Spain Invades France - is this Germany v. Sweden Revisted?

Day 744, 07:05 • Published in USA USA • by PigInZen
My Initial Reaction?



So great, Spain attacked France late last night leaving the US in a peculiar position foreign policy-wise. We're once again between a rock and a hard place and left with no real good positive positions to take.

Spain is one of our longest-termed allies and played a vital role when we were occupied by Russia, Portugal, Indonesia and Hungary. Spain's always been there to defend our regions, supply us with iron, give our land workers employment, hell, they even loaned us a significant amount of gold during WWIII that we desperately needed. And let us not forget that Spain is an EDEN member and we just joined that alliance.

France on the other hand is a nation with whom we haven't had good long-term relations: they attacked us during WWIII as a blocking maneuver, we invaded them several months back in an adventure named "French Toast" and as recently as July we attempted to PTO them. But France did leave PEACE GC over several outstanding issues including differences over Hungary's attack on Austria, hastening it's demise. France recently signed a peace treaty with the US and has made overtures of become more friendly towards the US and other EDEN nations.

This situation is a downside of permanent MPPs and alliances. Much like we did during the Scrabman administration the US will be forced to take a neutral stance in the current French-Spanish war. The reasons given will be obvious and logical: that Spain is a longtime ally, they're a member of EDEN, we get much of our iron from Spain, this is an issue between France and Spain alone, and that we cannot go risking our current friendships with longtime allies on potential future friendships with nations that have been traditional allies. Fair enough, it makes sense to me.


Do you want a bite of this?



But it still just smells like crap. Sorry, but the US is being served a shit sandwich here and we're going to have to take a bite. The end result will be to alienate the French from us and push them back into the sphere of their traditional PEACE GC allies. The thaw in relations that had been occurring recently will reverse. This is a bad thing for the US.

We already know what we'll gain (or keep) by choosing this route. We also know what we'll lose with France. But what of the other more nebulous gains and losses associated with choosing neutrality? Time and time again we've found it much too easy to not take a serious stance in opposition to our allies attacking neighbors with whom we have developing relationships. Before I go further, allow me to issue this disclaimer:


***I am not proposing that we dump Spain as an ally. I am not criticizing the current policies of the Josh Frost administration or his Secretary of State, Cerb. This is not a campaign article. This article is meant to get us thinking outside of the framework we've been operating in since the spring of 2009.***


An Activist Approach



The US stands to lose a good deal of international prestige if we stay on the sidelines in this conflict. It's easy for wargamers to think of power in raw terms - how much damage we can deal on a battlefield. There is another power that we can leverage in conflict, however, and that's soft power. Soft power is linked to prestige; it is all about our image in the world and how we make use of it. We can avoid losing prestige and use our soft power to improve our standing by taking some public steps:

1. Offer to negotiate a settlement between Spain and France.
2. Publicly declare that the US military will not be fighting on either side in this war (as long as that doesn't violate our commitments within the EDEN framework; I believe we're safe here)
3. Publicly free citizens to choose for themselves which side to support.
4. Publicly denounce the attack as detrimental to the future development of European comity.
5. Publicly state WHY the US believes that improved relations with France are important to us. (This should be easy, they're a neighbor, they've made overtures to us about improving relations in kind, they've publicly disowned their former ally Hungary, and we have serious Real Life ties to France).
6. Recruit other EDEN nations to join us in the court of public opinion.

By establishing what are in essence permanent alliances with certain nations the US is tying its foreign policy to that of our allies. When our allies take action that action is transferred to us whether we like it our not; as go our allies, so goes the US. Either we stop signing MPPs with nations that take actions that negatively impact US relations with other nations or we convince our allies to take our opinion into account. Since we're not going to abandon our MPP with Spain we obviously need to do a better job of arguing our position both privately between governments and publicly.