3: A Crisis of Deliberate Indecision
The Collapse of the Barreuco Administration, 2257-58
“When a President loses a war, there are consequences whether they want them or not. When a President refuses to admit they lost the war because they were afraid to lead, they deserve the consequences.” - Sarek of Vulcan.[1]
Charisma without Character
Erica Barreuco was not a wartime President. By any real standards, the Federation has never had a wartime President. There was no model for that kind of leadership within the political system of the United Federation of Planets. Barreuco had not intended to be involved in any major foreign policy endeavours in her premiership, finding such activity to be beyond the scope of the office. “I am a firm believer in the Prime Directive,” she told the audience at a primary debate in 2254. “The Federation can still uphold its guiding principles without making enemies of its neighbours, I think we can all agree on that. I’m here to make new friends, not enemies.”[2] That last phrase had been part of Barreuco’s own personal branding as long as she’d had any, whether you want to begin with her career in student politics at the University of San Juan or as a Junior Member for Puerto Rico in the United Earth Assembly. She was always a very slick operator, which just enough charm and charisma to make you trust her while still appearing affable enough to not be taken too seriously by her opponents. Her rise from junior AM to the United Earth Progressive-Labor Party leader seems inevitable to us, but at the time it sent shocks through Earth’s political system.
Barreuco’s appointment in 2251 as Terran Ambassador to the Federation Council came as a surprise to everyone, including Barreuco herself. Her decision to run for President in 2254 was even more surprising, considering how fresh she was to the political maelstrom that was Federation political society. Since the late 2180s the Federation’s size had grown at nearly exponential speeds, and with it the electorate. The small political grouping of the 2160s rapidly evolved into the galaxy’s largest democracy – in fact, the only democracy of any kind to match the size of the Klingon and Romulan Empires. It was immense, and largely autonomous when it came to day-to-day administration, but it was still controlled by one unicameral body: the Council of the United Federation of Planets, which represented the interests, concerns, and ambitions of several billion citizens. This body – and its leader, the President of the Federation, were differentiated from the Klingon Chancellor and the Romulan Praetor by one crucial factor: they were chosen by and responsible to the electorate of the UFP: all 400[3] Billion citizens.
By the 2230s the electorate of this democracy had neatly divided into two geographic sections: core worlds and the frontier. The core worlds were populous, prosperous, and well represented, almost all having their own representatives on the Federation Council. The frontier, however, was intermittently populated, with region populations hubs around major colony systems and member worlds. It was also a lot less prosperous, less because of any overt economic system and more down to the emergent nature of most of the colonised planets; outside of Mantilles, Benecia, Vega and New Paris, most of the Earth colonies outside of the core did not reach a population of more than around 750,000.
Their political status was just as sketchy. While all colonies (by Federation law) had representative and responsible governments of some sort, their council representation was a lot more incoherent. New member worlds had full representation as guaranteed by the Federation Charter; the colonies of older members were not guaranteed that right. Those of a certain size and importance (such as Vega, New Andor and Altair VI) had seats, but the majority were represented by either their home world’s council or the haphazard body known as the Colonial Committee. The Committee’s 12 members were chosen by the security council as representatives of all the UFP’s frontier settlements – a clearly adequate arrangement to serve the needs of over 200 worlds in all for corners of the Federation. The result was that the colonies were rarely if ever properly represented in Federation politics. This had not been a problem in the 2230s and 40s; colonists valued their independence greatly (and still do), so the prospect of being tied directly into the politics of Federation Central was not particularly attractive.
All of this was changed by the Colonial Crisis of 2245-46, when several disasters on the frontier – ranging from Klingon attacks to ecological disaster to the massacre on Tarsus IV – underline how the central government of the Federation was unable to live up to it’s promises to the frontier. Outrage and recrimination destroyed the government of Samuel Solomon Qasar overnight. The crisis signalled the end of the peaceful, autonomous frontier, as threats from the Klingons, Tholians and Gorn began the push the frontier back.[4] The colonists wanted a better deal from Federation Central – but lacked the direct bodies of representation to achieve it on the federal stage. They did, however, have the Presidential elections. While the office of Federation President had yet to evolve into the supreme executive body it would form after the Bavv Lorg administration, it still held immense power and influence over the Federation Council. The colonial voters – organised into the newly formed Outer Systems and Frontier Party (OSFP) began to exert their influence over both their planetary governments and the presidential elections. While inconsequential in the election of Paula Christenson, their voting bloc was noticeable in the 2250 election, where their votes against Kaj Sariv nearly prevented the Zelonite from winning.
Barreuco had observed their growth, intrigued by a political party that gathered strength without endorsing the demagoguery of the Pro-Earth Return Party of the jingoism of the Andorian Kumari Group. When she ran for president in 2253, she staked her campaign on the frontier voter bloc. Targeting them with promises of stronger links to the core worlds of the Federation, as well as stronger trade links with the UFP’s partners in non-aligned and protectorate systems.[5] By eschewing the standard strategy of courting the core worlds, Barreuco unexpectedly swept enough of the Frontier vote to outset the advantage her opponent had amongst the traditional Archerite caucuses.[6]
With the aid of Kent Wescott (who had given up his seat in the United Earth Assembly to serve as her chief of staff), she assembled a working majority of 45 seats of the 75 on the Federation Council, based primarily in the Pluralist and Archerite caucuses.[7] “Barreuco had put a lot on her plate for a Federation President,” Barreuco’s Chief of Staff wrote. “She had no intention to merely be a chair of a council. She wanted to leave a mark on the UFP - her own “New Deal”, so to speak.”[8] Even at 36 (a young age for a politician in a system where the average age of Vulcan Ambassadors remains over 100), Wescott had seen enough of the way that the Federation Council functioned to know that sort of decisive leadership required a lot of work and was rarely if ever, met.
