A sad conclusion

Day 1,257, 05:50 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Danie Fox

When deciding our future a few months ago, we thought the world worked as shown below, and we placed ourselves accordingly:

We thought, and were not told otherwise, that we could be in Terra and be friends with some of ONE, whilst still opposing EDEN. We believed the world now, for the first time, had a tripolar alliance system. We thought we could be friends with Serbia and Russia, Macedonia and France, and, of course, enemies with Ireland.

It turns out we were both mislead and naieve. The world actually works like this:

It has become increasingly clear, seemingly to us after everyone else, that the world is, and will always be, bipolar. The eternal two sided conflicts necessitate this: Romania and Hungary; Serbia and Croatia; Germany/Russia and Poland; France/Brazil and Spain are so tightly foght as to require each side to push for every MPP available, which must eventually always result in bipolarity. The last month has shown that if we add the UK and Ireland to this list of eternal enemies, we will have to accept what that entails. That's why Terra would never have supported us attacking Ireland, and more importantly that we are now at risk of being stranded in no-man's-land between Terra/EDEN and ONE, fair game to both and defended properly by neither.

This brings us to the most pressing question facing the UK today: can we survive independently in the space between ONE and Terra/EDEN? Whoever we elect on the 5th of May has a tough choice: do we try to maintain a foreign affairs juggling act, hoping to keep friendships intact with half of Terra and half of ONE; or do we accept we are going to have to join ONE wholesale and leave some of our best allies for some of our worst enemies. Ironically this is the decision we congratulated ourselves on managing to avoid a couple of months ago, attempting to settle in the purple comfort zone in the first diagram, ditching neither our traditional Phoenix allies nor long-standing EDEN enemies.

Personally I think eHistory tells us that, like the last time any country became neutral (I'd call it independent personally), it doesn't work and is only a precursor to something else - we joined PEACE after being "neutral" post-Atlantis. The US and Ireland aren't going to let us back into EDEN/Terra, especially seeing how they nearly passed an NE against us and we then MPPed Serbia. Being neutral will leave us vulnerable, either side will be able to attack us if it suits them, and their allies won't break up their alliance to defend us. The only significant country who I remembered turning neutral was India, who then proceeded to be conquered by Pakistan, Indonesia and China after a short delay, and they are still occupied to this day. There have been many other neutral countries, virtually all of whom have since been ignored, inactive, and used as pawns whenever it suits their stronger neighbours.

The only sensible option now, for those who haven't realised yet, is going to be (trying!) to join ONE. It will be slow, it will be painful, and we will lose a lot of good players and friends, but we've now got basically no choice. Every other member of Phoenix has had to lose half of their friends, we've just been a bit slower at seeing it than the rest. It was nice keeping all of our friends whist it lasted, but soon what started with Hungary and Poland's unlikely friendship is inevitably going to finish with an entirely new world order. We are going to have to pick a side, and only one (both senses of the word) is now available.

I'm not saying I want this, just that there is probably no other option in which we aren't screwed in the long run. I should have realised this before today, like many of our allies and people such as Thatcher seem to have. However, if EDEN had placed less importance on Ireland than Terra did on the UK, they'd be the ones having to swap sides - probably hence their pre-emptive MPP with Poland. I still don't think we've done anything particularly wrong or "traitorous", just been forced onto a new path by being a bit short-sighted ourselves and mislead and undervalued by Terra.



daniecox ;_;