Atlas & LETO

Day 2,442, 17:44 • Published in Canada Ireland • by Brian Boru

Hey, it's my first article in eCanada, you should totally vote this up. Also, a Polandball should be done by tonight.

Damagehood & Friendship
The dominant ideology of Foreign Affairs in eRepublik is "Damagehood". When countries talk about friendship, loyalty and honour, nine times out of ten they are largely referring to the reliability of delivering damage in favour of each other's countries in times of need. This is inevitable as most countries are connected only via the personal contacts of a very small number of people in each country. It's hard to be a friend to someone you never talk to.

Of course, there are ways to increase the damage you get. The prevailing ideal here for large countries has been to get together with other large countries to dominate the smaller ones. Small countries often try to copy this, and so the arrival of secondary alliances like LETO and its predecessors came long ago.

Common Interests
The problem with this is simple. Many countries in the secondary alliance have no common strategic interests whatsoever, more often than not being located on the other side of the planet to one another. For large countries, this is less of a problem as they do not need to deploy their entire strength via MPPs in order to make a difference, so alliances like Aurora can exist effectively. However, for smaller hangers-on, this means that the main people to be called upon in the event of an invasion of their territory have no real interest in the conflict. This is made worse by the parent alliance having its own strategic interests.

LETO is therefore very badly optimised to deliver the maximum amount of damage. It has no geographic core of countries which can rally directly to each other's aid, and the lack of proximity means that a crisis in one country is not regarded as a crisis for the alliance. The playerbases are also divided by a lack of a common culture, being based in different RL cultures and having little to zero ingame contact beyond diplomatic channels. As a minor alliance looked at on its own, LETO is a basketcase.

In short, apart from alliance obligation, why would Israel or Iran give a rat's ass if Canada was invaded? Or indeed, vice-versa.

Atlas, the way forward?
All this means I must applaud the initiative of the current Canadian government on the subject of the Atlas project. The treaty rallies the Atlantic states of LETO into a workable structure with a small number of countries with a common European heritage. Geography, culture, social contact, common strategic interests, the alliance is built very well to represent the interests of all three countries involved. Provided that Asteria support is retained, it should also be very successful.

This is the direction that Canadian foreign policy, and indeed, Canada's governmental policy in its entirety needs to move. Towards greater optimisation of military capability and away from frankly superfluous and bureaucratic arrangements with countries that are essentially incapable of aiding each other directly. Friendships should be maintained, but overarching alliances built only with countries with whom we have common interests. LETO should reform in a series of pro-Asteria geographic alliances along the path already forged by Canada, France and Portugal.

Brian Boru,
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