Ken Wescott was born in Pittsburgh, Earth, in 2221, the son of a schoolteacher from Trinidad and an economic analyst from America. Westcott’s father would be one of the last of his profession, taking part in 2225 on the last day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange before making a bumpy transition to a career helping Federation businesses interact with monetary economies on non-aligned worlds.[9] In 2243 Wescott graduated from the London School of Economics with a degree in New World Political Economy and began a career as a junior at the Commerce Department of the United Earth Government. In 2247, however, he was offered the chance to run as the representative for the Northwestern United States in the UE Assembly, which he took. He held the seat for seven years, serving in the Cabinet of Prime Minister der Hook from 2251 to 2253. It was at this time that he solidified his relationship with Erica Barreuco, a tenacious family friend of his mothers. Wescott had known about Barreuco’s plan to run for office in 2254 long before most and had been a core part of the ticket from the start. “I honestly can’t tell you what’s harder,” Wescott wrote of these times, “trying to run an electoral campaign the size of the Alpha Quadrant or trying to get the Federation Council to agree on something. Somehow, I managed both, and more.”
The first two years of the Barreuco administration had seen significant improvements to the Anchorpoint-Quarrus-Argelius route, turning the space lane from one of the most difficult to navigate to the easiest in the entire Federation. The President’s majority on the Council floor, which had been expected to break under pressure from the Vulcan Caucus and the Tellarites held firm in vote after vote. As Chief of Staff for the President, Wescott’s own tireless herding of Councilmembers did much of the groundwork for keeping the wheels of government working, surprising even himself with the amount of legislation that they’d manage to get past the Council. “People seemed to think that I could work wonders,” he commented. “Really, it was just that I knew how far you could push Sarek before he’d actually make any noises.”
The final session of 2255 had seen a nail-biting debate over the Rigellian Commerce Bill, which would see the Federation re-open trade with many of the Orion colonies in the Rigel sector based on their support of Starfleet’s continuing anti-slavery campaign. The bill had nearly split the President’s majority on the Council, with many in the Alpha Centauri caucus (including the councillor for the Rigel Colonies) seeing the bill as unfairly making those colonies which had dealt with slavers pay for the inaction of their peers, while still not doing enough to close the loopholes created by the much-derided Orion Neutrality Area.[10] Despite the massive opposition from both the Tellarite Mercantile Commission and the Federation Anti-Slavery Society, it passed, after three extensions of the session on the 23rd December, by a mere two votes. “We were relieved and were looking forward to using 2256 as a year of consolidation, building on areas of policy we had already proved our worth on. History, and more importantly, T’Kuvma, had other ideas.”
The 2256 war was a complete shock to the Barreuco administration. The naturally pacifistic nature of Federation policymaking had meant few in the Palais de Concorde considered war with the Klingon Empire even imaginable. The official business of the day for the President on May 11th (the day hostilities began at the Binary Stars) involved a meeting with the Federation Secretary of Commerce, a call with the First Minister of Tellar Prime followed by a state dinner with the United Earth Security Council. The Palais de Concorde would still not be aware of hostilities for an excruciatingly long six weeks due to communication delays. Despite the severity of the situation, Barreuco refused calls to form a unity cabinet with the opposition or use any of the provisions for state emergencies that existed within the articles of the Federation.[11] “I consider this flare-up in tensions to be nothing more than a return to the Klingon raiding parties and growing pains of the 2240s,” she told the press on June 16th. “Starfleet is more than capable of handling the crisis.”
By September 2256, however, it was clear that this was more than a repeat of the limited conflict of the 2240s. The Federation was engaged in an overt hot war with her neighbour, one which had been warned about hundreds of times since Jonathan Archer’s fateful trip to the Klingon homeworld in 2151, and she was barely holding her own. Barreuco was suddenly under major pressure from her own caucus to step up the war effort, with Earth Ambassador Siobhan Tilly calling for a “Total Mobilisation of the Federation” to counter the Klingon war effort. The President baulked at the prospect, completely opposed to the massive concentration of state power. Time and again Barreuco refused the demands of the Commission for Defence to grant them more powers. Her role, as the President understood it, was not to become an all-powerful wartime leader. Such a position had not been necessary during the Romulan War, and thus, to her mind, at least, would not be necessary now.[12]
“It is very difficult for an interstellar federal democracy to create the ground necessary for an FDR, or a Sarah Susan Eckert, or even a Kennedy to come forward to take the reins of government,” Wescott said of Barreuco’s obstinacy. “The Articles of Federation are designed to not allow that immense power to sit in one office, and the way that we are taught about our government is designed to prevent the ‘men of action’ like Churchill, Mao or Green from getting their grubby little hands all over the reins of power. That sort of mobilisation - millions of people tuned to one goal, one ambition, one vision is still possible in the UFP, but not through one office. Not from one person. It can only be achieved when the Federation is united behind its goals. It was not in 2256.”[13] Barreuco was a leader with charisma and charm, but she was not at ease with the reins of power she held, or with the prospect that his decisions could be the wrong ones. Faced with a situation where the wrong decision could bring the entire Federation down, she chose not to make any decisions at all.
