Reflection #3

This past week in Diplomatic Risk I’ve felt many mixed emotions, sometimes wanting to sabotage my own team after endless arguments and heated conversations over the acquisition of enemy territory. Non-aggression pacts were broken, wars declared, and superpowers brought to the forefront of the game. At the beginning of the week, I was deadset on winning the game for the hegemon and taking over the board entirely. While the red team might have had a few disagreements, we were all willing to do whatever was necessary to ensure our victory. The Public was prepared to pay for countless troops and our Head of State was confident in his strategy. This came before the declaration of war by the Black team and the sanctions that were placed on our territories. Essentially penniless and useless, our team broke down and our Public decided to exercise their superpower and declare civil war. In doing so, the Public split the team, took half the territory and currency, and left the former hegemon in ruins. The objective of the original hegemon was to retain power over the Australian territories and to get the World Council to agree to fortify airlifts. Having been chosen by the Public to leave the former hegemon and join the Yellow Team, this objective no longer applied to me and my loyalty shifted. Our new objective as the Yellow Team was to amass 150 units of currency which seemed nearly impossible with the rate the rounds were commencing at. Accumulation of currency being our main objective, my teammate and I decided to cede our territories in South America for outrageous prices in an attempt to salvage our losses and potentially win the game. 

As we all know now, the Black and Green team won with a tie, so obviously, my teammate and I did not meet our new objective. But with that said, I’m not bitter about our loss. We tried our best and in the end, we were beaten by a better team. I will say, however, that for the amount of chaos thrown our way on the final day of battle, we adapted well. We might have made a few enemies (*cough cough* the Red Team) but we managed to keep level headed and create more diplomatic relationships with the other members of the board. Besides our currency objective, my teammate and I agreed on remaining peaceful and minding our business until the end of the final round. Our strategy was to lie low and if anything, offer up our territory for sale, as we only wanted to make money, not declare war and end up having to pay a war tax in the end. With that said, my teammate and I didn’t win but at least we were debt-free and had several territories with either a city or a resource.

All of that aside, Diplomatic Risk was a great base to implement our previous readings in. The "One World, Rival Theories" article was essential in preparing for the game and provided more strategies than I had thought of before. Personally, I followed the realist perspective of accepting the situation at hand and dealing with it with the resources given. The tactics of my fellow Diplomats at the World Council meetings especially forced me to reconcile with this theory as I was the lone state against three others who were ready and able to take us down at any moment. Including the Athenian Thesis, this week for our blog post further emphasized this realist perspective as I had to deal with how skewed the balance of power truly was in our World Council. I was outvoted at the beginning of each round and had to face an alliance between our opposing states. There was no fairness or "justice" involved in the decision-making process of Diplomatic Risk furthering my idea of the Athenian Thesis being put into practice in real-life political communities. This past week of classes has been very insightful for myself and I can't wait for more discussions on these theories next week with the start of The Prince.