2NC Vs.

Baylor
2NC top level
 overview
Our interpretation is that the aff must defend a topical fiated action by the USFG to
reduce alliance commitments with the countries implicated in the resolution - that’s
Ericson - Debate is a competitive research game – both sides disclose, there’s a winner
and a loser, speech times, and assigned sides – the game is centered around a
resolution that was decided months in advance, and we all gave up our summers to
learn about it researching – every team we debate has an incentive to win, but under
their model of debate, the aff decides the contours of what we can and can’t talk
about – all ground we do get is concessionary and happens after the 1NC.

THIS DEBATE ENDED IN 1AC CX WE WILL CONCEDE THAT DEBATE IS A GAME BECAUSE
THE BALLOT ISN’T NECESSARY FOR SPILLOVER. AND IT’S A QUESTION OF WHO DID THE
BETTER DEBATING. IT’S GAME OVER AT THIS POINT because if a k aff concedes this
claim it PROVES.

I know this next argument is always overdone, but it makes sense in this debate: You
can agree with their political project while voting neg.

HOW CAN WE MAKE PICS, DA’S TO THEIR ADVOCACY, OR HAVE ANY LINKS IF THERE
ISN’T AN ADVOCACY STATEMENT?

WHY DID YOU ASK FOR CITES? We sent them cites from previous rounds that included
the Afrika PIC and then they CHANGED their aff FOR THIS DEBATE.

There are 4 T arguments on top:

1. They don’t give us a list of ground in this debate, so what should we have read?
It will be unethical to disagree with their aff NO MATTER WHAT if it’s a capital T
truth which puts them in a double-bind – either we’re forced to be unethical
and say some fuck shit OR they aren’t a capital T truth which means they can’t
solve and you vote neg on presumption.

2. This is a question about RESEARCH BURDENS – Why were small schools

successful with a K Aff AND THEN POWERHOUSES started reading K affs and
started fucking over k affs.
3. You don’t have to believe what you read.

4. They shouldn’t be able to weigh the impacts of the aff against T – remember:
it’s a question of models. You wouldn’t weigh nuke war vs. condo or T EVEN IF
they have an education claim because engagement is a pre-requisite to
engaging.
 ! - procedural fairness
Procedural fairness outweighs – 3 impacts
1. Truth testing – adjusting our perspectives is key to forming our subjectivities
and prevent dogmatism – their interp makes debate becomes increasingly
polarized which means we never revise our opinions or strategies– it decks
their solvency because their advocacy is commodified and ignored in the
interest of the ballot
2. The game - In order to debate about how to help people, you have to take into
account how competition affects how you do it – all of their arguments assume
that we’re just critical individuals – debate can facilitate some of it, but the
point of debate is to win – the judge votes on technicalities not the ethics
3. Procedural fairness also checks back against presumption claims – I know I did
truth-testing above, but there is an internal impact to voting for them which is
the fact that you might be voting for something violent. If we can’t test their
strategy then you might be voting for their death [give examples]
4. Topic education and advocacy skills – the only way to break down a space is to
occupy it – the research that we do through running a topical aff provides a
critical lens that debaters can use to approach the world overall---
understanding complexities of institutions has spillover potential that enables
us to address the political beyond the narrow focus of debate to become better
advocates for space policy – Debate should not be about their individualist
strategy in the debate space, but rather how we guide future deliberations and
how we use critical thinking skills to change material strategies that we can use
to resist violence.
In the context of alliances, interns for NATO have a higher chance of getting in, AND in
the context of NATO AND THE UN – Debates happen all the time – if they don’t have a
spill-up claim, then that means these debates will continue to happen which means
that violent hegemony will continue. The spill-over claims will be all on-case.
 ! - limits
The limits debate – setting a well enforced limit on the topic is a key –
1. Predictability and clash- having a limited topic is key to have preparation on
both sides – that’s better for in-depth clash and discussion – anything else is
just us talking past each other- in the context of the resolution,
2. Small Schools DA- their aff hurts debaters with the least amount of resources –
there’s a large number of affs on the topic, and adding non-topical affs only
increases pressure on small schools – they quit and only privileged debaters
from rich schools and 12 coaches can debate
 at: case o/w
1. The aff isn’t a capital T truth – debating about the validity of their argument is a
pre-requisite – don’t weigh the case if we win that we couldn’t effectively test
or engage it
2. The TVA solves – they can defend ____ while still having their critical discussion
– but it’s predictable enough for us to be able to engage it
3. They don’t solve it – they simply point out problems with current policy, but
don’t change broader institutions – that’s case
at: interps
 at: c/i
[answer specific c/i]

Their c/I is ineffective – they grand stand against {x] oppression or strategy, which
produces a self-serving politics that links them to their own liberal individualistic
subject – it makes debate an echo-chamber where we never engage material violence
that happens in the real world

Their c/I has no definitional support – it’s not grounded in real world lit which means
that even if you think their discussion can produce valuable debates, it’s impossible to
debate and justifies any team creating self-serving counter-interpretations designed to
avoid clash

It links to our offense – they still permit vague affs that don’t defend the usfg, which is
the only stable stasis point – teams could still read Bataille, Baudrillard, anti-
blackness, queer futurity, or any critique of the resolution – it creates a moral hazard
that incentivizes people to read the vaguest advocacies that are impossible to debate
to win

ALSO – the COUNTER-INTERP limits out OTHER FORMS OF THOUGHT. For example,
their COUNTER-INTERP doesn’t allow for all discussions which means they link to their
own offense – our offense applies to them more than it applies to us because we
shouldn’t prioritize a single instance of resistance against oppression if it impedes on
other – only governmental action is key to check back against those claims. YOU CAN’T
SAY LIMITS BAD AND COUNTER-INTERPS ARE LIMITING.
 at: “plus our aff”
Doesn’t solve –
a) infinitely regressive - every critical team will make the argument which justifies
compounding exceptions and means that no one is topical
b) it’s too late and skews in round fairness - we’ll never actually be prepared to
debate their aff because we never know until the 1ac happens
c) justifies exclusion – all other identity affs and important conversations are
excluded which causes lash out against the aff’s theory
 at: “utopian”
This CP doesn’t solve and links to our offense –
a) no stable definition for ‘utopia’ which means it’s arbitrary and links to the limits
da – every team will spin the aff as utopian, which doesn’t set a functional link
on the topic
b) doesn’t solve advocacy skills – imagining alternative worlds doesn’t change the
one we live in - discussing specific, targeted ways to address inequalities gives
us knowledge we can apply in real life, to make utopias less utopian
 A2 “towards the res”
Their counter-interpretation is awful – it is infinitely regressive because there can
always be a long chain to get to the resolution such as analyzing space cooperation in
another country, making a methodology off of that, and then turning it into an aff – it
is still unpredictable because going towards the resolution is such a vague statement –
there are an infinite number of ways to approach the resolution.
 at: emotive/identity
Doesn’t solve and links to our limits offense – infinite ways to emotionally relate to
the topic, which means that every emotion and person gets their own aff, which a) is
infinitely unpredictable and b) impossible to negate without discrediting someone’s
personal experience

Double bind – either we have to negate their particular advocacy in a way that creates
violence against their self-concept or we have to debate the infinite number of
advocacies that they produce

at: TURNER AND AVISON

On face, this card looks like it’s really good and answers Ericson, but it’s talking about a different author
writing in 1959 about crisis theory, which is distinct from space cooperation policy
 at: rob
Their ROB is arbitrary and links to our offense – any discussion that doesn’t promote a
resolutional question prevents in-depth debates – the role of the ballot should be to
endorse the best model of debate

And, we solve their interp better – [explain]

 at: reasonability
Competing interpretations are best-
a. Reasonability is arbitrary- every judge has a different interpretation of what’s
reasonable which makes it impossible to predict what is and isn’t topical and
guts fairness.
b. Unlimits the topic- the combination of all “reasonable” affs and interpretations
forces the topic to be as large as possible.
c. They’re not reasonable – limits debate should prove this
at: misc
 at: perm
Their interp is basically theirs plus our aff – it’s super arbitrary and doesn’t solve our
offense – it creates a competitive incentive to read unpredictable and small plan-less
affs
 at: pre-requisite
This is self-serving and infinitely regressive – we don’t objectively know when their
impacts have been resolved, which precludes all actual debates over the government
 at: we change stuff
Debate is only a game – the only thing we can do is to use learning tools to engage the
activity - it’s different from other academic settings because its curriculum is tied to a
stasis point of contestation, which allows us to engage [their stuff] when we leave
 at: state bad
1. Framework solves the impact – learning government policy lets us develop the
skills to challenge them - their model of debate cedes the political and uses a
head—in-the-sand approach to policy-making
2. This is a link to the dogmatism da – we can’t always say the government is bad
– refugee and asylum laws, healthcare for undocumented immigrants, child
protections, etc prove
3. You are not a bad person if you discuss the possible implications of a plan –
whether or not you believe in it doesn’t matter, but learning the tools of the
government, good or bad, gives us the skills necessary to actualize change
 at: fairness for whom
Even if we cannot resolve all structural inequalities within debate, the discussion
around the resolution is good – it is the only thing that everyone has access to and can
engage with – it creates a stable basis for argumentation

The ballot itself isn’t a magic wand for inequality, but it can endorse a method of
debate that produces the most educational dialogue

Fairness itself doesn’t privilege any particular group – there’s only a risk that it solves
competitive equity
 at: predictability impossible
This doesn’t assume the specific context of debate – it’s a competitive activity –
obviously you can never completely equalize the playing field, but we shouldn’t
abandon predictability – it’s still valuable, even if not to the complete degree – it
produces clash and the most productive discussions
 at: ssd is unethical
Simply characterizing SSD to “understanding” something is reductive – rather, out
argument is that having to debate the opposite of your advocacy means you a) better
understand the weaknesses in YOUR argument and b) the weaknesses in THEIRS –
that’s uniquely key to adjust your advocacy to different audiences, which is the only
way we can actually create broader social change
 at: gives us an out not to talk about [x]
The aff gets to choose the direction of the debate which means that we would have to
engage their theory – realistically, any team who didn’t engage with [whatever] would
probably lose because they wouldn’t resolve the aff’s impacts
at: offense
 at: impact turns
We don’t need to win the impact turns if we win we weren’t prepared to debate the
aff – first, every impact turn is only offense for us on procedural fairness – they prove
they kill engagement and advocacy skills by using their aff to make specific args
against framework – second, it’s a model v model debate – NOT model v their impacts
– it’s a question of whether or not we should have debated the aff in the first place
 (?) disads
No offense on their DA
1. It’s non-unique – [explain]
2. They can’t solve it – [explain]
3. Not intrinsic to the resolution – [explain]
4. They link – [explain]
 at: mechanization
No link to mechanization – a. They have to win that all immigration policy is bad and
b. we’ll impact turn it – topic education is good – learning about the nitty gritty is
critical - **Briggs**
 at: respectability
No link to respectability politics – we don’t include kicking
 at: accessibility
If we win any of our impacts and that the aff undermines the core value of debate, it
doesn’t matter if they increase access – the activity is no longer valuable, and it
prevents those who can now participate from gaining any benefit – see the topic
education/portable skills debate
 at: kArL rOvE
Debaters are not inherently violent or bad because they read a plan – it’s non-
falsifiable because some debaters are good and some are bad, but it applies to both
policy and k teams – some debaters go out to do good things!

