease trade restrictions with Cuba, the lifting of the embargo and the end of Cubas econ omic isolation may only be a matter of time. It is unclear how the Cuban government will respond to the immense political and economic pressure from the United States to enter into bilateral or multilateral trade agreements that would curtail Cuban sovereignty and erode protection for Cuban agriculture.n416 If Cuba accedes to the dictates of
agricultural trade liberalization, it appears likely that Cubas gains in agricultural diversification and food self-sufficiency will be undercut by cheap, subsidized food imports from the United States and other industrialized countries. Furthermore, Cubas experiment with organic and semi-organic agriculture may be jeopardized if the Cuban government is either unwilling or unable to restrict the sale of agrochemicals to Cuban farmers as the Cuban government failed to restrict U.S. rice imports in the first half of the twentieth century. Cuba is once again at a crossroads as it was in 1963, when the government abandoned economic diversification, renewed its emphasis on sugar production, and replaced its trade dependence on the United States with trade dependence on the socialist bloc. In the end, the future of Cuban agriculture will likely turn on a combination of external factors (such as world market prices for Cuban exports and Cubas future economic integration with the United States) and internal factors (such as the level
of grassroots and governmental support for the alternative development model developed during the Special Period). While this Article has examined the major pieces of legislation that transformed agricultural production in Cuba, and the governments implementation of these laws, it is important to remember that these reforms had their genesis in the economic crisis of the early 1990s and in the creative legal, and extra-legal, survival strategies developed by ordinary Cubans. The distribution of land to thousands of small producers and the promotion of urban agriculture were in response to the self-help measures undertaken by Cuban citizens during the Special Period. As the economic crisis intensified, Cuban citizens spontaneously seized and cultivated parcels of land in state farms, along the highways, and in vacant lots, and started growing food in patios, balconies, front yards, and community gardens. Similarly, the opening of the agricultural markets was in direct response to the booming black market and its deleterious effect on the states food distribution system. Finally, it was the small private fa rmer, the neglected stepchild of the Revolution, who kept alive the traditional agroecological techniques that formed the basis of Cubas experiment with organic agriculture. The survival of Cubas alternative agricultural model will therefore depend, at least in part, on whether this m odel is viewed by Cuban citizens and by the Cuban leadership as a necessary adaptation to severe economic crisis or as a path-breaking achievement worthy of pride and emulation. The history of Cuban agriculture has been one of resistance and accommodation to larger economic and political forces that shaped the destiny of the island nation. Likewise, the transformation of Cuban agriculture has occurred through resistance and accommodation by Cuban workers and farmers to the hardships of the Special Period. The
lifting of the U.S. economic embargo and the subjection of Cuba to the full force of economic globalization will present an enormous challenge to the retention of an agricultural development model borne of crisis and isolation. Whether
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Cuba will be able to resist the re-imposition of a capital-intensive, export-oriented, import-reliant agricultural model will depend on the ability of the Cuban leadership to appreciate the benefits of sustainable agriculture and to protect Cubas alternative agricultural model in the face of overwhelming political and economic pressure from the United States and from the global trading system.
Opposing the embargo is ACCEPTANCE of neoliberal dependency and REJECTION of anti-imperialism

Haron 13 (Carleigh, Trinity College, Colonial Trajectory As a Determinant of Economic Development in Cuba and Puerto
Rico: A Comparison, http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1295&context=theses)
As a newly, fully independent nation with full sovereignty, Cuba had a hard time breaking traditional production patterns of its colonial past and embraced the exploitive sugar economy it developed under colonialism. Albeit, continuing the patterns of monoculture made the island vulnerable, the cushion of sugar production invited Soviet support and allowed the revolutionary government to wield sufficient power to spurn their former (informal) colonizer, the U.S. This failure impeded development and equality in terms of food, exactly what the revolution aimed not to do. With the imposition of the U.S. trade embargo and a drop in imports, Cuba scrambled for a way to secure resources. Fortunately, its new ideological character allowed it to forge new trade relations through socialist division of labor, COMECON. With Soviet support, Cuba became the most well-developed Caribbean island; even ranking above the U.S. in the 1989 Physical Quality of Life Index by the Overseas Development Council (11th versus 15th). 124 In this trade arrangement the socialist Soviet nations provided a new market for Cuban sugar to be sold in, reinforcing its status as a monoculture export producer, though now the state owned all elements of production instead of foreign corporations. For three decades, 1959-1989, a whopping 85% of Cubas trade was conducted with the Soviet Bloc. 125 It seems that although the revolution intended to break with the past, Cubans seemed to forget that part of the transformation of society should have included restructuring its traditional trade dependency, which left Cuban hunger not quite satisfied.
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2NC Security Good

