Spontoon Geopolitics

a geopolitical primer by Ken Pick

"Geopolitics" is the term for politics at the global strategic level. (Despite its current use justifying Nazi expansionism, the term was not invented by Josef Göbbels or Joachim von Ribbentrop.) Before the Great War (1914-1918), geopolitics was better known as "The Great Game" or "Empire Building", fueling Europe's vast colonial empires.

The British Empire

The world's largest colonial power, the British Empire has little presence these days in the Pacific; the cost of the Great War in blood and treasure (and indigestion over its share of Germany's and Turkey's possessions in Africa and the Middle East) has forced a pullback to Africa, India, the Middle East, and the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Political Overview

The cost of the Great War has also affected the Empire in another way. With much of "the flower of a generation" dead in Flanders and the Somme and returned survivors coping with shell-shock and spreading horror stories of the trenches and No Man's Land, a cynicism towards the Government has taken hold, as has a widespread Peace Movement. Since the War, the Government and the British people have been in the forefront of the peace movement - disarmament treaties, peace demonstrations, formally outlawing war, and trusting in the "collective security" and "multilateral diplomatic action" of the League of Nations. (This "Peace Zeitgeist" reaction to the War is actually widespread among all the countries of Europe - except for one: Das Deustches Reich.)

Plus, the Empire badly overextended itself when it gobbled up Germany's former African colonies and carved up the former Turkish Empire (i.e. the entire Middle East) with France at Versailles in 1919. Previously, the British Empire had been careful to not take more colonies than they could actually administer and control. Now the Colonial Office (and the disarmament-reduced Army to enforce them) is stretched very thin; the Empire has been forced to abandon the Pacific and Eastern Asia, and independence movements (influenced more by the French and Russian Revolutions than the American) are spreading among the "wogs".

British-affiliated Pacific nations and surviving colonies:

Australia - Dominion Status, similar to Canada. (After news of the Breaker Moran incident got back home after the Boer War, the ANZACs wouldn't settle for anything less than full autonomy, even if the Pommies weren't willing to grant full independence.) Still associated with the British Empire, but much more autonomous. (And for the pulp feel, surviving critters from the Dreamtime - Giant gawanas, Thylacines, and Thylacoleos.)

New Zealand - Dominion status, similar to Australia, and for the same reason. Probably Maori-ruled after a successful revolution, but with British influence by way of Oz. (And the moa & giant eagle survived - what's a pulp universe without monsters?)

Hong Kong - British Colony and major free port for Southern China. Taken from China during the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion and maintained as a commercial free port.

Singapore - "Gibraltar of the Pacific", and for the same reason - a British Navy base at a major choke point on the world's shipping lanes, allowing the Empire to isolate the Pacific and Indian oceans and block enemy shipping in wartime. Main British Navy Base in the area (primarily used as a ready forward base without permanently-based major warships) and a classic Colonial society in a small city-state at the tip of the Malay Peninsula.

The United States of America

North America's major power and up-and-coming Great Power, having achieved naval parity with the British Empire in the Washington Treaty of 1924. A latecomer to the game of Empire, but seized the Philippines and several Caribbean islands from Spain in an 1898 war. After losing the Philippines to an independence movement, the USA's only Pacific holdings are the Kingdom of Hawaii (a de facto colony) and several minor islands (including the Aleutians between Alaska and Vostokaya Zemyla).

With the British Empire's postwar pullback, the United States Pacific Fleet has become the mightiest military force in the Pacific, matching its rival Japan almost ship for ship; however, except for seaplane patrols, "showing the flag", and occasional Marine raids on local "coconut republics", the American government and military largely keep to themselves. They had enough of fighting abroad in the Great War, and the Roaring Twenties followed by the Depression has kept Americans too busy/worried to care much about the rest of the world. In many ways the "world's largest island nation" sealed off behind two mighty oceans, the Yanks as a whole have little official concern or interest in what lies beyond those oceans.

Individual Americans, on the other hand...

English they be, and Japanee
That hang on the Bear's north flank;
And some be Scot, but the worst of the lot
And the boldest thieves be Yank!
- Rudyard Kipling, "Ballad of the Three Captains", 18??