Examples:

-Laura Sjoberg – critical gender IR theorist who examines the way masculinity undergirds state
interactions

-Erwin Chemerinsky –from Northwestern University - founder of Berkeley School of Law – sued Trump
once for not divesting from his businesses – supports some cool stuff like LGBTQ rights and represents a
prisoner in Guantanamo Bay
 at: western space expansion
1. It’s non-unique – other people outside of this round will read colonization affs,
which means nothing about reading framework inherently causes imperialist
violence
2. Not intrinsic to the resolution – the resolution is content neutral and provides
an opportunity to re-write existing narratives, i.e. the resolution isn’t to blame
for colonial logic, but rather how it’s perpetuated in debate
3. They can’t solve it – imagining a queer utopia without creating an in-roads for
political action is morally irresponsible because it leaves space policy to the cis-
white-hetero lawmakers that enable colonial logic
 at: negotiation/compuls hetero
No link to the negotiation DA
1. There are plenty of queer people who run policy affs while still running queer
theory arguments – that’s only an example of how they could just read it on the
ng
2. T is content neutral – we’re not imposing the ‘rules’ of debate, but rather
providing a competing model that we think accesses their internal links
 at: code-switching
1. We don’t force you to code switch – reading poetry, a personal narrative, or
playing music in the round is not mutually exclusive with reading a plan
2. We all do it – no one spreads or uses debate jargon in the middle of chemistry
class – we constantly change the ways in which we speak
 at: creativity
We solve creativity better – learning to work within constraints encourages innovation
and critical thinking that allows for both sides to meet at a middle ground
 at: exclusion
1. No link – we critique their form, not content or them as people – debate
changes contents every single year
2. Deliberation turns the DA – we agree that the dialogue itself is valid, but a
failure to defend a plan makes it impossible for us to engage it
3. It’s the burden of the neg to disprove their advocacy – their impact is inevitable
4. TVA solves – [explain]
 at: cheating good
All of our impacts are DAs to cheating – if you can just clip cards, break speech times,
it breaks the logic of the debate and ruins how we engage with each other
 at: rev v rev
These debates aren’t good – there’s no brightline for what being ‘revolutionary’
is and usually the authors come from a position of agreement surrounding 90%
of the issue which means the entire disagreement is over semantics - they
overemphasis minute disagreements about the correct reading of esoteric texts
rather than actual comparison of political strategies – there is a reason that
even k teams, including north broward, go for t against other k teams half the
time – it’s really hard to negate a descriptions tied to broader theory that means
they win on the perm most of the time

Judge interps not by the best possible debate, but the average - they can be good
sometimes, but devolve into shallow debates because debaters just don’t have the
time to research every single aff

There’s no brightline for voting aff or voting neg – we don’t know how our strategies
formulate or how to enact them, which is why debating about the resolution and
USFG action is good – affects millions of people (see pop other than yourself) and all of
the DAs that they read apply and they get ground
 at: language fake
Even if language doesn’t have objective meaning, we can still find predictable
interpretations of the resolution – while they may have many different meanings
independently, the specific combination of words in the resolution sets the most
predictable ground for the debate – we can still formulate some meaning and
communicate, which is proven by the fact that we are engaging in a communicative
activity – otherwise, you can just vote neg on presumption since there’s no meaning in
the aff
 at: ressentiment
No offense on ressentiment
a) [at: Grimm ’77] They link to it – reading a planless aff allows them to make
debate predictable for themselves – running away from engagement means
that they only have to answer framework and cap – it also links to their state
bad arguments because they confine themselves the only having to prove that
the state is bad in all instances, which is infinitely dogmatic and static
b) Framework solves it – it encourages innovation within borders – having fun is
an independent impact that is accessed best by a limited topic – working within
the confines teaches us to find joy and value in even the most boring of
situations – turns their offense – debating a policy plan without having
Congress pass it is also the least productive thing you could do
c) Productivity is inevitable – ie debate rounds necessitate things like flowing and
listening
 at: reaffirms gov legit
Debating with a plan doesn’t reaffirm government legitimacy
a) Negative state action - demands are made from outside the established
dominant order – plans call into question the legitimacy and sovereignty of the
state by deviating from the squo
b) Devil’s advocate – it’s a good balance for activism – turns their offense because
it’s unproductive
 at: topic paper
The topic paper doesn’t solve - it’s not directly linked to the resolution – what’s in the
topic paper isn’t a final version of what the topic should look like, which is especially
proven by how there are 20 different interpretations of what the words in the
resolution mean and potential wordings of the resolution
 at: black grammar
They don’t get offense based on this grammar argument 1. The McDuffie and
Thurmond card is about the ways in which words like “black” and “woman” are
weaponized as identity categories – which is not a specific link to the resolution or to
framework – 2. They don’t create alternative methods of engaging the grammar of the
resolution – that was the interp and presumption debate on the case flow
 at: game theory
Viewing debate as a game is not mutually exclusive with debate as a site of agency for
black individuals – our argument is that we can utilize debate as a space, but our
model resolves it better through mutually assured clash because it helps us test the
strategies that we would use outside of round
 at: white hegemony
I’ll pre-empt some of their offense here - we are not running away from blackness or
creating white hegemony, but rather positing a counter methodology for the way that
it should be framed WITHIN DEBATE specifically – you shouldn’t let them frame us as
an attempt to criminalize blackness when we’ve engaged their 1AC scholarship AND
have tried to actively clash with them – i.e. we’re not saying ‘you read a k aff, lol u
lose,’ we’re saying that we have an alternative methodology for accessing their
impacts, which is distinct – we only critique their form, not their content or them as
people – it’s only a question of whether or not we have the ability to engage them
more effectively – even if they win this argument, we’ll win terminal defense through
the TVA and that it’s inevitable because their attempt to hyper-visibilize blackness
within debate as a structure only means that other teams have a competitive
incentive to negate their arguments
tvas
 overview
You should evaluate the TVA as terminal internal link defense to the aff, NOT as a CP
that has to solve their impacts – the only thing we need to win is whether or not they
get access to their literature, which enables us to engage their claims

If they win there’s NO TVA

a) It proves our argument about monopolizing neg ground and prep – no aff
should have the right to a perfect plan – all of their DAs should be viewed as
good neg ground
b) it proves switch-side debate solves their offense –they could always read this
exact 1AC as a K against a topical aff
c) They critique the process of law without defending an outcome – that
reproduces the status quo
 Japan
The United States federal government should withdraw its troops from Okinawa.
 generic
The United States federal government should terminate its defense pacts and alliance
commitments with NATO member states, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the
Republic of the Philippines.
 NATO – Antiblackness
The USFG should withdraw from NATO.
Abolishing the U.S.-led NATO order would reverse the signal sent by the use of force
to coerce the AU into rubber-stamping NATO control of Libya
Mbaku ’16 (John, “The African Union: Which way forward?,” February 11,
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2016/02/11/the-african-union-which-
way-forward/, ME)
The events of the Arab Spring represented a new modality of regime change that the AU had never
before encountered. When military forces of the National Transitional Council (NTC) captured Tripoli on August 22, 2011 and
drove away then Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi’s forces, members of the NATO-led military alliance that had
been providing “aerial bombardment support to the NTC” immediately proceeded to pressure the African
Union to recognize the NTC as the only legitimate government of Libya . Nevertheless, when the democratic
uprising morphed into a de facto civil war, the AU’s response was a roadmap, which was informed by the organization’s long-
established approach to dealing with intra-state conflicts, which called for a ceasefire and negotiations for an inclusive interim government.
The NTC, however, rejected the roadmap, arguing that it did not make allowance for Qaddafi’s immediate departure. The
position taken by the NTC was significantly enhanced by the support that it was receiving from the NATO
countries, the Arab League, the United Nations, and several African countries. Although it denounced what it believed was an illegal
regime change in Libya orchestrated by NATO powers supposedly to protect Libyan civilians, the AU went ahead,
although reluctantly, and recognized the NTC as Libya’s legitimate government and granted the NTC the right to
represent the country in the AU. Some analysts have examined the AU’s failed efforts to mediate the peace in Libya’s political crisis and have
argued that “the
most important reason for this failure was the decision by France, the United Kingdom, and the
United States to “undermine and sideline the AU.” Other reasons for the failure of the AU’s roadmap are said to include the
inability of the AU to garner coherent support among African countries for its position on Libya and the fact that the AU never really gained the
confidence of either the Qaddafi regime or the NTC. Although Qaddafi’s regime was recognized as both oppressive and repressive towards the
country’s citizens, the
AU did not approve the decision by the NTC to transform a democratic uprising into a
civil war. The AU became even more adamant about its non-violent approach to the Libyan crisis after
the NATO countries effectively became agents of forceful regime change in Libya . However, some observers have
argued that the AU’s emphasis on the fact that the regime change was unconstitutional must be weighed against the fact that the Qaddafi
regime was not only unconcerned about democratic governance but promoted basic laws that were designed to perpetuate and entrench
Qaddafi’s hold on power.

More evidence – specific to NATO’s intervention in Libya – their 1AC Author

Campbell ‘19 [Horace, Professor of African American Studies and Political Science @ Syracuse, author
of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya (Monthly Review Press, 2013): “Global NATO: A 70-
Year Alliance of Oppressors in Crisis,” published 4-9-2019, Counter Punch,
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/09/global-nato-a-70-year-alliance-of-oppressors-in-crisis/]

The celebration of NATO’s 70 years of existence provides another opportunity to unearth the real history of the
ideas, practices and destruction wrought by this military alliance. Even with the clear exposure of the
cooperation between NATO, the CIA and the British MI6 to spread terror and psychological warfare in
Europe immediately after the formation of this military alliance, the mainstream media, academics and policy makers remain silent on

activities of the ‘stay behind armies’ and ‘false flag’ operations that distorted the real causes of insecurity in the world after 1945. The
evidence of the manipulations of the peoples of the world to ensure the continued survival of NATO has been well documented in the fraudulent interventions and bombings in the Balkans

identified NATO as the prime defender of the Atlantic project. This Atlantic
right up the present multiple wars against the peoples of Iran. Vijay Prashad had

project, he noted was, “a fairly straightforward campaign by the propertied classes to maintain or restore their position of dominance.” This Atlantic Project
was anchored in the military alliance called NATO with its principal work, that of reversing the South Project; the struggles for peace bread and justice by the poorer citizens of the planet,
 The ostensive reason for the founding of
especially those who had emerged on the world stage after the decolonization of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

NATO was to ‘thwart’ Soviet aggression, but in practice the organization was a prop for western
capital and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, became the core prop for Wall Street. In this year, there will be many commentaries on the fact that the existence of NATO
reflects a Cold War relic, that NATO is obsolete and lost its mandate, but very few will link the expansion of NATO to the military management of the international system. Prior to 1991, the
planners of NATO could justify the existence of NATO on ideological and political grounds, but with the threat of a multi polar world and the diminution of the dollar, NATO expanded to the

The Global thrust of NATO now

point where this author joined with others in labelling this organization Global NATO to reflect its current imperial mandate.

comprises 29 members from Europe and North America along with 41 ‘partners’ that had started off
under the banner of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) in 1991. Since that time, NATO has
launched a lengthy war without end in Afghanistan, colluded in the destruction of Iraq and conspired
with militarists to forge ‘Partnership for Peace’ (with most members of the former Warsaw Pact states). The
core 29 members are now enmeshed with treaties and undertakings from states involved in the Mediterranean Dialog and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and United

the ‘partners’ from across the globe: Afghanistan, Australia, Colombia, Iraq, Japan,
Arab Emirates. There are also

Republic of Korea, Mongolia, New Zealand and Pakistan. This enlargement served the military purposes of
encircling China and Russia who military planners in the West targeted. There is no shortage of literature on NATO and its milestones, but very few have
documented the real crimes of this global network of anticommunist operatives who precipitated real
terror and psychological warfare against the citizens of Europe and North America while supporting mass atrocities from Algeria
to Indonesia, and South Africa. Books such as that of NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe by Danielle Ganser and The Brothers: John Foster
Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, by Stephen Kinzer used rigorous research techniques to uncover the dark history of NATO. These two books can be distinguished from the
bland international relations texts that discusses NATO inside the old calculations of ‘strategy,’ ‘concert of democracies’, ‘security cooperation’ and the balance of power,’ and spheres of
influence. Most recently, this IR rendering of the history of NATO has been served up in a document entitled, NATO at Seventy: An Alliance in Crisis. Published by Harvard University with one of
the coauthors being a former US ambassador to NATO. This document spelt out ten challenges.[1] However, in a testimony before Congress, Nicolas Burns boiled down the challenge of NATO
to one objective; that the current role of NATO must be to contain Russia and China.[2] On the day before the actual 70thanniversary, on April 3, the Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
delivered an address to a joint session of the US Congress advocating an expansion of the alliance while promoting a military buildup against Russia. [3] European progressives will have to
reflect deeply on whether the current sanctions regime and the special propose vehicle called the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), is ushering in another round of inter

shifting alliances yielded confusion among working peoples

imperialist rivalry reminiscent of the currency wars of 1929-1939. Then, the

who ultimately went to fight against each other in Europe, spreading barbarism throughout the world,
from Auschwitz to Hiroshima. The continued struggles for bread, peace and justice ensure that it is only the authoritarian leaders from the Global South who are
compromised on the real meaning of the existence of NATO. In the present era, there is a new capitalist competition while North Atlantic Treaty