Disaster discourse is goodkey to mobilizing action Kurasawa, Associate Professor of Sociology, York University in Toronto, Canada , 2004
Fuyuki, Constellations, Vol. 11, No. 4, Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight, http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Kurasawa%20Articles/Constellations%20Article.pdf, last accessed 11.19.10 [RG] In addition, farsightedness has become a priority in world affairs due to the appearance of new global threats and the resurgence of older ones. Virulent forms of ethno-racial nationalism and religious fundamentalism that had mostly been kept in check or bottled up during the Cold War have reasserted themselves in ways that are now all-too-familiar civil warfare, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and global terrorism. And if nuclear mutually assured destruction has come to pass, other dangers are filling the vacuum : climate change, AIDS and other diseases (BSE, SARS, etc.), as well as previously unheralded genomic perils (genetically modified organisms, human cloning). Collective remembrance of past atrocities and disasters has galvanized some sectors of public opinion and made the international communitys unwillingness to adequately intervene before and during the genocides in the ex -Yugoslavia and Rwanda, or to take remedial steps in the case of the spiraling African and Asian AIDS pandemics, appear particularly glaring. Returning to the point I made at the beginning of this paper, the significance of foresight is a direct outcome of the transition toward a dystopian imaginary (or what Sontag has called the imagination of disaster).11 Huxleys Brave New World and Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, two groundbreaking dystopian novels of the first half of the twentieth century, remain as influential as ever in framing public discourse and understanding current techno-scientific dangers, while recent paradigmatic cultural artifacts films like The Matrix and novels like Atwoods Oryx and Crake reflect and give shape to this catastrophic sensibility.12 And yet dystopianism need not imply despondency, paralysis, or fear. Quite the opposite, in fact, since the pervasiveness of a dystopian imaginary can help notions of historical contingency and fallibilism gain traction against their determinist and absolutist counterparts.13 Once we recognize that the
future is uncertain and that any course of action produces both unintended and unexpected consequences, the responsibility to face up to potential disasters and intervene before they strike becomes compelling. From another angle,
dystopianism lies at the core of politics in a global civil society where groups mobilize their own nightmare scenarios (Frankenfoods and a lifeless planet for environmentalists, totalitarian patriarchy of the sort depicted in Atwoods Handmaids Tale for Western feminism, McWorld and a global neoliberal oligarchy for the alternative globalization movement, etc.). Such scenarios can act as catalysts for public debate and socio-political action, spurring citizens involvement in the wor k of preventive foresight. Several bodies of literature have touched upon this sea-change toward a culture of prevention in world affairs, most notably just-war theory,14 international public policy research,15 and writings from the risk society paradigm.16 Regardless of how insightful these three approaches may be, they tend to skirt over much of what is revealing about the interplay of the ethical, political, and sociological dynamics that drive global civil society initiatives aimed at averting disaster. Consequently, the theory of practice proposed here reconstructs the dialogical, public, and transnational work of farsightedness, in order to articulate the sociopolitical processes underpinning it to the normative ideals that should steer and assist in substantively thickening it. As such, the establishment of a capacity for early warning is the first aspect of the question that we need to tackle.
Liberal democracies prevent the mobilization of violence

