The League has reached a tipping point in terms of corruption and decay and yet its sheer size makes it dangerous for smaller powers such as Manticiore and its behavior is imperialistic.. The best way to neutralize the League is to break it up into independent star nations, each small enough so that it cannot dominate its neighbors, and then offer trading privileges, access to wormholes and junctions, defensive alliances and friendship so that the tempation to combine into ever larger empires, etc is mitigated.
As a short term strategy to intermediate term strategy, I think this looks good. In fact it is hard to see where Manticore and her allies really have any realistic choice. In fact it needs to be accomplished quickly while the GA’s military tech advantages still are overwhelming. If the League could catch its breath and gain time and resourses to overcome their tech disadvantage, it would only be a matter of time before the GA would be overrun.
But how does all of this look long term? Historically what happens when empires come unglued isn’t pretty. Chaos, warlordism, states that don’t have the legs to last, almost pertetual war over time. The result is a decline in economic activity and the impoverishment of once prosperous areas who are conquered, perhaps repeatedly, and pillaged. One remembers Rome and the beginning of the Dark Ages. The situations are not completely congruent, of course. But they are close enough to make the comparison uncomfortable. The League’s policies in the Verge were pretty nasty and the systems in the shell were disadvantaged for the benefit of the core worlds. But the League kept the peace in areas it dominated and even though the result frequently wasn’t fair, for a substantial portion of human occupied space, peace allowed trade and prosperity to flourish.
So now what? Can the GA step in and take the League’s place? Or is the chaos of the League’s collapse going to provide the Malign its opportunity to impose its vision of the human future on the rest of us?
What do you think?
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Don