Organization (NATO) serves as an integral part of the Pentagon’s world command structure. Recent experiences have

demonstrated in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya that the moguls of Wall Street are willing to wage as many wars, to destroy as

many countries and to kill as many people as necessary to achieve the dominance of US capitalism.
The destruction of Libya was a classic example of the convergence of finance as warfare, the
weaponization of information and incessant bombing to destroy a society . Where at the start of NATO the war scare was the
propaganda method, In the current digital age, brain hacking and the engineering of smart phones have placed the

giant technology firms of Apple , Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook at the forefront of the new weapons platform of NATO
and Wall Street. This analysis is in three parts spelling out the rationale for the call for all progressive forces to join together to concentrate their energies in the dismantling of
NATO. NATO at Birth: Stay behind armies, directed terrorist organizations and psychological warfare against Europeans. In the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall there were major press

the kidnapping and killing of the

reports on the role of NATO’s stay behind armies that had been operating inside Western Europe since 1949.Ten years earlier, when

former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro rocked western Europe, it emerged that his demise had been authored by clandestine
paramilitary network code-named “Operation Gladio” that was a false flag operation of NATO. Danielle Ganser’s book, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism

in Western Europe had meticulously documented how NATO funded and often even directed terrorist organizations throughout

Europe in what was termed a “strategy of tension” with the aim of preventing a rise of the left in
Western European politics. NATO’s “secret armies” engaged in subversive and criminal activities in several countries. In the specific case of Italy, Aldo Moro had
committed the unforgivable crime of contemplating a government that included Italians who belonged to the Italian Communist Party Right from the start of the Cold war, the CIA

and MI6 had worked closely with former fascists to oppose citizens and organizations in Western Europe that were
anti-capitalists. Under the leadership of US planners such as Allen Dulles, William Colby, Frank Wisner and later James Angleton, these operatives weaned and nursed a network of
agents and secret arms dumps across Europe, a network that would remain secret but active throughout the Cold War. [4] Ganser elaborated on the extensive operations of Operation Gladio
all across Europe with the explicit aim of subverting the democratic wishes of European citizens who were opposed to oppression. It is worth quoting at length the role of the secret armies.

“NATO’s “secret armies” engaged in subversive and criminal activities in several countries. In Turkey in 1960, the stay behind army, working with the army,
staged a coup d’état and killed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes; in Algeria in 1961, the French stay-behind army staged a
coup with the CIA against the French government of Algiers, which ultimately failed; in 1967, the Greek stay-behind army staged a
coup and imposed a military dictatorship; in 1971 in Turkey, after a military coup, the stay-behind army engaged in
“domestic terror” and killed hundreds; in 1977 in Spain, the stay behind army carried out a massacre in
Madrid; in 1980 in Turkey, the head of the stay behind army staged a coup and took power; in 1985 in Belgium, the stay behind attacked and
shot shoppers randomly in supermarkets, killing 28; in Switzerland in 1990, the former head of the Swiss stay behind wrote the US Defense Department he
would reveal “the whole truth,” and was found the next day stabbed to death with his own bayonet; and in 1995, England revealed that the MI6 and SAS helped set up stay behind armies
across Western Europe.”[5] The mainstream media and University commentaries have not been able to confront this history in so far as the manipulation and deception that gave rise to the

At the
birth of NATO is still at work against the citizens of Europe and the United States. War Scare, NATO and psychological warfare against the citizens of Europe and North America.

end of World War II, the defense Industries in the USA had been faced with the choice of conversion and
retooling the factories that made weapons or continue the massive subsidies for the industries vested in
military and armaments production. The choice was eventually made to embark on a propaganda war scare to justify
the need for an expanded army and it was in this context when NATO was conceived. To sustain the
WW II armaments enterprise, there needed to be a cycle of war scare and the fabrication and inflation
of threats and enemies. It was in this context that Lawrence D. Bell, President of Bell Aircraft Corporation, in a statement to the U.S. Air Policy
Commission Finletter Commission) on September 29, 1947, stated that “as soon as there is a war scare, there is a lot of
money available.” [6] According to Andrew Cockburn, “The aircraft corporations that had garnered enormous profits during the war on the back of government contracts had
discovered by 1947 that peace was ruinous. Despite initial high hopes, the commercial marketplace was proving a far harsher and less accommodating environment than that of wartime,
especially as there were far more companies than required by the peacetime economy. Orders from the civilian airline industry never lived up to expectations, while efforts to diversify into

In the spring of 1948, the U.S. Secretary of Defense James

other products, including dishwashers and stainless steel coffins, proved disappointing and costly.” [7]

began to sound alarm about a looming Soviet attack against Western

Forrestal and top officials of the Harry Truman administration

Europe. It is now known, from declassified documents, that the officials were aware that there was no
credible evidence to back up their war scare. Some analysts have argued that the war scare of 1948 was devised to save the aircraft manufacturing industry from plunging into
bankruptcy. And this goal was achieved. In the book Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948, Frank Kofsky states thatwithin 2 months of the emergence of the scare, the

Trumanadministration revamped the aircraft industry by embarking on a 57% increase in purchase of military aircraft, and the total budget of the Pentagon was increased by 30%. NATO
was born on April 4, 1949 out of this propaganda war to deceive the US citizens about a pending attack of the
Soviet Union on Western Europe. The task of organizing the deception of the citizens of the West was assigned to the Central
Intelligence Agency. There are now so many books and articles on the role of the CIA in deception, propaganda and psychological warfare that we will not spend a great deal of time on the
role of the Covert agencies in giving legitimacy to the idea of a Soviet threat. Stephen Kinzer and David Talbot are two writers who have documented extensively how the Dulles brothers

Universities were suborned to be surrogates for

ensnared every major profession in the USA in this deception. [8] It was especially chilling how

this psychological warfare. Noam Chomsky has dealt with this aspect of the period of the birth of NATO in the work on the Universities and the Cold War.[9] Racists and
anticommunists in the propaganda war It was not by accident that the thinkers and planners of these secret operations were known

racists and Nazi sympathizers. Frank Wisner who hailed from Mississippi in the USA was a good example of the upright US citizen who was an architect of the false
flag operations and the deception associated with NATO and western intelligence agencies. After the War, in 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon

afterwards under the direction of Allen Dulles, this Office of Special Projects was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and
counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Later James Jesus Angleton was to take this brand of counter intelligence work to the highest
levels of state assassinations. Wisner had been mandated told to create an organization that concentrated on “propaganda, economic

warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation
measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and
support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.” It was from this
opaque sounding name of Office of Policy Coordination where the brainwashing and virulent anti-communism of the Cold War era was refined. Evan Thomas reported in The Very Best Men:
the Daring Early Days of the CIA, the OPC’s charter gave it responsibility for “propaganda, economic warfare; preventative direct action, including sabotage, antisabotage, demolition and
evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of
the free world.” NATO as the principal prop for international capitalism today. In the celebratory events to memorialize the founding of NATO in 1949, it is usually forgotten that when the

Colonialism and imperialism took a new form

North American Treaty was signed in April 1949 most of the founding members were colonial overlords.

under the leadership of US capitalists defending the dollar and Wall Street. At that historical moment in 1949, the
justification for starting this organization was that it constituted a system of collective defense whereby its member states agreed to mutual defense in
response to an attack by any external party. The external party in question at that time was the USSR; insofar as NATO had been formed as an alliance ostensibly to defend Western Europe
against ‘communist expansion’. In the Treaty’s renowned Article 5, the new Allies agreed “an armed attack against one or more of them… shall be considered an attack against them all.”

The US military and industrial leaders studied the terror and propaganda tactics of the Nazis in order to
learn the lessons of how to develop an efficient military machine. James Whitman in the book, Hitler’s American Model: The United
States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, outlined what the fascists had learnt from the eugenics movement in the United States.[10] Although many anti-fascist scientists from Germany had
found a place in the US academy, the top planners of the Cold War linked the US primacy to the global history of
racism to the efficient, bureaucratic and professionalism of conservative Germany . One of the unspoken aspects of the
first years of NATO was the question of containing the possible revolutionary impulses of the German working peoples. To forestall such a possibility, the thinkers and

planners of NATO collaborated with the former fascists to learn their skills. The details of this alliance have been spelt out in the
book on the CIA by David Talbot in the book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. The merging of fascist ideas

with the ideas of Jim Crow in the United States were refined in the secret operation called, Operation Paperclip. Anne
Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America, [11] elaborated in great detail the secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency
(JIOA) largely carried out by Special Agents of Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and
his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. Many were former members, and some were former leaders,

The creators of NATO

of the Nazi Party. These elements were the foundation of a military program that has brought us the weaponization of space.

simultaneously mobilized the colonial and fascist elements in Belgium, Spain, Italy and France. Of the twelve
founding members, six were outright colonial powers and at that moment, countries such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain and
Portugal looked to the USA to support their plunder of colonial societies. In the specific case of France, in order to assist

French colonialism, Algeria was named as a territory of NATO. Sixty years later when the President of France, Macron, apologized for the
crimes of killing more than one million Algerians, there is no reflection inside western academic institutions on this role of NATO in Africa. Currently, the French have been the most aggressive
in promoting the fiction that the defense radius of Europe stretches 4000 kilometers out from Brussels, up to the arctic, well across the Russian frontier and down into central Africa. It is not

Portuguese fascists were some of the principal beneficiaries of the membership of

widely known that, initially, the

NATO, with major deployment of nuclear weapons in the Azores as reward for the NATO support for
colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea and other Portuguese outposts of colonial domination. Prior to
the formation of NATO in 1949, the 1947 document of the State Department on Cooperative Development of Africa had stipulated that colonialism

would assist the recovery of European capitalism. [12]The State Department had been explicit in outlining how cheap foodstuffs and raw materials
from Africa would assist Europe’s recovery and create the basis for unity and economic regeneration. The USA set about creating a number of

international institutions to guarantee the survival of Europe and of capitalism, the IMF , IBRD (World Bank),
the NATO, GATT, to guarantee the strength of the USA in international trade and finance . By the time NATO was formed in 1949,
the US planners had already made their plans with Britain and France to extend their military control over Africa. France was bequeathed the task of maintaining order in western Africa while

South Africa
the British sought to maintain naval power incorporating the British facilities from the Suez Canal down through Aden (Yemen), to Mombasa (Kenya), Simons town

across to Malaysia. [13] The racist apartheid regime had persuaded NATO that it was necessary to integrate the South

African military into the western defense planning in order to protect the ‘Cape route.’ After the Suez crises of 1956
and the 1967 war this alliance with the racist regime deepened. Throughout its existence NATO assisted in the refinement of the

racial status hierarchy in which whites are dominant and people of color are subordinate . [14] This
incorporation of racist ideas into western defense continued a long tradition that shaped the outlook
of NATO and reinforced the outlook of Frantz Fanon: “Colonialism is violence in its natural state.” France and Britain excelled in this violence with
the Belgians cementing their communications and logistics coordination to kill Patrice Lumumba and later support the killing of the Secretary General of the United Nation, Dag Hammarskjold.
[15] Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal deepened their links to NATO but in 1956, Dwight Eisenhower halted the planned offensive of the British and the French in the Suez war. After this
war, both the currencies of Britain and France suffered sharp declines with France seeking cover inside the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), while the British pound accepted its
place as a prop to the US dollar in the global economy. Within a year after the Suez debacle, France had pushed for the Treaty of Rome that paved the way for the European Economic
Community to be a competitive force with US capitalists. Within the context of the competition between European capitalists and US capitalists, Charles De Gaulle exhibited pique at the
organization of NATO that supported the armaments culture of US capital. Charles De Gaulle partially pulled France out of this alliance in 1966 after it became clear that this military
organization was dominated by the United States and Britain (supporting their military industries). De Gaulle argued for an independent nuclear arsenal while remaining a signatory to North
Atlantic Treaty and participating in the North Atlantic Council. Nicholas Sarkozy ended the farce when France returned to the fold of the NATO military structures in 2009. The duplicitous
actions on the part of the French leadership were always based on calculations meant to preserve the dominance of French capital in Africa. When the US devalued the dollar in 1971 and
broke the agreements of the Bretton Woods Treaty, it was the French who complained about the Exorbitant Privilege of the Dollar. For a short period, both the President of France and the
Chancellor of West Germany had chafed under the privilege and had worked hard to bring into being the Maastricht Treaty and the Europe Union to end the dominance of the dollar in the
international capitalist system. It was known than the one necessary aspect of this emerging common currency in Europe would be the dismantling of the military occupation of Europe by US
military personnel. Hence, both Giscard de Estaing and Helmut Schmidt had linked the common currency, the European Central Bank and common foreign and security policy (CFSP), with the
expectation that ultimately Europe will break from the traditions of NATO. It was in the face of this threat and the fall of the centrally planned economy that the forward planners expanded