Many have accused Barreuco of being weak, or worse, incompetent. These arguments – generally formed from the last two years of her administration – are ignorant of the real problems. Barreuco was a competent President, capable of consensus building, compromise, and legislative success. The immense infrastructure projects she initiated were not easy sells in the Federation Council, and their success was never guaranteed until they were signed off. Even day-to-day governance had been characterised by smooth sailing, especially when it came to balancing the disparate needs of the various federation member worlds and political factions. “It was less that Barreuco was a people person than that she was incapable of giving up.” Her charisma had always won over naysayers, even when it seemed impossible – there was a certain magnetism to her, so long as she was getting her way, but when she wasn’t that magnetism turned into a sour arrogance that made movement on any issue impossible.
Wescott was always surprised by the intransigence of the President, and her inability to compromise on other peoples’ terms. “I always thought that it was a sign of confidence, but as time went on, I began to think that Erica simply was not imaginative enough to think that other peoples’ ideas were as good as hers.” War was a crisis built entirely on unpredictability and impossible decisions, where every choice carried a price in lives. Barreuco’s certainty and self-belief were vital to her political victory, but during the war, it made consensus-building impossible. “It was one thing to convince people to vote for subspace relays, and another one to convince them to support wartime funding or security legislation.” It did not help at all that Barreuco simply did not do foreign policy. Technically, she didn’t have to, but she failed even to take up the mantle as a co-ordinator of the government.
“Barreuco didn’t really understand how the Klingon Empire worked – not because she didn’t attend the briefings, but more because she didn’t understand their worldview. The Klingon political system and war aims didn’t make sense to her, so they obviously couldn’t work.” From what evidence we have, it seems clear that the President tried to take the war seriously but couldn’t square it with the facts she could see – whatever they were. “She thought it was just a lot more raids, like Axanar and Donatu V. It really wasn’t. But she’d decided that’s what it was at the beginning of the war and was never going to be convinced otherwise.”
The Empty Office
By March 2257 it was clear to the Palais that Starfleet had lost its grasp on the war, and that soon the core worlds of the Federation would be at direct risk of Klingon attack. Panic began to spread within the inner colonies as more and more trade routes were cut off, and Starfleet presence began to ebb away as the Presidio fought to keep as much of its strength space worthy for the assumed “final attack on earth.” The President, however, remained resolute that the four core worlds would never be attacked, and that while the threat was severe, Starfleet was up to the task of holding the Klingons at bay. Even as more and more member worlds found themselves behind Klingon ‘lines’, Barreuco refused to push beyond her peacetime powers. She referred to this stance as “governance according to principles, not panic;” the Times of London, however, caught the public mood when they referred to it as “A Crisis caused by a strategy of deliberate indecision.”[14]
It was not an unfair assessment. During the Romulan War, President Nathan Samuels had been the core of a ‘war cabinet’ that combined the civilian leadership with that of Starfleet, the UESN and MACO corps, allowing for total control and direction of policy. Barreuco made no attempt to replicate this arrangement in any way whatsoever. Arguably, it may have been impossible; the Federation is arguably too large and autonomous for the immense state control required for the proper conduct of total war. There was, however, a desire for that sort of “national coordination”, especially amongst the Federal Commissariat and many members of the Council.[15] Barreuco simply wouldn’t take up that role. “The President wasn’t afraid of taking up a leadership role. She just didn’t get why she would have to do it in a wartime setting.
There was no glory for her in being a war leader. Her principles baulked at the concept of exerting state control over the member worlds, even when they were actively begging for national direction. While some of her rejections – such as refusing to activate the Arcturian “war born” clone soldier force – were sensible decisions, other more logical options were ignored. There was no “war plan” within the civilian government; no question of war aims, or what would be asked of the Klingons if they could be brought to the negotiating table as they had been after Donatu V. All those measures were too “militarist” for Barreuco. “I have beliefs in how to govern,” she told Wescott. “I’m going to stick to them, war or no war.”
It wasn’t a sensible stance, and even for Wescott, it was clear that voters and representatives alike had begun to lose patience with the president. Organised opposition, already fierce, began to form mainly around two figures: Tellarite Ambassador Nafraos Xaall and Andorian Ambassador Byss Th’Rhahlat. Both men had been supporters of the President during her run for election and early premiership, but the turn of the war had been extremely damaging for their constituents and their allies in the Council. They each represented wings of Federation political thought that had characterised the political battles of the first century of its existence, a deadlock that Barreuco had managed to break only in 2254 (with their help, admittedly).[16] However, their connections to their political ideologies were always going to supersede any loyalty to an individual.
Xaall, fierce if laconic by Tellarite standards, was a longstanding veteran of vicious, convoluted and sometimes-concerningly overzealous Tellarite Parliamentary System, but had graduated from that in the 2240s to a career in the Federation Civil Service on Earth. Said job in the Federal Department of Aid Control (FEDAC) had served only to cement his position that the bureaucracy of the Federation was unfit for its purpose - a cause he’d then championed since 2251 as the Councillor for Tellar Prime, arguing for more devolution to Federation member worlds on a wide number of issues.