American Territories and affiliated nations in the Pacific

Lemuria - American territory off the coast of California, a long slim island paralleling the coast with Great Cosmic Significance in Western Occult circles. (The Theosophists - an occult society popular during the Roaring Twenties - teach that the next "Root Race" would arise on an island rising from the sea off California.) Other than that, best known as Hollywood's main competition for America's movie industry - during the early days of cinema, Lemurian studios had even more advance warning of Edison's Pinkerton goons than Hollywood.

The Kingdom of Hawaii (Spontoon's nearest neighbor - Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono) - Though nominally an independent kingdom under King Kamehameha VII, Hawaii is closely associated with the United States - a colony in all but name. Except for the Royal Family, most positions of power in the government are held by haoles, descendants of New England Puritan missionaries who arrived to "Christianize and civilize" the islands between 1820 and 1835. By the second or third generation, sugar plantations eclipsed saved souls and the missionary families became the power behind the throne.

It is the example of Hawaii that energizes the fierce independence of the Spontoons and most of the other minor Pacific islands.

The US Navy has full basing rights in Hawaii, which secures the supply routes to American possessions at Midway, Wake, and Guam and serves as a forward deployment base for the US Pacific fleet. Presently the navy base at Pearl Harbor (on Oahu, next to the capital of Honolulu) can only support shallow-draft ships and seaplanes; capital ships are limited to the open anchorage of Lahaina (on the southern coast of Maui) until the ongoing dredging of the harbor approaches is complete.

The Philippines - Originally a Spanish colony, then a US possession by right of conquest, the Philippine Islands are now an independent republic under President Emilio Aguinaldo (a former guerrilla leader against both the Spanish and Americans). After taking the Philippines in 1898, the Americans discovered they'd inherited not only Aguinaldo's rebels, but a 300-year-old religious war between the (Muslim) Moros of Mindanao and the (Catholic) rest of the islands. After famous American author Mark Twain exposed massacres committed by American troops (in retrospect, the natural result of guerilla Jihad in the jungles gone lunatic), Philippine independence was just a matter of time.

In 1898, American President McKinley justified taking the Philippines to "advance them and Christianize them". He apparently didn't know that (except for the Moros), Filipinos had been Catholics for around 300 years... Bahala Na...

Part of the conditions for independence were US retention of the Army Air Base at Clark Field, navy basing rights at Subic Bay near the capital of Manila, and Manila's coast defenses on the islands of Corregidor and El Fraile. Having the US Navy in the islands is seen as a hedge against the threat of the two "Island Empires" to the north -- Kuo Han and Japan.

The Japanese Empire

Asia's only native-born colonial power, a chain of volcanic islands off the coast of China with the third-largest navy in the world (and the second-largest in the Pacific). Since the Tokugawa Shogunate of the 16th Century until First Contact with Western powers in the early Victorian era, Japan was home to an isolationist, highly-xenophobic feudal warrior culture. At the top was the Emperor: Tennohieka - "Son of Heaven", more often than not a figurehead for the real power behind the throne: the Shogun, a military dictator who ruled through a feudal hierarchy of lords and samurai held together by the traditional warrior code of bushido. All done "in the name of the Emperor" - the oldest trick in Japanese politics.

Note: An Emperor of Japan is never referred to by name. While alive and on the throne, he is always Tennohieka, usually translated into English as "H.M. the Emperor". After his death, he is known by the name of his reign, such as The Emperor Meiji (or his successor The Emperor Taisho). The present Emperor is the successor of The Emperor Taisho; his reign (begun 1922) is named Showa - "Enlightened Peace".

Commodore Perry of the US Navy "opened up" Japan with one of the first instances of "gunboat diplomacy" in 1853. This "wake-up call" alerted the Japanese that there were other, more advanced Imperial powers out there, and what was happening in China (the Opium Wars) served as an example of what these Great Powers meant to do to Asia - subjugate and dominate until all non-European lands were colonies. The shock of Commodore Perry had saved Japan from the fate of the Asian mainland.