NATO. Emergence of Global NATO and the myth of ‘humanitarian intervention’ Usually, when an alliance is formed for a specific purpose
such as halting the spread of communism, that alliance is folded when the mission is complete. Hence, after the
fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was expected by those seeking the ‘peace dividend’ that the mission of NATO would be scaled down. Instead, NATO expanded,

seeking to encircle Russia by extending its membership to include former members of the Warsaw Pact
countries. Progressive scholars have documented the cynicism of the US military planners who orchestrated the ‘humanitarian
intervention’ in the Balkans in order to advance the hegemony of US capitalism after the fall of the
Soviet Union. The scholarship on this manipulation of the European working peoples to entrench NATO is rich and needs to be revisited at this moment of the celebration of the
70thanniversary of the founding of NATO. Richard Aldrich in the book, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence’ brought out evidence to expose how the massacres
in the Balkans, helped give a new impetus to US hegemony.’ [16] David Gibbs had argued, “How the Srebrenica Massacre Redefined US Foreign Policy.” It is worth quoting at length how the
Balkans war was used to manipulate public opinion in Europe, “Perhaps most importantly, the massacre helped give a new impetus to US hegemony, contributing to its post-Cold War

the Srebrenica massacre cannot be overstated: The massacre helped trigger a

legitimacy. In bolstering America’s hegemonic position, the significance of

NATO bombing campaign that is widely credited with ending the Bosnian war, along with the associated atrocities, and this
The
campaign gave NATO a new purpose for the post-Soviet era. Since that time, the Srebrenica precedent has been continuously invoked as a justification for military force.

perceived need to prevent massacres and oppression helped justify later

interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, as well as the ongoing fight against ISIS. The
recent UN doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, which contains a strongly interventionist tone, was inspired in part by the memory of Srebrenica.” [17] The more nefarious aspect of this
manipulation of humanitarianism was the ways in which elements such as Bernard Kouchner used their credentials as former members of the left and progressive forces to give cover to US
imperialism. Since the war in the Balkans it is now accepted by the military planners that humanitarian intervention acts as a force multiplier. [18] This position was explicitly stated by General
Colin Powell who noted, “Just as surely as our diplomats and military, American NGOs are out there serving and sacrificing on the front lines of freedom NGOs are such a force multiplier for us,
such an important part of our combat team.” These observations can shed light on the relationship between NGOs such as Doctors without Borders and the International Rescue Committee in

after the Asian economic crisis, US capital mobilized

global militarism. The fiction of collective western security was effectively broken while

NATO to defend Wall Street. In this defense of Wall Street, NATO incessantly bombed Kosovo for 79 days in 1999 as it
gave itself a new mission to enlarge US military power right up to the doorstep of Moscow. Gingerly, NATO
expanded under US President Bill Clinton from 12 members to 16, then to 19, then to 26 by 2004 and by 2009 to 28 members. Despite vocal opposition from Russia, the discussion

of expanding NATO now proceeded to develop the idea of Global NATO. In 2019 there were 29 members of NATO. In his
presentation before the US Congress Stoltenberg advocated for a further expansion of NATO and boasted of the high state of readiness of the NATO Response Force (NRF) which had been

Global NATO was the preeminent force to orchestrate the

created in 2002. NATO and the Weaponization of finance

weaponization of everything. Michael Hudson has outlined finance as warfare and the weaponization of finance in the
current phase of imperialism. It will be important to grasp the present sanctions regime of the USA as a form of warfare. In the current literature on imperialism, the
term weaponization of finance refers to the foreign policy strategy of using incentives (access to capital markets) and penalties (varied types of sanctions) as tools of coercive diplomacy. The

multiple wars agains Iran represent a model example of the weaponization of finance, the
weaponization of information and the weaponization of trade. Under the Presidency of Barack Obama,Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, noted that the
weaponization of finance offers to the US “a new battlefield…one that enables [the US] to go after those who wish [the US] harm without putting [US] troops in harm’s way or using lethal force.” Instead of fighting countries
militarily, the US can now “cripple them financially. The Obama administration had retreated from a full scale weaponization of finance with Iran by signing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA ) with Iran in 2015. Under
the terms of this agreement in Vienna on 14 July 2015 between Iran, the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States—plus Germany),[a] and
the European Union, it was agreed that Iran would accept the P5+1 would ensure that Iran did not develop nuclear weapons. Both Saudi Arabia and Israel had opposed this agreement. When Donald Tromp became President of the
United States, his administration renounced the JCPOA in 2018 and then signed an executive order reimposing sanctions on any foreign company that continues to do business with Iran. The order gave companies 90-day or 180-
day grace periods to extract themselves from existing Iranian contacts or face punitive US measures. Those NATO partners of the USA who signed the JCPOA refused to accept the sanctions imposed on Iran and in 2019 agreed to
create a special purpose vehicle to manage their trade with Iran. Britain, Germany and France rolled out INSTEX in February 2019 as one way to break the weaponization of Finance by the USA but in the cat and mouse game of
economic warfare, the Foreign Ministers of Europe have not yet been transparent on the full mandate of the special purpose vehicle. These developments mirror the weaponization of trade [19] and finance within NATO and the
problems of inter imperialist rivalry in West Asia. The threats against the countries that created a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to help facilitate trade with Iran must be taken very seriously, especially in the context of the political

Since the global

insecurity generated by BREXIT. This period reminds the world that of the depression when trade wars and currency wars eventually fueled open fighting in World War II. Finance as warfare

financial crisis of 2008-2009, there have been efforts by countries holding US debt to limit their exposure
to the dollar. In 2009, the Russians and the Chinese worked to establish an alternative international institution involving Brazil, Russia, India and
China, later including South Africa and called BRICS. Within the context of BRICS, the Chinese set about a slow process to internationalize its currency, the RMB and undertook currency swaps to avoid the US dollar. After
failing to negotiate successfully within the Bretton Woods institution for an increase of its drawing rights commensurate with its volume of international trade, the Chinese embarked on major economic and financial ventures
under the banner of One Belt One Road and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. When the AIIB was launched in 2015 with 57 countries, the former Treasury Secretary of the US, Lawrence Summers noted that the launch of
the AIIB was a turning point and ‘the creation of the AIIB will undermine the leadership role the U.S. has long enjoyed in global finance.’ Both Russia and China intensified their swap trading efforts and Russia settled its crude sales
to China. “In March 2018 news broke that Beijing is planning a pilot project for the second half of the year to pay for imported crude oil with renminbi instead of dollars. The two countries allegedly selected for the pilot are Russia
and Angola, with rumors that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may become involved. If this venture is successful, it will act as a spur to similar schemes for other imports and primary products.” China was joining the
leaders of Europe and the countries in Asia and West Asia who were calling for a multi-currency financial system. Many progressive economists noted that it was not a matter if more countries would flee the dollar, but when. One
economist writing from Singapore wrote, “the emergence of a multicurrency or multi-asset international payments system will take time. It doesn’t portend a collapse of the global payments system, but does point to a
redistribution of global wealth. The seigniorage harvested by the US as the world’s banker will gradually fall, narrowing the room for maneuver in US economic policy, which for the last 70 years has had the greatest influence on
markets globally. As the power of the dollar wanes, the US will be pressured to adjust to a world economy vastly changed since 1945.” [20] The German financial leaders along with France were maneuvering to speed this change
with the establishment of the special purpose vehicle to continue trading with Iran. At this time of writing the specific details of the specific purpose vehicle called the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) is still being
worked out, but the statements of former Ambassador Nicholas Burns before Congress on March 26 made it clear that the Foreign Policy establishment in the USA will not retreat from the weaponization of Finance, especially since
INSTEX allows members of NATO to continue trading and financial arrangements with Iran, China and Russia. In so far as Global NATO is serving the task of defending the dollar, the extent to which China has created an alternative
clearing system in the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) will be seen as another blow to US financial hegemony. Although in its first rollout of the CIPS system, the Chinese went to great length that it would cooperate
with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system, the current US intelligence war against the Chinese telecom firm Huawei point to the integration between Finance, information warfare and
cyberwarfare. [21] In the book, The Perfect Weapon, David Sanger discussed the debates within this highest levels of US intelligence and the Federal Reserve of whether the USA should use its Federal Reserve and cyber warfare to
backdoor into the Russian Central Bank to make money disappear. It is in this context where one can note in the planning of NATO strengthening the cyber capabilities is at the top of the Agenda. The Harvard study emphasized the

The convergence of cyberwarfare, economic warfare and information

importance of winning the Technology Battle in the Digital Age.

warfare is being taken to new levels under the current administration with its wide ranging sanctions
against countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Traditional books on NATO had surveyed the integration of diplomacy, sanctions
and weapons procurement, but the new push of the USA in formulating its position of unrivalled dominance is turning

out to be another front for defending the dollar. In a world where the USA had imposed sanctions on
Cuba, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Turkey, North Korea, Syria, Sudan along with individual sanctions
against individuals in Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, Ukraine and Zimbabwe, the logic of these sanctions
enforced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Treasury has now clarified to the allies of the USA in NATO the importance finance
was warfare. It was the former Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, who had warned that the over use of sanctions could dull their effectiveness. His logic was simple: Sanctions work
because they cut targets off from dealing with U.S. citizens and American financial institutions—a complete severance from the world’s largest economy and its most important financial

What
center. If Washington used this power idly, Lew suggested, it could encourage countries to find partners outside of the United States, and undermine sanctions’ deterrent effect.

Lew did not acknowledge was the relationship between the Treasury, Global NATO and the financial
wars. Much of the scholarship on the printing of dollars miss the way in which the infusion of capital in emerging economies further enmesh these societies into the instability of the
system. Ultimately, the export of the oscillation of the US economy deepens social and political challenges on the world and reinforces the militarization of the international political economy.
Michael Hudson outlined three ways in which flooding of dollars through debt leverage and QE supported the military: (1) the surplus dollars pouring into the rest of the world for yet further
financial speculation and corporate takeovers; (2) the fact that central banks are obliged to recycle these dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the federal U.S. budget deficit;
and most important (but most suppressed in the U.S. media, (3) the military character of the U.S. payments deficit and the domestic federal budget deficit. He continued, “Strange as it may
seem and irrational as it would be in a more logical system of world diplomacy the “dollar glut” is what finances America’s global military build-up. It forces foreign central banks to bear the
costs of America’s expanding military empire effective “taxation without representation.” Keeping international reserves in “dollars” means recycling their dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury
bills U.S. government debt issued largely to finance the military.” After the financial crisis in Europe, Quantitative Easing was extended to the Eurozone and Japan, but in the continuing re

alignment, of global capitalism, US capital is working hard to decapitate Russia and China as opponents of Global NATO.The currency wars and weaponization
of finance is now accompanied by the weaponization of trade and the weaponization of information.
Sanger’s The Perfect Weapon War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Agehas opened one window into how full spectrum dominance and the

militarization of space is now linked to the weaponization of information and cognitive hacking. We
now have new terms of warfare, terms such as “fake news”, “disinformation,” “weaponized
information,” “post-truth” and “alternative facts.” Weaponized information (WI) defines a new method messaging
and dissemination of content that contains falsehoods, facts taken out of context and pieces of truth
strategically released, in an attempt to manipulate knowledge and beliefs. The NATO destruction of Libya was one clear
example of how falsehoods were refined to lull workers in Europe to support the destruction of Libya The weaponization of Finance and the Destruction of Libya Not enough is

being done to expose the real role of Global NATO and the role of so called humanitarian operatives in
ensuring that humanitarian interventions become a force multiplier. Currently, many countries of the EU collaborate with France in the
North African region in the fabrication of terror to ensure the deployment of the US Africa Command and French forces in Africa. In Western Europe, NATO has

been very successful in ensuring confusion, demoralization, paralysis, and apathy in relation to western
imperialism in Africa. African scholars and progressives are very clear that while calling for the dismantling of NATO there must be a call for the EURO to break from the CFA
franc zone. Nicolas Sarkozy was very clear that the intervention in Libya was to save the Euro. Africans cannot have a Newtonian view of the struggle against imperialism to assure those from
the European left who want solidarity with Africans while supporting French imperialism in Africa. Global NATO and French machinations are involved in a delicate dance and there is silence
from the left in the EU when it comes to Europe’s 4000 km strategic radius that covers the entire area of West Africa, North Africa and down through East Africa to Somalia. It is beyond this
commentary to delineate the ways in which German scholars, religious organizations, German foundations and non-governmental organizations are now implicated in the criminal acts of
France in Africa, especially the war on terror. It is the task of the progressive movement to penetrate the areas of cooperation and conflict between European capitalists and Wall Street so that

