Coalition: Foreign Relations

Coalition foreign policy is founded on one tenet: Earth for the Earthborn. All decisions are made looking through this lens; for many years, the focus was narrowly American in addition to this. However, with the decision to establish a Navy, taken a decade ago, and the growing contacts with Germany and South America, the Coalition has begun to take a wider, longer-term view of its diplomatic contacts. It was to that end that, during the height of the Tolkeen War, the St. Lawrence Conference was held, a three-party negotiation with the NGR and Free Quebec. Since the Coalition and Quebec were nominally still at war, the negotiations were kept secret until the signature of two vital documents, the St. Lawrence Treaty, which ended the Quebec war, and the Containment Pact.

Expansion
The Coalition views all of North America as its natural domain. To this end, expansion has focused simultaneously on establishing trade with human states, and eliminating inhuman or magical states. The Arkansas intervention was an example of the former, while the Tolkeen War epitomized the latter. As part of the run-up to the Tolkeen War, the predecessor of the Containment Pact, the Anti-Naruni Agreement, was signed with the two major human industrial powers of Upper Michigan, Ishpeming and Manistique, and formal trade relations established. These trade relationships are strikingly similar to those established in Arkansas and in Ontario before that.

Within its official borders, the Coalition follows a fairly aggressive policy of settlement and pacification – excess population from the urban sprawl surrounding Coalition cities is often transplanted, willing or not, to settle stretches of Missouri or Lone Star. The strong Coalition military presence in these regions is as much for domestic security as it is for defense. In Missouri, the main resistance is from independent city-states like Whykin, while Lone Star is plagued by bandits from the Pecos Empire, whose tenuous control of much of the state rivals the Coalition’s own.

The Containment Pact
The Containment Pact was the crowning jewel of the St. Lawrence conference, announced in April of 109 PA during the Tolkeen victory celebrations. Because of its significance worldwide, it is discussed separately.