"Sure. Pelape helped but doesn't really have the background."

"So, there are wizards! None of their governments think we have any rights, and occasionally they abduct us to keep until they get bored, and there's nothing we can do about that without the help of a nongovernment faction of wizards. The nongovernment faction of wizards wants to protect us, which is great, and they might have terraforming, which is straight-up the most important thing in history, but they also want us to break the population controls treaty, something that will definitely get all of us personally killed along with probably a hundred million other people. And they want human rule, which seems probably detrimental to humans but as long as it's voluntary then humans just won't choose it if it's harming them, so that's fine. Diplomat's job is to convince these wizards that their request will cause a war, and then feel them out - is their attitude 'well, it'll mostly be Amentans dead in a war, that's acceptable to us' or 'well, it's stupid that this would cause a war so we're going to just behave as if it wouldn't, because game theory', or 'if it would genuinely cause a war, that's not worth it, but we don't really believe Amentans about that' or 'oh, this is actually not worth that price, let's talk about non-war-causing options'. 

And then, depending which of those it is, diplomat's job is either to get to work on non-war-causing options or to try to get out of this proposed alliance as nondestructively as possible, because 'some rate of random abductions' is less bad than the war and we actually cannot make the proposed bargain. Except this isn't a conventional kind of agreement, and it's not clear if there is a way to reject it gracefully or at all; it might just be that we'd end up declining an alliance and that you'd still insist on no population controls, in which case the only option available to us is to pick who we want to fight. Aitim has told her that he thinks that you care about Amentans dead in a war, and have game-theoryish instincts but wouldn't follow them off a cliff, but Aitim met wizards who he admits he can't read perfectly under deeply atypical circumstances and she has to make that determination herself.

So you talk about the population controls, and to her it sounds like a mix of all of the above. You think a war is less bad than we think a war is - I don't actually think that's because you're discounting Amentan lives, I think it's because wizards mostly don't have wars and it's hard to get a feel for things like 'a 1% chance of two hundred million people dead' without spending tons of time specifically drilling yourself in how to do that..."

"I can just multiply it out but it seems stupid on the part of the would-be aggressors and I don't follow the logic of why they'd do that beyond that a treaty entitles them to."

"Anitam has one point six billion people now. We're the largest country in the known universe and in a generation we'll be the largest military and industrial power. If we decided to stop doing population controls entirely we could grow to forty billion, on Earth, and be trivially more powerful than everyone back home. That kind of imbalance compounds. We can make more ships, we can take more planets, we can turn them into net producers of value for our country faster. If we had the slightest expectation we could get away with it it'd be obviously the right thing to do for our own people. And past a point, we could get away with it. That point - the point at which we'd be militarily powerful enough that we could announce we're ending population controls and no one could do anything about it - is uncertain. No one knows the extent of anyone else's military capabilities, we were far enough ahead of everyone else that we got FTL first - it would not be inconceivable to a strategic analyst trying to estimate our capabilities to think that we might, if we had two billion humans, be past the point where anyone could challenge us.

And there are going to be two billion humans. Even if we imposed controls as planned, every human born today gets two and the infant mortality rate just collapsed, the population might level out in the long term but in the short term it's spiking. Not imposing controls, then it's going to level in a couple generations, at two or maybe at four billion. Four billion is very likely to be past the point where Anitam would be militarily in a position to drop controls entirely. Not definitely past that point, because everyone else could coordinate in a war, but we've got the giant casteless population we could grey, at two billion and definitely at four billion we have way more potential soldiers than anyone else.

Without population controls for humans Anitam is headed towards a place where it could stop obeying them for Amentans. And everyone is going to presume we would be tempted."

"Are you assuming they're assuming you'll use humans in combat positions?"

"It will occur to them as a possibility, and things we do make it look more and less likely we'd consider it a possibility, and humans would honestly be very suited for grey and that will itself be a thing that makes it seem more likely."

Sigh.

"Does that help you make sense of why people might go to war with us if we made it clear we wouldn't enforce population controls on humans?"

"Yes. I think you should have had better contingencies for 'but what if this species isn't just vaguely inferior less advanced Amentans in some way' but oh well too late do better next time."

Sigh.

"Why was she so stuck on castes? Swaps are sometimes seriously considered even for just Amentans."

"So, we went in knowing about two demands - the population controls and the human sovereignty. But you actually care about a lot more things than that. So now she's worried that you've decided your faction is in a position to make arbitrary demands, which is why she was trying to steer you towards making those requests in some other context - she was trying to figure out if we were still in 'these are the conditions of our protection from roving teleporting rapists' territory or if we'd moved on to 'while I have you here's how I think policy should go'. Council'd been told that  casteing of humans the way we did ex-reds was not going to be acceptable and decided on opt-in starting in a couple decades once humans had better educations and more information. Now that's not acceptable either, and she's worried that if she says 'sure, swaps are fine' then next month swaps won't be sufficient either. So she spends a while trying to get at the question of whether this is a condition of protection from the rest of your society or just a thing you really feel strongly about, and also whether you actually will be happy with swaps or keep pushing until you're demanding full caste abolition."

"That did not feel like what she was doing and I'm not sure she got what she wanted out of it."

"Her report said that you seem to prefer adding arbitrary demands in the context of negotiating this agreement because you don't expect to get what you want through any other avenues, and she's not sure it'd be useful to convince you that you can get what you want through other avenues because you probably can't because they're 'mostly very harmful policies whose uselessness is reflected by their overwhelming unpopularity.'"

"Wow. Is she bad at listening or am I bad at explaining?"

"It certainly sounds like she failed to listen. Though - you are, in fact, asking for the whole set of requests in this context because you don't think much of our other channels, right? That part's true?"

"Yes, but I explained what my problems with the other channels are."

"Yes, it seemed vanishingly unlikely that your problems with the other channels were 'they won't give me what I want because I want silly things'."

"I didn't think of it as adding extraneous cruft mostly because to my mind the context of the negotiation is 'okay, maybe you can have our planet, but you have to treat it adequately' and all the pushback on treating it adequately which isn't good faith like 'let's poll more humans on that' or 'which part of that is important to you, here's the part of it that matters to us' or 'we're using that as a way to get this thing we think you'll like' is just... changing the context to 'we're definitely keeping your planet and we're negotiating about how many people have to die to make that happen and how many minor concessions we feel like giving you'."

Nod. "So I think we should have caste swaps and probably will have caste swaps and 'humans definitely get swaps because they're going to be a worse fit for the first few generations' should be easy to get accomplished. But I can see how someone who didn't know you as well would worry that 'you have to treat it adequately' might extend eventually to 'wherever we disagree about policy, we win' and I think that's what they're trying to avoid."

"Maybe I should bring you to the next meeting. And Karen, she's better at dueling than I am and doesn't look like anybody, since we are supposed to be protecting you and stuff."

"I would be happy to attend meetings, though I don't think everyone is completely convinced we're not hostages. Honestly it sounds like this is about half 'this is a hard thing to get right' and about half 'and the people attempting it have need more ability to sometimes bite their tongue and say 'I'm sorry' when they instead want to dispute some minutia."

"...is there some way of making it clear you're not a hostage?"

"Not really. Aitim has said, emphatically, and you're not acting like it, but it's just so strongly what it looks like that it's hard for that to clear up all doubt instead of just some of it."

Sigh.