Byss Th’Rhahlat, however, was a firm Archerite, putting strength in the institutions of the UFP and their ability to be “greater than the sum of their parts”. A thin, sallow thaan, he was a quiet individual who liked to enjoy the finer things in life and appreciate things – whether they were fine food, classical music, or romantic partners he was not currently married to – to their fullest. As a politician, however, his tendency to muteness was not a curse, but a weapon. When he spoke, he spoke fiercely and passionately, demanding attention from those who would prefer to ignore his demands for colonial rights and stronger governmental bodies. Much of this had to do with his upbringing in the Andorian colony world of R’vel and his experience of the collapse of its ecosystem in the 2230s. The severe loss of life, he argued in his biography, would have been avoided if both Starfleet and the Federation had been empowered not only with the resources to tackle crises in the distant colony worlds, but the legal jurisdiction to act without having to consult the parent worlds of frontier planets.[17]
Unlike Xaall, Th’Rhahlat had stayed out of politics until 2246, when the disaster at Tarsus IV compelled him to action. The Tarsus disaster, as well as toppling the poorly-run Qasar Administration, galvanised the discontent those who lived on the Fringe had with their political representatives.[18] Th’Rhahlat’s rise to the council had been supported by the emergent Outer Systems and Frontier Party, which had rapidly risen as the key political group advocating for constitution reform. He summed up the OSFP’s beliefs in his maiden speech in the 2249, when he argued that “if the colonies had real representation - real, direct representation on the council, not diluted by far off assemblies on ‘parent planets’ - then men like Kodos would never end up ruling with an Iron fist and a thirst for blood.”[19]
Th’Rhahlat saw the combination of strong government tied into with direct representation as the only solution that would prevent division, and it was that message that saw him win his seat on the Federation Council in 2253. He had been a strong supporter of Barreuco during the campaign and her first year, helping push his landmark communications and infrastructure projects through the council and earning himself a reputation as somewhat of a kingmaker. However, as time went on, Th’Rhahlat became disillusioned with the Barreuco administration. The President’s foreign and defence policy (or lack thereof) was of increasing concern to Th’Rhahlat, who along with the Rigellian Ambassador and others were the lone voices in the Security Council calling for increased security in the Klingon Border Area. Unlike, Xaall, however, Th’Rhahlat had backed the president for much of the war’s duration despite his concerns. In a time when more and more councillors were cheering Xaall on in the Council debates, the Andorian Ambassador remained a fierce defender of the President’s conduct.
Xaall’s opposition movement, despite its growing numbers, was still limited even as Starfleet’s conduct of the war fell apart at the seams. Federation politics was consensus-building by design, and the attitudes of most councillors preferred a protracted negotiation towards consensus over a vicious adversarial battle. The tipping point, however, was the fall of Starbase One, whose position from Earth was measured in mere AUs. Even at this moment, Barreuco called demands for maximum mobilisation an “overstatement of our position”, referring to the Klingon raid as “an exception, not the rule.”[20] While behind doors she took the crisis seriously (even endorsing Admiral Cornwell’s plans to make direct peace overtures with the then opposition leader L’Rell), in public her calm demeanour just came off as dangerously uninterested.[21]
When the war did come to an end with a full ceasefire by the Klingons (who withdrew to their ‘claimed areas’ beyond Axanar), Barreuco declared ‘victory’ for the UFP. “The light of liberty,” she told the Federation Council, “has flickered, but will now shine brightly throughout the galaxy.”[22] Her sentiment was not shared widely. Xaall is supposed to have leant over to the Beta Rigellian Councillor and replied, “it’d be shining brighter if she hadn’t poured all that water over it.”[23] President Barreuco did no favours for his popularity when she followed this speech up with the formal pardon and decoration of Commander Michael Burnham, whose arguably illegal actions had precipitated the war in the first place.[24] As far as the president was concerned, The Klingon war was just another crisis, comparable to the Tholian incursion or the Orion police actions. “The way I see it,” she told Wescott in late September, “this war hasn’t been that bad. We shouldn’t change course just because we took a few knocks and bumps. A steady hand on the tiller is what the Federation needs, not Xaall and Th’Rhahlat pulling us every which way over every little thing.”[25]
Wescott was unimpressed with this outlook. “I don’t know whether she didn’t care, or didn’t want to listen, but it was clear the President had been avoiding looking at the state of the Federation on the ground. Mainly because if she did so she’d be proved wrong.” Barreuco achieved her victories by trusting her political instincts and hunches even when everyone around her had lost their heads. It had won her countless votes in the United Earth Assembly and put her in the Palais de Concorde. It had got her landmark bills through the Council and made her popular as a leader who got the job done. But when it came to the war and how people felt about it, she was completely off the mark and refused to accept any information that didn’t fit with his own worldview. “After the war ended, she stopped attending Starfleet briefings entirely, because the Admirals were telling her things she didn’t want to hear. It was unprofessional, and frankly dangerous. Sometimes it felt like there wasn’t even anyone in that big Palais office of hers.”[26]
As 2258 began, President Barreuco’s administration was swamped by the rising tide of public discontent at the administration’s failures, which were all too apparent to Federation citizens whose lives had been upended by Klingon warships. Xaall’s opposition movement entered the new year in a far more coherent state than most expected. Despite some flirtations with more dangerous elements of Federation politics, such as the Kumari Group or the remnants of various parochial xenophobe parties, she had not succumbed to the dangerous radicalism that had come out of the shadows during the war to demand drastic and illegal activities to fight the Klingons.