Kurasawa, 4 Associate Professor of Sociology @ York University
(Fuyuki, Constellations, Vol. 11, No. 4) Lastly, I contended that the work of preventive foresight can parry alarmist misappropriation or resignation by advocating a process of public deliberation that blends the principles of precaution and global justice. A farsighted politics can function through the public use of reason and the honing of the capacity for critical judgment, whereby citizens put themselves in a position to debate, evaluate, and challenge different dystopian narratives about the future and determine which ones are more analytically plausible, ethically desirable, and politically effective in bringing about a world order that is less
perilous yet more just for our descendants. Many fora, ranging from local, face-to-face meetings to transnational, highly mediated discursive networks, are sowing the seeds of such a practice of participatory democracy. None of this is to disavow the international communitys rather patchy record of avoiding foreseeable calamities over the last decades, or to minimize the difficulties of implementing the kinds of global institutional reforms described above and the perils of historical contingency, presentist indifference toward the future, or alarmism and resignation. To my mind, however, this is all the more reason to pay attention to the work of preventive foresight in global civil society, through which civic association s can build up the latters coordination mechanisms and institutional leverage, cultivate and mobilize public opinion in distant parts of the world, and compel political leaders and national and transnational governance structures to implement certain policies. While seeking to prevent cataclysms from worsening or, better yet, from occurring in the first place, these sorts of initiatives can and must remain consistent with a vision of a just world order. Furthermore, the labor of farsightedness supports an autonomous view of the future, according to which we are the creators of the field of possibilities within which our
informed public participation in deliberative processes makes a socially self-instituting future possible through the involvement of groups and individuals active in domestic and supranational public spaces; prevention is a public practice, and a public responsibility.
successors will dwell. The current socio-political order, with all its short-term biases, is neither natural nor necessary. Accordingly,
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We should endorse state sponsors of terrorism as a foreign policy the impact to terrorism massively outweighs any risk of the aff
De Leon 5 (3 Regent J. Int'l L. 115 (2005) Girding the Nation's Armor: The Appropriate Use of Immigration Law to Combat
Terrorism; de Leon, Farrah G. GIRDING THE NATION'S ARMOR: THE APPROPRIATE USE OF IMMIGRATION LAW TO COMBAT TERRORISM Farrah G. de Leon* I. INTRODUCTION The laws
of necessity, of self-preservation, and of saving our country when in danger are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrific ing the end to the means. 130 A. The Constitutional Underpinnings The rationale behind the "Constitution of
necessity," as espoused by Michael Paulsen, is that "[t]he Constitution itself embraces an over riding principle of constitutional and national self-preservation that operates as a meta-rule of construction for the document's specific provisions and that may even, in cases of extraordinary necessity, trump specific constitutional requirements."'131 Further, interpretations of the Constitution should be construed to complement its various pro visions and should not be given a contradictory interpretation.132 How ever, when interpretations which are inconsistent or contrary to the purpose of the Constitution will likely result, "the necessity of preserv ing the Constitution and the constitutional order as a whole requires that priority be given to the preservation of the
nation whose Constitu tion it is, for the sake of preserving constitutional government over the long haul, and even at the expense of specific constitutional provi sions.,'133 The text of the Constitution
recognizes the constitutional law of necessity and, based on the presidential oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,"'134 charges the President with both the duty of executing the Constitution and the dis cretion to judge the necessity of those efforts. 135 The Framers also gave the legislative branch necessary and proper powers136 so that in times of national crisis, Congress has the power to legislate measures to accomplish preservation. Paulsen further con tends that, given the Supreme Court's jurisprudence regarding a com pelling interest analysis, national survival-the protection of
innocent life and preservation of constitutional government-is the quintessen tial example of a compelling interest.138 Judge Posner presents a similar view of constitutional jurispru dence in times of exigency.
Recognizing that the Constitution should not be made into a suicide pact, Posner contends that the present rights which the Constitution confers are a result of judicial interpretation rather than the Constitution's literal text and "are alterable in response to changing threats to national security"'139 in order to produce the most efficient and just resolution. Posner further argues that in
re sponse to the September 11 attacks, police powers and military force are required to control the threat of international terrorism. As a result, some civil liberties will and should be curtailed "to the extent that the benefits in greater security outweigh the costs in reduced liberty."''40 Notwithstanding exigent national security concerns, legislative and judicial officials "must weigh the costs as carefully as the benefits."''41 History has shown the tendency of government officials to underesti mate dangers to national security that have led to the most violent incidents in the nation's history, namely, the Civil War, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the emboldening of North Korea to invade South Korea, the Tet Offensive of 1968, the Iranian revolution and Iran hostage crisis of 1979.142 Posner, like Paulsen, cites Abraham Lincoln's wartime suspension of habeas corpus as the
foremost exam ple that "even legality must sometimes be sacrificed for other val ues."'143 He stressed that "[w]e are a nation under law, but first we are a nation."144 Although Posner's views are based on an economic analysis of the law, he brings force to his argument by acknowledging the necessity of preserving the nation. B. The Rationale Applied Today's in Context Justice Holmes' proverb holds true today: "[A] page of history is worth a volume of logic.',, 5 The lessons from Korematsu v. United States146 should never be forgotten. This nation learned a logical and valuable lesson from Korematsu: mistakes should not be repeated."47 Today, Korematsu serves as a grave reminder that civil liberties should be vigilantly guarded and should be limited only upon the most pressing of circumstance.148 Korematsu will forever remind the gov ernment to cautiously weigh the present exigent circumstances against the overall scheme of constitutional government and democracy. The present historical moment calls for some measure of increased protection against a formidable foe. Nevertheless, every protective measure must be sufficiently analyzed, and weighed against compet ing compelling interests, to determine whether the curtailment of some civil liberties is warranted by the immediate circumstances. It is well established that national security is a compelling gov ernmental interest. "It is 'obvious and unarguable' that no governmen tal interest is more compelling than the security of the nation."'149 The measures
taken by the government post-September 11 are necessary and proper and within the confines of the political branches' constitu tional authority.

Cuba Embargo Affirmative and Negative - Wake 2013

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Wake Forest Debate [___User Name___]

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AD1: US-Cuba Relations

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time has come to completely normalize

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Russian imperialism will result in a US/Russian nuclear war Scaliger 8

US/Russian war causes extinction most probable Bostrom 2

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AD2: Cuban Economy

Risks in the short term

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government to engage constructively alongside an effort to empower the Cuban people.

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We access multiple internal links to Cuban economic recovery

The harmful economic effects of the embargo

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Plan Solves / Embargo Key

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Cuba Economy Advantage

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Collapse Now / Plan Solves***

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Plan K2 Cuban Reforms

Removes the biggest crutch of Cuban economic dependency

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Trade Deficit Internal

with a lifted embargo.

Trade deficit is key to Cubas economy

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EXT Bioterror Impact

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Impact Korea War

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Impact Africa War

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Impact Caucus War

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Obama Credibility Add-on

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