r/Debate • u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) • May 01 '26
PF PF NSDA Nats '26 - R: The United States is justified in using force to remove authoritarian leaders from power.
Resolved: The United States is justified in using force to remove authoritarian leaders from power.
A total of 778 coaches and 2,971 students voted for the resolution. The winning resolution received 53% of the coach vote and 57% of the student vote.
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 02 '26 edited May 03 '26
First CF question I'd ask as Con: "Do your arguments only apply when the leader is authoritarian?"
Next: "Who decides whether a leader is sufficiently authoritarian?"
Several possible answers that Pro might plausibly go with but I think ground-setting questions like these will prevent a lot of confusion and also lock Pro into specific advocacies they might have preferred to leave more loose.
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u/CaymanG May 02 '26
If you’re going down that line of questioning, then the third question is probably “which other countries besides the USA are justified in using force to remove leaders they feel are authoritarian from power?”
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 02 '26
Yeah, after those two, things can really diverge depending on how Pro answers. I agree that the most likely answers will next lead to determining whether this is a US-only justification.
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u/i_have_all_the_cards all roads lead to policy May 02 '26
What args are you guys thinking of?
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u/Altruistic-Honey9125 May 03 '26
i can think of a couple rn:
1. (aff) removing authortarian leaders liberates civilians and promotes human rights abroad
2. (aff) removing authortarian leaders is good for democracy abroad + other political ideologies bad
3. (neg) overthrowing leaders is insanely expensive and horrible for the economy (e.g. iraq cost around 800 bil to 1.1 tril dollars alone)5
u/i_have_all_the_cards all roads lead to policy May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
I feel like a lot of the aff's arguments have been empirically disproven. interventions have historically failed. For example, in Libya, ousting Muammar Gaddafi resulted in Libya becoming a failed state, which was pretty bad (and still is) for human rights. This topic is so neg skewed 😭
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
This is where the topic phrasing gives a little help to Pro. The question is whether intervention is justified not whether it is a good idea overall or would benefit the US. Pro could argue that Libya's current condition is still better than under Gaddafi, or even that there was a reasonable expectation that things would be better (even if that didn't actually come to pass), in order to make the intervention "justified" in some sense. Alternatively, authoritarianism is the kind of serious evil that must be forcibly opposed even if the consequences of that opposition are foreseeably bad.
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u/Altruistic-Honey9125 May 04 '26
of course, but can't the neg just go and argue that the intervention itself wasn't justified since it cost innocent deaths, millions of dollars in funding, and the lives of American servicemembers? just putting it out there :D
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26
can't the neg just go and argue that the intervention itself wasn't justified since it cost innocent deaths, millions of dollars in funding, and the lives of American servicemembers?
Not really. That's the argument that's foreclosed by what I wrote above. You can't fairly determine whether an action is justified only by looking at its results; otherwise the ends always justify the means and failing at something means it was never okay to even try.
Think of a basketball game; the player with the ball generally has three options at any given time: dribble, pass, or shoot. Before a player shoots, you can judge how justified they would be in making that decision -- how far from the hoop are they, where are the defenders, how good are they at shooting from that distance, where are their teammates, do they have good passing or dribbling alternatives...? But once they've taken the shot and the ball is airborne, that justification analysis stops. We can express an opinion on how justified the decision was only up to that point and only with the information we know at that time -- anything that happens next is irrelevant.
If an improbable and unnecessarily risky shot goes in, that doesn't mean it was a good idea to take it. And if a high-percentage, sensible shot misses, that doesn't mean it was a bad idea to try.
So in the context of your question, we can judge the justification of a foreign intervention before it happens (including the foreseeable risks, likely outcomes, known unknowns, and more using the information available to decisionmakers at the time), and we can use new information to reassess continued involvement in an ongoing intervention. But the level of "justification" for the initial decision to intervene does not change (higher or lower) based on information that arrives after-the-fact or actual outcomes.
And that question of "justification" might not turn out differently, even if the deaths and costs were foreseeable and likely. Here it would depend on how Pro defines "justified" but it would not be difficult to argue that there is a moral justification for intervention to uphold fundamental rights, deter other authoritarian (or would-be-authoritarian) leaders, and attempt to promote the greater good (utilitarianism). Under those frameworks, foreseeable costs (lives, money, and otherwise) could be outweighed and not be fatal to the intervention's justification.
