Monthly Musings

[Guhrayen]

Maadi's Monthly Musings

Let your people know: they are hereby invited to bear witness to the monthly gathering of all the Maadi who, together in splendor, sit beside the Foremost in intellect, before the remains of many thrones, and momentarily speak upon the matters of the multiverse and Osiris's place within it. May Thoth attend to us in madness.

Index

Meeting #1: Short-Sighted Observations
Meeting #2: Gazing Betwixt Times
Meeting #3: Commentary on Multiversal Metaphysics
Meeting #4: On the Limits of Instrumentalist Relations

Spoiler

Q: Is this in-character?
A: Yep. I would personally prefer to play NS in a way that is not considered the norm by most prominent, long-time players, who choose to separate 'roleplay' from 'gameplay'. This philosophy extends to regional publications I author, like this one, where the persona of the Maadi takes center stage.

Q: What is this about?
A: Right now it's just whatever the Maadi feel like commenting on around NS, but I try to keep it topical for Osiran readers, who occupy a certain part of the multiverse, and won't extend it out into totally foreign waters too often. Until I have more experience with things going on around here, it may more often resemble a public diary than a publication.

Q: Formatting?
A: Look, I'm bad at using forums. I'll make up an index within this post and separate out different issues into new posts and make it all pretty eventually.

[Guhrayen]

Meeting of October 21st, 2022
Short-Sighted Observations

It is not long before the Maadi's voices unite this month as their consciousness turns towards affairs of state abroad, so they speak upon it:

Since before our world has found itself within the realm of the honorable Pharaoh, there has been much shifting in the alliances between our region and those of foreigners. This, we know, is the way of the multiverse, where few things, least of all the relations between those who consider themselves ambitious, remain ever-stagnant. Yet, the flurry of activity over the last few months are indicative of something we find most miserable: shortsightedness on the part of those who have withdrawn from their relations with us. We have paid attention to the multiverse's various communication streams and those publications which may have contributed to this lack of sound judgement on the part of our former allies, as well as those statements by those regional representatives who have, either explicitly in rhetoric or via their actions, declared themselves enemies of the Pharaoh, and wish now, here, to elucidate on how, and why, the sum of the maneuvers taken against us and our allies shall sorely disappoint their operatives.

In June, the proxy state of the nation Roavin, known as Curious Observations, published a piece titled 'Diplomatic Isolation', in which they advocated (let no one delude themselves into thinking such a publication was published with no intent), for the sundering of relationships between The North Pacific, The West Pacific, Lazarus, The Rejected Realms and our own region. This advocacy was rooted in a relatively simple presumption: that the Brotherhood of Malice was fundamentally weaker, its alliance less valuable, than the New Pacific Order when a similar maneuver was aimed at that government years prior. It followed from this that the Pharaoh would be foolish to choose the Brotherhood over its relations with a myriad of other GCRs and so, if faced with a well-executed ultimatum, would surely fold to collective pressure.

Less than a month later, the government of Quebecshire, a nation representing a region which had previously declared 'war' upon Osiris (those in the audience will be forgiven for having forgotten this state of war existed given The League's prodigious record of utter inaction prosecuting it), capitalized on a defection from within the Brotherhood of Malice to leak the existence of a long-since-aborted attempt to infiltrate the regional government of Balder. This proved news to many, our region's government included, but the details of that aborted attempt need not concern us, for we were ignorant of it, and played no part in either its conception nor dissolution. What does interest our memories is the events which transpired immediately afterwards.

In perhaps the most transparently self-serving and ham-fisted demonstration of propagandizing recently seen, Quebecshire littered the expose on the defunct operation with mentions of our venerable region, despite lacking a shred of evidence of Osirian participation in, awareness of, or any other meaningful relationship to said operation. In other words, an utterly unnecessary act that amounts to little more than rhetorical trickery, devoid of substance. To be fair, speaking loudly and often without much to say is characteristic of The League's Foreign Affairs team, so perhaps those more familiar have simply come to expect it at every turn.