Barreuco, in her usual aloofness, ignored most of the signs of her impending demise. As far as she was concerned, their speeches and protests were nothing beyond the usual complaints of the opposition, nothing that wouldn't be stifled without a few concessions to their arguments. One of these (barely noticed at the time by either the government or the new opposition) was Uncle Shu’s Inquiry, signed off by the President alongside a myriad of other reports as part of measures to address the "Diplomatic Shockwave" that faced the UFP after the armistice. For the large part, this went ignored - allusions to the still-distant findings of reports did little to assuage Barreuco's feeling that the crisis would pass, and that the Federation's desire for strong leadership in difficult times would see it fall behind her. “[Barrecuo] had a complete vision for her two terms,” Wescott wrote. “It was very detailed. There was no space for a war. We could barely talk about it in strategy meetings. It was as if it had never happened – or, at the very least, that it was some form of freak natural disaster instead of a crisis exacerbated by her own decisions.”
As February rolled into March, the President could no longer ignore the reality of her situation: her coalition, both in the council and in the general electorate, was on the verge of collapse. In the end, it was not the Council that set-in motion her fall from office, but as always, events. Starfleet Intelligence (despite its many flaws) had always warned that the Federation’s diplomatic hold on many of the neutral, associated and ‘protectorate’ worlds of the disputed area was far more tenuous than the Palais de Concorde believed. Even before their reform after the disaster of the Control Program, their warnings that without clear power projection or benefits many worlds would slip out of the grasp of the UFP had been ignored. “You can’t just draw a big circle on a map of the Galaxy and call it Federation Territory like some 20th-century Imperialist,” Starfleet Intelligence chief of Operations Ash Tyler pointed out (correctly) to the Security Council in late 2259.[27] “You have to actually be present in star systems and sectors. It’s not just about the Starships. It’s about the merchant marine; the corps of engineers; the bureaucrats and diplomats; the Starfleet Delta on the side of a shipping crate, or the Federation seal on dividend payments. We must make sure people know what we do and how we can help. If people don’t know who we are, what we do and don’t see us doing it, we’re just a faceless husk. They won’t trust us, and the moment they won’t trust us they’re lost to the Federation.”[28] This fundamental truth had apparently been lost on President Barreuco when, in late March, news of the Convoy PD-14 disaster arrived in Paris.
Convoy PD-14 was the first official dilithium supply convoy out of the Archanis Sector since the Klingon ceasefire. With the withdrawal of Klingon forces from deep within Federation space, attempts to return to ‘normalcy’ began to emerge. The dilithium convoys had taken a while to return to normal, as the mining outposts restarted production after nearly a year of constant raids and destruction. When they eventually did scramble enough resources and ships together to form a convoy of 20, concerns soon rose about its escort, a mere two ships. The convoy, however, had to run: its resources were needed, especially for the massive reconstruction projects on planets like Corvan II or Novo Leningrad. Everyone knew how necessary it was. Starfleet simply couldn’t spare the ships, especially considering that PD-14 wasn’t even the largest convoy running into Axanar that month. It was unprotected, incredibly risky, and was bound to go wrong, but when protests reached the Palais de Concord, Barreuco ordered it to go ahead.[29]
PD-14 was first attacked about 10 light-years out of Archanis IV by six Nausicaan raiders. For the next two days, the convoy was attacked relentlessly before the Captain of the USS Laikian gave the order for the convoy to scatter. When the last surviving ship (SS Nairobi) limped into Starbase Axanar two weeks later, it was one of a mere 5 that made it to their destination. Both the USS Wilson and the Laikian were lost to enemy action.[30] Without the vital dilithium supply, reconstruction efforts across much of the southern quadrant of the UFP were impossible. The news first broke on the core worlds on March 20th, and the President’s first reaction was to declare the incident ‘an unavoidable tragedy’, a line that (unsurprisingly) did not go down very well with the Federation Council, or the public, especially considering his (wildly optimistic) claim a week earlier that the Federation Frontier was “as safe as it had ever been”. What exacerbated the scale of the crisis was the effect the crisis had on negotiations with neutral planets on the Klingon Fringe; namely, Coridan.
Coridan had been a world within the Federation sphere for longer than there had been a Federation to speak of. The planet had been a protectorate world of the Vulcan High Command before the Kir'Shara Revelation (To use the Vulcan term for what John Gill called the Surakian Counter-revolution), providing the High Command with a near-constant supply of high-quality dilithium. This factor meant it had become a contentious political football in the long cold war with the Andorians. Coridan slipped out of Vulcan’s sphere during the Romulan war when she was targeted by the Romulans with nuclear weapons to prevent Starfleet from using it as a base. The resulting destruction, while physically limited due to Starfleet assistance after the war, destroyed what remained of Coridan's fragile political system, which fractured into civil war for the rest of the 22nd century and much of the 23rd.[31] Situated just beyond the fringes of core Federation space, its status as an associate member (granted in 2231) meant that while it was technically a protected world, it was open to all comers. Thus, the depopulated planet attracted the worst of Orion and Nausicaan pirates as well as illegal mining operations from several Federation member worlds including the Tellarites.[32] Needless to say, the issue of its accession to full membership was something of a political minefield; it was hard enough maintaining the status quo on Coridan, let alone convincing the planet to favour closer union.
