The Pegasus/Treaty of Algeron

[Anji]

It's pretty simple: not every agreement you sign is for your advantage.

[Vanyel]

We can't say the Treaty was bad for the Federation. We don't know what the Romulans gave up. Their ships don't run on a matter/anti-matter reactor, so maybe they lost access to planets full of dilithium.

[sonak]

Anji wrote:

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It's pretty simple: not every agreement you sign is for your advantage.

true, but when you're signing a treaty that's not to your advantage, it's usually because you're losing or are somehow in a weaker position than the other party.

[MacLeod]

We know so little about the Treaty about the only provisions we know about are :-

Entry by either side could be considered an act of war.
The UFP is banned from developing cloaking devices.

Aside from that we don't know what if anything the Romulans had to concede. Without knowing that it's hard to say if the treaty was a bad treaty.

[Timo]

Entry by either side could be considered an act of war.
The UFP is banned from developing cloaking devices.

And actually, we only know that the Treaty of Algeron speaks of the latter issue.

The Neutral Zone treaty might be a different beast altogether, and unrelated to Algeron. After all, such a treaty was in existence in TOS already, and supposedly was signed all the way back in the mid-22nd century, whereas Algeron has "kept the peace" and "tied the hands of Starfleet" for just sixty years.

Of course, it might be that Algeron originally didn't do a good job at keeping the peace, and only really got going a hundred and fifty years after its signing. And Starfleet might not have considered its hand tied by a fanciful "no invisibility devices" clause until Kirk's adventures revealed that invisibility actually existed and Romulans had it already.

But the intended idea seems rather to be that Algeron was only signed around 2310 (possibly as a reaction to the 2260s revelation that cloaks existed, and to a putative Starfleet countermove in the 2270s-90s, after which the two sides sat to discuss ways to avoid another war) whereas the Neutral Zone Treaty dates back to 2160 or thereabouts. Whether the no-cloaks treaty is an expanded version of the original NZ treaty, and what the proper name of the original NZ treaty might have been, we don't really know.

Timo Saloniemi

[Cephas]

I just finished reading the Lost Era novel, Serpents Among the Ruins, last night. It dealt with the Tomed Incident and the subsequent Treaty of Algeron.

***Minor Spoilers from Novel***
In short, the Federation had no true interest in developing cloaking technology but gave the appearance of pursuing it in order to gain a treaty concession, namely that the Romulans withdraw from Koltaari, a planet they had recently occupied. Though not an onscreen answer, it's an answer.

[Timo]

The specific bit about cloaks there always felt a bit forced to me, not flowing naturally from the rest of the plot, but yeah, it's an explanation.

For all we know, the Treaty of Algeron was dictated on both the Feds and the Romulans by an outside force, much like the Treaty of Organia. Although it also seems probable that only the truce of Organia was forced on our heroes and villains, and the contents of the treaty were then created by the two sides when both found the short respite from fighting advantageous.

Perhaps the UFP and Romulus went to a bitter war in the 2290s when the complicity of Romulans in all that ST6 nastiness was revealed, and some of the big boys then stepped out and put a stop to that? Once forced to negotiate, both sides decided to give up something they felt they didn't need, to make it look good - and fighting advantages were cheap currency now that fighting was forbidden anyway.

Timo Saloniemi

[MacLeod]

Well we can sort of Place the Treay of Algeron to being signed in 2311 following The Tomed Incident.

[Timo]

Yup - we know that the incident took place just before Romulans went into isolation, and if the Treaty of Algeron has kept the peace for 60 years as of 2371, then it might be deduced that the isolation began in 2311. It would be odd for the isolation to start first, and peace to only follow much later... Not impossible, but odd. (A bit more likely for peace to start first, and Tomed to come later but, being an isolated incident, not count as an "actual" breach of peace.)

But 2311 is probably too accurate a date for the incident, as it would be something of a coincidence if the episode "The Pegasus" took place exactly sixty years after the incident, rather than merely approximately so.

Note that when Tomed is discussed in "The Neutral Zone" (the only mention of it ever), it is said to have been fifty years ago, even though "The Neutral Zone" and "The Pegasus" are separated by six to seven years, not ten. So a date more like 2315 is probably a better bet.

Timo Saloniemi