To their collective misfortune, a number of regions then allied to Osiris either took this or other bait, and turned upon us. One by one, they demanded we immediately denounce an operation that, to review, we were unaware of, would have had no interest in, had been abandoned months prior to the defection made knowledge of it known to The League, and was aimed at Balder, a region we have had no meaningful relationship with beyond our shared statuses as vessels for the rebirth of derelict nations. The usual regional governments aligned against us took to their paltry pulpits to denounce our lack of respect for 'regional sovereignty', as if if the long-stated public goals of our own military had not been explicitly aligned with raiders for many years, or as if to imply that Osiris, true to her treaties, would now, suddenly, aspire to undermining her treatied allies and their most valuable associates. The time of reckoning, for following through on the blueprint put forward in 'Diplomatic Isolation', had seemingly come. Of course, went the theory, the Pharaoh would cave to those attempting to hold our region guilty-by-association unless we issued a condemnation of the Brotherhood or broke off our relations with them.

As treaties between ourselves and those who applied this pressure began to unravel, it soon became apparent that the result of the diplomatic isolation campaign against the Brotherhood would fail. In an admirable show of principled affirmation of those governments which saw the community of our realm as more than mere multiversal political capital, Osiris pushed back upon the pressure exerted against it and in doing so sent the clear message that the Pharaoh was playing a far longer, more productive form of inter-regional diplomacy than those who had scrambled to break its relationship with the Brotherhood. In addition, the government of The Rejected Realms, one of the chief targets of the isolation effort should it have expanded, saw through the pretense and stood with Osiris in an admirable show of similar far-sighted diplomatic calculation. In the months that followed the initial flurry of activity over Operation Ragnarok, both our region and the Brotherhood have secured additional alliances with little difficulty. Among those treaties for the latter include one just yesterday with Warzone Asia, an independent GCR itself allied with regions who had initially pressured Osiris.

So what went wrong with the plan to diplomatically isolate the Brotherhood via targeting Osiris? Its author had made sure to emphasize in the conclusion of that piece that timing had been the cause of the failure of a similar campaign against the Pacific's government, but in taking the analogy too far without proper attention to other important differences in the scenarios under examination, had neglected to account for the following: the nature and value of the Brotherhood's relationship to Osiris, the integrity and determination of the Pharaoh to preserve control of our own foreign affairs decisions, and the flimsy, quickly deprecated pretense that 'Operation Ragnarok' proved to be. Indeed, we can speculate that in a timeline in which the target of Operation Ragnarok had been TRR instead of Balder, a real rift would have been opened between ourselves and the Brotherhood; this not being the case, Osiris made a far easier decision than the proxy state of Roavin had predicted.

We can only hope, for the sake of those who have recently alienated themselves from us, that they too shall reflect carefully on the failure of July and the example set of support for our closest allies by the Pharaoh, and correct their courses.

The voice of the stone golems fade into more individual phrases of thanks and conversation as their musings come to an end.

[Guhrayen]

Meeting of November 23rd, 2022
Gazing Betwixt Times

There is a sundering shaking. Time itself falls, no, twists, back as powerful magics re-acclimate one strand of the multiverse with another. Approximately a month has arrived back upon the scene of changing. The Foremost steps forward not from a crowd descended into oneness, but among dialoguing . . . kin? Individuals? They fall silent as their voice rings forward and a faithful copy of a scroll lies atop a small lectern behind them.

Five years have very nearly passed since the proclamation of the current foundational law of Osiris: the Scroll of Horus. It is this document which is today the subject of our consideration; a consideration purposefully from the position of one understudied, for who are we, so relative a newcomer, to pass judgement on the entirety of its foundational years? Such a thing would be a different quality of consideration, bringing experiences we do not possess, and so we cannot offer it. Instead, what we shall say will follow only from this principle: in the years since the Scroll of Horus was granted assent, Osiris, as all things, has changed. We might venture to peer from a perspective in the present onto this constitutive document from another time and place, amended though it may be, in order to derive a glimmer of insight about the future prosperity of the Pharaoh's realms.

We will not deliver our remarks section-by-section, as we do not have the leisure time for such today, but we can broadly remark on what we observe to be some stand-out sections of the text which fit our theme of a prosperous future.