By the time a new Emperor (Meiji) ascended the throne in 1867, the British had shelled Kagoshima in another example of gunboat diplomacy and the Imperial Court had split into two main factions: traditionalists around the Shogunate who wished to maintain Japan's isolation and feudal system, and progressives around the Emperor who stood for Westernization and modernization. This conflict came to a head in the 1867 with a Japanese civil war, the Meiji Restoration. The Emperor's Western-equipped, modern army of commoners crushed the Shogun's feudal army of samurai - guns against swords - and the winning faction went all-out for modernization and industrialization.

Within ten years, Japan was a British-style constitutional monarchy with a German-style school system, a French-style Army, a British-style Navy, and a rapidly-growing industrial base. Japanese demonstrated a knack for engineering and for copying the best of foreign organization and technology and improving on it. (Despite this demonstrated talent, most foreign powers still badly underestimate Japan, thinking of this upstart empire as primitive "wogs" blindly imitating their betters.) Their highly-organized, highly-regimented society - a holdover from the feudal clan system and the Shogunate - provided the discipline and organization to work a miracle, bringing Japan from the 14th to the 19th Century within twenty years. And like any 19th Century country that wanted into the Age of Colonial Empires, they developed a powerful military and started thinking about seizing colonies of their own.

In 1894, Japan fought a series of naval skirmishes with China. In 1900, Japan joined the Great Powers in a multi-national expeditionary force into China to put down the Boxer Rebellion. In 1905, Japan started and won its first war with a major power - Russia. The Japanese Navy's modern torpedo-boats and British-built battleships completely wiped out the Russian fleet - first the Russian Pacific fleet in a surprise-attack opening on their bases at Port Arthur and VZ, then the Russian relief fleet in the strait of Tsushima. By the time American President Teddy Roosevelt brokered the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the war, Japan was now one of the Great Powers with an army and navy the size of most European powers and colonies-by-conquest in Korea and a few islands off the Chinese coast.

Except the other Great Powers didn't treat them as such; being new upstarts and Asian instead of European, they were still wogs. America, in its own attack of xenophobia, denied citizenship to Japanese immigrants, clamped down on immigration, and sent its navy ("The Great White Fleet") on a round-the-world cruise as a show of force. After the Great War, the other Great Powers delivered similar snubs - the British backing out of the war's Anglo-Japanese alliance, the Europeans freezing Japan out of the spoils of defeated Germany, and the Washington Treaty fixing the Imperial Navy as permanently inferior to the British and American battle fleets - and Japan's warrior pride was insulted, responding to arrogance with arrogance. Gradually, over the next two decades, Japan drifted into its own brand of Fascism, emphasizing its samurai tradition and xenophobia.

Japan Today

Though still a constitutional monarchy with a civilian government, the xenophobic Army has become a new Shogunate, ruling as it pleases in the name of the Emperor. Those in the Parliament or Cabinet or Navy who oppose the Army find themselves assassinated by the swords of "Patriotic Societies" (providing the Army with "plausible deniability"); the Kempei Tai - the Army's military police - doubles as a national secret police to keep the populace in line; bushido has mutated into a cult of blind-obedience and Japanese supremacy taught in every grade of every school; and the native folk religion of Shinto has become a State Religion of Emperor-worship unto death. The Minister of War - the Army's highest-ranking general - is now Shogun in all but name; the Imperial Army is flexing its muscles conquering Northern China, while the Navy (the junior service) tries to rein in the Army in a vicious inter-service rivalry (up to and including assassinations).

The largest and most secretive of these "Patriotic Societies" is the Kokuryukai or "Black Dragon Society" with tentacles throughout the Zaibatsu (major industrial cartels) and Yakuza (organized crime clans) as well as the Kempei Tai and Army High Command.

Imperial Japanese Navy officers are often well-travelled and educated abroad, more able to see the "big picture" - especially the relative size and resource base of Japan vis-a-vis its main rivals (VZ, Kuo Han, and America). Imperial Army officers, however, are completely raised and trained within Japan, leaving the home islands only as part of a conquering army steeped in Japanese supremacy over the gaijin; Western cartoonists' caricatures of nearsighted Japanese wearing thick Coke-bottle glasses are actually a fair symbol of the myopic attitudes of Army High Command. Despite this, whatever the Army wants, the Army gets --
"TENNOHIEKA! BANZAI! BANZAI! BANZAI!"

