RoFAvin 2.0
Electric Boogaloo

---

In February, I successfully ran for Minister of Foreign Affairs on a platform of revamping how the Ministry thinks about its ambassadors. Its key feature was a manifesto that I wrote, called “The modern South Pacifican Ambassador”, and in that term I used it as a guiding principle. Despite some setbacks, good progress was made towards making that vision a reality, with myself as the Minister and Qaz as Secretary of State at my side, helping me with organizational aspects. However, there is still work to do. I am once more asking for your vote for us to continue this journey.

Let’s step through that manifesto together to see where we are and where we need to go.

---

The modern South Pacifican Ambassador

The modern South Pacifican Ambassador won’t bore the foreign citizens of their assigned regions with lengthy texts that nobody reads. Rather, they will give short and quick updates about the important events in the South Pacific, tailored in style to the intended audience, and engage with the citizens of those foreign regions to answer questions and drive interest.

The South Pacifican Ministry of Foreign Affairs has long eschewed the big foreign update format to promulgate information to other regions. This is a good thing — as I’ve said before, quicker, shorter updates are more likely to be read, more likely to be timely, and more conducive to discussion. That being said, we have not made sure that ambassadors are providing those quick updates. Nobody likes saying it out loud, but at the end of the day, these updates do serve as a quasi recruitment function, which after this latest summer lull plus the possible coming changes with Frontiers and Strongholds, becomes more important than ever, even for a feeder such as ourselves.

The modern South Pacifican Ambassador won’t be isolated to one or more assigned regions. They will, as part of their duties, be frequent readers and, ideally active participants, of the wider NationStates Gameplay bazaar, and through that be imbibed with a working knowledge and understanding of the interregional political world.

When I took office in February, most ambassadors were not aware of the wider world. We made some progress during that term, but still too many ambassadors were not engaged or acquainted. Once again, we will be prompting ambassadors to immerse themselves in the wider interregional politics, which will be made easy for them given the next point.

The modern South Pacifican Ambassador won’t be left to self study the impact of what they are seeing. They will engage in active conversation with their colleagues, seasoned advisors of the Ministry, and the Minister about the meaning and significance of foreign events from all over the place, and thereby gain crucial intuition for judging and categorizing what is happening.

This point was a huge success in my February term, but unfortunately this stagnated somewhat in this past term. Reestablishing the productive internal culture we had established by June won’t be hard to do and we will do that immediately. To help facilitate the culture, I will reevaluate our roster of advisors and make sure we have a set of active and knowledgable people participating and sharing their knowledge.

The modern South Pacifican Ambassador won’t keep the information they gather to themselves or a select few bureaucrats within the Cabinet. They will actively bring updates from their assigned regions to the South Pacific for consumption by its citizens, and keep public informational documents on their assigned regions up-to-date.

During my term, we made some progress towards generally accessible wiki pages for various regions (including a template for these pages), and began to gather updates from foreign regions collected by ambassadors in a central place. I was quite happy to see that during Jay’s term, these updates began to be regularly published to our citizenry in digest form, a practice which I intend to continue. We do still need to work on the informational wiki pages, but it won’t be as much work as it would have been a few months ago — Qaz has already gathered much of the necessary data, and it just needs to be brought into the wiki and augmented by the expertise of the various region’s ambassadors.

The modern South Pacifican Ambassador won’t be clueless about how to talk to foreign diplomats, or about correct decorum in diplomatic discussions. They will be part of these discussions whenever possible to see first-hand how these things work and, given their intimate knowledge of both the South Pacific and the other region, be uniquely qualified to participate.

I generally took the assigned region’s ambassador with me to diplomatic meetings during my term, even during the intense negotiations with the North Pacific. I will continue this practice, and as often as possible have the ambassador take over parts of the conversation for themselves. To make sure that every ambassador gets a small taste of it, I intend to engage with every region that we have an ambassador for, spaced out throughout the term.

The modern South Pacifican Ambassador is a Minister-In-Training. Any one of them that has performed their duties for some length of time will have all the skills, tools, and wisdom required to become the next great Minister of Foreign Affairs.

We're training our ambassadors to be curious and involved in their assigned regions, keep themselves updated about the state of the interregional world, and negotiate with skill and confidence. This is exactly what we want in a Minister of Foreign Affairs. We also want competitive elections, with multiple great candidates presenting and debating their plans for the future. It’s a sign of a healthy democracy. All the other points of the manifesto directly contribute toward this point, and even if the full vision had no other ultimate goals than this one, it would be one worth pursuing.

---

Foreign Policy

I remain satisfied with our current direction and position in terms of foreign policy. As I’ve said before, we are democratic, defender, and defenders of democracy. We are also willing to work with almost anyone in good faith if our interests align and good faith is reciprocated.

The planned changes to the game with regards to Frontiers and Strongholds are likely to have foreign policy implications. During the diplomatic engagements with other regions I mentioned above, I (or the relevant ambassador) will be talking to these regions about those changes to see how they stand on it and where our interests align.

