Second Breakdown in Negotiations

title: Second Breakdown in Negotiations author: Lord Admiral Orinnari date: 2021-04-04 01:31 excerpt: Follow-up negotiations breakdown

Shortly after the first treaty negotiations broke down, the Lord Admiral tried something different. Instead of negotiating an extradition treaty, he would take Mount September's extradition process as a given and build around it to make it as painless and frictionless as possible.

The image above shows an island almost exactly halfway between Wesbury and Mount September. At first the Lord Admiral wanted the island to be a condominium or shared island, to be co-owned by Wesbury and Mount September where both can store pearls from the other while pending approval, however Mount September took no interest in this solution and instead favoured expanding their sovereign borders to claim the island so that Wesbury could construct a secure storage bunker there like one could a shop or a house.

Since the bunker, or "embassy" was to be constructed under the same law as shops and houses, the Lord Admiral requested certain opt-outs to property regulations: dereliction and build codes, both current and future. The Lord Admiral had chosen the island for very specific reasons: it's small, out of the way, and is ocean biome and so would hopefully not be attractive to anyone wishing to claim land through the dereliction process. However, the Lord Admiral still desired some legal certainty, and those exceptions seemed reasonable to those within the diplomacy channel, notably Allen, but then...

Almost two weeks later a new Septembrian diplomat was appointed. The Lord Admiral re-suggested the condominium and shared island solutions as to try and ensure the treaty as bilateral and mutually beneficial, however this was promptly ignored. The diplomat went on to reject the exceptions to property regulations that were previously considered reasonable by members of the Cupboard (Mount September's Cabinet), that all he could offer was the political promise of notifying Wesbury should a dereliction request be made against the island; that Mount September's acquiescence to expanding their borders was already a generous offer that should be enough for Wesbury, and that if Wesbury doesn't trust Mount September then why even continue these negotiations?

This breakdown angered the Lord Admiral. The first treaty negotiations failed because Mount September fundamentally did not trust Wesbury. This reattempt at negotiating a favourable outcome was taking Mount September's lack of trust in Wesbury as a given and basing a solution off of it, and yet the Septembrian diplomatic admonished Wesbury for its reciprocal lack of trust. In addition, while the Lord Admiral accepted and agreed that the border expansion was highly unusual for an embassy negotiation, he nonetheless found the framing of it as an "already generous offer" and "[not trusting Mount September] even when we’ve gone to such lengths" deeply disrespectful and obtuse. This was compounded when he asked why Mount September wasn't discussing a reciprocal and thus mutually beneficial solution should Mount September need to extradite a pearl from Wesbury, to which the diplomat said he had no interest in making any arrangements with Wesbury.

Given that the treaty negotiations were forcibly whittled down to be lesser than even the Declaration of Friendship treaties, and that the little being "offered" was being framed as an exceptional undertaking, the Lord Admiral backed out of negotiations for a second time, figuring that it would be easier to simply build a secure storage ship within Mount September's territorial waters and hope that the borders aren't changed to exclude the ship. This arrangement would also have the benefit of not giving fuel to the notion that Mount September has given Wesbury a favour with its "generous offer," thus making Wesbury politically beholden to Mount September.