The great fear is of a linkup of Fascist Japan with Nazi Germany; fortunately, this appears to be unlikely, given the growing ties between Vostokaya Zemyla and the Third Reich. There is enough bad blood between the Mensheviki and the Japanese since 1905 that even a Fascist Japan may very well align against these two Fascist powers on general principle.

Japanese colonies

Korea - taken by Japan between 1896 and 1900 after the assassination of Queen Min (by Japanese agents -- "Kokuryukai! Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!") triggered a succession crisis in the Korean Royal Family and ruled ever since as a colony. According to reports filtering out of the former Hermit Kingdom, Japanese rule is becoming more and more brutal and savage over time as Japanese-supremacist Fascism becomes more and more established.
"TENNOHIEKA! BANZAI! BANZAI! BANZAI!"

"Manchukuo" - Manchuria, northernmost coastal province of China, invaded by Japan in 1931 as the next step in its empire-building, and still being fought over. The League of Nations responded with stiff diplomatic protests and calls for sanctions - without noticeable effect.
"TENNOHIEKA! BANZAI! BANZAI! BANZAI!"

China

For over two thousand years, China had been the dominant power in Eastern Asia; all the neighboring minor countries - Korea, "Viet Nam" (present-day Indochina), and to some extent Japan - show influence or outright imitation of the Great Central Kingdom and its Celestial People. Since unification under the First Emperor, China has always been dominated by its conservative, bureaucratic north. The more cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial, and adventurous Cantonese of the South have always been under the thumb of bureaucrats from the North, to whom the System was perfect, ordained by Heaven, and maintained by proper calligraphy on all official documents.

Smug in its superiority and stagnated by its bureaucracy-gone-mad, China refused to acknowledge - much less react to - these Foreign Devils from Europe who snapped at its borders, eager for the riches of "Cathay". And with advancing technology and new up-and-coming empires, they slowly rolled over the Chinese. The British were first - introducing opium addiction to the Chinese to fix a trade deficit with China's tea using India's big cash crop; when China objected to their people becoming addicted, England forced them to accept their drug trade at gunpoint - the Opium Wars. More Europeans followed, forcing concession after concession, until their "Legations" in the capital were effectively foreign colonial outposts in all but name.

This sparked a nationalist backlash - the "Boxer Rebellion" of 1900 - where Chinese-supremacist secret societies ("Fists of Righteous Harmony") tried to massacre and/or drive out all Foreign Devils with covert backing by the Dowager Empress. The resulting war in all but name (known as "55 Days at Peking" from the high-profile siege of the Foreign Legations) resulted in the crushing of China by a multi-national expeditionary force and the abdication of the Empress. Reparations were assessed against China by the victorious Great Powers; only the Americans did something for China with their share (setting up a scholarship program for Chinese students) while the Europeans and Japanese just squeezed China dry.

About the time of the Great War, the Manchu Dynasty finally toppled to the "Kuomintang" (a clique of progressive reformers outside the Imperial system, rumored to be covertly backed by the Black Dragons) and the Republic of China was proclaimed. This ushered in a "time of troubles" as legend and history portray as always happening between dynasties; border provinces once more fell under the hand of warlords as a Communist movement (inspired by the Russian Bolsheviki) took hold in the countryside and began their own guerilla war against the Kuomintang who controlled the cities and capital.

China Today

"The Sick Man of Asia" - an isolationist former empire badly pummeled by new empires, to the point of almost becoming a colony of these new empires. The Manchu Dynasty is no more, and a new "time of troubles" has coalesced into a three-way, slow-motion civil war between the Kuomintang (or "Nationalists", officially the post-monarchy Government), the Communists (a large outer-provinces rebel band under a guerilla leader called "Mao"), and a lot of warlords who took the opportunity to set themselves up as petty kings in the outer provinces.

