Diplomatic Risk and the Real World Stage

 Blake Burchill

International Politics

Blog post 5


Diplomatic risk


Diplomatic risk is a very interesting game for an international politics class to play. While it is just a game, it creates an atmosphere that is as close as we can get to feeling as though we are on the international stage. This is also a game where the goal is not necessarily to create peace amongst others. Groups want to make war and peace where it would be most strategic to achieving their goals. There were five groups (red, blue, black, green, and yellow). Each group chose a president and a diplomat. The president was in charge of making final decisions whether that be to create an alliance or to declare war. The diplomat met with the other diplomats before each round to decide on the order of the turns or any other deals that needed to be made. Each team had its own specific goal. To win, your team had to achieve that goal. It would seem that some groups' goals were harder to achieve than others. For example, blacks' goal was to hold alliances with every team while yellow's goal was to gain 12 territories. While this was only a game, it showed that you can not trust each other and alliances can be broken. You had to understand that every move that a team made whether that be to make an alliance or start a war was to achieve their own goal. This game resembled what happens on the real international stage during a war period.

When states create alliances or refuse alliances, they are doing it for the benefit of their own motives. No state is joining a group like the UN because they are just good people. They feel like that alliance will benefit their state more than not being a part of the alliance. You can also see historically that states go to war because they have a specific motive. In the game of risk, no group's goal was to take over the world. They each had a specific goal. Although it is harder to do in the real world it is best to hide what your real goals are. This way other people are more likely to agree to an alliance or make a trade. By seeming like you are only trying to help your allies, they are less likely to suspect that you are really just trying to achieve your goals. 

Our team (yellow) had the goal of taking 12 territories. The strategy that our team used was to try and make alliances with almost all the teams besides ones the few that we thought would help us by waging war against. This way we could focus on trying to take territories from that team without worrying about getting attacked from all angles. This also helped because our allies also picked away at the team we were at war with making it easier to take territories. Because we had so many alliances and held most of our territories across the map, the other teams did not seem to suspect what our real goal was. If they did they would have fortified more of our neighboring territories with more than one or two armies. This allowed us to slowly take our 12 territories. Something that could have happened was if our diplomat decided to make his own group splitting ours in half. This would have made it much harder to win and would have allowed a better chance for the other groups. This game taught us that even though we are in the same class you can not always trust each other to help you because they have their own motives and goals. Even allies will have to go against each other to have overall success.


Comments

  1. Cassie LawlerMay 5, 2022 at 11:53 AM

    It was really interesting reading this post from the perspective of being on an allied team with yellow but having a minimal idea of what your total strategy was. I think that your team did a really good job of flying under the radar with your intentions, especially in the wake of keeping your enemies closest. In my post, I wrote about how the limited capabilities of alliances was not realistic enough but after reading your post, I understand that it is definitely a reality that many states make allies for purposes of convenience (i.e, not being attacked).

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