Firstly, the position of the Pharaoh and of the line of succession is relatively robust, providing a minimum of four persons whom may lawfully ascend to the role upon the incumbent's abdication. It is difficult to envision a scenario unfolding in which this line is utterly exhausted which would not also entail the loss of regional control entirely to usurpers or outside actors. That being said, difficult is not the same as impossible, and should both the Pharaoh abdicate and the Guardians be dispersed through some combination of attack, negligence, treachery, or tragedy, the line comes to a startling halt, with no extant mechanisms for either the nations which may still be lawful members of the Council of Scribes to procure a new Pharaoh from among their number nor a designated colony of Osiris to retreat to. The message here is clear: the loss of Osiris's Pharaoh and Guardians are the end of the current constitutional order as functioning foundational law. The existence of a rump government claiming legitimate continuity with the Scroll of Horus in the event of disaster seems to us to be rendered extremely unlikely by this fact. Whether this is a desirable acknowledgement of circumstances likely to involve a de facto loss of the Scroll's authority and chance for renewal or a hindrance to any future successor to OFO in the event that the region is lost, but potentially only temporarily, is not for us to say.

As an aside in the same vein of discussion, the term "Vice Delegate", which has no legal definition under the Scroll of Horus, is invoked as a position which the Pharaoh assigns their Heir Apparent to. This appears to be a legal artifact and the reference could be eliminated entirely while preserving all of the same definite powers of the Heir within the Scroll.

Let us cast our gaze from the executive to the legislative. A set of circumstances we find odd are encountered here. Most odd is the relationship between the censure powers of the Chief Scribe and the Pharaoh. The Chief Scribe's ability to enact censure that can exclude Council members from all Council business for periods of up to one week for what could be called fairly broad and unenumerated criteria. In the case of the Chief Scribe's abuse of this censure, they could, and likely would, be removed by the Pharaoh, but because the Pharaoh appoints the Chief Scribe, and therefore may entertain or even endorse such use of the censure, a situation seems to exist that would allow for the Chief Scribe to effectively block all of the Council's de jure recall proposals against both themselves and a compliant Pharaoh. In such a hypothetical scenario, the Pharaoh and their Chief Scribe could effectively rule the region by decree, with no legal remedies available to the otherwise censured Council of Scribes and the Council of Priests vulnerable to the Pharaoh's dismissal. We cannot say whether or not we are reading these constitutional clauses closely enough, but they do seem on first glance to pose a potential issue.

Moving on to one final curiosity within the text we are examining today, we observe a discrepancy in the ease with which a Constitutional Convention may be convened relative to the amending of the Scroll of Horus itself. The Council of Scribes requires a steep two-thirds majority be met in both cases (bringing an amendment to the Scroll forward and bringing forth a convention), yet the Pharaoh's potential ability to stopan amendment to the existing constitution is actually greater than their ability to block the adoption of an entirely new constitutional order. This is because the results of a constitutional convention are described not as an amendment is, but as a repeal and replace of the existing Scroll of Horus. Such a distinction is of the utmost importance, because it reduces the Pharaoh's veto power to the state of suspensive from their prospective absolute veto over direct amendments. Bizarrely, this creates the conditions by which it may be easier for a proactive Council of Scribes to simply call a constitutional convention in the face of a particularly stubborn Pharaoh over in order to enact a single constitutional amendment rather than pursue either a recall or direct amendment to the Scroll of Horus.

The eyes of the Foremost begin to grow cloudy as their voice fades like a declining whirl of machinery.

We will have more to say rather soon.

[Guhrayen]

Meeting of January 9th, 2023
Commentary on Multiversal Metaphysics

Following a lack of published material of interest to the region during the month prior, the Maadian government (such as it is) takes great pains to ensure the adequate distribution of a series of large, highly reflective metalized screens to be displayed in auditoriums and other adequately sized spaces in other Osiran nations. Accompanying these were twenty-pound, pyramid-shaped crystalline structures and scrolls containing instructions and command words; once the latter was spoken while the pyramids were within 200 ft. of the screens and properly aligned, a ritual enchantment was activated, and upon the screen came an illusion of a somewhat ramshackle golem of clay 'speaking' at a lectern. Synchronized sound emanated not from the metalized screen, but the corresponding pyramid.

"For those of you yet unaware, The Foremost has seen fit to, on occasion, mobilize various loyal territorial components of the co-realms, such as Saandin, to achieve aims outside the region of Osiris. We take it as truth that these aims correspond with the values of Restorationism, that sacred philosophy of our people, but it may not be evident to some in the audience why this is the case. Being a rather recent decision by The Foremost, I take now is both a good time, and grander opportunity, to elucidate that sometimes elusive 'why' for those of you willing to both hear and listen.

