2 March 2025
Well, that's right—it's very difficult to make sense of what's happening here. We can understand the events as they unfold, but explaining the thinking behind them is much harder.
To me, the simplest way to understand the relationship between a metropole and its vassal states is to see it as a parent-child dynamic.
The metropole acts as the responsible authority, making decisions and providing stability, while the vassal behaves like a dependent child—lacking responsibility, struggling to pragmatically assess consequences, and making demands based on emotion rather than a well-thought-out strategy.
We armchair analysts can observe these moves from our Olympian heights, where action and reaction are easy to interpret. But for the "child" vassal, subject to the authority of the parent metropole, the bigger picture is often misunderstood. Instead of strategic reasoning, emotions guide decisions—leading to hissy fits when demands aren’t met or sulking or self-harm, when things don’t go their way.