It is the example of China - from the Opium Wars to the present - that fuels anti-colonial movements throughout the Pacific.

(And then there's Manchuria, China's northernmost coastal province, which was invaded by Japan and has now "stabilized" into a four-sided war between the Kuomintang, the Communists, the Japanese, and any & all local warlords.)

Kuo Han

The Founding of Kuo Han

In 231 BC, Chin Shih Huang Ti was "Son of Heaven", i.e. Emperor of China. Styling himself "The First Emperor", he had all books that pre-dated his reign burned so all history would begin with him; all scholars who objected were sawn in two, buried alive, or sent as common laborers to build the Great Wall. Obsessed with gaining immortality, he consumed an endless succession of mercury-based magic potions in order to live (and rule as Emperor) forever. One of his courtiers announced that he had found an Elixir of Immortality on the "Isles of the Blest" to the East; the sorcerers and alchemists there would provide the Elixir to the Emperor - for a price.

The price was a fleet of oceangoing junks loaded with hundreds of young men and women and tons of specifically-itemized tribute - coincidentally, all that was needed to set up a new colony from scratch. The junks were loaded, the courtier placed in command, and the tribute fleet sailed off into the China Sea and were never seen again.

So was founded Kuo Han, with the expedition commander proclaiming himself the new Son of Heaven and reproducing the Chinese Empire in miniature on this new land, overrunning and absorbing the aboriginal peoples until Kuo Han was Chinese in every way but name and allegiance.

(The First Emperor, his sharp courtier, and the disappearing "tribute fleet" are all historical. Only their destination is fictional. - KP)

Kuo Han Today

To this day, Kuo Han remains a second, smaller China in language, society, customs, and Imperial system. Standoffish and self-sufficient, the Second Celestial Kingdom has survived the transition to the Twentieth Century by charting a middle course between China and Japan - more receptive to foreign ideas and technology and modernization than China, less so than Japan. They avoided the fate of their parent China by plain blind luck, being smaller and farther away; when the Europeans finally reached this "New Cathay", they were already over-extended and could do no more than make a token attempt at takeover.

Through fast learning, observation of China, and skilled diplomacy (balancing off one Great Power against another, like Ethiopia after the first Italian incursion), Kuo Han has managed to keep itself more or less intact. They remained studiously neutral in the Great War, and have countered the naval threat from Japan with a defensive navy of their own built around short-range coast defense battleships optimized for littorial conditions around their home island.

(Kuo Han provides an opportunity for a semi-mythical, archaic "China" to coexist with the historical "Sick Man of Asia". - KP)

Vostokaya Zemyla

Originally settled as a bridge between Siberia and Alaska, this backwater Russian colony became prominent during the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War, as the White Russians fled the mainland to this last bolt-hole. Currently Tsarist/Fascist, anti-Communist, and anti-Semitic, with blood feuds on for both Japan (since 1905) and the USSR (since 1917). HRH the Grand Duchess (mouthpiece of the boyari and Fascists) is always claiming that "Next year we invade and liberate Mother Russia from the Bolsheviki", which 20 years later has become a running joke to everyone except the VZs - and the pathologically-paranoid Stalin.

The origin of VZ

After selling Alaska to the Americans (until 1917, Russo-American relations had always been very civil), Russia concentrated on VZ as their only remaining farthest-east territory. Still, VZ remained a backwater; the only seaport harbor (with rudimentary defenses) was a secondary/backup base for the Russian Pacific Fleet, but the island was far enough away from the growing threat (Japan) that the bureaucracy in Moscow always had more important things to spend rubles on. As the showdown with Japan loomed throughout 1902-03, VZ was scheduled for reinforcement, but this too got lost in the immense Russian bureaucracy.

VZ in the Russo-Japanese War, 1905

When Japan launched the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, they struck VZ simultaneously with Port Arthur in a two-pronged counterforce opening. The strike on VZ was a hit-and-run raid to destroy the base facilities, followed by minelaying to render the only military-capable port inoperable as a base for the duration of the war. It succeeded in doing so.