When the news of the PD-14 disaster broke on Coridan, the implications of a spike in dilithium demand caused an immediate crisis. Coridan, sparsely populated and without a proper defence force of its own, was now an easy target for freebooters, traders and pirates attempting to make a quick profit by mining the planet’s dilithium. The decades-long work Starfleet had done to limit Orion mining operations on the surface was undone almost overnight, with privateers dropping onto the system within weeks of the convoy attack. The fractious coalition government soon collapsed, and the planet fell into another brutal stage of open conflict: a disaster that stung severely not just because of loss of face, but because of how close Coridan had been to requesting full membership into the UFP. Federation expansion in the southern quadrant of the galaxy, already stilted by the Klingon war, was now in danger of being halted and reversed. The status of Federation colonies and allied worlds along the Klingon Fringe was now even more fragile than it had been at the war’s end. Several member worlds and associated states on the edge of Federation space, including the vital treaty port of Argelius began to wonder whether the confidence they had placed in the Palais de Concorde was well placed or not.[33]
This incident alone would not have been enough to trigger a downfall if the President hadn’t decided to blame Starfleet. This deflection made its debut in the ‘Presidential Questions’ session on the 24th of March, where she turned on Starfleet, declaring that “while Starfleet Command has performed to a high standard during the conflict and this crisis, questions must be asked as to how such an incident as PD-14 was allowed to occur.”[34] While a President coming for Starfleet was not a well-advised move in normal times, it was only a more disastrous move considering that it was well known to almost all how much the President had been supportive of Starfleet Command’s stagnation in the early 2250s. Barreuco had made opposing Starfleet expansion a core part of his foreign policy – he’d even been building his re-election campaign on it before the war had disrupted things. More importantly, this u-turn came after months of defending Starfleet’s conduct in the war. It implied more than an unwillingness to take responsibility for decisions - it suggested that Barreuco was unable to keep her story straight.
When she came to speak on the 26th on a completely unrelated issue, Barreuco was ambushed by several questions on his ‘defunding’ of Starfleet across his administration. Her attempts to backtrack and argue that she’d always been in favour of Starfleet expansion were ridiculed by an increasingly unruly council chamber, which heckled him in a manner much closer to that of the old British parliament than Federation Ambassadors. “They were angry,” Wescott wrote of the session on the 26th. “They felt like Barreuco was talking down to them. Did she mean to? That was irrelevant, really. She was trying to tell them she was on their side when they knew she wasn’t, and they were furious with her for even trying to say that.”[35] Considering the President’s place in the chamber was closer to a sitting speaker than that of a government official, the sight of her being bombarded unrelentingly by discontented representatives was a shock to many political commentators. As more and more councillors stood up to denounce the president, it became clear that what had originally begun as a mere “backbench revolt” had escalated into a full-scale attack on the president.[36]
[1] Sarek, “Memoirs, 2240-2260”. (Shikahr: Vulcan Historical Institute, 2261)
[2] A.G. Conte, The Furious Folly of Erica Barreuco, the President who lost the Peace (Harper-Collins-Ch'Rell, 2299)
[3] Estimating the population of the Federation is notoriously difficult. Despite the meticulous efforts of the Federation Census Bureau, the UFP contains an immense migratory and itinerant population, who often pass through it’s borders and throughout it’s territory at will. There are also a significant number of colony worlds and outposts whose populations are simply unknown or estimated, due to their distance from Federation Central or out of respect for their isolationist beliefs.
[4] While formal contact with the Gorn would not come until 2267, Gorn attacks on Federation colonies and shipping are estimated to have begun in the early 2240s. They would not be formally identified as an “hostile power” by Starfleet Command until 2259.
[5] While they had observer members on the Federation Council, colony worlds of Federation members would not receive their own directly appointed councillors until the Federation Reform Act of 2275.
[6] Barreuco received 54.2 percent of the vote, to his opponent’s 45.4 in the popular vote. Archerism was the dominant political ideology of the first half of the 23rd century, built around strengthening Federal power while limiting the military strength of Starfleet.
[7] The Caucuses on the Federation Council are not directly based on species but gained their name from how the Council initially split along the lines of the founding races as new members joined according to the policy priorities of said members. For example, the ‘Terran’ Caucus was mainly concerned with the expansion of the Federation’s colonies and the protection of said worlds, while the ‘Andorian’ Caucus was concerned with maintaining the defensive arms of the Federation and protecting her core worlds.
[8] Kenneth Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais: My Journey to the Concorde.
[9] Paulo Liverno, The End of Money: How United Earth ended the Age of Capital. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2296)
[10] The Orion Neutrality Area had been created by the Rigel Neutrality Zone Commission in 2246, with the Federation compromising on the massively unpopular Orion Neutrality Act of 2222. The Act declared that the Rigel system and all the Orion Colonies were unaligned with any space-faring power and had the right to trade with whoever they wished, whatever they liked, on their terms and without having to say how or where the goods came from. At the cost of increased border tensions with the Federation, it preserved interstellar trade with the Orions, and what little political power they had. In 2246, the Federation declared specific boundaries for the jurisdiction of the act (much to the Botchtock Congress’s displeasure) but were unable to end the practice of slavery within the zone.
[11] Article 14 and all subsequent subsections give the President the right to, amongst other things; federalise the defence forces of all Federation members, turn over civilian shipyards and facilities to Starfleet Command; suspend the Federation Council’s right to review all Security Council Directives. No measure within Article 14 would be enacted until September 2257, when President Barreuco federalised the United Earth Defence Force and UESPA to defend the planet.
