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Sunday, Sep 17, 2023 - 23:08 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

The Gall Of The Gaul

As we wait for the new Turn to begin, there's some informal rapport-building between the Teams, which has turned into an impromptu stand-up comedy routine. The American delegate has the players all in tears with his mimicking of Syria demanding payment for their stolen oil, and it's swell to see would-be foes have something to bond over, one supposes, as the United Nations gets sidelined as forecast last May.

The first three Turns (11 to 13) of Twilight Struggle: New Moon being over, we enter a New Era, as recently conclusively confirmed by the U.S. Secretary of State! In the base Twilight Struggle game, this corresponds to the transition between Early War and Mid War, which happened about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962... and Team Blue's (i.e. mostly America's) ultimately-doomed involvement in the Vietnam War, which had begun in 1955 and saw the U.S. eventually send their troops in, a decade later. For the New Moon expansion, however, its open-ended nature means that no Early/Mid War labels can be applied with confidence, and moreover the Game had started with cards from all three periods (Early, Mid and Late) anyway.

As such, all that is done for this changing of the era is the reshuffling of previously-discarded cards back into the deck, excepting cards explicitly "removed from play". This reshuffling is of great strategic importance, since it hampers card counting/tracking, and returns previously-expended resources (cards) to the mix; therefore, more-advanced players will try to hold onto vital opponent Event cards, and use/discard them only after a wholesale reshuffle is done. This would guarantee that those cards will not return in the New Era, as would have been the case had they been played in the previous Era.

Team Red exposes their first card of the new Turn - Quoi!


Turn 14, Headline Phase (Team Red)



Stories of old, truth unfold, Control over Europe he holds
(Original sources: twilightstrategy.com, time.com, wikipedia.org)


Hero against the Nazis, General Charles de Gaulle (1890 — 1970) would eventually rise to be Prime Minister and then President of France. Revered by many as the embodiment of his nation, he was also a firm opponent of a pan-European union, and a constant thorn in the side of perceived Anglo Influence on the continent - a feeling that was reciprocated.

The particular event that De Gaulle Leads France references would be his famous withdrawal of France from NATO's integrated military command (until 2009) over what he viewed as outsized American Influence over the alliance, accompanied by his pursuit of an independent nuclear weapons program towards preserving France's strategic independence. The French were of course still displeased at their U.S. "allies" leaving them out to dry in the Suez Crisis about a decade ago, and their inability to hold on to the canal was "one of those moments" that confirmed a passing of the "top dog" torch, from the French (and British) to the parvenu Americans.

Some say the French were particularly ticked off by the perceived backstab, given how they had provided critical aid in the American Insurrection against the British back in 1778, and gifted them their top tourist attraction besides - and this before entering into the longstanding Anglo-French cultural rivalry that had persisted since the Brits were a backwater Roman border settlement, and the French (and their language*) were predominant in Europe. The entire debacle on "freedom fries" after France's (on hindsight well-justified) objection to Yet Another War by the Americans likely didn't help reconciliation, and while they remain nominally on the same (Blue) team, French interests have oft diverged from those of the Yanks.

Much the same went for the Brits even before Brexit severed them from the continent proper, and with overt German leadership of Europe still unpalatable due to two very big mistakes, there frankly aren't many other contenders for the title. China knew well where they had a wedge to drive, and this year alone has seen France insist that China must be engaged (against U.S. decoupling hints), that Europe should not intervene on Taiwan and risk becoming Anglo vassals, request an invitation to Team Red's BRICS summit, and then block a proposed NATO liaison office in Japan. Is it any wonder, then, that Macron has come to be described as an "echo of De Gaulle", who did his fair share of balancing towards China?



The Headlined Event then sees France now at 3/5 Influence from 5/4, with all their recent moves - including the continued strengthening of economic ties with China - signalling a determination to strike out on their own, which has to be interpreted as some realignment away from the Blues towards the Reds, if with hefty Influence from both Teams. There may well be repercussions, certainly, and it would be such a shame were something to happen to France's neo-colonial rump empire... but that's a card for another day!

[*The ongoing displacement of French by English of course being another lingering sore point for le French, who are often known to refuse efforts to converse in the upstart language. That said, I freely admit the inadequacies of the Mandarin moon rune system (I can say that, I'm Chinese, we probably know like twenty percent of them anyway), and if the U.S. does in fact not prevail in Cold War II, I'm pretty confident** that usage of English as the lingua franca will survive handily, in much the same way that Latin outlived the fall of Rome.]

[**Assuming everyone doesn't just rely on language translator ear implants in the near future, of course, from how foreign language proficiencies - and majors - appear in decline across the board, with enrollments for English and history down by a third over the last decade, among other humanities. On this, the ongoing student debt crisis might offer an explanation as to why undergraduates are considering more-immediately lucrative degrees, which was also why I took mine in the order that I had. Hey, a guy's got to eat too, and it's probably easier to just pick up the literary classic of one's choice at the library, than say partial differential equations from scratch.]



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Next: Truisms Of Men Past


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