Firstly, let it be known that our knowledge of the multiverse is ever-incomplete, and worse, suspect to the tides of changes most chaotic. You may recall rumors in our neighbors recently of a "Great Forgetting", where time itself was supposedly lost. Keep this fact in mind and perhaps show generosity should I be correct today and mistaken tomorrow.

As you likely know, polities, which usually but not always refer to themselves as 'nations' or 'nation-states', are liable to be recognized within the multiverse only after achieving for themselves some elements of sovereignty. Signs of this include a population of sapient creatures of approximately a million or so, sufficient self-organization to have espoused some common values for its collective community, and, most telling, I think, the ability (if not always the will) to communicate directly with the peoples of other polities within the multiverse. Once these elements are achieved, having come into the correct magick relation with one another, a relation I believe to be at least partially formulaic, ontologically-speaking, the resulting grouping finds itself a part of the multiverse-at-large, but contained within an entity we know as a region.

I will not spend too much time now upon this aspect of the metaphysics as they relate to specific, named parts of the multiverse, as it is not the focus of this address. Rather, I shall turn your attention to a curious fact applicable of all recognized polities: they may create, or claim, a region of the multiverse for themselves. In this way, the multiverse is ever-expanding, and yet, as polities birth regions, so too can regions created by these polities disappear, vanishing within the magickal ether at a precise moment following the disappearance of the polity which founded them so long as other polities have not taken up residence within! More remarkable still, polities possess, from the first inkling of multiversal recognition, the capability to manipulate the fundamental weaving of the multiverse to travel in whole from one region to another. The consequences of this knowledge is vast.

'Yes, yes, but how is this relevant to The Foremost's recent decision to join many of Maadi's peers within the region in the mobilization of our associated realms?'

It is a good question, I can hear yourself asking! Let us proceed to the vital topic at hand.

There are those polities within the multiverse which have forged for themselves regions that they have, afterwards, abandoned along with the self-organization of their own peoples. As you may imagine, such regions are prone to fates of persistent negligence, only very rarely rising above the circumstances of such an insecure existence to secure for themselves a prosperous present for those that continue to reside there. Many of these neglected spaces in the multiverse have simply ceased to be, yet others linger on, the object of invasions by the puppet states of more secure, better organized states seeking to seize control of such regions, even if only to trick the bureaucrats of the World Assembly into recognizing their ownership of the seized region for a brief span in time. This practice is the business of many nations within Osiris. Ours now among them.

Maadi has found these actions to be in keeping with The Foremost's visions of Restorationism only in part, but those actions not corresponding to the sacred truths still sanctioned by the Pharaonic nation of Malphe II to be unobjectionable. Now, having covered the basics, let us expound upon these nuances:

1. Regions which do not possess a single nation of either great enough ambition or sufficient self-preservation instinct to secure for themselves a prosperous and active association of nations have no reasonable expectation to persistence within the multiverse. However, we diverge here with peers within Osiris who believe that space within the multiverse ought to be secured by their singular puppet-states presiding over wasteful 'advertising' among the unread stacks of 'World Factbook Entries'. Let those places which have none willing to grant it the vital breath of ankh cease until another time arises, not persist in a state of accursed undeath far from the light of Horus.

2. The practice of fooling World Assembly gnomes into recognition of a subservient or co-operating occupational nation's possession over a region for the purpose of honing the skills of the occupying forces' deployment maneuvers serves as valuable practice leading up to the seizure of a region which must, for the health of the multiverse, be either destroyed or regenerated, but serves no other use which we are aware. These forms of invasion, The Foremost holds, are not the primary focus of a polity ascribed to our Restorationist creed, but an accessory.

3. Strange regions known as 'Warzones' are a particular waste of our occupational forces, as they cannot be destroyed nor easily restored to a form of vitality without immense and difficult-to-hide investment likely to be continually contested by the purveyors of stagnation known as 'defenders'. This is not to rule such a task out entirely, should metaphysical and interregional political circumstances change, but to rightly ascertain that it is an undertaking of too great a magnitude for little, if any, reward.

4. The coalition of nations known throughout the multiverse by the collective term 'defenderdom', as well as the vapid, unprincipled entities which at times support their efforts, are at best misguided, and at worse, outright foolish. Contrary to their self-perception, the regions they 'defend' are, with precious few exceptions, inhabited by either those willfully ignorant of some of the metaphysical facts which I have already spoke of today or those so sentimental in their dispositions for a specific, named region in the multiverse that they refuse to relocate their peoples to a more secure, vital, and prosperous location on a principle so emotive it flies in the face of rationality and endangers the very sovereignty of their own peoples. Far from liberators or valiant upholders of self-determination, this coalition beguiles the polities of the multiverse, selling them on an imagined right to possession of fundamentally insecure positions, even when the always-available ability of all responsible national leaders to secure for their people a safer destiny via national relocation assuredly stares them in the face when this coalition finds itself overwhelmed and the regions they puppet to 'life' are laid to rest.

