| End of Term Address |
The Future of TSP's Foreign Policy Strategy
an End of Term Address by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Introduction For the past 15 years, the Coalition of South Pacific has represented the success of democracy in NationStates. Our democratic traditions and values have survived several coup d’etat attempts, infiltrations and subversions, and hostile foreign powers. These values guide us in both our internal and external relations and continue to provide a guiding light for the future. Our foreign policy works best when we consciously choose to uphold our values. In this document, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will provide an overview of the strategic landscape of the game, our role in it, and how our traditions and values can aid us in achieving success. The State of the Game We find ourselves in an interesting state of flux. Where five years ago alliance networks were steadfast and centered around common ideological interests, today’s alliances are malleable and lack a centralizing force of ideological or mutual strategic interests. Much of this can be traced back to the fall of imperialism and the void left by the leaders of the former United Imperial Armed Forces. Today’s Independent-imperialist sphere is guided mostly by Europeia. Despite an aborted attempt through the Independent Joint Command Coalition late last year, this sphere has not reached the height of its former glory. What filled the void left by the imperialist sphere was a much weaker and ill-defined network of bilateral alliances among raider and imperialist regions. The power-sharing between Game-Created and User-Created Regions dissolved, and now most military power in the game is found within UCRs and related non-regional military organizations (e.g. The Black Hawks and The Grey Wardens). Relations among GCRs are in a grey state at the moment, with no clear blocs compared to the game of 2014-2017. Those GCRs that have adopted an official military alignment have generally allied among themselves and the “leaner” GCRs that nominally are neutral but nonetheless favor one alignment over the other. While this loose alliance network hints that alignment/ideology may resurface as a central cleavage among blocs and spheres of influence, we haven’t seen a significant effort to disrupt the amorphous status quo. Conflicts among regions in the game have instead revolved around out-of-character incidents and minor in-character scandals. Rather than utilizing regional forces, the weapon of choice in these conflicts has been social trolling and blacklisting through off-site properties like Discord. In other words, there isn’t much of a strategic playground for today’s GCRs, as most conflict is happening among and between individual personalities, about matters only tangentially related to regional strategic interests, if at all. One likely source of this state of affairs is the overall weakness of military gameplay compared to the previous decade. The decline of defending precipitated a general decline of interest in this key part of the game. Raider organizations grew, but strategically significant military operations are few and far between. The unwillingness of most regions to adopt official military alignments likely contributed to this decline. While we were once told that non-alignment or independence would lead to a more active and interesting game, the result has been the clear opposite. Without the core cleavage of military alignment being a matter of debate, there isn’t much driving inter-regional conflict. But rather than prosperous peace, this interbellum period is marked by inactivity and disinterest outside of the aforementioned personality conflicts. There have been some bursts of activity, particularly regarding the New Pacific Order. It looked for a moment that the conflict between the New Pacific Order and the “pro-Pacifica” alliance would create a new axis upon which Gameplay would spin. But unfortunately, that too devolved into personalized conflict, namely with the accusation that the New Pacific Order was fascist or sympathized with fascism, a laughable claim that has been since been retracted. Our Role and Our Values For the first part of this decade, the Coalition’s guiding principle was self-preservation. In the wake of crippling coups, we aligned ourselves with the military power of imperialist alliances for their protection. Indeed, at one point, fear of what imperialist powers would do if we were to ever buck those alliances was a significant barrier to addressing the inequality of our power relationship with the United Imperial Armed Forces. At the midpoint of the decade, that alliance was broken and the South Pacific found itself adrift and without any clear guiding principles. Democracy emerged as the obvious first principle of our foreign affairs, and has guided us to this day. We lay claim to being the oldest extant democracy in NationStates. This accomplishment lent itself to natural affinities for our democratic partners in the Game-Created Regional sphere, specifically The North Pacific and The Rejected Realms. It’s not mystery that TNP is our oldest and strongest alliance, despite the divergence in military alignment from time to time. Our commitments to democratic governance are a shared value and that is, indeed, invaluable. The concept of civil rights and political freedoms goes hand in hand with our commitment to democracy. We can and should expect our allies to respect these rights and freedoms in their own regions, and to respect ours here. Not every Coalition Cabinet has lived up to this principle, though, and every time we look the other way, we lose a little bit of the legitimacy to claim democracy as our first principle. Allying with the New Pacific Order was done out of self-preservation, harkening back to the early 2010s, despite their non-democratic nature and numerous controversial protectorates. At the time, the Cabinet was trying to protect the region from multiple hostile fronts. The New Pacific Order commanded a robust military force, whereas we did not, and their support in fighting back against a hostile invasion or infiltration would likely prove vital. But it was a Sophie’s choice of strategy—one that ultimately hurt more than it helped. The New Pacific Order’s control of St Abbaddon was a powder keg that exploded, and the contemporaneous reveal that several Senators were involved in long-term foreign infiltrations worsened our diplomatic problems. While the relationship ended amicably and the South Pacific and the New Pacific Order remain colleagues, at