[12] A.G. Conte, The Furious Folly of Erick Barreuco
[13] Kenneth Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais: My Journey to the Concorde. (New York: Penguin Books, 2275)
[14] The Times, May 10th, 2257 (Times Archive; Memory Alpha).
[15] The Federal Commissariat is another term for the Federal Cabinet of Ministers.
[16] Richard Ch’Rella, The End of Indecision: Federation Politics from Richard Morville to Lorna McClaren (Khartoum; Andorian Political Annals, 2290)
[17] Byss Th’Rhahlat, Frontier Democracy, (Laikian; The Imperial Printer’s Office, 2257)
[18] Zane CP Hosht, "The Political Ramifications of Tarsus IV". (Paris: Federation Political History No.14/3, 2273)
[19] Th’Rhahlat, Frontier Democracy
[20] Hansard, Emergency Session of the Security Council of the United Federation of Planets, 22nd August 2257
[21] Claims that Admiral Cornwell (and thus the President) signed off on backing L’Rell’s coup d’etat have never been proved and are firmly denied by all parties involved.
[22] Hansard, Special Session of the Council of the United Federation of Planets, 5th September 2257
[23] Gamoolead, Terra Memoirs,(Rigel IV Planetary Press, 2272)
[24] Lena S. Revell, “Michael Burnham, The Battle of the Binary Stars, and the Legality of the ‘Vulcan Hello’” (Oxford: Oxford Journal of Interstellar History, October 2295)
[25] Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais
[26] Ibid.
[27] Quentin Hawk, The Official History of Starfleet Intelligence, 2161-2301 (San Francisco: Starfleet Press, 2311)
[28] Ash Tyler in The Official History of Starfleet Intelligence
[29] Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais
[30] Walter Grayson, Purple Gold: A History of the Dilithium Belt (New York: Beta Quadrant Histories, 2308)
[31] Stanley Wilkinson, Learning to Fly: The First Ten Years of the United Federation of Planets (London: Harper-Collins-Ch’Rell, 2290)
[32] S. Ivenist, The Coridan Conundrum (London: Reed Press, 2296)
[33] While this was not known at the time, recent records have emerged that prove that several fringe member planets (including Sauria, New Paris and Kobax VI) considered opening negotiations with the Association of Free Worlds. It is unknown how far these negotiations went.
[34] Hansard, FC Deb 24 March 2268 vol.013
[35] Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais
[36] Barreuco, to Wescott in From Pittsburgh to the Palais. A “backbench revolt” is an Old Earth term for a minor political revolt by unimportant representatives.
Charisma without Character
Erica Barreuco was not a wartime President. By any real standards, the Federation has never had a wartime President. There was no model for that kind of leadership within the political system of the United Federation of Planets. Barreuco had not intended to be involved in any major foreign policy endeavours in her premiership, finding such activity to be beyond the scope of the office. “I am a firm believer in the Prime Directive,” she told the audience at a primary debate in 2254. “The Federation can still uphold its guiding principles without making enemies of its neighbours, I think we can all agree on that. I’m here to make new friends, not enemies.”[2] That last phrase had been part of Barreuco’s own personal branding as long as she’d had any, whether you want to begin with her career in student politics at the University of San Juan or as a Junior Member for Puerto Rico in the United Earth Assembly. She was always a very slick operator, which just enough charm and charisma to make you trust her while still appearing affable enough to not be taken too seriously by her opponents. Her rise from junior AM to the United Earth Progressive-Labor Party leader seems inevitable to us, but at the time it sent shocks through Earth’s political system.
Barreuco’s appointment in 2251 as Terran Ambassador to the Federation Council came as a surprise to everyone, including Barreuco herself. Her decision to run for President in 2254 was even more surprising, considering how fresh she was to the political maelstrom that was Federation political society. Since the late 2180s the Federation’s size had grown at nearly exponential speeds, and with it the electorate. The small political grouping of the 2160s rapidly evolved into the galaxy’s largest democracy – in fact, the only democracy of any kind to match the size of the Klingon and Romulan Empires. It was immense, and largely autonomous when it came to day-to-day administration, but it was still controlled by one unicameral body: the Council of the United Federation of Planets, which represented the interests, concerns, and ambitions of several billion citizens. This body – and its leader, the President of the Federation, were differentiated from the Klingon Chancellor and the Romulan Praetor by one crucial factor: they were chosen by and responsible to the electorate of the UFP: all 400[3] Billion citizens.
By the 2230s the electorate of this democracy had neatly divided into two geographic sections: core worlds and the frontier. The core worlds were populous, prosperous, and well represented, almost all having their own representatives on the Federation Council. The frontier, however, was intermittently populated, with region populations hubs around major colony systems and member worlds. It was also a lot less prosperous, less because of any overt economic system and more down to the emergent nature of most of the colonised planets; outside of Mantilles, Benecia, Vega and New Paris, most of the Earth colonies outside of the core did not reach a population of more than around 750,000.
Their political status was just as sketchy. While all colonies (by Federation law) had representative and responsible governments of some sort, their council representation was a lot more incoherent. New member worlds had full representation as guaranteed by the Federation Charter; the colonies of older members were not guaranteed that right. Those of a certain size and importance (such as Vega, New Andor and Altair VI) had seats, but the majority were represented by either their home world’s council or the haphazard body known as the Colonial Committee. The Committee’s 12 members were chosen by the security council as representatives of all the UFP’s frontier settlements – a clearly adequate arrangement to serve the needs of over 200 worlds in all for corners of the Federation. The result was that the colonies were rarely if ever properly represented in Federation politics. This had not been a problem in the 2230s and 40s; colonists valued their independence greatly (and still do), so the prospect of being tied directly into the politics of Federation Central was not particularly attractive.
