Reading the Resolution: What the Regime Change Topic Actually Asks

The 2026 Nationals resolution reads: "Resolved: The United States is justified in using force to remove authoritarian leaders from power." It looks like a foreign policy topic. It isn’t, or at least not in the way most Public Forum topics are. There is no "should," no plan, no "on balance," no year-by-year cost estimate to fight over. The resolution asks a moral question about a category of action, and teams that prep it like a policy topic end up with a stack of cards and no way to tell the judge what the cards prove.

Before you write a contention, you need to know what the words ask of each side. This post goes through the resolution one phrase at a time. For each phrase, I’ll cover what it most plausibly means, what interpretations teams will try, and whether that fight is worth your speech time. By the end you should be able to write a short framework, two or three sentences at the top of your constructive, that tells the judge how to decide the round before you read a single piece of evidence.

"The United States"

Start with the actor, because it’s the phrase most teams skip. The resolution doesn’t ask whether force is ever justified to remove authoritarian leaders. It asks whether the United States is justified in doing it. That matters for both sides.

For Pro, the actor narrows the question in a helpful way. You don’t have to defend a world where any country can invade any neighbor it calls authoritarian. You defend one actor with specific capabilities: the largest military in the world, a network of alliances, a permanent Security Council seat and a long record of both successful and disastrous operations. Pro can argue that capability creates responsibility. If one actor can stop a massacre at a reasonable cost and nobody else can, the question of whether it is justified in acting is sharper for that actor than for anyone else.

For Con, the actor is where much of the best ground lives. Even if regime change could be justified in the abstract, Con can argue that this particular actor fails the test. The United States has interests in oil, bases, trade and alliances that shape where it intervenes. It has supported authoritarian governments when they were useful, and it has a documented history of covert operations against elected governments, such as the 1953 coup in Iran. A Con team can concede the philosophy seminar version of the question and still win by arguing that the US specifically lacks the impartiality and track record that justification requires. I’ll call this the agent argument, and it comes up in every post in this series.

One interpretive fight to be ready for: does "the United States" mean acting alone, or does it include acting as part of a coalition? The plain reading is that the US is the one using force, alone or with partners. A US-led NATO campaign counts. A French operation that the US doesn’t take part in probably doesn’t. Don’t let the other team win the round on this. Offer the reasonable reading in one line and move on.

"is justified"

This is the most important phrase in the resolution, and the one that decides the most rounds. "Is justified" is a claim about moral permissibility. It asks whether the action can be right, not whether it will turn out well every time and not whether the US should adopt it as a policy tomorrow.

The first thing to settle is whether the resolution is a general claim or a universal one. Does Pro have to prove that US force against authoritarian leaders is always justified? Or only that it can be justified, in at least some meaningful set of circumstances? Most judges will hear the resolution as a general principle, the way "lying is wrong" is a general principle that doesn’t collapse because you can think of one case where lying saves a life. That reading sits in the middle. Pro can’t defend a single hypothetical and call it a day, and Con can’t win by pointing to one bad war.

In practice, the strongest Pro teams defend a bounded principle: the US is justified in using force to remove an authoritarian leader when specific conditions are met. The usual conditions come from just-war thinking: mass atrocity underway or imminent, peaceful options exhausted, a reasonable chance of success, and a response proportionate to the harm it prevents. The strongest Con teams attack that principle two ways. The first is that the conditions are never really met in the real world. The second is that a principle the US applies to itself becomes a principle it applies selectively, and that selectivity is the problem.

Here’s the trap that catches Pro teams. If you defend conditions so narrow that they almost never occur, a good Con team will argue your case is no longer topical in spirit. The resolution is about removing authoritarian leaders, and your case is about stopping genocide, which is a different and much easier question. Your conditions need to be narrow enough to be defensible and broad enough to still be about regime change. We’ll come back to how to strike that balance in the Pro post.

The trap that catches Con teams is the reverse. If you spend the round listing failed interventions, a smart Pro concedes every one of them and says: "Those failed our conditions. They weren’t justified. Nothing in this list touches our principle." Con needs a reason why the record of failure is evidence against the principle, not just against specific decisions. That reason is usually structural: regime change fails for predictable reasons that the conditions can’t screen out.

"in using force"

"Force" most naturally means military force: airstrikes, invasion, special operations raids, naval blockades enforced by arms. It probably doesn’t mean sanctions, which are coercive but not force in the ordinary sense. It probably doesn’t mean diplomatic isolation or funding opposition groups either.

The interesting edge cases are covert operations and support for armed rebels. If the CIA arms an insurgency that overthrows a dictator, did the United States use force? Reasonable people disagree. Pro generally wants a narrow definition, because the history of covert regime change is ugly and Pro doesn’t want to defend it. Con generally wants a broader one, for exactly the same reason. My advice to Con: don’t build your case on the definition. Use covert history as evidence about the agent, about what the US does when it decides a foreign leader has to go. That argument works under any definition of force, because it’s about American judgment rather than about which tools count.

