From: Martyrdom
You're one to talk about spin when it's no secret that said cancellation was in no way political and that IRON signed off on our own treaty with Umbrella.
I'll be honest, I don't know much about the interactions there. I don't doubt that IRON signed off on that treaty, but I guess I question if IRON's opinion really mattered at all in the first place. If IRON said, no, we prefer if you didn't sign that treaty. Would things be different today? Maybe you would have waited a couple weeks before you pressured for approval again, but I doubt they'd be able to prevent the treaty from being signed. They may have just said yes to cut through the b.s..
We were aware of the Umbrella treaty and didn't have any principle objections, we didn't "sign off" on the treaty, we don't sign off on the foreign policy objectives of our allies, it's not our job to dictate their agenda. If we are on divergent paths then we will quite simply part when we come to the cross roads. IRON knows where TOP perceives itself to be in the world and vice versa, we're not concerned and neither should anyone else be
Source: Martyrdom
I wanted to make another post about what MCRABT is saying here. It seems there's a small conflict between what TOP and IRON are saying. TOP says IRON was fine with the Umbrella treaty, and IRON is saying they had a ~neutral opinion on the treaty. Further, MCRABT doesn't feel it's his right or responsibility to press his agenda on anyone else, which further begs the question, did you really have a neutral attitude, or did you not want to put your ally in a tough position? That's a rhetorical question, really. I don't need a bunch of TOP rage posts. I'm not here to mudsling. The true answer is probably somewhere in between, and that's OK. I realize there are many dynamics involved with these decisions/events. But I digress, I wrote this blog because I think MCRABT has highlighted an interesting difference between Sparta and IRON, and I wanted to talk about it.
MCRABT seems to imply IRON takes a highly hands off approach to diplomacy of allies and allies of allies. I'd say that's a sharp contrast to how Sparta handles diplomacy with our allies. I'd say Sparta is a pretty vocal alliance with our allies in the sense that treaty partners come to us and tell us they'd like to sign a new treaty partner. Further they ask, how does Sparta feel about that? We see this very clearly: an ally of Sparta's ally, is an ally to Sparta. We want to like our friends. We want to like the friends of our friends. If we don't like someone, we're going to let you know about it. Granted, the choice to treaty is ultimately up to the alliance in question, but the way I see it is if your ally is a liability to us, then it's our business. To have little consideration for our thoughts or opinions is a bold move to make. As such, I/We/Sparta appreciate when other alliances listen to and value our input when it comes to treaty partners. I can think of, but won't name, a few instances where this has had significant impact on Sparta, our allies, and the unaligned. Was the impact positive or negative? Well, I could argue both with myself. I would never argue that we make the right decisions all the time, but I am glad we do things the way we do.
Is Sparta's or IRON's approach better than the other? You can decide that, I suppose.
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