HHAYD, on Nov 7 2008, 09:50 PM, said:
I have a question, what caused GOONS, FAN, and GATO lose so much powers?
I am a bit interested in CN politics now, but I am mostly a bystander.

GATO used to be even stronger (in relative terms) then it looks like on this chart, but it lost three wars with Pacifica (the two seem to be opposed since the elder days of the first great war), the last one more or less putting it in the crippled state it exists in today. (Though they have proved to be the &#$@roaches of CN, bouncing back when no one expects them to, so maybe they will eventually make a comeback.)
FAN got smashed by the rest of the initiative in the VietFAN war for both agreeing to unknown truces with WUT enemies and generally being impossible to control, and though they took their chunk of flesh out of the NPO on the way down they never really have had the breathing room to recover at all. They are currently stuck in VietFAN number two, so I don't see that situation changing anytime soon, but they do seem to have a functioning government and membership base, so the capability for rebirth is probably still there if they are ever granted it.
GOONS probably came the closest to establishing a New World Order centered on them, but they just pissed off too many alliances and when the Unjust War broke out they were swapped by a huge coalition and torn to shreds. They tried to pull off their own version of VietFAN called AfGOONistan, but, well, the results were less then spectacular and eventually they disbanded.