There’s also a question of scale. Does a single targeted strike that kills a leader count as using force to remove him? Probably yes, and that opens up a debate most teams won’t prep: targeted killing as a narrower, cheaper form of regime change. Pro teams looking for an edge can argue that removal doesn’t require occupation. Con teams should be ready to answer that removing the leader without a plan for what comes next is the recipe for a power vacuum.

"to remove"

"To remove" sets the purpose. The resolution is about force aimed at removing a leader from power, not force used for other ends that happens to weaken a leader. That distinction matters for historical examples. The 1999 NATO air campaign over Kosovo was aimed at stopping Serbian forces, not at removing Slobodan Milosevic, who stayed in power until protests and an election forced him out in 2000. The 2011 intervention in Libya was authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1973 to protect civilians, but it ended with Muammar Gaddafi’s fall and death, and critics argue regime change was the real goal from early on.

That Libya fight is worth preparing, because both sides will use the case. Pro may say Libya shows force stopping an imminent massacre in Benghazi. Con may say Libya shows how a limited humanitarian mission drifts into regime change, how that drift damages trust (Russia and China abstained on 1973 and later cited Libya as a reason to block action on Syria), and how the aftermath goes wrong without a follow-through plan. Know the facts well enough to explain which part of the operation you think the resolution is about.

"Remove" also says nothing about what happens next, and that silence cuts both ways. Pro will want to argue that the resolution asks only about the removal: if removing the leader is justified, the aftermath is a separate question about implementation. Con will argue, correctly in my view, that you can’t evaluate whether an action is justified without its foreseeable consequences. Just-war thinking itself includes a reasonable chance of success. If removal predictably produces civil war, that’s part of whether the removal was justified. Pro teams that try to wall off the aftermath usually lose that argument with judges, so don’t rely on it.

"authoritarian leaders"

The last phrase defines the target, and it’s broader than many teams realize. "Authoritarian" covers a wide range: one-party states, military juntas, personalist dictatorships, and hybrid regimes that hold elections but don’t let anyone win them. The resolution doesn’t say "genocidal leaders" or "leaders committing crimes against humanity." It says authoritarian.

That breadth is Con’s friend. Under the plain text, Pro is defending a principle that applies to a large share of the world’s governments, including some US partners. Con can ask in crossfire: "Is the US justified in using force to remove every authoritarian leader, or only some? Who picks which ones?" If Pro says only the ones committing atrocities, Con can argue that Pro has rewritten the resolution. If Pro says all of them, Con has a far easier case to beat.

Pro’s best answer is that "authoritarian" is the condition that makes the question arise, not the only condition for justification. Being authoritarian means the population has no peaceful way to remove the leader. That is what makes outside force even thinkable. Whether force is justified in a given case depends on additional criteria. This is a reasonable reading, and most judges will accept it if you explain it early and calmly rather than springing it in rebuttal.

Putting it together: write your framework first

Once you understand the words, you can write a framework. On a justification topic, the framework does more work than on almost any other PF topic, because it tells the judge what counts as winning. Without one, the round becomes a list of examples and counter-examples, and the judge picks whichever list sounded more alarming.

A workable Pro framework sounds like this: "The resolution asks whether US force to remove authoritarian leaders can be morally justified. We defend a principle: it is justified when an authoritarian leader is committing or about to commit mass atrocities, peaceful options have failed, and force has a reasonable chance of stopping the harm at a proportionate cost. If we show that principle is sound and that real cases meet it, you vote Pro."

A workable Con framework sounds like this: "Justification requires more than good intentions in the abstract. It requires an actor who can reliably tell justified cases from unjustified ones and a method that predictably produces better outcomes than the alternatives. We’ll show the United States fails both tests. If the principle can’t be applied responsibly by the actor the resolution names, it isn’t justified, and you vote Con."

Notice what both frameworks do. They name the standard, say what each side has to prove, and set up the weighing before the evidence arrives. Practice saying yours in under twenty seconds. Then practice answering the other side’s version, because the most important clash on this topic is usually the clash over what "justified" requires. Whoever wins that clash usually wins the round.

Definitions worth fighting over, and ones that aren’t

Not every interpretive question deserves speech time. As a rough guide, fight over "is justified" (general versus universal, and whether consequences count) and over whether "authoritarian leaders" means all of them or those who meet further conditions. Those fights decide rounds. Don’t fight over "the United States" (alone or in coalitions both count), over whether sanctions are force (they aren’t, and nobody will run it seriously), or over dictionary definitions of "remove." If the other team tries to win on one of those, give a one-line reasonable reading and spend your time on the clash that matters.

The next two posts build each side from these foundations. The Pro post covers atrocity prevention, just-war criteria, and how to defend a bounded principle against the historical record. The Con post covers sovereignty, the record of foreign-imposed regime change, and the agent argument. Read both, whatever side you’re on, because on this topic you can’t answer an argument you haven’t tried to make.