“For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn’s words tell us a lot about US-Russo relations and the attitude of the West toward Russia, as a whole. For much of most living people’s memory, Russia was a both communist country and a constant threat to the United States. It was “us” against “them”—“we” didn’t trust “them”, “they” didn’t trust “us”. Even though the Soviet Union is gone and a quasi-democratic Russian Federation has emerged, relations are still tense and for many in power in the US, trust is still an issue. Now is the time for the US to remove that obstacle of distrust and suspicion in its dealings with Russia, significantly change its over all foreign policy toward Russia, and then enjoy the direct result of better relations between the two countries.

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Personally, I think this is an amazing resolutional analysis/opening for a case that has anything to do with cooperation, relations, et cetera. I love Solzhenitsyn, and the above quote is absolutely amazing. I wish I could say I came up with this, but I can’t. Although I did re-write it a fair amount, I got the original idea from a portion of this document (side note: that PDF has a lot of good generic info about Russia and the US, dealing specifically with a high school policy debate resolution on the topic. hmm…sound familiar? : ))

If you are one of those debaters who doesn’t like to have your 1AC open with a piece of evidence (which I’m not, but…), and if your case is related to some sort of relations-improving, cooperative policy, this could be an excellent 1AC introduction.