Speaking of the Typhon Pact, and how unsure everyone is over whether it's "bad" or not....
It would be interesting if Nan Bacco would use something similar to the following as a campaign ad for a second term--with her face replacing Reagan's at the end, of course:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpwdcmjBgNA&feature=related
Just sayin'....
Ummm. You do remember that Bacco was elected on a
pro-peace, pro-diplomacy, anti-belligerence, let's-not-run-around-telling-everyone-that-we're-ready-to-go-to-war-with-them platform, right?
That's the sort of campaign ad that Arafel Pagro would run, not Nan Bacco.
(BTW, I don't consider the ad I linked to to be "fear-culling" or "warmongering". The entire point of the ad was, "We don't KNOW much about this bear...whether it's hostile or not...so doesn't it make sense to be prepared for all scenarios...just in case?")
And I'm sure that that's what Bacco, indeed,
any Federation President would do... behind closed doors.
To drag that out in the public sphere does not actually increase Federation security, though. Foreign states would be observing that kind of campaign rhetoric, and it would register with them. They would take it as a message of hostility and belligerence. To make the, "Let's get ready to kick everyone's ass just in case" notion a central part of your political platform is to, in essence, declare to the galaxy that you are untrustworthy, suspicious of others, and unwilling to trust others, and are therefore an unreliable potential ally.
Reagan is just lucky that Gorbachev was the guy who came to power in the Soviet Union in '85, leading to the liberalization policies that weakened Soviet unity and promoted the previously-suppressed nationalist sentiments that brought down the USSR. God knows what would have happened if a less liberal, more hot-headed asshat had taken the Kremlin.