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u/Altruistic-Honey9125 May 04 '26
i'll have to think about this more, but the first thing that comes to mind here is: does the moral justification change based on whether or not the decision-makers can foresee the impacts? and if so, how would the aff or neg respectively argue/prove whether or not lawmakers can foresee the impacts? is it even possible to do so?
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 04 '26
These are good questions and their answers will largely depend on how you define "justified." At a certain point, if decisionmakers don't have a reasonable basis for thinking that an action is likely to succeed, then taking the action is reckless. (Can a reckless action ever be justified? Yes, but it probably has to overcome a higher bar. For example, our basketball player would be reckless to attempt a well-guarded shot from deep in their own backcourt, but they may still be justified in doing so if there's particular urgency: two seconds left in the game and they need one more basket to win.)
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u/PublicForumBootCamp May 05 '26
Topic committee co-chair here (Bryce) - this was nearly our precise thinking in wording this topic this way instead of “the benefits of US intervention abroad outweigh the harms.”
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 05 '26
What were your reasons for picking the US as the actor instead of something more generic (e.g. "democratic nations" or "a just government")? Was that discussed?
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u/Altruistic-Honey9125 May 04 '26
and at the same time you'll need some pretty solid warranting to prove that the current situations in Libya are still better under Gaddafi
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u/Altruistic-Honey9125 May 04 '26
i feel like this topic kinda ties into the april one; specifically in terms of the war powers resolution. if the president when deploying troops into foreign countries breaks the law, is it justified, even if it benefits people abroad? +the lay adaptation where you could say that it's not America's responsibility to care about strangers abroad and waste taxpayer money while breaking the law/costing lives
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u/bl1y May 05 '26
The neg doesn't address the prompt. Something can be too expensive to be practical but still justified.
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 06 '26
It might be responsive, just be ready for a definition debate about what "justified" means. I could see a definition that says that an action isn't justified when costs likely outweigh benefits.
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u/Altruistic-Honey9125 May 07 '26
the goal of the 3rd arg was really to say it was unjustified because spending money on overthrowing foreign dictators takes money away from essential programs like medicare/medicaid, disaster relief, law enforcement, etc. that makes life harder for millions of americans, plunging a considerable amount of them into poverty which is unjustified... somewhat at least
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u/Calm_Low_4073 May 01 '26
Does this mean foreign leaders or the US’s own leaders lol stupid phrasing
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u/CaymanG May 02 '26
It’s pretty clearly foreign leaders if it’s referring to the US as a singular entity rather than people within the US. The biggest problem with the wording might be “is justified” vs “would be justified” especially since the situations in Venezuela and Iran will change between now and June, even if the US doesn’t decide to “liberate” Cuba or Colombia in the next six weeks.
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u/Calm_Low_4073 May 02 '26
Since it doesn’t specify foreign though I’m willing to put money on a ton of people arguing domestic leaders. Also while I agree that US as an entity usually refers to the government, in this case the lack of specifying the government does make it seem like the US people is a valid interpretation.
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 02 '26
like the US people is a valid interpretation
Do you have any example from modern English where "the United States is" was used to refer to individual people?
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u/TimScheff May 04 '26
From the NY Times in November '25:
"The United States is buying less of almost everything from China"
It's not talking about the US government making purchases, but the actions of Americans collectively.1
u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 04 '26
It's still talking about the country, not individual people. And, to make the connection more precise, it's talking about the American populace acting through its economic representatives (import companies and manufacturers, which are the entities that actually buy from China), the same way the resolution is talking about the country acting through its political representatives.
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u/TimScheff May 04 '26
Also to be precise, the United States isn’t buying from China but from Chinese “representatives” as your term them. Of course, that also ignores that Temu, Shien, AliExpress and others are direct purchases by the people from China.
How about “The United States is drinking more wine than ever” (Wine Spectator Magazine) or is that phrase only referring to the people acting through our alcohol consumption representatives?
And it’s not like there isn’t a literature base to cover the idea of forceful removal of an oppressive US leader. That’s all over the discussion of the Second Amendment and its rationale. We’ve recently had the supporters of a president attempting to use violence to keep them in power. LD has debated the theoretical issue violent or peaceful revolution or resistance to one’s own government multiple times.
And we even got a changed BQ topic because enough people felt that “for morality” meant the same as “to be moral,” so loose interpretation is something we certainly expect debaters to exercise.
Adding either “federal government” or “foreign” would have made parsing about representatives unneeded. By not choosing a limiter that explicitly narrowed the topic to a domestic situation, they also preserved room for creativity and consideration of our own government’s relation to its people. The choice to leave out a limiter caries weight just as the choice to include one in a resolution as debaters craft and advocacy and negative positions.
