First War-Related Blog Post Goes to Me!
Entry posted by Ashoka the Great
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It doesn't take a whole lot of brain power to look at the current match-up between Polaris and those attacking her and to realize where this may very well be headed.
Will it go global? Oh, almost certainly.
My question, though, is how long will it take before some poor alliance is put in the position of having allies and adversaries on both sides? It doesn't take a lot of playing connect-the-dots to make this happen, assuming that people don't activate the non-chaining clauses in their treaties.
What we may see in the days (weeks?) ahead is confirmation of something I've been saying since the middle of the last global conflict. In this brave new world of ours, it is more and more difficult for alliances to belong to a bloc while also having individual treaties with other alliances. It is inevitable that a conflict will occur at some point, and I rather suspect that in most cases bloc ties will take precedence over individual treaties.
While I find the current situation to be deeply regrettable, it may have one side-effect that I could support. If the leaders of various alliances are able to grasp the truth of the paragraph above, we may see a major shake-up occurring either during or after this war. By this I mean that we could end up with two, three or more 'sides' with limited (if any) ties to each other beyond the usual diplomatic niceties that are exchanged between non-allies.
Just to be clear, these 'sides' would not necessarily be enemies just waiting for the opportunity to strike. Or maybe they would. I don't know that it matters.
It may well be that I'm asking too much of alliance leaders. Complacency has taken root in many alliances, to the point where some seem to regard multiple treaties as a kind of insurance that they will never have to get their hands dirty in any conflict. Perhaps, though, this conflict will compel people to take a long hard look at their treaties and (if applicable) their bloc memberships and untangle the Gordian knot that is the current treaty web.
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