the end of the day we were no richer in defense and our standing with other regions declined. Why did we find ourselves in that difficult position? While it may be controversial to say, the answer is quite obvious. We never fully committed to a values-driven foreign policy strategy, so our trustworthiness as an ally was always in question. When raider-friendly administrations were elected, we would enjoy lukewarm reassurances of mutual defense from raider and raider-leaning regions (the dubbed “Independent-imperialist bloc”). Meanwhile, relations with defenders crumbled, oftentimes due to direct hostility from Coalition politicians who preferred the Independent-imperialist bloc. Conversely, when defender-friendly administrations were in power, relations with the Independent-imperialists immediately reversed course, and yet defenders would remain skeptical of getting into an alliance with a region that may end up flipping sides again in four months. We have been left with few avenues for strong long-term alliances. When Hileville usurped and we needed foreign aid, it turned out that we could not count on all of our (then-) allies to meet their treaty obligations, exactly because of the wide canyon between our values and theirs. Our Independent-imperialist allies were okay with an illegal coup, because it happened to include a purge of high-profile pro-defenders. Our current paradigm has been a recipe for disaster for the South Pacific for the past 5 years, but collectively we have refused to admit it. The political class has preached “neutrality” or “non-alignment” as the best choice in the game, without reckoning with the consequences of those positions. We have believed that it is possible to have a robust and active military, a solid and reliable diverse alliance network, and secure regional borders while purposefully placing ourselves in the untenable position of walking the thin plank described above. It has failed spectacularly many times over the years, yet remains the default safe position for the political class to run on, and in the process those failures are swept under the rug and become taboo to discuss openly. With democracy as our first principle, we need to face that reckoning. When it comes to how NationStates is played, what style aligns more faithfully with our culture of democracy? Raiding is definitionally anti-democratic. Non-alignment is untenable and makes us an unreliable and untrustworthy partner in the long run, in the eyes of our foreign colleagues, thus leaves our security up in the air when we need our allies the most. Our natural affinity is with defending. It is within our best regional interests – culturally, politically, and strategically – to adopt defending as our official military alignment, and organize our foreign affairs around democratic and defender principles. In doing so, we must maintain our commitment to civil rights and political freedoms, and not fall prey to the desire to purge ourselves of non-defenders as some non-democratic defender regions have done in the past. Adopting defending as our official alignment must be a pro-democracy choice. Alliances & Security The flux nature of our position within the NationStates community has made holding a solid alliance network difficult. In many instances throughout our history, our alliances have depended on our partners’ perception of our alignment. The North Pacific and The Rejected Realms remain the only Game-Created Region allies that have not reneged or cast doubt upon their treaty commitments in the past half decade. In most cases, our alliances have failed because we were perceived as “too defender,” despite strenuous attempts by various administrations to proclaim our “Independence,” non-alignment, or neutrality. If we officially align ourselves with the defender realm, we would open avenues to strong alliance that would withstand the tests of time. The paradigm that has driven our foreign affairs for nearly the past decade has been to act within “regional interests.” But those interests have never been clearly defined. At best, we have formed alliances and conducted foreign affairs based on self-preservation, as in the case of the New Pacific Order alliance. Self-preservation is important, but what are we preserving? Rather than simply preserving our territorial integrity, we ought to preserve our values. Self-preservation of values vitally important. After all, if we aren’t preserving our values, then what “self” are we really preserving? Forming alliances with both democratic and defender regions would not only assure our territorial integrity against foreign attack, but also reinforce our values in democratic governance and the natural affinity to defending arising from that. By becoming a member of the defender realm, we would attract truly reliable allies, compared to the weak and ever-shifting alliance network we have struggled to keep afloat as a nominally non-aligned region. That is not to say that we cannot or should not ally with non-defender regions. The North Pacific, for instance, is not defender but was also the only non-defender ally to have offered material assistance to us during Hileville’s coup. Other non-defender allies at the time, like Europeia, stood idly by while privately wishing the coup would succeed. A diverse alliance structure is not reliable, and in fact places us at greater risk, because we assume our partners across the aisle will come to our aid when they usually don’t. For non-defender regions, specifically those who have adopted democratic government, we should certainly seek non-aggression pacts and alliances. We would need to exercise caution and perhaps participate in confidence-building activities beforehand, but if these regions are willing to accept us as friends and allies, as an officially defender region, then we should welcome them in kind. Bright-Line Principles In concluding this address, the Ministry would like to set forth two bright-line principles that it believes current and future administrations should follow. These flow from our values as a democratic region. Holding these principles would guide us in navigating murky foreign crises, where sometimes the Cabinet can’t see the forest for the trees. By sticking to these principles, we can come to the right decision in many foreign policy crises we find necessary to deal with. Being first-order principles, a lot of guidance can be extrapolated from them.
|
![[-]](https://tspforums.xyz/images/sidr/blue/collapse.png)
![[Image: XXPV74Y.png?1]](https://i.imgur.com/XXPV74Y.png?1)
| Users browsing this thread: |
| 1 Guest(s) |