When 200 African scholars wrote the open letter on the

European workers do not continue to complicity support ‘humanitarian interventions.’

impending crime against the peoples of Libya, there has been and continue to be silence on the part of
the left in Europe and the United States. Barack Obama had described the intervention in Libya as a mistake and the British Parliamentary Committee
outlined how the Libyan intervention had been based on lies. Obama may have considered the intervention a mistake, but his understanding of the process did not reveal how Goldman Sachs

was thoroughly implicated the destruction of Libya. The case in the London High Court of the Libyan Investment Authority vs Goldman Sachs brought out revealing evidence of how firms
such as Goldman Sachs and others involved in the financialization of the energy markets sought to
mobilize the resources of oil rich states with Sovereign Wealth Funds to keep alive the private equity, hedge funds and structured derivatives
markets of the global capitalist economy. Most societies and peoples in the world want these banks to be brought under control. But Goldman Sachs
benefitted in the ruling because in 2014, two and a half years after the case was brought before the High Court, there was a war in Libya and there was no government therefore one could not
represent the Libyan Investment Authority in this arena. We see therefore that the financial institutions are direct beneficiaries of the warfare that is going on in Libya. When the United
Nations passed Resolution 1970 and resolution 1973 in 2011, those who had signed these resolutions did not understand then that the resolution was for regime in Libya.[22] The current

Since the writings

fighting in Libya remains one of the most inglorious aspects of the 70 year history of NATO but there is silence among those celebrating 70 years of NATO. [23]

on Finance capital over a century ago by Rudolph Hilferding, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Nikolai Bukharin the role
of finance in the international system has grown beyond the parameters outlined by those who linked
finance capital to modern imperialism.[24] After the collapse of the dollar/gold system of 1944 the financial industry of the West
has become the axis on which international capitalism spins.

Abolishing the U.S.-NATO alliance spurs global progressive efforts that promote
solidarity against imperial intervention disguised as humanitarian democracy-building
Shelton and Spieler ’18 (Dylan and William, “There is no "progressive" case for NATO: a
response,” July 31,
https://www.progressivemaryland.org/there_is_no_progressive_case_for_nato_a_resp
onse, ME)
As already mentioned, to the extent austerity politics drive social discontent and violence, the
NATO umbrella is protecting
violent domestic policies. Nearly every example brought up regarding NATO military intervention can be
interpreted as a strategic and humanitarian failure. In Kosovo, the NATO coalition bombings actually catalyzed more brutal
atrocities than were occurring before the alliance took military action. In 2000, Amnesty International released a report claiming the
indiscriminate NATO bombing of Kosovo constituted war crimes. Former State Department official under President Clinton Strobe Talbott
admitted, "…It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform--not the plight of the Kosovar Albanians--that
best explains NATO's war." Trade at the point of a bayonet can hardly be said to be democratic or progressive. The very presence of foreign
troops, in a country as familiar with foreign invasion as Afghanistan, breeds more resentment and resistance that keep its insurgencies alive.
This conflict continues with no end in sight despite the loss of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. In 2011, across the border from
Afghanistan, NATO bombed a Pakistani military base for two hours killing 26 Pakistani soldiers in what is known as the Salala Incident. NATO
action off the coast of Somalia is far more complicated than the “Captain Phillips” movie suggests. The “pirates” also exist to ward off EU (read:
NATO) countries who are dumping their nuclear waste onto the Somali coast while the country was operating without a centralized
government. Piracy will continue until there is some agreement to end this destructive dumping, until then, a Somali writer says, “We do not
want the EU and NATO serving as a shield for these nuclear waste-dumping hoodlums.” NATO also disastrously
intervened in
Libya, which even President Obama regards as his worst mistake. The country is now split between two or more rival
governing factions, whose members rove the countryside killing indiscriminately . Militant extremists and
weapons are smuggled from Libya through the proxy of NATO-member country Turkey into Syrian extremist
camps. Migrants flee the country, many drowning in the Mediterranean because EU-supported right-wing austerity has led to immigrants being
unjustly persecuted and feared by national governments and their people. The history of NATO’s expansion eastward refutes
the claim that it was the Russians who precipitated the need for a NATO military presence in Eastern
Europe. The chain of events is in reality the opposite; declassified documents show NATO moved east in opposition to agreements made
during and just after the Cold War. George Kennan was the father of the Cold War “containment” policy against the Soviet Union that is
ostensibly the basis for NATO’s existence. At the time of NATO’s expansion during the late 1990s, Kennan remarked to New York Times’s
Thomas Friedman, “There was no reason for this whatsoever...Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO
expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.” Finally, how
does NATO achieve a
resemblance of “stability” in Europe? Through undemocratic means and subversion. It has regularly
used totalitarian strongmen to secure strategic locations on the globe and has promoted undemocratic
movements to overthrow or destabilize elected governments. One of the founding countries of NATO was Portugal,
which at the time was ruled by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, showing how NATO’s commitment to democracy had never existed. The
United States even wanted to Franco’s reactionary Spanish dictatorship in the original founding NATO countries, but the resistance by other
nations was too strong. Presently, NATO sits silently while Turkish strongman President Erdogan violently cracks down on peaceful civilian
protests in Gezi Park and oppresses the disenfranchised Kurdish minority in Turkey. NATO
member countries have also
undergone military coups without any action on NATO’s behalf to stop them. A military junta ruled Greece after a
coup in the 1960s. Turkey has had numerous successful and attempted coups through its existence as a NATO partner, the latest being just two
years ago. NATO has historically aided and abetted right-wing political and paramilitary organizations to counter organic left-wing movements.
After World War II, the US through the CIA and the Western powers through NATO established “stay behind” networks in most European
countries, consisting of far-right, anti-communist paramilitaries, which, needless to say, are incompatible with any vision of a progressive
society. Since
the end of the Cold War, NATO has shifted to protecting American and EU economic
domination over the globe, despite it being Western powers that first created the problems NATO is
mandated to act against. It is hard to believe Trump could actually affect a withdrawal of the
US from NATO. As Schablein admits in his article, Trump’s cabinet and advisors do not want such a thing. But this isn’t a
result of their maturity; rather they are clinging to the established US foreign policy agenda that has stretched
back to the beginning of the Cold War. Proof of Trump’s capitulation to foreign policy status quo is the fact that Henry Kissinger is
advising him to leverage Russia against a rising Chinese powerhouse. Most importantly, if the left wants to make a progressive
case for an international institution, that case must rely on international sources and perspectives . The
leaders of the three fastest growing left-wing movements in Europe all are skeptical of NATO’s usefulness in the 21st
century. Jeremy Corbyn called NATO, “a Cold War organisation, it should have been wound up in 1990 along with the Warsaw Pact." French
leftist leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon grouped NATO in with the EU as organizations that "strangle the voice of the people." The Spanish Podemos
party leader Pablo Iglesias has likewise condemned the EU’s European Central Bank and NATO, and said he would “absolutely” withdraw Spain
from the alliance if elected. All this
points to a considerable energy on the international left to reevaluate 20th-
century forms of international politics that have placed trade, protection, and democracy on an
imperial war economy foundation. If the progressive left wants to keep up with our international comrades, we should
focus on making international organizations based on solidarity and not security , on democracy
instead of deception, and cooperation over containment. A left that doesn’t do so is doomed to fall
prey to the war pigs of the foreign policy establishment.

The TVA may be imperfect – but it produces material change on contingent examples
of violence that carve space for the aff’s criticism – any of those imperfections prove
there is adequate neg ground
O’Sullivan 17 (Susannah O'Sullivan, teaches International Relations at the University of Bristol and University of Leicester, UK. She
received her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2015. “Military Intervention in the Middle East and North Africa: The Case of NATO in
Libya”, August 29, 2017, pg. 167-)

