This is something that has reared its head in recent times due to the NEW situation that’s going on. Now I’ve seen people write things like these, avoiding mentioning specific names, in the hopes that they can inspire objective debate on the subject at hand, but it always devolves into debating the current situation that has inspired the question so I’m not even going to try. I’m talking about this because of NEW, PC, iFOK and whoever else is involved by now. The main thing I’ve been thinking about is the ‘e-lawyering’ that goes on regarding which clause people are using to enter a war, specifically whether you consider the war as a whole, or each individual front when judging whether your declaration would fall under the ‘aggression’ clause or the ‘defence’ clause of your treaty.
Personally I believe, and I also think that precedent supports this opinion, that each front should be taken as a separate entity. It seems to me that this being how things were widely regarded in the Cyberverse was the main motivation behind the large number of ‘non-chaining’ clauses in treaties today. The way the vast majority of the optional aggression clauses that I’ve come across are written states that the alliances have the choice to join the treaty partner in an aggressive war that they declare, joining onto the war declaration basically. This seems to fall down when no war is declared by the ‘aggressive’ alliance such as when alliances join in on the other, defensive , side of the war.
To tie this back to the current situation, NEW launched an undeclared and aggressive war against the remnants of DF (henceforth known as DF for ease) and it is quite clear that on the NEW/DF front anyone joining the war would be using the optional aggression clause. Again on the other side it’s quite clear that INT and TPE have entered in defence of DF in declaring war on NEW. Due to the non-chaining clauses iFOK and PC have no obligation to defend NEW and I doubt many people will claim they do, however I’ve seen several people defending their decision by saying the treaty calls for optional aggression and they have chosen not to activate that clause.
This implies that NEW are in an aggressive war against anyone defending DF which simply doesn’t hold any water for me. You can declare a war on NEW by activating a defensive clause, you can declare a war on NEW because they were the original aggressors, but you are declaring war against them, it is a defensive front as far as NEW are concerned. This is the exact situation the non-chaining clauses are written for, to ensure you’re not obligated to go to war in situations like this and, as stated above, the majority, if not all, optional aggression clauses in treaties I’ve seen don’t legislate for when an alliance isn’t actually declaring a war.
You don’t have people later in the war, five or six fronts removed from the original declaration, activating their optional aggression clauses to come to the defence of their ally who chained in to defend their ally against someone who chained in to defend their ally against someone who…. You get the point. Would things be different if PC and iFOK were one front removed from the main war? If NEW and FEAR were in reversed situations would they be saying they weren’t activating their optional aggression clause against ODN because they would be on the same ‘side’ as the original aggressors even if it was ODN declaring war?
The only way I can envisage that working would be to see the ‘sides’ of a war as a single entity. NEW were the original aggressors, regardless of the situation anyone declaring on that side of the war is declaring an aggressive war and anyone declaring on the other side is declaring a defensive war. Difficult though because you’re still going to have to break it down to individual alliances rather than declaring war against a ‘side’ otherwise you’ve hundreds of broken NAPs/NA clauses littered about the place.
$%&@ this !@#$, my writing is a mess and so this is incredibly difficult to follow no doubt. Unless treaty activations are based on individual fronts I’m of the opinion we will end up with !@#$%* micro wars going forwards, restrained to only a few fronts, and that’s as good a reason as any to avoid it right? Besides, the treaty web is way more likely to explode this way, and everyone has the option to do whatever they like “obligated” via treaty or not.
PS: Poison Clan needs better treaty writers (I enjoy the irony of my criticising someone's writing after this mess as much as you no doubt will), obviously the spirit of the treaty is what matters and so the non-chaining clause would apply, but it was written stupidly and this is the 2nd time PC have broken a treaty on a technicality because they were written inadequately.
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