A Battle Unseen

[Doc]

Cliff House, Kaliburg, June 5641 6:30pm

Martin sat back, legs propped up on the foot stool. He was focusing particularly intently on the logic puzzle he had been working on over the past couple hours. Finally, he realized where he had gone wrong. How can the Mr. Smith's car be green when clue 3 says it is some color but not green... Oh for goodness sakes, then that means that Smith didn't deliver the birthday cake to the school at 2:45... he must have did it at 3:15, so that means... ah god damn it, now he'll have to erase this whole thing all over again and start. He let out an audible sigh, and closed his book...

"What are you fighting with over there?" asked Mary, looking up from her work.

"Nothing, just these logic problems get quite complex sometimes and I've already started this one over again like twice..."

"I'm sorry you're having such a difficult time figuring that one out," Mary said, trying to be consoling.

At length, Martin smiled and asked, "Do you want to go get dinner with me?"

Mary thought for a moment, "No, I still have a couple hours of work here. If you like you can go home."

Martin smiled. The offer was abrupt, but he felt that he knew his fiancé well enough by not to know she didn't mean anything bad by it. It was a good faith offer, she just was a little abrupt sometimes. "Can I help you with anything, Majesty?" he asked with a mischievous smile on his face.

"Please, don't call me that," she answered. "It's weird, especially from you..."

"Does that make me a weirdo?" he asked again.

"No, it... I'm sorry. I really need to finish this or I am never going to get it done..."

Martin got up and walked over to the desk. "Sure I can't help you?"

Mary put down her pencil. "I'm just... well, I'm worried about the National Assembly's spending," she said. "They're spending too much money. I need them to slow it down. All of these expenditures are eating into our reserves, and they're on track to spend more next month too. By these projections we'll have spent half of the surplus by the end of the year. It's stressing me out. And its all on stupid foreign stuff, which doesn't benefit us at all, which doesn't benefit the people of this country in any way. It just benefits everyone else, all these foreigners who are happy to take our money and our blood, and then turn around and run us down for being too stupid to not for it."

"Well, its what happens when you are on top," said Martin.

"It sucks, it was never supposed to be this way. We're competing with Egelion? For what? We gain nothing from the competition. It just hurts us, and meanwhile they are just adding whole fleets just out of thin air, and missiles and all this other garbage. For what?"

"Probably to upset you, my dear," said Martin in an understanding tone.

"And us keeping up with them is getting incredibly expensive. But we gain nothing from it, like at all."

"That's probably true, and I think everyone knows that except you." Martin responded.

"What if I just stopped?" she said after a minute.

"Stopped what?" Martin asked.

"Well, Margaret was telling me the other day about international relations theory. She said that the world is chaotic. Order is a facade. The international, structure thing, is governed by anarchists."

"Anarchy, my sweet," Martin said. "It's anarchic, not anarchistic."

Mary looked up at him, and smiled. He was more educated than she was, for sure, but he had a way of explaining things without making her feel dumb. "Yes, anarchic. Margaret said that realists are people who see that and try to figure out how to exist in that system. They build weapons, they fight wars. The only way to get people to do what you want them to is to attack them, or put fear in them so they do what you want."

"Yes, that tends to be what realists say."

"She said that realists believe that the strong can do what they want and the weak have to suffer what they must."

"Something tells me you don't like that, though," answered Martin.

"No, I really don't. Because its not really true. The System is set up so if one country gets too strong, it really doesn't matter how many ships they have, even how many nuclear weapons they have, if they get too strong, a lot of the time, other countries will gang up against them for no other reason than that they sense blood and want to gain by someone else's loss. She called it balancing."

"And this is what is happening to Kalistan?" asked Martin.

"It completely is. And if you think about it like a lever, on the one side, it feels like several countries are sitting there weighing their whole side down, and there is only Kalistan, maybe Hutori, maybe Dolgava, maybe Lodamun still on our side. I don't know how many of those countries would come to our aid if we were attacked, though we will always come to theirs if they are attacked. Because that's what we are expected to do."

"Because we're an empire," added Martin.

But Mary just continued. "At any rate, we'd be on our own for a while, and we would likely lose, because we don't have defenses in place anymore: what we do have is too spread out, and there's too much of the wrong stuff. And what we need, we can't get because the people we are relying on to help us haven't come through with any of it yet. If we were attacked tomorrow, there's not a lot we could do about it except what we've always done, which is defend the Strait and make sure it will hurt them severely by the time they get there. That's the traditional Kalistani defensive model from after the Indralan invasion. And it works. There were no five fleets... We didn't need five fleets back in the old days."