5. It is the duty of the Maadian peoples to preserve only that worth preserving until such a time as it may be restored in earnest. Restorationist realms shall never seize a region in the multiverse for the purpose of a toothless colonization. If we are to claim the service of an entirely new location outside of Osiris itself, then we must forge of it no mere 'trophy', as others do, but a region of power, character, and prosperity for its future denizens.

I hope these five points have adequately expressed the overlap between our realm's doctrines and those of other nations within Osiris without oversimplifying anything for you. I shall now take questions.

Yes, you over there?"

. . . The illusion fades from the screen as the pyramid goes silent.

[Guhrayen]

Meeting of April 9th, 2023
On the Limits of Instrumentalist Relations

An unerring calm has prevailed over the sands which characterize much of the Osirian landscapes. Maadi has been no exception, finding itself unable even to commit its clients to the rousing of the Sekhmet Legions. In the court of the Foremost, domestic politics, such as they are, have for months involved only the usual participants in Maadi's lackadaisical theater. Judgements made on the World Assembly's doings are made swiftly and with little fanfare. The story of Maadi's relations with its fellow nations within the region one of under-explored opportunities, in many ways not yet even begun. The status quo is broken today only by the arrival of news from places far-flung, inviting an excited chorus of commentary from the gathered courtiers until the Foremost begins to muse openly. Frustration, if not visible upon their metallic visage, evident in their intonations.

"Ought those among you who claim to be sources of wise counsel have expected this or something akin to it?

Look now upon the limitations of the much fêted realpolitick of the self-assured regional administrators who have made themselves parties to such excesses! All find themselves condemned by what has transpired, not because each bears equal responsibility for this particular incident, but because of its predictability. You, my courtiers, ascribe too much importance to the wrong categories, and so do not comprehend this point. There are too many dripping mouths hungrily anticipating the weakness of so-called "Defenderdom" in its blundering response.

Slacken these partisan appetites among yourselves elsewhere. Lessons of more import are at stake, but it requires your willingness to listen. Let us arrive at them by working through the implications of the events abroad which have so engrossed your attentions.

Any number of regional associations proclaim their independence. This independence, if we might consult what are widely considered the 'constituting' documents of such an abstract thing, copies of which I have here, state their distinguishing factors from the "Raider/Defender dichotomy" are to be found in these objectives, and I quote: "maximizing regional activity and stability; increasing the region's influence and impact in the interregional stage; developing strong ties with like-minded communities and regions; and protecting the sovereignty of friendly and aligned regions".

Notice that the objectives which I have just read overlap one-to-one with precisely those objectives of any region with a governing or associative body with ambitions upon the interregional stage. In other words, independence-as-such fails to act as its own pole for cooperation, but proudly proclaims its narrow self-interests as paramount. We can draw a clear contrast between this approach and two other popular ideologies among foreign regions: Raider Unity, which provides for its adherents a principled framework of non-interference that exceeds the individual interests of the involved regions, and Moralism, which binds its adherents to a general principle of combating interregional activity it considers aggression. In both instances, the undertaking of commitments on the parts of the participants must necessarily, by virtue of their conflict with their opposite, lead to the consolidation and self-identification of one's own region's interests with another's. Interdependence in operations increasingly becomes the only viable path to the conquest or defense of regions in which a contest unfolds.

This produces a conundrum for the self-professed independent region which cannot reliably contest the preponderance of forces on either side of the raider-defender equation in the event of conflict if it maintains interregional relations which require its involvement. In The North Pacific's case, its commitment to the defense of Stargate, a region without sufficient endorsements of its 'legal' delegate by residents to avoid being raided, is just such an interregional relationship. Yet The North Pacific, itself incapable of independently contesting the raids on its ally, which takes on the appearance of a burden rather than an asset, now finds itself drawn into the wider conflict between two ideological groups with substantially more infrastructure, both social and technological, for coordination among themselves. Its only offering, outside of sporadic military activity which is overshadowed by the engagement of the two spheres it is caught between, are endorsements of proposals made in the World Assembly.

