As a high school debate coach, your plan might be to let your team lose a few times, as if you had a choice, as a way of getting them motivated but not demoralized. Any sport comes with reality checks. In competitive sports, such as high school debate, those checks may come in the form of the other team.
The American team has to be ready to take a pro-Russian view as the teams train to argue both sides in some kind of Lincoln-Douglas format. We’re talking a private elite school with plenty of bandwidth. There’s no requirement to fly to Russia or to have the Russians fly here.
The pro Russian position will likely be that Russia did not “invade Ukraine” as Anglophones tend to put it, as the oblasts in question were asking directly to be rescued and amalgamated into the Russian Federation, ala Crimea. The lawyers were never able to reach an agreement on the legitimacy of these referenda, and subsequent ratification in the various chambers, and that started this war of narratives. The legal profession has a reputation for failure, although it’s not as bad as the military profession’s.
The Anglophones will likely stick to their characterization as one of invasion. The relevant data might include: to which side did civilians flee when evacuating their own farms? If the special military operation is actually an invasive onslaught, then Kiev will be able to document how civilians fled towards NATO (i.e. towards the west, geographically) whereas if the population drift were towards Russia (geographically to the east) then that’s called “voting with one’s feet”.
I’m an older guy and not a debate coach myself. I’d judge the debates as a random parent, which isn’t to say we’re completely ignorant of the art of rhetoric. The Roman heritage we get from being Anglophones includes recognizing many pitfalls and fallacies. Ad hominem arguments usually miss the point and so on. If all the pro Americans can come up with is “Putin is a bad guy” then their ship is likely sunk, in the eyes of the judges, but I’m sure they’ll do better than that.
I did find some debates in the archives, again among elite private schools if memory serves, regarding an earlier chapter, wherein the question was whether to link electrical grids. This is what we were up to discussing back in the Reagan Era, when the Cold War was thawing into a healthier time of warmer relations, featuring Apollo-Soyuz and so on.
Then came then unending failures of the State Department, with the successive appointments of deeply unqualified individuals. Obviously that’s just my point of view. I never developed an ounce of respect for those jerks, starting with Secretary George Shultz, the Theranos guy (how I think of him). Madeline Albright was probably the worst.
The brief peace we started under Casey-Reagan, when the Ollie North types were on the run, was replaced by a long period of juvenile delinquency, culminating in the present class of deeply unqualified numbskulls with less than a high school level of education by today’s standards.
Clearly I’m somewhat biased in my outlook and would probably not make a good debate coach, given I just indulged in some ad hominem. The team should use me as a role model for how not to behave on stage.
