However, Steel Vanguard was a major break from GDI's previous plans to play defense against Nod surprise actions and then counterattack. While GDI leadership and the Nod military forces were aware that Nod was planning to strike first in a large scale, it would look like GDI suddenly launched a massive offensive war of choice out of the blue to everybody else. While GDI could reveal that Nod was planning to strike GDI first, almost all Nod civilians would not believe it as they have been taught always believe the worst about GDI.
Yes. On the other hand, this is what Nod civilians have been taught to expect from GDI, so... neutral result.
One of the key things to remember, and that I think you kind of leave out of this analysis,
@BoredStudent1414 , is that it's meaningless to talk about whether something is good or bad without a benchmark for comparison. Good or bad compared to
what?
If GDI pulls into a shell of defenses and just tanks Nod attacks, Nod makes propaganda about GDI living in ivory arcology towers and leaving the Yellow Zones to die.
If GDI goes out of the defenses to do useful things in the Yellow Zones, Nod shoots at them.
If GDI shoots back too hard and starts forcing Nod back, Nod makes propaganda about GDI imperialists out to take your land and tiberium.
In every situation, Nod will force
something bad to happen to GDI, so you can't use "will Nod say mean things about us" as a proxy for "did we win," because Nod will
always do that no matter whether we win or lose.
After all, from the average pro-Nod Yellow Zoner's point of view, GDI has indeed launched a massive worldwide offense to take Nod lands out of the blue and has caused the biggest refugee crisis since the Third Tiberium War.
This looks a little different when you reflect that said refugees are running
toward us, not
away from us. When 10% of Nod's entire population defects or is overrun, it's a good sign that the rest of the population knows the score. That is, the bulk of the Nod population knows, even if they cannot publicly admit, that GDI is in fact
feeding and housing these new refugees. Assuming GDI hasn't been taking stupid pills, they will publicize this fact, and it will probably neutralize or even more than neutralize the political consequences of 'causing' the refugee crisis in question.
Remember that Nod subjects are crossing the border to join GDI on purpose; the reverse is generally not true.
Meanwhile, many GDI citizens would also view Steel Vanguard as a potentially unnecessary offensive of choice because they might too not believe GDI's claims that Nod was planning to strike GDI first because of a distrust of the government, or out of the belief that a Nod buildup now was just an intimidation tactic, or that a Nod attack could simply be repelled and does not justify a massive offensive war.
The lived experience of GDI citizens would argue against this. You are acting as if these are residents of a real life 21st century democracy. They are not. They are residents of GDI, a nation which has been
repeatedly attacked without provocation by Nod over and over for roughly a whole human lifetime.
No one in GDI will be even slightly surprised to learn that Nod was about to launch a massive onslaught against the Blue Zones with copious use of bizarre masterpiece weapons and crazy shit and killbots and ninjas and giant cyborg gorillas with laser eyes and whatever. Nod has done
that exact thing at least two or three times within the living memory of most people in GDI society.
I suspect the median GDI citizen is just pleased that
this time we saw Nod coming and gave them a good swift kick in the balls, instead of not detecting the onslaught until it had already fallen on us, as happened in 2047,
literally just fifteen years ago, the last time this happened.
Nod has been a murderous and atrocity-mongering enemy from the perspective of GDI citizens for as long as almost any of them have been alive. There is widespread popular support for defeating it. This is very different from the situation which obtains in real life circa 2022 where most First World nations are not under realistic military threat.
With the Regency War being an offensive war of choice by the minds of many GDI citizens, it is less public support for the war than in previous conflicts with Nod and the war is very unpopular with a loud sizable minority who resent being called on to sacrifice for a war effort to conquer lands full of people who hate GDI and love Kane which they consider not worthwhile.
By this point, there is significant impact from experience with actual Yellow Zoners (tens of millions of refugees who lived under Nod rule for varying lengths of time before we rolled forward in the mid-2050s, a smaller wave than from Steel Vanguard but still a wave).
It will be apparent to most Blue Zone citizens (apart from Initiative Firsters) that the typical Yellow Zoner is not truly someone who "hates GDI and loves Kane," so much as they are desperate to survive and find praising Kane to be a way of increasing their life expectancy in cities ruled by Nod Confessors.
Likewise, the Nod terrorist attacks may well be seen, not as a consequence of GDI's "war of aggression," but as a consequence of Nod being Nod. Typical GDI citizens
really hate Nod. Many if not most GDI citizens have already had to evacuate their home one or more times, as either they or their immediate ancestors must have fled
into the existing Blue Zones from what are now the Red Zones.
GDI citizens, from long experience, are mostly well primed to blame all acts of Nod terrorism
on Nod, rather than on GDI.
How well is the Brotherhood of Nod doing? This is a complex question. While we tend to speak of the Regency War as a war between all of GDI and a sizable portion of the Brotherhood of Nod, that is not the way the Nod leadership views this war. The goals that Kane, the high-level Nod warlords, and the low-level Nod memberships are seeking in the Regency War are quite different. From the viewpoint of Kane, the Regency War is nothing but an audition to discover the best warlord to serve as his right hand person to help him achieve his ultimate goal of leaving Earth. The loss of strategic Nod buffer territory and the deaths of many of his forces is of no concern to him. The only way Kane could fail to achieve his goal for the Regency War is if every warlord failed miserably against GDI by an equal margin leaving him with no successful warlord or most successful failure to raise up which was very unlikely to happen.
Well, Kane would also have suffered a serious setback if GDI had done so well that it effectively broke the Brotherhood of Nod as a viable military instrument. Much of Kane's bargaining power comes from his control of a vast and loyal army. If Kane were coming to us alone, or with a handful of followers, with the TCN blueprints, we would likely build them, but he would have almost no leverage to ensure that they were built on his terms.
But instead, he has an army of millions and about half the remaining viable territory on Earth loyal to him. This means that he can do a lot more to disrupt our own efforts, and also has more resources and land to offer us to collaborate on the project.
If GDI takes in these refugees, it is a massive burden on the GDI welfare systems that will polarize the Blue Zone public.
Notably, this is objectively true and is an important point to make...
But GDI's economy is growing by leaps and bounds (we have taken pains to make it so), with 5-10% GDP growth
per year. As such, we have a better chance of weathering the sudden influx of 20% of our population in refugees, many of them disabled or unskilled, than would almost any other nation in all of history.
...
Overall, I think your analysis falls prey to the old truism that "the enemy is always ten feet tall." You largely ignore or bypass reasons why GDI citizens might support the war, or why we might have nothing to lose in the propaganda war in the Yellow Zones, while focusing heavily on the idea that everyone (including GDI citizens) will essentially take Nod's version of events at face value. I'm not saying this is out of dishonesty or desire to side with Nod, I'm sure it's not. But in effect, you are counting every way GDI might be weakened, while ignoring all ways that GDI might be strengthened. That's inevitably going to yield biased results.