In March 2011, as NATO bombs were falling on Libya, the White House Middle East strategist Dennis Ross told the
press this was a “limited humanitarian intervention, not war” (Douthat 2011). In turn, in a letter from South America to
the Speaker of Congress, Obama said that the “these strikes will be limited in their nature, duration, and scope” (White House 2011). He
said that the US was engaged in “military efforts” which were “discrete”. This was not a war, this was a “limited and well-
defined mission” (White House 2011). The word ‘limited’ appeared several times in the statement on the 21 March. The word ‘war’ did
not appear once. This discursive trick that transforms violence into something discrete , ethical and limited
echoes one used in an earlier war. When asked about the effect on Iraqi children of the disturbing
sound of low-flying US military helicopters at a press conference in Baghdad in 2004, General Mark Kimmitt
replied, “tell the children of Iraq the noise they hear is the sound of freedom” (Blomfield 2004). This reply
neatly encapsulates a discourse on virtuous war in which violence, technology and morality have
become fused to the extent that they are logically inseparable. War is celebrated in a broader
narrative of success rooted in technological advancement of military capabilities . As Benjamin (1977: 244)
noted on the aesthetics of contemporary war: “if the natural utilisation of productive forces is impeded by the
property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for
an unnatural utilisation, and this is found in war.” The vast irrationality of warfare is paradoxically an
expression of the creative capacities of capitalism. The final irrationality of capitalism, he suggests, is to
celebrate this distortion of human capabilities as morally progressive. Aerial warfare is the apogee of
progressive war, effectively performing the God delusion of modern capitalist societies of complete
control over their material environment. The wider rhetorical trick of humanitarian intervention is that
the phrase itself leaves little room for opposition. It colonises a representational space of resolute and
determined assistance, a moral enterprise that is both cosmopolitan and technologically advanced. The war that occurred in Libya is
rendered a cosmopolitan awakening and a technical humanitarian fix. The representational trick is, therefore, one which
conceals the material and bodily impact of violence from public view , not only in the spaces of
humanitarian intervention but at the margins of the wider network of violence that makes intervention
possible. This insulation of publics from the impact of humanitarian wars effectively limits opposition
and resistance. The trick of humanitarian intervention is to conceal a truth that is irredeemably violent
both within and outside of its dominant frames. This book has pushed at the limits of these frames, arguing that precision
aerial bombing is not as precise, limited or ethical as it represents itself as being. Beyond the immediate space of intervention,
a wider network of violence stretches across vast areas, consistently oppressing a little-seen minority
at a profit. My aim has been to destabilise the representational certitude with which humanitarian intervention is produced as a solution to
the problem of political violence. In unravelling the discursive certitudes of humanitarian intervention, the book has made three
central
arguments. The first concerns the political topography of intervention and R2P. I have challenged claims of
spatial separation in which political territories are clearly demarcated, showing that the security practices of
liberal states are now predicated on a deterritorialised network of surveillance, monitoring and
border control in which borders are not obsolete but are highly differential in impact . The dominant
geography of intervention is one predicated on separation and disconnection. This leads to a limited
and limiting set of moral questions about the possibilities of intervention. There is an old joke about a tourist in
Dublin who asks a local man for directions. The Irishman replies, “Well, if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.” The joke challenges the logic in
what we perceive to be true. We often presume a simple linear causality in a chain of events because our view is blinkered to the wider context
in which those events are produced. In the context of intervention, liberal claims of spatial demarcation are
premised on a mythical conception of territorially-based political community that is little more than a
convenient fiction. As a result, to the question “Should we intervene, or should we turn away?”, I would
reply, “Well, if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.” What I mean by this is that our ethico-political
engagement begins not at the moment at which military intervention is raised as a solution to mass-
scale violence. Our ethico-political engagement with other people is an eternal and necessarily flawed
relation of tolerance and acceptance of mutual vulnerability. In addressing humanitarian intervention
differently, I suggest that we should refuse the questions ‘can intervention be morally justified?’ or
‘under what circumstances should we undertake military intervention? ’ These questions are complicit in
the acceptance and reproduction of a wide network of systemic violence of which intervention is one
part. In this way, imaginative geographies and our ethico-political engagement with violence are
inextricably linked. I have demonstrated that the imaginative geography of crisis through which intervention is
justified reproduces Orientalist assumptions about the postcolonial other, positing him or her as either
depoliticised and vulnerable, or as irrationally immature and violent. This reflects not an authentic truth, but a
projection of the fears, assumptions and impulses of a liberal self that has been unable to shake the
colonial mindset that it must destroy and rebuild in order to help the other. The knowledge of
Orientalism is a distorted mirror of the collective unconscious rather than a window into another
culture. In this way, violence is reproduced as the logical, rational and even benevolent response to disorder or crisis in the postcolonial
world. This book disrupts claims of spatial separation by challenging both the deterritorialised security practices of liberal state (and privatised)
power, and the imaginations of difference and otherness on which these practices rest. The
assumption of spatial separation
underlying claims of fighting ‘limited wars’ is a convenient lie that attempts to conceal a network of
violence in the form of private security and increasingly militarised policing and immigration systems .
This network relies upon and is sustained by its own imaginative geographies of the other as a threat
who must be monitored, placed under surveillance, detained, and if necessary, deported. Any rational
attempt to pinpoint this threat will result in failure, as the logic of the system is to reproduce itself with
ever-increasing anxieties. The maintenance of the system itself becomes its central aim, and the
‘enemy’ within against which it is securing us disappears further into the shadows with every attempt to
find it. Instead of positing an alternative moral imaginary with which to frame our response to crisis, the book has
argued that the ways we commonly think about global politics and intervention are implicated in the
reproduction of violence as a response to political unrest. The purpose of this argument is to reveal
humanitarian intervention as a contingent instance in which violence is
produced. To ask how it is produced is to highlight the fact that war is not an inevitable
or enduring feature of international politics. If we accept that war is an ethico-
political decision and not the duty of the powerful to uphold the normative order, then we can begin to
think differently about our engagement with violence. The second primary claim of the book concerns a displacement in the ethical
measurement of humanitarian war to a temporal plane. In other words, the
success of intervention is measured not in terms of
lives saved, or the extent of rebuilding and reconstruction after conflict, or even the humanitarian aid ,
but in the speed at which intervention is mobilised. A good war has become a quick war. The equation
of speed with humanitarian or ethical success is a subtle shift, but a profoundly worrying one. It is
enabled by what Virilio terms the ‘propaganda of progress’, in which increasingly swift and efficient technology
has become the sole aim of capitalist societies. In this thirst for speed, wider reflection on the
implications of technology is squeezed out of the discursive space for politics. Virilio argues that if this trend
continues, the potential for politics itself will be annihilated. There are two important implications about this
conflation of speed and ethics in humanitarian war. First, it enables the production of violence as a
rational and desirable response to crisis. The superiority of the military technologies of intervening
forces forms a key part of the representational conceit of intervention in which might and right are
fused. The technological frame in which intervention is justified is a subtle one, particularly as
interventions shift from the spectacular ‘shock and awe’ of the Gulf and Iraq wars to the increasingly invisible and technical
‘precision’ strikes of drone warfare at the margins of the ongoing ‘overseas contingency operation’.1 In post-Cold War interventions
the technological and the humanitarian frames through which war is produced have become
increasingly fused. The production of humanitarian war takes place on an assumption that our technologies have become so precise that
we can fight a ‘clean’ war in which only the bad people get hurt. The second, related implication is that the technological frame
alienates us from the material impact of its results . As the technological frame produces warfare that is better, cleaner and
more precise, less attention is paid to the material and bodily impact of intervention’s violence . The danger
is that we become so blinded by the advanced technologies of warfare that we forget that these
technologies are still intended to result in destroyed buildings and strewn body parts . The declaration that the
means of committing violence are increasingly precise and efficient makes violence more likely, as it is assumed that the messy impact of war
can be avoided through advanced technology. The
war in Libya, as every war, shows that the messy impact of war can
never be avoided. In wars people will die, buildings will be destroyed and people will always be left to deal
with the consequences of societal divisions, grieving families and weakened infrastructure. These
mundane tasks will usually fall to the world’s poorest, and rarely to those who drop the bombs from a
great height as part of a humanitarian intervention. The third central claim of the book is that humanitarian
intervention depends upon, reproduces and perpetuates divisions and distinctions between people who
are worthy of protection and those who may be killed. As reiterated above, the imaginative geography of
intervention is one in which the postcolonial world is produced as failing or failed. The ‘propaganda of progress’
in which liberal war is celebrated as increasingly swift and efficient is also riven with a distinction between the technologically advanced and the
marginalised targets of intervention who will either be killed or saved. The
moral universe of intervention is one where
people are divided according to legitimacy based upon a series of assumptions about race, gender, class,
religion and nationality. Those deemed legitimate potential subjects are worthy of saving , but many
others are seen as beyond the pale for liberalising interventions, and can be sacrificed without regret.
This moral universe appears at first glance to run counter to a liberal cosmopolitanism that draws upon universalism and progressive teleology.
However, these elements of liberalism create the foundation for distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate subjects. Liberalism
creates a universal moral subject who is transcendent of his social context . This subject is a historical
and theoretical artifice, born out of a need to create the basis for law and rights in modern Europe. It has served as
justification for innumerable injustices across the world in European imperialism and colonialism , driven
by a desire to impose this legal system on other peoples against their will. This was a legal system in which it was lawful to
enslave and oppress and in which hierarchical authority and clearly delineated class divisions were
sacrosanct. The book ties these three claims to the liberal thought at the basis of human rights claims in human security and humanitarian
intervention. The universalism of liberalism rests upon a dualism between the irrationality of nature and the
rationality of society and law. This dualism is at the heart of the idea of transcendence, in which the liberal subject stands above the
lower, material realm of nature and the body in a transcendent plane of universal rational consciousness. The divide upon which liberal
theorists constructed the edifice of universalism contains within it the potential to divide people between the legitimate and lawful, and the
irrational and illegitimate. The
effect of this is to temporalise difference as not only spatially distinct, but also as
eternally and metaphysically inadequate. As I have shown in the case of Libya, this difference is violently
policed through the various practices of security which include contemporary humanitarian
intervention. Liberal thought, underpinned by universalism, dualism and progressive teleology, was allied to the pursuit of
colonialism, with the wilful exploitation and enslavement of societies it entailed. This alliance between
universal moral principles and the ruthless and violent policing of divisions between peoples appears
to be a paradoxical interpretation of liberalism. Yet it represents not an aberration from liberal
principles but their precise fulfilment, with humanitarian intervention following a line of practices from
the spread of Christianity to development and peacebuilding. My argument here is not that no good can come from
these practices, but that their alliance with violence, division and exploitation should give pause to those who believe themselves to be saviours
of the word. The
tragedy of history is not only that particular elites took it upon themselves to enforce
universal moral principles with extreme violence in the rest of the world, but that they continue to do
so.

It’s in the lit in the context of the 1AC’s example – the U.S. should withdraw from
NATO – paving the way for its complete abolition
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament No Date (“No to NATO,”
https://cnduk.org/resources/no-to-nato/, ME)
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is a nuclear-armed military alliance which is an obstacle to a peaceful world and
global nuclear disarmament. It currently comprises 30 member states, including the United Kingdom. NATO was first established during the
Cold War, and since its inception has expanded both its sphere of influence and the scope of its activity,
destabilising international relationships as it does so. How the alliance developed NATO was founded in 1949, in the early years
of the Cold War, by Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK and the USA.
The Warsaw pact was established in response by the then Soviet Union and its allies in 1955. In the 1950s, Greece, Turkey and West Germany
joined NATO, followed by Spain in 1982. At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, but NATO was not. Rather than scaling
back its global military presence, the US moved to fill the positions vacated by its previous rival. As the countries of eastern Europe embraced
free market economics and multiparty democracy, the US moved rapidly to integrate them into its sphere of influence via NATO. This would
prove to be an effective strategy, as witnessed by the support of those countries for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The 1990s saw NATO
developing its regional cooperation forums and inviting new members to join the alliance. In March 1999, Hungary, Poland and the Czech
Republic were all admitted as full members. Ten days later they found themselves at war with their neighbour Yugoslavia, as part of NATO’s
illegal bombing campaign. But developments at that time were not limited to expanding its membership. At NATO’s fiftieth anniversary
conference in Washington in April 1999, a new ‘Strategic Concept’ was adopted. This moved beyond NATO’s previous defensive role to include
‘out of area’ – in other words offensive – operations, anywhere on the Eurasian landmass. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria
and Romania were admitted to NATO in 2004 – not only former Warsaw Pact members, but also former Soviet republics in the case of the
Baltic states. In 2009, Albania and Croatia became members with Montenegro joining in 2017. North Macedonia was confirmed as the newest
member in March 2020, while Bosnia and Herzegovina are also in negotiations to join the alliance. This
scale of expansion has
contributed to international tension as Russia sees itself increasingly surrounded by US and NATO bases. The increasing
NATO presence in the region has been a contributory factor to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine . In the past few
years, NATO has exacerbated the situation by announcing new bases in eastern Europe. Deployments – including
British troops – arrived in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland during 2017. In addition, the NATO Response Force was expanded in 2014 to
include a Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, with an ability to deploy at two days’ notice. NATO has also opened a training centre in Georgia
and will support the reform of Ukraine’s military. Out of area activity A US drive for global domination through military influence was most
notable in Afghanistan. NATO assumed control of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in 2003, marking NATO’s first
deployment outside Europe or North America. While NATO officially ended its mission in Afghanistan in 2014, it has since launched a new ‘non-
combat Resolute Support’ operation, agreeing in 2017 to increase the number of troops in the country to 16,000. A February 2020 agreement
between the US and Taliban should see all NATO troops leave the country, but there is still no end in sight to leaving the Middle East
completely. Defence ministers agreed to expand NATO’s anti-ISIS training mission in Iraq in February 2020 – this just weeks after the country’s
Parliament voted in favour of demanding that foreign troops leave. NATO has also undertaken operations in Libya and the Horn
of Africa over the last few years. At its 2019 summit, NATO even declared space ‘an operational domain’, extending the reach of the alliance still
further. Global reach? NATO adopted a new Strategic Concept at its 2010 summit, entitled Active Engagement, Modern Defence. It
recommitted to an interventionist military agenda that set back the cause of peace and nuclear disarmament.
This included an expansion of its area of work to ‘counterterrorism, cyber-security, and the proliferation
of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons’. The summit also agreed to integrate the US missile defence system with a
European theatre missile defence programme under the auspices of NATO. At its 2012 summit, NATO declared that it had taken successful
steps towards establishing a missile defence system. It also announced developments in its air command and control system, as well as plans
for improved and more integrated armed forces. Further developments in the system were announced at the 2016 summit. At the Wales
summit in 2014 a statement was made that cyber-attacks on any NATO members could warrant a collective response, expanding the scope of
circumstances under which military action could be authorised. This is particularly worrying because of the difficulty in determining the source
of cyber-attacks and technical evidence of them is rarely shared or clarified. The NATO summit in Poland in 2016 demonstrated that the alliance
is set to continue to promote military intervention and posturing as the way to resolve international differences. Precisely at a time when what
is needed between the alliance and Russia is cool-headed diplomacy and a thawing of relations, NATO
is instead taking destabilising
and provocative steps the other way. There seems no doubt that there is a long term plan for maintaining and
extending NATO’s global influence Military Spending NATO expects its members to spend 2% of national income on defence
every year. NATO should not be in a position to impose spending guidelines on independent nations, which
should be determining their own funding priorities based on genuine need. Nine NATO countries met this target in 2019, including the UK. US
President Donald Trump has now gone further and has called on members to actually spend 4% of their GDP on defence. Trump even
threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance if members didn’t spend more (although this would need to be approved by the Senate and
Congress). Asian Pivot Former US President Obama’s rebalancing of US foreign policy towards Asia undoubtedly had repercussions on NATO.
This ‘pivot’ is already raising tensions and helping to militarise the Asia-Pacific region, a part of the world with four nuclear weapon states –
India, Pakistan, China and North Korea. NATO’s closest partners – Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea – are based in the region.
With more US involvement in the Asia-Pacific, NATO could follow suit and deepen its cooperation with its partners there on perceived threats
such as cyber-attacks and terrorism, possibly antagonising further relations with China. In its 2019 summit declaration, NATO ominously
referred to ‘China’s growing influence’, a pretext for further activity in the Asian region? A nuclear-armed alliance NATO is a nuclear-armed
alliance and around 150 US B61 nuclear bombs are stationed in five countries across Europe – Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and
Turkey. There is strong opposition to these weapons, including from the governments of some of the ‘host’ nations. Germany, Belgium and the
Netherlands have all, unsuccessfully, called for the removal of US nuclear weapons from their countries. NATO recently restated its
commitment to being a nuclear alliance and announced that the nuclear weapons under its umbrella will be upgraded to make them more
usable. NATO’s nuclear policies conflict with the legal obligations of the signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Articles 1 and
2 of the NPT forbid the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapon states, but US/NATO nuclear weapons in Europe are located in non-
nuclear weapons states. The alliance rejects a policy of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons and maintains that nuclear capabilities remains a core
element of its strategy. The UK’s nuclear weapons system has been assigned to NATO since the 1960s. Ultimately, this means that the UK’s
nuclear weapons could be used against a country attacking (or threatening to attack) one of the NATO member states since an attack on
one NATO member state is seen as being an attack on all member states. Expansion into Latin America NATO and
Colombia concluded a partnership agreement in 2018, ‘with a view to strengthening dialogue and cooperation to address security challenges’.
This despite the fact that the Latin American states and the Caribbean are a Nuclear Weapon Free Zone under the Tlatelolco Treaty, agreed in
1967. There has been angry rejection of the NATO agreement from some of Colombia’s neighbours, with Venezuela accusing Colombia of
inviting ‘external factors with nuclear capability to gain a foothold’. 70th anniversary NATO marked its 70th anniversary in 2019 with two
summits. Foreign ministers gathered in Washington earlier in the year while the leaders came to the UK in December for a very short formal
summit. The final document reaffirmed the alliance’s commitment to nuclear weapons. The next summit will take place in 2021. Theway
forward CND believes that a vital step towards global nuclear disarmament would be achieved with the removal of all
US nuclear weapons from European bases. Britain should also withdraw from NATO, and all foreign military bases on British soil should be
closed. NATO should not be expanded but rather disbanded and the influence, resources and funding of the Organisation
for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) extended towards a nuclear-free, less militarised and therefore more secure Europe.
 anti-blackness
Plan: The United States Federal Government should substantially reduce its alliance
commitments with the republic of the Philippines by at least withdrawing from the
mutual defense treaty.