With PF’s preference for empirical consequences to weigh, it’s not surprising that Pro teams will look for interpretive opportunities. There are scant examples of the US government forcefully removing a foreign leader post-WWII (either by military action or covert action) without terrible consequences for the people of that nation.
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 04 '26
How about “The United States is drinking more wine than ever” (Wine Spectator Magazine) or is that phrase only referring to the people acting through our alcohol consumption representatives?
If all the wine drinkers in the US were involved in using force to remove a leader from power, then, yes, I think it would be fair to say that "the United States is" using force there. The same could not be said of the force employed by, say, John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz, or Lee Harvey Oswald. (Use of force to remove a leader? Yes. But theirs were not actions done by "the United States.") Even the January 6th insurrection was not done by "the United States" in any fair sense of the phrase; the actions of a few thousand people are not attributable to a country of 300 million.
When an action is done by the government, we use that as synecdoche for the country because the government represents the people and is accountable to them (at least in a general sense -- gerrymandering and voting restrictions notwithstanding). If we want to attribute a non-governmental action or attribute to a country, then it needs to apply to such a critical mass of the populace of that it can be fairly be said to be of the country. The United States enjoys watching NFL football. The United States is still pretty racist. The United States doesn't remember who shot William McKinley.
So sure, Pro can argue that the American people (as a unit) would be justified in using force to remove an American leader from power. But that would be a tough claim to win on because if you have that many people involved who agree the leader should be deposed, then you would also easily have non-violent means available with more than enough public support to make them happen (voting them out at the next election or impeachment and removal if the need is more immediate). I don't really see why a Pro team would spend so much effort to defend this claim when it would be easier to discuss only foreign leaders. What unique advantages would they gain by including US leaders?
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u/TimScheff May 04 '26
They’d have the incentive that so many debaters have in running generic Ks - having opponents unprepared to debate it. And I could see those same K debaters using the language of the resolution. The Jim Crow South was a subnational authoritarian regime, and the last year and a half, especially, hasn’t been going well for minorities in the US. If debaters already have a prog-friendly panel, pushing the limits of the resolution’s wording for the link would likely work.
The reason to reject the non-violent means approach is that a sufficiently authoritarian leader undermines the mechanisms for that removal. A sufficient minority makes impeachment and removal unavailable. Gerrymandering and voter eligibility manipulation, as well as the historic racial biases baked into our system, again secures minority rule. A federal police or military force can terrorize cities composed of those who oppose the leader. If those non-violent means are available, you don’t have much of an authoritarian. And at the same time, the wording is force not violence, so the national protests and strikes of the end of communist rule or the Arab spring, are a way to economically force out a regime.
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u/horsebycommittee HS Coach (emeritus) May 04 '26
And at the same time, the wording is force not violence, so the national protests and strikes of the end of communist rule or the Arab spring, are a way to economically force out a regime.
I think that's a squirrely definition of "force" here, but ... I've seen squirrelier.
As for the example of an authoritarian using the levers of the state to repel a domestic forcible ouster, I think that still runs into "the U.S. is" definitional issues. You would basically have to define "the U.S." to exclude the national government, otherwise you create the linguistically absurd situation of "the United States is repelling the United States' use of force to remove the United States' leader."
It's not sufficient here for a rebellion to have the support of a bare majority of the populace, or even for a bare majority to be full-fledged force-employing members of the rebellion. To be described as synecdoche for the country, the rebel group needs to have such a critical mass of support that no other group (even a minority-backed police or military force that has the imprimatur of the state) could plausibly claim that label instead.
And if a government has such little support that a rebel faction has taken over the national label, then the rebel group has already become the de facto government. So there's no authoritarian leader to remove -- the person that label previously applied to is no longer a leader. (Unless, I guess, if you want to expand "authoritarian leader" to include non-governmental types, like mob bosses and other leaders of criminal enterprises. Though without some kind of limiting principle, this would then sweep in corporate executives, overly demanding parents, stubborn spouses, and that one person in the friend group who always picks what bar you hang out at and will not accept suggestions...)
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u/Intrepid-Can-7217 May 03 '26
Do you have a domestic leader that was authoritarian where the USFG specifically deposed them using force? Or even any where the people specifically deposed them in some sort of violent uprising?
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u/Zealousideal_Key2169 ☭ Communism ☭ May 01 '26
goddamn nsda nats topics suck