Fellow South Pacificans,

By this time, I assume most of you are aware that there’s a multilateral treaty concerning TSP and several of our other allies at work behind the scenes. There has been a considerable amount of speculation about it and some criticism has been levied at the Cabinet for keeping the Assembly in dark for the entire process. As such, I believe that the current situation justifies the necessity of this thread, for the sake of being transparent and holding ourselves accountable to the Assembly.

In July 2021, the then-Minister of Foreign Affairs Jay Coop started working on a joint alliance with our defender allies; 10000 Islands, Spiritus, the Union of Democratic States and The Rejected Realms, who joined halfway through the negotiations. The underlying concept was to have an explicitly defender-natured treaty that can generate significant interest in the faction and pave one of several ways for others to join it if they wish so. The closest comparison that would describe this well was the XYZ Treaty between TRR, Mordor, Renegade Islands Alliance and Lazarus, with Lazarus withdrawing out of it in 2017 due to the civil unrest it faced at that time. In Jay’s mind, this was an ambitious venture that would be our most valuable treaty once Frontiers/Strongholds rolled out and would fill in the gaps of security we and the other signatories would have then. A name was agreed upon for it; the Aegis Accords, named after the shield wielded by the Greek goddess Athena and her father Zeus, which symbolized the special defender status of this treaty.

In October 2021, as the term was winding down, Jay presented the outgoing Cabinet (which included me as the Minister of Media) with the treaty text and it was approved unanimously. Jay then decided to wait until it had the assent of the incoming Cabinet too before it was presented to the Assembly. This version of the text was already ratified in the UDS and XKI and it seemed that all was progressing well.

However, the treaty never saw the public light of the Assembly here.

A couple things happened in the meantime. We had a new Cabinet, with HumanSanity as the Prime Minister and Roavin as the Minister of Foreign Affairs. TRR joined in on the negotiations. Upon further inspection by the newly included representatives, several ambiguities and flaws were found in the text, with valid concerns being raised by how certain clauses would be interpreted if sticky situations related to it arose. It was generally agreed that it would be better to start over with a new document in place and all the parties would be happy to restart. The talks continued about straightening these flaws out and Roavin created an outline on which the new version would be based off. And then…the momentum kind of died off. Several of the prospective signatories had elections going on in their regions and people just got busy with other pressing issues.

Somewhere along the line, HS and Roavin arrived on the conclusion this was a purely performative piece of legislation that would have no significant impact on the way things are done here and might instead add legal complications in the future that would be hard to deal with. All the parties included already had a standing alliance with each other in place, with the exception of Spiritus and the UDS, and Jay’s vision of providing a viable way of entrance into the defendersphere for new regions wasn’t likely to be accomplished, at least not without taking significant risks for what appears to be very little gains. This was bureaucratizing and placing restrictions on the operations of a faction that doesn’t need any in the first place. And I’m not even going into how some regions would keep how things are right now regardless of what noble intentions this treaty has.

So…the talks stalled out. The very little enthusiasm we had for it petered off entirely and this was punted to the backburner, to be pursued by someone else when they felt like it. Other matters, like our NAP with Balder, took priority and this was left to linger in the oven, with no end in sight. Other representatives didn't care enough to revive it, so we didn't revive it. We just...chose to forget that it existed.

So why am I here in front of you, six months after this entire saga started? Well for starters, I would really love to give this a closure. The current situation can't continue indefinitely. Either we move forward with this and see this completed, or else we admit that this isn't feasible, cut our losses and pull out of this, potentially taking a blow to our PR with the allies involved. This thread is meant to get the Assembly's perspectives on it, because honestly speaking, I'm absolutely clueless on what to do in this situation due to how unprecedented this entire thing is.

And on the behalf of the previous Cabinets, I apologise for the lack of transparency shown throughout the last six months and I hope that I can at least somewhat atone for it, even if that train might've left for the station a long time ago.

Faithfully yours,
Prime Minister Moon.

(This post was last modified: 03-19-2022, 10:54 AM by Moon.)

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Moon's description of events is, from my perspective, largely accurate.