withdrawal decreases tensions in the scs due to u.s. military presence---the

philippines rebalance to regional partnerships
Tobin, Journalist, 20
Meaghan, journalism and public policy in Washington, Taipei and Beijin, journalism and public policy in
Washington, Taipei and Beijing, 2-16, “Ending Philippines-US military pact will affect South China Sea disputes:
analysts”, accessed 8-20-20, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3050833/ending-philippines-us-
military-pact-will-affect-south-china-sea) STJ

In a commentary for the Chinese state-run tabloid Global Times, Li Kaisheng, the deputy director at the Shanghai Academy of Social
Sciences’ Institute of International Relations said he did not believe the scrapping of the pact would see Manila “gravitate
towards Beijing” as China was only one of several countries it was pursuing closer ties with. Instead, there would be an impact on
the South China Sea, he added. “Washington has repeatedly meddled in regional affairs through various means,
such as sending its warships to conduct so-called freedom of navigation operations, and joint military exercises with
other claimants, including Vietnam. Without the VFA, US interference with the South China Sea will be constrained,” Li
wrote. The US continuously deploys between 500 and 600 troops in the Philippines, according to Rand. The US presence
was dramatically reduced in the early 1990s when lawmakers in Manila moved to shut down two bases in the
1990s which were at the time the largest US military outposts in the western Pacific. Philippines Defence Secretary Delfin
Lorenzana on Thursday said the annual joint military exercises – called Balikatan, meaning “shoulder to shoulder” in Tagalog – planned for May
would take place during the agreement’s remaining 180 days. “Once the termination is final, we will cease to have exercises with them,”
Lorenzana said. Are Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia about to get tough on Beijing’s South China Sea claims? 17 Feb 2020 More distant
relations between Washington and Manila could also lead to a recalculation by other countries in Southeast Asia, especially those whose South
China Sea claims overlap with Beijing’s. Collin Koh, research fellow at Singapore’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said Indonesia
and Vietnam could seek closer military cooperation with the US. Singapore has also been a key defence partner of
the US and could expand military cooperation, Koh said. “On the cusp of the closure of the US military bases in the
Philippines in the 1990s, Singapore offered the US access to Changi naval base,” he said. “Singapore has been an
ardent supporter of the US military presence in the region.” Australia also maintains a
visiting forces agreement with the Philippines and has in the past, along with Japan, taken part in the annual
joint military exercises with the US and the Philippines. Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of
Staff General Felimon Santos Junior said the nation will increase military engagements with these neighbours after the
agreement with the US ends, local media reported.

island building destroys corals reefs and ecosystems, triggering territorial disputes
Smith et al., 19
(Leland, Fellow at Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown University Law Center, Peter
Cornillon, Professor of Oceanography at University of Rhode Island, Don Rudnickas, Ice Information
Branch Chief at US Coast Guard, Colleen Mouw, Associate Professor of Oceanography at Rhode Island
University, 3-19, “Evidence of Environmental Changes Caused by Chinese Island Building”, Scientific
Reports, Accessed 9/14/20, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41659-3) DJG
The geo-political significance of the impacts identified above could be large. The SCS is bordered by
Taiwan and China to the north, Vietnam to the west, Malaysia and Indonesia to the south, and Brunei
and the Philippines to the east. Each of these nations claim full entitlement to resources within the portions
of the SCS adjacent to their respective coastlines based on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This law, signed by
167 nations including China and the Philippines, set forth boundary limitations, anti-pollution laws, and many other standards. Pollution by
one country in another country’s waters aggravates territorial disputes. The most contested sub-
regions are the Spratly and Paracel Islands, which are home to many islands that were uninhabitable to humans. According to
expert testimonies during the Philippines v. China Arbitration hearings, Chinese island-building represents the quickest
deterioration of coral reefs in human history20, a deterioration consistent with the decrease in chlorophyll-a
seen from 2016 through 2018 in the lagoon and surrounding waters. Such destruction of coral reefs
does not only impact the immediate area, but also reduces commercially vital fish stocks, and the ability
of the Pacific Ocean to detoxify waste that can impact climate21. Additionally, man-made [created] structures
such as airfields and the islands themselves remove reef habitats, may cause leeching, and could cause
extinction of local fish, invertebrates, and other critical components of the local ecosystem22,23. Primary
production is reduced, the reef topography is changed, and the ability to sustain life, as suggested by our results, is likely
diminished. In many cases, the island building and harbor digging could be irreversible24. Despite multiple studies, court cases,
and media reports on the subject of Chinese island-building, little quantification of the extent of the disruption to the surrounding ocean
existed prior to this paper. It is therefore difficult for law-makers or multi-lateral regulating organizations to create rules around the topic, or to
truly understand the ecological damage that such activity causes. This paper serves as a step toward better understanding by initiating a
discussion and providing quantitative measurements from which other scientists can base their analyses in the unfolding story of island-building
in the SCS. While this study focuses on one particular reef, there is a much larger practice of this activity currently ongoing.

spratley coral reefs are key to biodiversity in east asia---island building wrecks global
climate and biodiversity
Ives 16
(Mike, journalist, 10-16, “The Rising Environmental Toll of China’s Offshore Island Grab”, Yale School of
the Environment, Accessed 9/16/20,
https://e360.yale.edu/features/rising_environmental_toll_china_artificial_islands_south_china_sea)
DJG

The researchers’ hunch, which proved to be correct, was that larvae

were floating to the near-shore reefs from the
Spratlys — an offshore archipelago that lies between Vietnam and the Philippines and is a key spawning ground for one of the
world’s most productive fisheries. Scientists later reported that the South China Sea, which is the size of India and has
hundreds of islands and islets, has some of the highest marine biodiversity on earth, with 571 known species of reef corals
alone. But the South China Sea’s rich natural heritage, long threatened by overfishing, now faces a new ecological danger:
A campaign by China to build artificial islands on disputed reefs in the Spratlys and elsewhere in the sea. China’s
island-building initiative signals an aggressive stance intended to secure dominance in the South China Sea, a strategic area that contains some
of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and is a potential source of oil deposits. Over the past several years, Chinese President Xi Jinping has
ordered engineers to pile sand onto some of the sea’s disputed offshore reefs, mostly in the Spratlys, with the apparent goal of building military
bases there. Satellite imagery shows that China has so far constructed seven artificial islands in the Spratlys, and added ports, radar equipment,
and airstrips. Three of the seven islands were designed as military bases, U.S. military officials say, and one has an anchorage larger than
Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. Marine scientists worry that the next target for dredging and construction will be
Scarborough Shoal off the Philippine coast — which, like the Spratlys, is also known for its rich biodiversity. Based
on satellite information, computer-modeling data, and previous studies of human impacts on coral reefs, scientists are concerned
that China’s campaign may be causing irreparable damage. Coral reefs in the Spratlys and other offshore regions,
including the Paracel Islands and Scarborough Shoal, supply larvae for fisheries that feed hundreds of millions of
people. They also are a living seed bank that could help the region’s marine communities deal with the long-term
impacts of climate change. The scientists’ concerns stem partly from the island-construction process. Ships
more than 300 feet long have been dredging deep-water channels and harbors, while smaller boats have dredged in shallower waters around
reef flats and lagoons by digging up corals with their propellers, according to a forthcoming study by McManus. Both activities produce
plumes of sand and silt that coat living reefs and block their access to sunlight. Deep-water dredging can also
lower the existing seafloor by up to 30 feet, the study said, changing wave patterns and inhibiting the growth
of the red algae that are essential to reef calcification and sedimentation. Additional local and regional damage to
reefs and fish stocks will occur, scientists say, if China turns some of the new artificial islands on the Spratlys into harbors for the country’s
commercial fishing fleet. “What you’re essentially talking about is destroying the equivalent of seven worldwide natural heritage areas,” says
Kent Carpenter, a professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia who has studied coral reefs in the Philippines for four decades. The long-term
environmental impacts of China’s activities on the seven Spratly reefs it occupies may never be known unless the Chinese military allows
independent experts to conduct research there, scientists say. But nearly six square miles of artificial islands have been built recently on
disputed reefs in the sea, primarily in the greater Spratly Islands, according to the McManus study. Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the
Philippines accounted for just a tiny percentage of that construction, the study said, while China’s
activities were responsible for
99 percent of the resulting damage to offshore coral reefs. Although six square miles may seem like a small area, the
McManus study indicates that the total damage from island building and dredging has already affected more than 10 percent of the Spratlys’
total shallow reef area. China has long claimed offshore territories in as much as 90 percent of the South China Sea. Its claims overlap with
competing ones by Vietnam, the Philippines, and other nations. Tensions over the claims have simmered for decades, and some countries have
conducted limited land reclamation work on disputed islands and atolls. In July, the Philippines won a landmark case at a United Nations
tribunal, successfully challenging China’s territorial claims in the sea. (Both McManus and Carpenter worked as paid science advisors to the
Philippines on the case.) But President Xi has vowed to ignore the tribunal’s ruling, and some analysts think that China’s island-building efforts
could raise geopolitical tensions and eventually lead to military conflict with rival claimants or the United States. At the center of this drama lie
the 12 main islets and more than 100 coral reefs of the Spratlys. Scientists describe the Spratlys as biological
“stepping stones”
for successive generations of corals and fish, meaning that larvae float hundreds of miles toward the Spratlys
on ocean currents and stop in eddies near their corals to breed. Successive generations then travel further to create
or repopulate marine communities elsewhere in the South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, or the Coral
Triangle between Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Solomon Islands. The Spratlys are “positioned very
neatly to transfer biodiversity” across open water, says Clive Wilkinson, the former lead coordinator for the non-profit Global Coral
Reef Monitoring Network. In addition to producing larvae, the Spratly reefs also function as biological “roadside cafes”
for migratory fish, including tuna, that travel through the South China Sea on their way to the Indian Ocean
and stop at the Spratlys to feed, he adds. “So any damage to them [the reefs] will have long-term repercussions,” says
Wilkinson. The South China Sea is chronically understudied, in large part because so many of its offshore rocks, reef, and atolls are military-
patrolled zones that scientists cannot access. Chou Loke Ming, a coral reef expert at the National University of Singapore, says that nearly all
on-the-ground scientific research on the South China Sea has so far been confined to near-shore areas where territorial ownership is not as
murky as it is in the Spratlys. But the existing science already paints a portrait of abundant biodiversity. For example, a 2015 computer-
modeling study found that larvae from the coral
species Acropora millepora, whose intricate branches help to shelter other organisms,
float from the Spratlys across large swathes of the South China Sea and the Coral Triangle, “further
highlighting the importance of the Spratly Islands to the greater region. ” And a 2015 species survey said previous
estimates of the South China Sea’s reef biodiversity have been “exceedingly low,” largely because of a lack of data for the Spratlys and some
reefs off the Philippine island of Luzon. Scientists think the Spratly reefs’ genetic diversity could help them
weather the impacts of storms, ocean acidification, and other impacts linked to global warming.
Larvae from the reefs could help repopulate distant marine communities that are less biologically
resilient. If patches of biodiversity “blink out” occasionally across the South China Sea, “the idea is that if you have a lot of exchange, they’ll
be reseeded in the near future,” says Eric Treml, a marine biologist at the University of Melbourne who has created computer models of
regional fish-larvae movement. Scientists say China’s
island building may imperil that system of genetic diversity and
biological connectivity. But how great is the cumulative threat from reef building and fishing? McManus estimates that
China has already caused 55 square miles of “decadal-scale” damage through giant-clam harvesting and
seafloor dredging near its new islands. That is worrying because seafloor dredging can kill corals by blocking their
access to sunlight as has happened near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where sediment plumes
extended for up to 28 miles from a seafloor dredging site. By contrast, only 6.5 square miles of South China Sea reefs have
been damaged by China’s island building and dredging for channel and harbor projects, according to McManus’ forthcoming study. Yet he
describes that damage as “essentially permanent.” “You cannot grow a coral on an airstrip because they don’t grow on airstrips;
they grow underwater,” says Edgardo D. Gomez, a marine biologist and a professor emeritus at the University of the Philippines. And because
the Spratly reefs have such a high degree of species endemism, Gomez adds, “We may have lost a number of species that we never
discovered.” Scientists
also worry that China’s island-building campaign could exacerbate the risk of a
fisheries collapse in the South China Sea. Decades of commercial trawl fishing in the sea’s coastal areas have already led to
declining catches in most of its fisheries, and many Chinese and Southeast Asian fishing fleets — some with support from government programs
— have begun to target deep-water habitats, according to the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia. The
Spratlys and
other offshore reefs have long been somewhat protected from these pressures because fishermen saw
them as difficult and dangerous to access, scientists say. But China’s new islands could change the
equation by providing offshore harbors for Chinese fishing fleets. Wilkinson says that once ports are established on the
new islands, “fishing boats will use the area more and more until eventually they deplete populations.”

