Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

Soft Power Solves Deterrence

Soft power key to deterrence- hard power alone can’t solve
Douthat 7 [Ross, senior editor, The Atlantic, July 13, http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/the_case_for_deterrence.php]

In almost all real-world situations, 'the bomb' is not "the ultimate guardian of our safety". Our ability to solve conflict by non-military means is the ultimate guardian of our safety. By the time we use the nuclear bombs, our safety has already been compromised, yes? Therefore, our national security really, really does rest with our capacity to understand people(s), use soft power, influence events away from the development of dangerous red lines, incent collective action (even more so as a hegemon), and do much else besides ensuring that everyone is sufficiently frightened to compliance. (I know the love-your-bomb and I'll-put-my-faith-in-weaponry folks will hate that, but that doesn't make it untrue.)

Soft Power Solves Warming/Disease/Terrorism

Soft power is key to solve warming, disease, terrorism, and organized crime.

Nye 4 (Joseph S, “Soft Power and American Foreign Policy”, Harvard IR prof., vol. 119, no. 2, p. 264)

Because of its leading edge in the information revolution and its past investment in military power, the United States will likely remain the world's single most powerful country well into the twenty-first century. French dreams of a multipolar mihtary world are unlikely to be realized anytime soon, and the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, has explicitly eschewed such a goal.^^ But not all the important types of power come out of the barrel of a gun. Hard power is relevant to getting the outcomes we want on all three chessboards, but many of the transnational issues, such as climate change, the spread of infec- tious diseases, international crime, and terrorism, cannot be resolved by mili- tary force alone. Representing the dark side of globalization, these issues are inherently multilateral and require cooperation for their solution. Soft power is particularly important in dealing with the issues that arise from the bottom chessboard of transnational relations. To describe such a world as an American empire fails to capture the real nature of the foreign policy tasks that we face.

Soft Power Solves Warming/Terrorism

Soft power is key to solve climate change and terrorism.

Khanna 8 (Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. Council on Foreign Relations: “The United States and Shifting Global Power Dynamics”) online: http://www.cfr.org/publication/16002/united_states_and_shifting_global_power_dynamics.html

To the extent that our grand strategy will involve elements of promoting good governance and democracy, we will have to become far more irresistible as a political partner, offering incentives greater than those of other powers who do not attach any strings to their relationships. Even if you are agnostic on this issue, we are all aware that this is a perennial plank of American diplomacy and if we want to be even remotely effective at it, we have to up our ante in this arena of rising powers. This I believe is part of what you would call “non-military spending on national security,” a course of action I strongly advocate for the Middle East and Central Asia.

An equally important component of grand strategy will have to be a realistic division of labor with these rising powers, something both of us clearly emphasize. Whether the issue is climate change, public health, poverty reduction, post-conflict reconstruction, or counterterrorism, we do not have the capacity to solve these problems alone—nor can any other power. I argue that we need serious issue-based summit diplomacy among concerned powers (and other actors such as corporations and NGOs) to get moving quickly on these questions rather than (or in parallel to) allowing things to drag through their course in cumbersome multilateral fora. This last point is crucial: the missing ingredient to a globalized grand strategy is the U.S. foreign policy community cleverly leveraging the strengths, activities, and global footprint of the U.S. private sector and NGO communities into what I call a diplomatic-industrial complex. It is in changing our foreign policy process, as much as some of the goals, that our success lies.

Soft Power Solves Heg/Terrorism

Soft power is key to sustain hegemony and solve terrorism.

Nye 4 (Joseph S, “Soft Power and American Foreign Policy”, Harvard IR prof., vol. 119, no. 2, p. 257)

But it would be a mistake to dismiss the recent decline in our attractiveness so lightly. It is true that the United States has recovered from unpopular poli- cies in the past, but that was against the backdrop of the Cold War, in which other countries still feared the Soviet Union as the greater evil. Moreover, while America's size and association with disruptive modernity are real and un- avoidable, wise policies can soften the sharp edges of that reality and reduce the resentments that they engender. That is what the United States did after World War II. We used our soft power resources and co-opted others into a set of alliances and institutions that lasted for sixty years. We won the Cold War against the Soviet Union with a strategy of containment that used our soft power as well as our hard power. It is true that the new threat of transnational terrorism increased American vulnerability, and some of our unilateralism after September 11 was driven by fear. But the United States cannot meet the new threat identified in the national security strategy without the cooperation of other countries. They will cooper- ate, up to a point, out of mere self-interest, but their degree of cooperation is also affected by the attractiveness of the United States. Take Pakistan for ex- ample. President Pervez Musharraf faces a complex game of cooperating with the United States on terrorism while managing a large anti-American constitu- ency at home. He winds up balancing concessions and retractions. If the United States were more attractive to the Pakistani populace, we would see more con- cessions in the mix. It is not smart to discount soft power as just a question of image, public re- lations, and ephemeral popularity. As I argued earlier, it is a form of power—a means of obtaining desired outcomes. When we discount the importance of our attractiveness to other countries, we pay a price. Most important, if the United States is so unpopular in a country that being pro-American is a kiss of death in their domestic politics, political leaders are unlikely to make concessions to help us. Turkey, Mexico, and Chile were prime examples in the run-up to the Iraq war in March 2003. When American policies lose their legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of others, attitudes of distrust tend to fester and further reduce our leverage. For example, after September 11, there was an outpouring of sympathy from Germans for the United States, and Germany joined a mili- tary campaign against the al Qaeda network. But as the United States geared up for the unpopular Iraq war, Germans expressed widespread disbelief about the reasons the United States gave for going to war, such as the alleged connec- tion of Iraq to al Qaeda and the imminence of the threat of weapons of mass destruction. German suspicions were reinforced by what they saw as biased American media coverage during the war and by the failure to find weapons or prove the connection to al Qaeda right after the war. The combination fos- tered a climate in which conspiracy theories flourished. By July 2003, one-third of Germans under the age of thirty said that they thought the American govern- ment might even have staged the original September 11 attacks."