When Jay proposed the idea of a multilateral MDT, I was always skeptical. After all, almost all of these regions have mutual defense treaties, and the ones that don't are executive foundered UCRs with few security needs regardless. Each of these regions has an existing and separate bilateral relationship with one another, and that network is sufficiently strong for defender integration without tying things to a superstructure that is inherently precarious due to needing to satisfy too many competing demands. Originally, the possibility of a MDT was discussed as being incorporated into the existing PfS as an "opt-in element", but this was strongly opposed by several PfS members.

As a result, "Aegis" as a concept was born. From here, my skepticism increased, as to some extent I saw the value of a treaty under PfS' banner and branding as a way of giving a platform to multilateral promotion of defending. But the treaty we were discussing was no longer that, it had entirely become a multilateral mutual defense treaty which almost entirely reduplicates existing mutual defense guarantees. Arguably, an international Defender bloc, with security, cultural, and military provisions would be valuable to promote a public face for defending. However, this simply is not what was under negotiation, nor were we even discussing a launching point for that. (After all, we already have a launching point for that, it's the PfS! And other PfS members have demonstrated opposition to widening the bloc. Roavin wished to bring Aegis under PfS branding, which further delayed the project.)

At this point, I no longer thought of the project as a "high priority" given the above issues with its fundamental concept. It's not a bad idea, I'm certainly not opposed to us doing it, but it was substantially lower on the Cabinet's FA agenda than just about anything else, and as a result never reached its conclusion.

That said, I'm not going to say this was handled perfectly. The broad scope of the negotiations should have been made public, likely during W&S' Cabinet with Jay as MoFA, but if not then certainly during my Cabinet with Roavin as MoFA. I take responsibility for not ensuring that happened. It led to the Assembly being left in the dark and frankly far overhyped on a project that, from my perspective, would be a nice addition to our existing treaty network and foreign affairs tools but not something fundamentally revolutionary.

As a note, for the record, I'll copy and paste Roavin's response on Discord in #legislator-lounge since I doubt he'll hop on the forum thread to post it:

Roawful — Today at 1:56 PM
I tried to get it to work, it being a project initiated by TSP (in the form of Jay), with the expectation of us being the leading force there.
That means getting TRR involved (because of course), trying to clean up the text, and see if this can be a PfS-as-a-brand thing rather than on its own.
Then Reliant happened and I'm retiring, so here we are ?

Minister of Foreign Affairs
General of the South Pacific Special Forces
Ambassador to Balder
Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

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I can't begin to express my profound disappointment that the Aegis Accords fell through, and now that the cat's officially out of the bag and considering the situation we find ourselves in, I owe it to you to discuss at length. When the Assembly elected me as MoFA in June 2021 based on the promises I made, I took that as a mandate to pursue this treaty. In that election, I promised to add security provisions to the PfS Charter. In hindsight, maybe I wasn't clear enough. Nevertheless, when the PfS felt that they were not ready to add security provisions to the Charter, I decided to go down the alternative path I laid out in the SPINN interview during the June 2021 election:

The issue of the region's military presence surfaced in the Minister of Defence Debate earlier this week. Do you think that there is work to be done in that front, particularly as it relates to the South Pacific being a credible leading actor for a defender military alliance?

Yes, we should have a discussion with our friends in the PfS as to whether we are willing to expand the organization's scope, which means adding a military alliance component to the PfS through an opt-in treaty. If that is a conversation that our partners are not willing to have within the PfS, then I will try pursuing it through other avenues, particularly in parallel to the bloc. The work that we need to do is at least have that discussion.

Source: Jun. 2021 Cabinet Election #6 - Minister of Foreign Affairs Interview (Jay Coop)

To restate, I did not consider approaching the Assembly to discuss the alliance because I saw my election as a mandate to pursue it. The saying goes that hindsight is 20/20, so it's easy to say now that mistakes were made during the process. Regardless, I take responsibility for these mistakes.

