The Economist ~ An update on CTRL

Day 1,793, 12:30 • Published in Poland United Kingdom • by Spite313


Dear friends,


Some weeks ago when I first moved back to ePoland I wrote an article which had a mixed but mostly negative reaction from the Polish people reading it. I got a lot of abuse, some people questioning my friendship, loyalty and even my intelligence. In the article I pointed out that the CTRL alliance had serious structural and inherent flaws which not only made it unlikely to succeed long term, but also risked the diplomatic position of Poland in the world.

Now I’m not going to repeat myself, and you can read my thoughts there on the problems CTRL faced as a fledgeling alliance, but since that article CTRL has been officially announced, ran for a good month and has fallen flat on its face. The tensions between the two biggest countries has exploded, countries are maintaining the old alliances they had over the new and the large non-native populations in both countries have allied against the new alliance. It’s obvious that Poland wants to maintain an alliance with Serbia and Hungary, and that the USA is not willing to abandon it’s TEDEN friends to throw in its lot with the tiny amount of CTRL and ALT countries to the exclusion of everything else.

From the first day of the alliance countries were fighting for opposite sides. The battles with Serbia in the middle-east and Asia saw the two halves of the alliance fighting on opposite sides directly against one another. No amount of cajoling by a succession of weak alliance leaders has managed to force the countries to dump their former allies and fight together. Even a direct attack on a member (MKD on USA) saw lukewarm responses from the other CTRL nations, with many actually fighting for MKD despite Poland and MKD having historically poor relations.



After my last article a lot of people said stuff like “It’s funny how the biggest critics of CTRL are people from ex-ONE and EDEN who just want it to fail blah blah”. I’d just like to point out that the UK is a candidate for ALT and has been since day 1 more or less, because the UK is best friends with Poland. If we did jump into ALT the UK would be surrounded on all sides by allies and would have a really easy six months. On the other hand if CTRL fails the UK will be surrounded by hostile countries in the form of the USA, Canada, France and potentially Ireland too. So we’d be in a much worse situation, but you have to be realistic. Abandoning proven allies for an alliance which is falling apart already would be stupid. For now my own personal position, and also happily that of the UK President Talon, is to maintain our excellent relationship with big brother Poland (hi Junior here!) and our polite relations with the rest of CTRL.

The problems with CTRL will only get worse with time. The ultimatum issued by the USA that Poland drops its balkan MPPs has not been met with a similar action from them (a Croat MPP was signed just a few days ago) and the founder of CTRL aVie has publicly denounced the ultimatum. The sad thing is that an ultimatum to drop MPPs and forge a new, mutually agreed set is the ONLY way to save CTRL, but that ultimatum must come from a CTRL HQ not from one country to another. The USA making demands stinks of every other alliance they’ve ever been in, and despite it often not being true they are always accused of using their allies as puppets or meatshields.

The thing that I feel has gone least considered by Polish leaders about the Balkan involvement issue is that fighting wars abroad is to the benefit of Poland. Fighting via MPP against the EDEN nations provides them with the possibility to keep wars far from their borders. A simple NAP with the USA would provide both countries with a secure border and secure bonuses. The rest of the CTRL alliance is just fluff built on that. By being part of greater global alliances (or MPP networks as they are now) Poland and the USA can protect their own interests by keeping their enemies weak and their allies strong. Ditching the major balkan superpowers doesn’t make Poland stronger- in fact it makes them much more vulnerable by making more enemies and no new friends. This obvious political reality is directly responsible for the MPPs being maintained.

It’s time to acknowledge reality


Iain