The Pegasus/Treaty of Algeron

[cbspock]

Picard was wrong for what he did. Guess that is why he never went beyond Captain. His career was done, they already didn't trust him after Wolf 359, and the I Borg decision.


-Chris

[sonak]

Three possibilities:

1. The Romulans had the advantage at the time and could dictate the terms of a treaty.
2. The Romulans agreed to give up something equally valuable as a concession that we just don't know about.
3. The Federation negotiators were a bunch of spineless appeasers who wanted peace at any price and agreed to a bad treaty.

[Timo]

or 4. The Federation negotiators were under orders to indirectly provoke an attack from the Romulans so that the enemy could be crushed once and for all. Unfortunately, the Romulans turned out to be spineless appeasers who failed to violate the treaty despite the deliberate throat-exposing.

Timo Saloniemi

[Hartzilla2007]

Anwar wrote:

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And we don't know what the Romulans gave up in return. They never use that super-powerful plasma torpedo the BOP in Balance of Terror again, maybe they agreed not to further develop THAT tech in exchange.

Well in DS9 the season 7 opener with the Romulans and Bajorans facing off was over the Romulans trying to install plasma torpedoes in Bajoran territory without their permission so they may still use them.

[sonak]

Timo wrote:

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or 4. The Federation negotiators were under orders to indirectly provoke an attack from the Romulans so that the enemy could be crushed once and for all. Unfortunately, the Romulans turned out to be spineless appeasers who failed to violate the treaty despite the deliberate throat-exposing.

Timo Saloniemi

mmm... far too Machiavellian for the UFP we've seen, but interesting.

[T'Girl]

sonak wrote:

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3. The Federation negotiators were a bunch of spineless appeasers who wanted peace at any price and agreed to a bad treaty.

Federation President:

"I hold the Treaty of Algeron. A honorable agreement, from a trustworthy people."

[Timo]

agreed to a bad treaty

Bad in what way? They did get the peace - the Romulans supposedly kept to their side of the bargain. To achieve that, all Starfleet needed to do was stop spending money on a technology they didn't need now that their enemies were eating from their hand anyway. Win-win for the Federation.

Which makes one wonder why the Romulans ever agreed to such a devastatingly bad treaty for their part...

Timo Saloniemi

[Dream]

sonak wrote:

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3. The Federation negotiators were a bunch of spineless appeasers who wanted peace at any price and agreed to a bad treaty.

We know that already with the way they handled the Cardassians after that war.

[R. Star]

The Federation offering a policy of appeasement seems completely in character. They did so with the Cardassians, we know for a fact. This more vague treaty could be another example of the same thing, especially considering it was a pre-Wolf 359 Federation too, that didn't take defense seriously at all.

[sonak]

Timo wrote:

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Bad in what way? They did get the peace - the Romulans supposedly kept to their side of the bargain. To achieve that, all Starfleet needed to do was stop spending money on a technology they didn't need now that their enemies were eating from their hand anyway. Win-win for the Federation.

Which makes one wonder why the Romulans ever agreed to such a devastatingly bad treaty for their part...

Timo Saloniemi

er, there are more adversaries out there for the UFP than just the Romulans. Don't you think a cloaking device would be tactically useful against them?

[JirinPanthosa]

I got the impression the Federation and the Romulans were in a position that it wasn't clear who would win the war but they would definitely both take heavy casualties. The Romulans probably thought they would lose an all out conflict, so instead they set up a scenario where they could be safe in the short run and win in the mean time. And the Federation negotiator was, well, a dummy, probably believing that just given enough time the Romulans would want to join the Federation just like everyone else.

Remember the Romulans' tactics in TNG. They wanted a war, but a specific war: The war where the Federation draws first blood, guaranteeing nobody would join on their side, because they knew that's the only war they could win.

[Vanyel]

The Romulans could have also given up some or a lot of space to the Federation. Maybe, like during the Dominion War (when the Dominion was making concessions to gain a planet that had some of the resources to make the White), the Federation gave up cloaking technology to gain scarce resources on a planet now on their side of the Neutral Zone.

In a good compromise, or Treaty (a treaty to end or stop a war where there is no victor as of yet), neither side is completely happy. The Federation had to expend resources and talent on developing better sensors, both sides lost a chunk of space, and the Romulans had to pour resources into new cloaking technology. The Tal'Shiar and Section 31 or Starfleet Intelligence had to work over time to get the new sensor/cloaking information back to their governments.

[The Castellan]

Who wants yet another cold war going on, simple.

[Timo]

er, there are more adversaries out there for the UFP than just the Romulans. Don't you think a cloaking device would be tactically useful against them?

Not really. It's good for surprise strikes past defenses, but we don't see Starfleet perform that sort of thing - Starfleet is in the business of fighting fire with fire, of negating enemy defenses, and is not interested in hurting the soft targets beyond.

Cloaking is good in strategic terms: Klingons are known to routinely cloak even their civilian shipping ("Rules of Engagement"), let alone their expeditionary warfleets ("Way of the Warrior"), making it difficult for their opponents to predict large scale movements (which makes it all the more curious why the military shipment in "Sons and Daughters" was not cloaked!). At the tactical level, it doesn't matter much whether one sneaks up to the enemy with or without a cloak, as the act of decloaking gives enough time to the opponent to raise his usual defenses anyway; we have never witnessed real tactical surprise as the result of cloaking.

Timo Saloniemi

[The Librarian]

Star Grinch wrote:

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The Federation offering a policy of appeasement seems completely in character. They did so with the Cardassians, we know for a fact. This more vague treaty could be another example of the same thing, especially considering it was a pre-Wolf 359 Federation too, that didn't take defense seriously at all.

What appeasement with the Cardassians? It wasn't a one-sided agreement, as the Cardassians also had to give up planets that they wanted. The entire point of the DMZ was that they were going to finally set down a clean, undisputed border after decades of disagreement over who owned what planets. It wasn't appeasement, it was saying, "This conflict is stupid, let's just fix the border, exchange a few planets so that both sides gain and lose about the same amount, and then slap on a demilitarized zone for good measure." There were plenty of Cardassians who weren't happy with the treaty either, with several DS9 episodes showing that some members of the Central Command wanted to keep the peace and others wanted to grab some more colonies.

Next you'll be saying that failure to stick to "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!" was appeasement.