Climate change ensures a continual practice of environmental injustice globally –

especially for black folk
Lai-Peterson 18 (Jennifer Lai-Peterson – Senior Attorney at Advancement Project. 4/30/18, “Climate
Change Is Not A Future Problem For Communities of Color. It Is a NOW Problem.”
https://advancementproject.org/climate-change-not-future-problem-communities-color-now-problem/)
The discourse around climate change today is not about whether (no pun intended), but when. Even oil and gas companies are openly stating in
federal court that they “accept the consensus in the scientific communities on climate change. [1] Some climate scientists say we have about
20 years before catastrophic changes are upon us.[2] Others say due to fracking, “we’re almost there today.”[3] For communities of
color, however, the when is now. “It’s not about one or ten or twenty years before climate change. Nah. It’s happening right now in the Black
community. We’ve been dying,” a Black elder who survived Hurricane Katrina, Curtis Muhammad, told me recently. “We live in the low-lying
flood areas. We’re in Cancer Alley. We are the canaries in the coal mine.” Indeed, communities of color have long
been “living on the front lines of both the causes and effects of climate change,” says Monique Harden, Assistant
Director of Law and Policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ). [4] Studies show polluting industries that
release both toxic and climate pollution are disproportionately located near communities of color. In addition, there is
little disagreement today that due to structural inequities based on race, communities of color continue to be
hit “first and worst” in the climate crisis.[5] “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana is one example. It is an area that
stretches along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and the Gulf of Mexico with over 200 petrochemical
facilities. African American and Indigenous communities bear the brunt of that pollution. Such pollution
can cause not only asthma and cancer, but also the warming of the planet and the creation of stronger
hurricanes that wreak havoc on communities of color in the Gulf of Region. “These are all of one piece,” Ms. Harden
concludes.[6] Ms. Harden’s group, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), is leading local efforts to stop a proposed gas
power plant that is planned near predominantly African American and Vietnamese American neighborhoods in East New Orleans. [7] Residents
of East New Orleans continue to struggle to rebuild their communities after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and levee failure. Their
struggle is difficult not only because of the hurricane, but because of the inequities in governmental disaster funds that have skipped over
them.[8] Adding to this injustice, Entergy, a utility corporation, is seeking environmental permits for the gas power plant, which would allow
on an annual basis more than one million pounds of toxic air pollution near homes and schools in East New Orleans and over one billion pounds
of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. “Climate science indicates a level at which greenhouse gas emissions should be cut back
to mitigate climate change. Environmental science tells us that there is no safe level for many of the pollutants that are spewed into the air.
How long would it take to establish laws and policies that respond to this science if, on a national and global scale, predominantly white
children and families bore the brunt of all the risks and harm of climate change and toxic pollution?” Ms. Harden asked in a recent discussion.
Communities of color face tremendous challenges during and after climate-related extreme weather
events. For example, communities of color often have fewer resources to evacuate. And when evacuated,
communities of color are displaced for long periods of time without governmental recognition of their
fundamental right to return. In this period of displacement, the machinations of “disaster capitalism” then
descend and the wholesale dismantlement of public systems (schools, utilities, housing) is suddenly on
the table.[9] It is beyond the scope of this post to detail the tireless and brilliant work of all those in the Gulf South, Puerto Rico, and
Houston who fight this fight every single day. Instead, what I lift up today is a foundational principle that has stayed with me through the years:
Nothing about us without us is for us. This was the rallying cry of Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The people most affected by the impacts
of climate change must be at the center of the response to the climate crisis. Those most affected must lead our collective efforts. And those
leaders and efforts should be identified and expanded now.

Black women are uniquely key to environmental justice movements and spearhead
current political reforms – 1. Proves they get access to their literature base about
black women and political processes and 2. Proves the institutions key argument
because absent engagement, white climate deniers will always reframe the debate
against black communities
Toney ’19 (New York Times, “Black Women Are Leaders in the Climate Movement,” 7/25/19,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/black-women-leaders-climate-movement.html)//geo
Before the first Democratic debate, I watched one of my favorite shows, MSNBC’s AM Joy, excited to see not one, but three people of color
tapped to talk about climate change and how candidates were discussing it along the campaign trail. My heart dropped when Tiffany Cross, a
guest commentator on the show, stated that while climate change disproportionately impacts communities of color, it’s an issue only in very
“niche groups” of those communities. She wasn’t claiming that the issue wasn’t important, but that your average black person didn’t see it as
an everyday thing. Despite stereotypes of a lack of interest in environmental issues among African-
Americans, black women, particularly Southern black women, are no strangers to environmental
activism. Many of us live in communities with polluted air and water, work in industries from
housekeeping to hairdressing where we are surrounded by toxic chemicals and have limited food
options that are often impacted by pesticides. Environmentalism, in other words, is a black issue. For
more than 20 years, Dr. Mildred McClain has been fighting to protect and educate communities of color in
Savannah, Ga. When the air was thick with pollution from the shipping channels in the Savannah port in 2018, Dr. McClain convened
community meetings so that people were part of the solution. She encouraged African-Americans in her community to
become certified in environmental fields like hazardous waste removal, soil remediation and air
monitoring. Dr. Beverly Wright, a professor of sociology, has been training leaders from our country’s
historically black colleges and universities in the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. She started
the HBCU Climate Change Consortium and the HBCU-CBO Gulf Equity Consortium, where her students assisted Hurricane Katrina
victims, researched climate impacts on vulnerable communities and took their brilliance to places like
the COP21 in Paris to witness the negotiation of the Paris Climate Accord. Dr. Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, a
community activist and an assistant professor of environmental and health sciences, helped to start
West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA), an organization in West Atlanta that has helped protect an
entire community watershed from sewer overflowsthat affected one of the area’s oldest black
neighborhoods. We live in pollution, play around it, work for it and pray against it. Hell, we even sing
about it. Black women are everyday environmentalists; we just don’t get the headlines too often. Rarely do we see
or hear black voices as part of national conversations about policy solutions, the green economy or
clean energy. We’re relegated to providing a comment on environmental justice issues like the water
crisis in Flint; or we’re the faces in the photos when candidates need to show that they’re inclusive
when talking about climate solutions. This January in my home state of Mississippi, hundreds of families and farms were
overwhelmed with floodwaters. In 2019 alone, the Mississippi Delta has experienced 114 days of high water — the most days of consistent
flooding since the Great Flood of 1927. Communities from Belzoni to Anguilla to Rolling Fork to Greenville have been ravaged. I grew up in the
Mississippi Delta, mere blocks from the river. As a child, I both feared and respected it. I
was raised in a community of elders
who told stories of how women and children were evacuated and more than 700,000 were made
homeless by the treacherous 1927 floodwaters. Black men were forced by white landowners and law
enforcement — at gunpoint— to build barriers. Black women could get food for their children only
through a white person to whom they “belonged” or for whom they worked on their plantation. An
estimated 10,000 farm families were stranded near my hometown while they watched in horror as the
river kept rising. Our elders and ancestors lived through emergencies. The 1928 Hurricane of Lake Okeechobee is rumored to be the
greatest loss of black life in one day before Hurricane Katrina. At least 2,500 souls perished in that flood, mostly black migrant workers from the
Caribbean. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and the Eastern Seaboard Heatwave of 1911 both saw significant loss of life, but also the survival
of those who made it through. When I became mayor of Greenville, Miss., in 2004, I grew from revering the river to respecting its power and
understanding the need to protect it. Over the course of my eight years as mayor, Greenville experienced two500-year flood events. Despite
hearing the Republican rhetoric of “climate change ain’t real,”people knew that something more than a
rising river was changing and amiss. Deer and duck seasons weren’t the same as in years past. Cotton and soybean crop yields
were different; increased heat, droughts and floods meant more pests and decreased yields. The river waters were coming faster and stronger
from the increased snow from the Northeast. It felt like no one was listening to the voices of the poor, of rural folks, of Southerners. We knew
then just as we do now: Climate change is a threat to black life. Earlier this year, I attended the Women’s Auxiliary meeting of the National
Baptist Convention in Jackson, Miss. A group of us from Moms Clean Air Force had produced a climate-focused Bible study, but we’d made a
miscalculation. In a room of more than 350 black church women leaders, we ran out of the 150 Bible study books we had on hand. These
studies include scriptures, lessons and actions that activate a community to engage on climate. Each lesson included actions that members
could take either individually or collectively as a congregation. From simple nature walks with a Sunday school class to calculating your
ecological footprint to discussing air pollution and asthma among members; each section of the Bible study ends with an action. One woman
wasn’t leaving without the assurance of getting a study book. “Listen baby, stick this in your bra, I want to make sure you don’t lose it,” she said
to my colleague Shakeila James. We smiled as we knew exactly what she meant. Only items of precious value and importance are kept in a
black woman’s bra. Be it a hidden $20 bill, the phone number of a special person or numbers to be played in the lottery; there is no more
secure place on this planet. To be given a note to put in one’s bra, close to the heart, is an unspoken message of trust, and this dear lady was
communicating it clearly. My friend stuck the paper with the woman’s name, address and phone number in her bosom. She’d make sure the
woman got her book. It’s now our responsibility together as black women — but even more so as black people — to continue sharing the
messages of not only climate but also our expertise on what can be done. We must make our voices heard by contacting our
congressperson and senator, and by voting for climate candidates. These actions will get us to the larger
goal of passing the kind of big, ambitious federal laws like those requiring 100 percent clean energy that
we need to rein in our carbon and methane emissions. Let us all begin passing the proverbial “bosom notes” through
churches, schools, grocery stores and neighborhoods everywhere. Our communities and our mothers are depending on us.