Martin considered the words for a moment. "So then the solution would be to fast track more building, right?"

"See, at first I thought so," said the Empress. "But I am learning now that no matter what Kalistan does, others will automatically be able to outdo us, just like automatically. We build submarines, at the same time as others spam aircraft carriers. At sea, we have no aircover. The next battle is already lost. And it really doesn't matter how many resources we wasted doing it, the other side will ALWAYS be somehow able to spend more to beat us. And there are likely several countries arrayed against Kalistan that we don't even know about, let alone the few that we do."

"It does seem to be a quandary," said Martin. "You're sorta damned if you do and damned if you don't."

The Empress thought for a moment. "More damned if we do..." She sat silently, pondering. After a minute of silence, she said "What if the Brethrenists were right?"

Martin was surprised by the question. "In what way?"

"Well, Meg also said something about anarchy being a construction. I'm not quite sure what that really means, but she said that it exists, but only because we allow it to exist."

"But it exists, though," said Martin.

"Well, yes and no. It exists but it doesn't NEED to exist. I mean... well, I mean... we don't need to let it control what we do."

Martin thought for a second. "What does that have to do with the Brethrenists?"

"Well, they don't play. That is the choice they make. When we say let's go to war, they don't engage in the debate about whether or not it is ethical. That question is resolved already for them. They just don't do it. Many of them don't sign up at all: It's one of the reasons we still have NSP, so they can serve without picking up a gun."

"Well, unfortunately, my dear, you are an Empire. I don't think you have that option."

"I have all the options I want," said Mary. "Not because I am an empire, but because I don't care to allow some half frozen nation to determine my foreign policy for me, or some ratty desert dystopia trick me into spending myself into oblivious. I don't have to do that if I don't want to. I don't have to invest our nation's birthright into developing countries that will turn around and someday decide that they want to compete with me. When Egelion was coming out of its dark ages basically, my family supported that government enthusiastically. They were there from day one to offer to help that country. Dana Ananto dumped hundreds of millions of my family's money into their economy to help them kickstart their projects, because we thought it would be a good thing to have a friendly country to our north. And then they used that investment to become our rivals and edge us out? Why should we have invested in them in the first place?"

"Mary, I do enjoy watching you be animated, but I don't know what you are really talking about..."

"I mean, the rule book says 'An empire invests in other countries as an effort to tie others to itself. An Empire invades others who don't do what they tell it to. An Empire holds on to its possessions with an iron grip and can accept no rivals.' But why? Why invest in a developing nation when there is no return on that investment, except resentment and eventual animosity? Why did we lose tens of thousands of people fighting fascism in Kundrati just so the rest of the world could bitch and whine about how we are doing what they should be doing but were too cynical to do so? Why do I have to listen to liberals lecture me about international institutions and international norms when none of them showed up on any level to help us punish the defection in Kundrati, but instead went around and profitted from it? Why should we try to keep up with Egelion, when Egelion obviously has access to the weapons and technology of a former superpower, and we can't even get a god damned thermal imaging camera right? No matter what we do, we lose. So why should we even play the game? We don't have to. We can choose to do something completely different with our time, our energy and our money, and tell these pinche putas to go pound sand."

"Well, good luck telling that to KalMilInCo," said Martin with a smile. "I kind of want to see you call Director Jacobson a 'pinche puto'."

"KalMilInCo doesn't run this nation, Martin. I do." Martin realized his little joke stepped over the line. "That's it. We know Beiteynu is advising Luthori, and I personally believe they are behind Egelion's moves as well. Why should I let them dictate what I do? I'm not a puppet like they are. And I am not going to spend this nation into debt to keep up with a nation who is intent on building ICBMs for no reason whatsoever."

Martin sensed that Mary had resolved herself to some course of action. "My love... what are you thinking?"

Mary had already picked up the phone. "Koenig, I want you, Waltrip and Bonaventure in here tonight... We're becoming Constructivists.... No, I don't know what that means, so get my sister in here too, she will need to explain it to all of us. No... IBSI will already be here... Yes, in 20 minutes. Alright good bye." As she hung up, she looked at her fiancé. "Martin, I will need you to order us some pad hanzai. No egg for me, extra peanuts extra tofu, extra sprouts and extra lime, and I will need it Number 5 hot. for the Ministers, get them the works, but make it zero hot. Koenig is a bit of a baby when it comes to spicy food."

Martin had to admit to himself: Mary was usually a very decisive woman, but he had never admired her more than he did at this moment, and he didn't quite know why.