On the whole, I think this article makes a good point about how Frontier/Stronghold needs to be framed by defenders as being an opportunity to create and solidify an international order based on universalized regional sovereignty, including sovereignty of "Frontier" regions. 

I think this update could potentially produce a propaganda boost for "pure raiders" because it gives a notion that natives have "opted in" to a "raiding/defending game" instead of simply being stuck with it. I think this update will likely be a propaganda boost for Independents because it gives actual concrete stakes to the idea of "regional interests" in a military context -- i.e. creating and defending your own Frontiers and raiding/destroying the Frontiers of enemies. 

I think both of these propaganda points can be contrasted by the notion of an international order which Jay forwards.

I'm cautious about Jay's notion of a multilateral defense alliance. For starters, it's unclear how much such a thing might matter, defenders are already fairly synchronized. That said, it begs the question of how such an alliance would work, how integration between regions would work, and what the political and military purposes of the alliance might be. From there, we can start to seriously evaluate such an idea and its value. On its currently stated terms, I'm not sure the idea is revolutionary, but I think there's something there we can build into something