It's been nine months since talks started on this treaty. Nine months. Most of that time had been dedicated to cobbling the parties together to negotiate this treaty. Initially, the issue was that one party's regional leadership had other real-life matters that limited their ability to participate in the negotiations. Nevertheless, I showed patience. When that party was able to participate in the talks, we worked through the kinks and settled on a final draft that I presented to the cabinet in October. The June–October cabinet unanimously supported bringing the treaty to the Assembly. However, since the region was in transition because of the October elections, I added the stipulation that the October–February cabinet should also vote on the treaty. When weeks went by without the treaty presented to the Assembly, I assumed that the new cabinet was waiting for a change in leadership in The Rejected Realms that would see their entry into the talks when the previous leadership turned down the offer, so I showed patience and trusted the process and kept my mouth shut. Inevitably, the new government in TRR agreed to participate in the talks, so I felt confident that we would have a treaty in the near future. Then months went by, and the treaty never made its way to the Assembly. Then, we have today, and we learn that the talks have apparently fallen through.

I take strong offense that this treaty is "purely performative". With Frontiers and Strongholds on the horizon and a resurgent raider threat, there has never been a greater time to pursue this treaty with such urgency. I saw the Aegis as a vehicle to unite and expand the defender world, and what has happened in the time since we started these talks nine months ago? Sedge announced their intention to add F/S to the game, and the raiders have become a significant threat more so than it has ever been in years. Need we recall that, not too long ago, the raiders destroyed a region? The Mystical Council was destroyed by the raider threat, and there was nothing that the defenders could do about it because we lacked the numbers to overcome the enemy and liberate the region. Today, TMC has been refounded under raider tyranny.

Even though The North Pacific and Thaecia have since cut ties with The Black Hawks and other raider organizations, we need true-blue defenders. The patchwork alliance we have among defenders is not enough to build a strong and united defender world. This is where the will to build a multilateral defender alliance exists. We cannot deny the propaganda value that such a treaty would have and the potential it has to incentivize regions to join the defender cause. Defenders are woefully unprepared to fight in the brave new world of F/S and the resurgent raider threat. We can barely get what we want to pass in the Security Council, and the failed anti-quorum raiding resolution serves as evidence of it.

If it weren't for the fact that I have real-life responsibilities, I would have run for a consecutive term in October and continued the work on this treaty. Instead, I left it with the next cabinet and entrusted them to continue the work, provided that they do so in their own interests. So, if they decided to go another path, I would have accepted it and instead return to the cabinet down the road and revive the treaty then if no one pursued it in the interim. However, we have regional leadership that not only stopped pursuing this treaty but question the need for it. I can accept that having critical eyes is part of having a healthy democracy, but to reduce this treaty as being "purely performative" is outrageous in the face of F/S and the growing raider threat.

It has been five months since I left office, and I waited and waited patiently and trusted the process. To reach this point and hear that the Aegis has fallen through is disheartening. Despite what has happened, I will never stop fighting for this treaty because I firmly believe that it will help strengthen and expand the defender world the way that the PfS has done. I will go as far as to say that, if real-life conditions permit, I will run for MoFA in June on the promise that we revive this treaty and get it done because it does more good for us than harm.

Edit: There is an argument to be made that the Aegis features parties that have, for the most part, treatied up and already bound themselves to the provisions of this multilateral treaty, but the intent here is that the Aegis will inevitably grow beyond these parties to incorporate regions that don't already exist as part of the patchwork of treaties we already have.

4× Cabinet minister /// 1× OWL director /// CRS member /// SPSF

My History

(This post was last modified: 03-19-2022, 10:00 PM by Jay Coop.)

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I've already left most servers due to my resignation, so I have to go off memory here. But Jay, your portrayal downplays your complete and utter failure here, and I don't even know where to begin.

When I came into the Aegis server in October and got to see the "negotiations", I was appalled. There was a treaty draft written by Jay and presented as final. There was no real discussion about the text. UDS and XKI just rubberstamped it, and Spiritus dragged their feet. The project was obviously led by Jay, with an expectation that TSP is taking the lead on this (which is fine and a good thing) but the communication was so bad that UDS and XKI already passed it literally months before Jay even presented it to the TSP Cabinet!

The treaty text was not the worst I've seen, but far from good in any way. We collectively decided to start over, and rather than just submitting a draft and expecting the other signatories to rubberstamp it, we then actually started crafting an outline of what we wanted to achieve, discussing certain topics, and actually having a conversation with each other on what Aegis should be. That was woefully lacking up to that point, unless you did things in DMs in which case they were meaningless anyway because they weren't at the table. As it turns out, particularly UDS was quite active in this effort and, it seems to me, were happy to be "allowed" to participate in this way rather than being expected to go along with it and making them feel like a lesser partner in the process. By the way, Jay, in case you didn't know, UDS is a long time treaty ally of ours.

