Tripartite Alliance

In the immediate aftermath of the Third World War, none of the surviving Great Powers retained a capacity for global military intervention. Wasted Japan managed to maintain a limited capacity for intervention in neighbouring areas of Asia, while the European Confederation -- with its Egyptian allies -- maintained a capacity for intervention in the Middle East and northern Africa, and South America -- particularly Brazil and Argentina -- could project power throughout the South Atlantic and South Pacific areas, even into the Caribbean. However, none of these countries or confederation kept the military capacity and the economic base to maintain an effective global intervention force.

The need for such a global intervention force was questioned by many, since the major combatants in the Third World War -- Siberia, China, Southeast Asia, and North America -- had been thoroughly devastated and could not longer threaten the safety of the entire world. Yet, the breakdown of law and order in much of the world created new threats for the surviving countries of the world. For instance, either corrupt governments or simple anarchy could create huge flows of refugees, while unstable local dictatorships might well amass surviving pre-War weapons to try to blackmail surviving states into making concessions. The possibility of epidemic diseases emerging in the most chaotic areas and promptly spreading worldwide, decimating a weakened population of survivors, was also considered a serious threat by the League Health Secretariat. Too, the simple human cost to survivors in the combatant states of large-scale violence hampering the recovery of their homelands from the war, and thus slowing down global recovery, was also considered.

Towards the end of 1983, the governments of the major Great Powers had come to an understanding that the construction of some kind of global intervention force capable of preventing the anarchic areas of the world from threatening the rest of the world, and of laying the foundations for the eventual recovery of these regions from their nadir, was essential. They still faced the question, though, of what form it would take. The League of Nations was the most obvious choice, but the League's secretariats and affiliated agencies were far too busy to even consider the construction of a League of Nations military force. In the end, the Great Powers -- specifically, the European Confederation, Japan, and the South American Community -- decided to substitute a single intervention force for a global alliance.

The Accord on International Military Cooperation, signed in the Swiss city of Ticino on the 15th of February, 1984, by representatives of the European Confederation, the South American Community's member-states, and the Empire of Japan, created what was known as the "Tripartite Alliance" owing to its membership of three immensely powerful Great Powers. In the Ticino Accord, the signatory powers agreed to develop in common strategies and cooperation pathways that would let them deploy forces worldwide in order to respond to threats officially designated as such in a three-quarters majority vote of the League of Nations General Assembly. The Ticino Accord also established that the Tripartite Alliance signatory powers were charged with cooperating with designated League of Nations members in whichever region an intervention was planned: Egypt in the Middle East, West Africa and South Africa in sub-Saharan Africa, Mexico and Canada in North America, Korea in northeastern Asia, Thailand and Australia in Southeast Asia, and the independent Indian successor states in South Asia, were all designated as the local partners of the Tripartite Alliance, meeting the concerns of these powerful regional states that any Tripartite Alliance intervention in their neighbourhood might be conducted without their consent.

The first Tripartite Alliance military intervention occurred in the Persian Gulf, as Iranian-backed revolutionary armies from the new Islamic Republic of Arabia threatened to overrun the oil-producing emirate of Oman. After the Iranian and Arabian governments refused to obey a General Assembly resolution commanding both governments to cease and desist, a second General Assembly resolution was passed authorizing the Tripartite Alliance to enforce Iranian/Arabian withdrawal from Oman in April of 1984. After a series of pitched battles between a combined European/Japanese force and the Arabian military outside of the Omani capital of Muscat, Iran and its Arabian proxy agreed to withdraw from Oman.

The next challenge faced by the Tripartite Alliance was the Chinese successor state of Shandong, in northeastern China. Relatively unaffected by the final nuclear exchanges of the Third World War, Shandong and adjoining provinces were unified under the leadership of surviving Communist cadres. Despite this partial restoration of stability in the area, though, Shandong's peasant population had suffered from a major famine at the end of 1984 owing to the lack of fertilizers, and by all indications was set to suffer another famine at the end of 1985. After the Japanese and Korean governments rejected Shandong's desperate plea for food aid on the ground of their own meagre reserves, in July of 1985 the Shandong Central Committee attempted to blackmail both countries into supplying Shandong with the food supplies by threatening to target several dozen surviving land-based short-term nuclear-armed missiles at Japanese and Korean cities. This precipitated another General Assembly resolution authorizing the Tripartite Alliance to intervene against Shandong in order to destroy the nuclear weapons and to prevent Shandong from posing a threat to League of Nations interests. The resulting Japanese-led multinational intervention successfully captured or destroyed all of the nuclear-armed missiles, while decapitating the Shandong government. Unfortunately, the Tripartite Alliance intervention destroyed Shandong's unstable government and caused the slide of that province into anarchy, dooming millions of people to premature death.

The fallout from the Shandong intervention, and the roughly simultaneous Japanese annexation of Luzon, discouraged the Ticino Accord's signatories from continuing their interventionist role. For the remainder of the 1980's and the early 1990's, the Tripartite Alliance's efforts were redirected towards supporting the establishment of the League of Nations mandates in Asia, supplying the military forces that were necessary in order to effectively impose the authority of the Mandate governments across their assigned territories. Though this use of military force was criticized by many opponents of the Tripartite Alliance as blatantly imperialistic, official and public opinion alike in the signatory countries generally supported this use of military power.

As the League of Nations gradually became a self-sufficient in the course of the 1990's, the need for the Tripartite Alliance began to decline. In 1996, in fact, the General Assembly debated the abolition of the Tripartite Alliance and the establishment of a League-funded military force in its stead. Though this resolution failed, the debate that it caused might eventually have led to the Tripartite Alliance's abolition had it not been for the Holy Alliance invasion of Eurasia in 1998. The crucial role of the Tripartite Alliance in mobilizing off-world support for the expulsion of the Holy Alliance occupation forces -- in particular, the alliance struck with Communauté globale that saw the use of the kinetic-kill Thor weapons against the remaining Holy Alliance occupation forces in the former Soviet Union -- made quite a few former opponents of the Tripartite Alliance fervent supporters.

As of early 2001, it seems likely that the Tripartite Alliance will survive in one form or another, although the rise of non-signatories to the Ticino Accord to the status of Great Powers and the growth of League planetary-defense strategies and agencies indicate change. By the end of this decade, the Ticino Accord may eventually be folded into the League of Nations treaty structure, with full membership being extended to the recent additions to the Supreme Council and to other responsible rising powers, such as West Africa, South Africa, and the Indian states of Maharashtra and Tamilnad. Whatever the changes that will overtake the Ticino Accord, though, its legacy will remain with this world for some time to come.