Join the new world

It has been hinted that the Empire of Japan is already planning on annexing Taiwan (unless the emperor was joking when he told me). This means that regardless of this island’s lack of resources and its strategically unimportant location (unless the USA want a quick route to the Chinese mainland again) the Republic of China will be forced to maintain an army to fend off foreign invasions.

Thanks to the changes recently introduced to the game that allow players to recover vast amounts of health by eating food, the military potential of the common people has been greatly increased. If a state company would stockpile food and cheaply sell as soon as a war approaches, every citizen would be able to fight multiple times in a row. Therefore, such an emergency stockpile and well as generally cheaply available food and weapons on the open market should be a common goal of both our economy and our defence.

Since I cannot see our population growing immensely in the near future, our economy and human resources will remain crippled for a while. This means that maintaining state companies to produce all four kinds of weaponry (rifles, tanks, helicopters, artillery) for use by an organised Taiwanese military would be way too expensive and tie up too much of the country's already limited work force.
Since there are other small countries who have similar problems, I propose that we should try to permanently ally with some of them to cooperate on weapon production. For example country A could build tanks and supply the two other ones with them, country B trades its rifles and helicopters for country C's artillery, and so on. This would reduce the costs for every individual nation but still ensure that they are fully equipped in case of a war, presuming every country produces enough to share with the other ones.

Last but certainly not least, there remains the need to have MPPs. Seeing how China and Japan are probably our greatest threats, it would be logical to join Phoenix. However, Phoenix is known to care very little about its smaller members, and I personally dislike both big alliances as being in one limits a country's choice of partners and entirely robs the game of the fun aspects of diplomacy and foreign relationships. Maybe we should try to align with other nations of smaller size from all around the world (so that if our MPPs are activated the attacker will not be able to steamroll through either ally and continue its conquest in the neighbouring one). Quite a few smaller nations do not have any MPPs at the moment, and I am sure that most of them would welcome an opportunity to fight in a war again. Another option would be to bond with the nations we would eventually produce raw materials in, for both states to be able to defend their economic interests as well as the other's freedom.