After TR brokered the Portsmouth Treaty ending the war, Russia rushed to settle the island and fortify it against the Japanese threat; the expense of this helped bring about the collapse of the Tsarist government during the Great War but left VZ ready and waiting as a bolt-hole during the Revolution.

VZ in the Bolshevik Revolution/Russian Civil War - 1917-22

The Bolsheviki ended up pushing the Tsarists across Siberia to their bolt-hole at VZ. Enough "Whites" were able to escape the "Reds" to make VZ into a functioning nation - with a serious grievance culture against the mainland (now USSR). Some of the Russian Pacific Fleet (including one Dreadnaught) was able to escape Vladivostok & Archangelsk, giving the new nation a rudimentary sea defense (and more important, denying those ships to the mainland).

VZ and "Black Market Battleships" - mid-1920s

When the Washington Treaty of 1924 fixed upper limits on naval strength for the Great Powers, the largest navies (read: Royal Navy) were forced to downsize. Faced with disposing of older ships to get down to the Treaty limits, the British (and to a lesser extent, the Americans) decided to sell their older warships off to non-aligned minor nations (read: newly-independent Pacific Island countries) instead of scrapping them. This led quickly to a seller's market in Dreadnaughts - the "Washington Treaty Fire Sale".

VZ was the trigger - paranoid of both the USSR and Japan, with access to the Romanov Crown Jewels, HRH the Grand Duchess a cousin of the King of England, and only one surviving Third-rate Dreadnaught to counter the 10+ of their main maritime enemy (Japan), they started buying as much of the Brits' surplus inventory as they could - five older Dreadnaughts (HMS Erin, KGV, Centurion, Ajax, and Agincourt) and as much smaller stuff (cruisers, destroyers, submarines, torpedo-boats, and gunboats) as they could.

Other, smaller North Pacific nations saw this and started panic-buying, in a naval bidding fever that led to some pretty interesting cloak-and-dagger action and some outright black-market swindles.

("Psst! Hey, buddy! Wanna buy a battleship?")

When Japan threatened to withdraw from the Treaty and re-start its full "8-8" building program in the face of this re-arming, the other Great Powers stepped in and forced a Pacific Minor Nations Naval Treaty. Held at the neutral Spontoon Islands in 1926, the Spontoon Conference extended the Washington Treaty to all Pacific nations.

VZ and Fascism

Because of its background (Tsarist Russian, with the Tsarist political traditions of "Autocracy and Serfdom" and a pre-existing secret police and bureaucracy) and its paranoia about the Communists on the mainland, VZ found itself already primed for the latest in political cults - Fascism. Having missed out completely on the Roaring Twenties, the Depression hit VZ hard; the country went Fascist almost overnight.

"Mensheviki Fascism" acts entirely within the trappings of the old Russian Imperial System, canonizing the last Tsar as a martyr, elevating his surviving daughter HRH the Grand Duchess to Tsarina and making "Taking back the Mainland and restoring the Tsar" a National Article of Faith. The VZ Orthodox Church continues its historic subservience to the Royal Family with its "Third Rome" doctrine of VZ (through Russia) as the true heir of the Roman Empire, blessing the "Restoration" as a Holy Crusade. Over time, "enemy of my enemy" has led to closer and closer ties to the premier Fascist state - Das Deustches Reich, aka Nazi Germany - until VZ has become in all but name Herr Hitler's ally of convenience in the Pacific, despite the Nazis and Tsarists being barely able to stomach each other.

Note that despite its fearsome reputation, the Okhrana - the Tsarist secret police - is actually much less bloodthirsty than its mainland counterpart the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD or whatever Comrade Stalin calls it this week. (Before the Revolution, most all the Bolsheviki had done time in prison or Siberia courtesy of the Okhrana. They were able to later take over the country and proclaim the USSR only because the Okhrana let them live. The Bolsheviki - especially a certain Georgian street thug whose gangland alias was "Stalin" - swore they'd never make the same mistake.) Fall into the hands of the Okhrana and if you survive the initial arrest you will be forcibly deported or at worst imprisoned, not killed outright as is the case on the mainland. The Okhrana is paranoid and brutal, but less so than Germany's Gestapo or Japan's Kempei Tai.