Federation President:
"I hold the Treaty of Algeron. A honorable agreement, from a trustworthy people."
The Pegasus/Treaty of Algeron
- Thread starter indolover
- Start date
Federation President:
"I hold the Treaty of Algeron. A honorable agreement, from a trustworthy people."
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
We know that already with the way they handled the Cardassians after that war.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who wants yet another cold war going on, simple.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
***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.
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
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
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
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
Similar threads
