“In the case of the Star Kingdom—excuse me, the Star Empire—of Manticore, there’s no previous tradition of imperialism. Not in the territorial sense, at any rate. Manticoran power has traditionally been extended on an economic basis, by continually increasing the Star Empire’s inroads into the League’s shipping industries and penetrating market areas in the Verge and the Shell for its own goods. And, of course, there’s the enormous advantage the Manticoran Wormhole Junction bestows on its financial sector. Yet while all of that’s true, its recent expansion into the Silesian Confederacy and then into the Talbott Sector suggest there’s been a fundamental change in the Manticorans’ internal calculus. Our best guess over at Economic Analysis is that they believe it’s time to expand their political control in order to bolster their economic dominance and give them greater strategic depth. This may actually be a result of their conflict with the Havenites, a response to the awareness that a single-system star nation, however wealthy, is at a serious disadvantage when fighting a much larger multi-star system star nation because a single defeat can cost it everything. Which is rather ironic, I suppose, since the star nation it was worried about fighting is currently its ally against us.

“Regardless of the motivations in Haven and Manticore, however, we probably have to accept that the ambition for expansion will reinforce all the other reasons they believe they have for standing together against us. In which case, their alliance is going to have a lot more stability and staying power than anyone in the League would prefer.”

He paused politely to allow Kolokoltsov to digest what he’d already said, and the permanent senior undersecretary nodded slowly. He was impressed. Gweon might be young, but he was also articulate, and it sounded as if he had a much clearer and more detailed appreciation of the situation out in the Verge than any of the Navy briefers Rajampet had ever brought along with him.

“If I’m correct,” Gweon continued after he’d given Kolokoltsov a few moments, “and we can’t realistically expect the ‘Grand Alliance’ to self-destruct, we have to look at the balance of economic power as it exists and to consider just how stable we are ourselves.

“Economically, we have many times as many industrialized, heavily populated systems. Almost all of our Core Worlds have tech bases at least as good, overall, as the Manties and probably superior to anything Haven can produce at this time. Some of them don’t, and we need to be aware of that, as well. On balance, though, it would certainly appear the scales are heavily weighted in our favor.