Let's talk about the PfS aspect. It's correct to say that it was strongly opposed by a few PfS members, but the way this played out was Jay asking a one-sentence question (akin to "how's the weather today") in the PfS server near the beginning of his term, 2-3 individuals replying with "nah", and.... that was it. There was no attempt made to actually start a conversation, to explain the benefits, to ask why there was opposition, or anything. That was the opposite of leadership by Jay. To then portray this as "strong opposition by PfS members" is correct in only the most technical sense at best and a blatant and deliberate mischaracterization at worst. I suggested the topic again, and the idea was to approach PfS again but this time with a more cogent plan, either based on the new outline of Aegis we were working on or even the final treaty, to bring it into PfS and establish PfS as a brand with SC and MDT components.

When you left Cabinet, TRR wasn't part of Aegis. That's actually a huge minus, given TRR's status in interregional defender politics, so while only 20% of the membership, not having them be part of it lessens the treaty's value by much more than that. I got TRR on board, and while it's fair to say that the new government with Nakari as Delegate and Fratt as FA Officer was likely to be more receptive than the Aga government, it's not like TRR just said "ok sure" and jumped on board; furthermore, given how you broached the other topic with PfS, I'm left to wonder if you even tried in any meaningful fashion.

Moving on to F/S, you whinging about F/S in your post is actually the most egregious part about it, because your treaty text did not address F/S AT ALL. Not. One. Bit. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. Only when I took over did the server actually start talking about F/S, and ... well, surprise surprise, the delegations actually had something to say about the topic.

(By the way: Yes, Aegis as it was in October was mostly performative, but that doesn't mean it's without value, and I would say my efforts have made it less performative in the process)

Jay, you're sincerely good at writing nice and uplifting texts, and your complaints about the process are rhetorically well crafted. But that we even got to this point is in large part because of your failures, your lack of leadership, and your basic FA blunders along the way. The idea of Aegis was yours. Nobody can take that away from you, it's a good idea and worth pursuing. But, you have very clearly demonstrated that you are woefully unfit to see it to its conclusion.

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Roavin's commentary is certainly quite the addition to perspective on this.

Anyway, I actually think the Aegis Accords (conceptually) are a really good idea that should be sought after. You could argue that it doesn't accomplish a new policy position, but I feel it could be both new and relevant to the foreign affairs scene if it does two things,

• Address frontiers and strongholds and how the signatories plan to approach it. This could be BIG for setting the stage of how defenders plan to approach the update and its potential consequences.
  
• Leave the door open for additional future signatories to the group.
  

Granted, it could do more to be topical and new, but those are the two things that came to my head right away. I will give it credit in that (if I recall correctly) the draft I saw in October did include the second thing and I assume the redone drafts did as well.

But yeah, major L on the handling of this thus far. If it is going to be pursued, I hope we see better communication and conduct than was initially done.

New Quebecshire,
Full Player Résumé
Discord: Cubic#1608

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For giving more context behind Roavin's post, here's the version that Jay drafted while he was MoFA from June-October 2021;

The Aegis Accords (Jay)

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The treaty text was not the worst I've seen, but far from good in any way.

Could we have more specifics on what exactly where the issues with the original text, and how subsequent discussions addressed (or tried to address) those issues?

Former Delegate of the South Pacific
Posts outside High Court venues should be taken as those of any other legislator.
I do not participate in the regional server, but I am happy to talk through instant messaging or on the forum.

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I genuinely cannot see what was objectionable or complicated about that treaty text.

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Can we get some more clarification? Roavin alleged that Jay's draft did not address F/S at all, but the version Moon posted which he says was Jay's seems to be revised in a few ways and does seem to reference F/S (at least by my interpretation) in a few highlighted sections.

New Quebecshire,
Full Player Résumé
Discord: Cubic#1608

(This post was last modified: 03-20-2022, 09:57 PM by Quebecshire.)

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Just so I'm clear: this treaty is not active, right? Like no region thinks its part of something that it (or we) are not?

-tsunamy
[forum admin]

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