It seems to be accepted wisdom that the only thing wrong with treaties is not having enough of them. More treaties = more power! All those allies of yours who will happily march into the meat grinder to further your glorious ambitions and provide a barrier between you and any enemy seeking to harm you. Signing a million treaties is only bad for the game because stagnation or because it makes you a !@#$, but that's someone else's problem man, for you it's ballin'. Few people seem to realize that treaties themselves have significant downsides which erode your sovereignty, earn you enemies and makes you a target for wars, the exact things that treaties are supposed to protect you from.
Most alliances have enormous requirements for declarations of war against another alliance. Democratic alliances could require the whole alliance to vote in favor, or only the emperor is allowed to declare war, and is a decision made with gravity and seriousness. If you have even one treaty though, this entire process is hijacked and you are thrown into someone else's conflict because you signed a piece of e-paper. The decision as to when and how and upon whom you declare peace or war is the most significant element of sovereignty an alliance has, and treaties with any mandatory defense clause destroy this. For reasons unknown, this surrender of sovereignty to third parties is often done with happiness, as alliances don't want the stress and burden of maintaining their own foreign policy, and essentially cede control of this to their "allies" (masters?) who take a more proactive view of foreign policy. In this instance, you no longer control your foreign policy, you ally controls your foreign policy, you are no longer an alliance, you are a subset of your ally's alliance. You have just made yourself into a vassal state. This surrender of sovereignty is significant but unheralded, and the slaves insist they are free, and prove it by going from one master to another.
The ugly secret about treaties is that they do not keep you safe. A treaty is an aggressive act, not a defensive one. A treaty is essentially a declaration of war in a bottle, which you hand to someone else for them to make use of in an emergency. It is less like a shield and more like a daisy chain of grenades. Because of the nature of defensive treaties, having a treaty with the target of a war can mean that due to the sick logic of treaty chess, you are the one attacked, as was seen most recently with the war against Rose where Mensa HQ attacked Vanguard instead of Rose, knowing that Rose will have no choice but to counterattack. Did Vanguard joining a bloc with VE and Rose keep them safe? No, it made them a target.
The giant blobs of treaties which have amalgamated into three vague blocs of paper essentially view each other as a threat, and so have made enemies out of each others constituent alliances who had few and isolated prior arguments, purely due to the fact that they exist as rival power structures. Rather than disengage from these power structures and maintain their own foreign policy, the answer to this hostility and looming warfare is MORE TREATIES. Yes, always more treaties with more power blocs, every important alliance must be connected directly to you!
This leads to the final absurdity of treaties in that in the end it's a promise, and not everyone keeps their promises. After all the downsides of hostility and partisanship, alienating alliances due to your connections, loss of sovereignty, loss of independence and increased risk to yourself for signing so many treaties, in the end when your alliance is attacked by your various enemies and rivals, half those treaties are worthless because those allies also have treaties with your enemies and the half that don't will find any excuse not to defend you.
So put the pen down, stop being such a !@#$ and have some self control, for !@#$ sake.
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