---

On Me

I’ve been around and done quite a lot in the South Pacific. I am our longest serving Prime Minister, at 5 full terms (20 months!) non-consecutively. It’s fair to say that I have been the most FA-forward Prime Minister we have had, at least in recent times. I have also been an FA advisor for years and was usually involved at least as a consultant for nearly all major FA events of the past few years. And of course, I served in this very position already from February to June of this year.

Last term, I promised that I would only run for one term. While that ultimately came to pass (in part due to RL), I honestly considered breaking that promise, as I enjoyed this office very much and felt that I was very effective. I won’t make that promise this time, but I hope for solid and viable competition for this job by our ambassadors come next February. I look forward to that, no matter if I’m running then or not.

My home region is, and always has been, the South Pacific. If conflicted between the South Pacific and any place else, I will always choose TSP, no exception. That being said, I am also a citizen in Lazarus, serve as Chief Justice in Mariner Trench (the companion region to the MT Army), and am a Commander in the Order of the Grey Wardens. I have no intentions of attaining any political position in any of these, and I see the potential for conflicts as extremely low (and so far, history has validated this).

---

And as always - I encourage you to ask any and all questions that you have. I will be delighted to answer them.

Reply

Are there any regions that stand out to you as worth pursuing a treaty or starting a relationship?

Do you have any plans to improve defender influence in the Security Council? If so, how will you achieve them?

How will you handle our relationship with TNP, which has seen a tenuous past year, and their continued antagonism against the PfS, such as their organized downvoting campaigns against PfS recommendation dispatches?

How will you handle inter-bloc relations between the PfS and the WALL considering that the two will likely publicly stand on opposite ends from time to time as they had on the quorum raiding proposal?

And lastly, fish?

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

My History

Reply

Policy questions, woo! \o/

Are there any regions that stand out to you as worth pursuing a treaty or starting a relationship?

For pursuing a treaty, none come to mind where it's an obvious slam dunk worth doing. Just for reaching out and touching base, Alvarez might be worth taking a look at.

Do you have any plans to improve defender influence in the Security Council? If so, how will you achieve them?

Our support for PfS is our strongest weapon to fight for our interests in the SC.

How will you handle our relationship with TNP, which has seen a tenuous past year, and their continued antagonism against the PfS, such as their organized downvoting campaigns against PfS recommendation dispatches?

As with other regions, I will be reaching out to TNP to just discuss how things are at the moment. Points of contention, such as what you mentioned, will certainly be brought up and discussed. TNP's incoming Delegate is Madjack, who became their MoFA near the end of my last term and with whom we were able to then finally reach an agreement on the quorum raiding dispute that plagued us throughout the first half of the year. Where that ultimately goes is up in the air, though I'd like to note that the Aurora Alliance is our eldest extant treaty and that's not an accident of history.

How will you handle inter-bloc relations between the PfS and the WALL considering that the two will likely publicly stand on opposite ends from time to time as they had on the quorum raiding proposal?

Let things run their course! These are two large and powerful blocs, and it's to be expected that they will stand on opposite ends. Both have various tools at their disposal to fight for our interests, and with us being proud members of PfS, we'll of course throw our weight behind PfS-supported initiatives.

And lastly, fish?

Fish.

Reply

As with other regions, I will be reaching out to TNP to just discuss how things are at the moment. Points of contention, such as what you mentioned, will certainly be brought up and discussed. TNP's incoming Delegate is Madjack, who became their MoFA near the end of my last term and with whom we were able to then finally reach an agreement on the quorum raiding dispute that plagued us throughout the first half of the year. Where that ultimately goes is up in the air, though I'd like to note that the Aurora Alliance is our eldest extant treaty and that's not an accident of history.

I'm very concerned with this answer. While I realize you may have some attachment to the "agreement" that was signed, I have to say as the Prime Minister who agreed to it, I think it has ultimately shown itself to be a mistake. TNP still takes antagonizing, or at best opposing, positions to TSP on a number of foreign policy issues particularly surrounding the World Assembly and military gameplay. My concern is that there's no lesson learned here, as this response approaches that agreement as a positive. And the note about the TSP-TNP treaty being the oldest extant one seems to portray a sense that, again, we will go to nearly any length to keep the "alliance" for the sole sake of keeping it because it's our oldest extant one.

I've shared my thoughts about the "agreement" that was negotiated when I was PM and you were MoFA. But to summarize, it was a band aid solution to a long-term problem that had no clear possible resolution. This Cabinet has already felt constrained in broader FA considerations towards TNP because of this very narrow and singular non-binding agreement. I continue to seriously worry that it's been over-sold and being used as a roadblock to other avenues that would be better for TSP in the long run. The future of TSP does not go through the Aurora Alliance, and indeed has been impeded more than helped by it overall dating all the way back to TNP's reluctance to fight against Hileville's coup until nearly the last minute.

Reply