Herein lies the crux of the unequal relationship which then develops between the region which adheres only to its own interests without the prerequisite assets to assert itself. Reduced to providing for its allies in a field of engagement (the World Assembly) with increasingly few returns for the ideological forces at play, who pursue goals primarily of importance elsewhere, where the position of the independent region grants it no special purchase, its position steadily erodes until such a point that it must eventually find itself on the receiving end of trades that threaten to undo its sovereignty to the benefit of allies who must, in order to continue justifying the relationship in service to their broader ideology, continue to extract some benefit from the independent region. Under these circumstances, the actions of the The South Pacific and those regions which have co-signed its position, while egregious, are not just intelligible, but predictable.

Other regions attempting to navigate the same fundamental dynamics have been met in recent times with similar outcomes. The West Pacific, for example, has forfeited closer cooperation with our region and The Communist Bloc over situations borne from a similar confluence of underlying factors. In all cases, tenuous and short-sighted policies advocated for by one faction in the Raider-Defender contest in opposition to the other required non-military contributions from independent regions in exchange for retaliatory measures on the field executed per-dominantly not by the independent regions themselves.

The pertinent question facing these regions is not one of whether or not they are "sufficiently" adhering to the vacuous maxims of independence, nor one of simple recommitting to regional sovereignty. I have already elaborated above on why such a retrenchment does not extract them from the interregional dynamics at play. Instead, independent regions who, for whatever reason, cannot commit to non-involvement in the raider-defender contest in the form of neutrality, must decide for themselves whether or not it is within their capabilities to produce truly regional infrastructures capable of contesting conflicts with raiders and defenders without one or the other's support. The trust which develops and underpins the long-term commitments of the two opposed factions must assuredly trump the instrumentalism characterizing the relationship between individual regions within those groupings and the aloof position of the independent region which proudly proclaims its lack of desire to commit to one side or the other.

If, in making that decision, any individual independent region finds itself confronting an inability to construct sufficient sovereign resources, they must then further decide whether or not continued exposure and involvement in relationships which expose its government to the greater forces of cooperation inherent in the multiplication of forces evident on both sides of the raider-defender divide are truly within the interests of itself and the nations which rely on it. In the event it decides other goals it pursues requires such involvement, it becomes of the foremost importance that its officials are not only constantly aware of the fundamental dynamics which result in its relative dis-empowerment, but have established some fundamental principles beyond the excessive vagueness of capital-I Independence. Without these, the independent region cannot produce a foundation of commonality with other similarly-minded regions on grounds of trustworthiness which might mature to the same caliber of cooperation evident among the adherents of Raider Unity and Moralism. Lacking that foundation, its sovereignty, such as it applies to interregional relationships, becomes but a fictitious instrument to be claimed and contested by the whims of individual agendas steering it wherever they believe the most short-term benefit lies and evacuating from it all but the most shambolic symbolic value."

Silence engulfs the court.

". . . I have exceeded myself in keeping your ears for so long. We have other things to attend to. Let this matter be at rest."

[Malphe]

A very good read.

How regions straddle the line between diverse allies is the biggest diplomatic dilemma of the last year, in the absence of defender or raider ideology there does need to be a systemised framework for how diplomacy is conducted and what is judged acceptable. Subscribing wholly to either ideology gates maintaining relationships across the divide, moralists are obligated to avoid raiders and raider sympathisers and raiders will always chafe diplomatically with regions that are anything less then wholly accommodating of raider activities and ideology. Independents and moderates are awkwardly squished between them without any effective response to either party, and often choose to allow their diplomatic interests to be hijacked in the interests of pragmatism.

This dynamic effects Osiris as much as it does TNP, how we approach relations with TRR and other none-raider organizations is a prescient concern. My best solution is to endeavour to maintain absolute integrity, leastways as much as the eternally hypocritical geopolitical entity can muster. I disagree with the assertion that coercive politicking in the interests of a region or bloc is par for the course, my experience working with our standing allies tells me the best way to get shit done without headaches is to brook alliances carefully, ensure you know and trust who you're working with, and talk plainly with them. Placing doing proper and being done proper by your allies as an eminent interest for your region, rather than the utilisation of your allies as a tool for political gameplay, removes a lot of the stress from nominally conflicting interests.