All of this was changed by the Colonial Crisis of 2245-46, when several disasters on the frontier – ranging from Klingon attacks to ecological disaster to the massacre on Tarsus IV – underline how the central government of the Federation was unable to live up to it’s promises to the frontier. Outrage and recrimination destroyed the government of Samuel Solomon Qasar overnight. The crisis signalled the end of the peaceful, autonomous frontier, as threats from the Klingons, Tholians and Gorn began the push the frontier back.[4] The colonists wanted a better deal from Federation Central – but lacked the direct bodies of representation to achieve it on the federal stage. They did, however, have the Presidential elections. While the office of Federation President had yet to evolve into the supreme executive body it would form after the Bavv Lorg administration, it still held immense power and influence over the Federation Council. The colonial voters – organised into the newly formed Outer Systems and Frontier Party (OSFP) began to exert their influence over both their planetary governments and the presidential elections. While inconsequential in the election of Paula Christenson, their voting bloc was noticeable in the 2250 election, where their votes against Kaj Sariv nearly prevented the Zelonite from winning.
Barreuco had observed their growth, intrigued by a political party that gathered strength without endorsing the demagoguery of the Pro-Earth Return Party of the jingoism of the Andorian Kumari Group. When she ran for president in 2253, she staked her campaign on the frontier voter bloc. Targeting them with promises of stronger links to the core worlds of the Federation, as well as stronger trade links with the UFP’s partners in non-aligned and protectorate systems.[5] By eschewing the standard strategy of courting the core worlds, Barreuco unexpectedly swept enough of the Frontier vote to outset the advantage her opponent had amongst the traditional Archerite caucuses.[6]
With the aid of Kent Wescott (who had given up his seat in the United Earth Assembly to serve as her chief of staff), she assembled a working majority of 45 seats of the 75 on the Federation Council, based primarily in the Pluralist and Archerite caucuses.[7] “Barreuco had put a lot on her plate for a Federation President,” Barreuco’s Chief of Staff wrote. “She had no intention to merely be a chair of a council. She wanted to leave a mark on the UFP - her own “New Deal”, so to speak.”[8] Even at 36 (a young age for a politician in a system where the average age of Vulcan Ambassadors remains over 100), Wescott had seen enough of the way that the Federation Council functioned to know that sort of decisive leadership required a lot of work and was rarely if ever, met.
Ken Wescott was born in Pittsburgh, Earth, in 2221, the son of a schoolteacher from Trinidad and an economic analyst from America. Westcott’s father would be one of the last of his profession, taking part in 2225 on the last day of trading on the New York Stock Exchange before making a bumpy transition to a career helping Federation businesses interact with monetary economies on non-aligned worlds.[9] In 2243 Wescott graduated from the London School of Economics with a degree in New World Political Economy and began a career as a junior at the Commerce Department of the United Earth Government. In 2247, however, he was offered the chance to run as the representative for the Northwestern United States in the UE Assembly, which he took. He held the seat for seven years, serving in the Cabinet of Prime Minister der Hook from 2251 to 2253. It was at this time that he solidified his relationship with Erica Barreuco, a tenacious family friend of his mothers. Wescott had known about Barreuco’s plan to run for office in 2254 long before most and had been a core part of the ticket from the start. “I honestly can’t tell you what’s harder,” Wescott wrote of these times, “trying to run an electoral campaign the size of the Alpha Quadrant or trying to get the Federation Council to agree on something. Somehow, I managed both, and more.”
The first two years of the Barreuco administration had seen significant improvements to the Anchorpoint-Quarrus-Argelius route, turning the space lane from one of the most difficult to navigate to the easiest in the entire Federation. The President’s majority on the Council floor, which had been expected to break under pressure from the Vulcan Caucus and the Tellarites held firm in vote after vote. As Chief of Staff for the President, Wescott’s own tireless herding of Councilmembers did much of the groundwork for keeping the wheels of government working, surprising even himself with the amount of legislation that they’d manage to get past the Council. “People seemed to think that I could work wonders,” he commented. “Really, it was just that I knew how far you could push Sarek before he’d actually make any noises.”
The final session of 2255 had seen a nail-biting debate over the Rigellian Commerce Bill, which would see the Federation re-open trade with many of the Orion colonies in the Rigel sector based on their support of Starfleet’s continuing anti-slavery campaign. The bill had nearly split the President’s majority on the Council, with many in the Alpha Centauri caucus (including the councillor for the Rigel Colonies) seeing the bill as unfairly making those colonies which had dealt with slavers pay for the inaction of their peers, while still not doing enough to close the loopholes created by the much-derided Orion Neutrality Area.[10] Despite the massive opposition from both the Tellarite Mercantile Commission and the Federation Anti-Slavery Society, it passed, after three extensions of the session on the 23rd December, by a mere two votes. “We were relieved and were looking forward to using 2256 as a year of consolidation, building on areas of policy we had already proved our worth on. History, and more importantly, T’Kuvma, had other ideas.”
The 2256 war was a complete shock to the Barreuco administration. The naturally pacifistic nature of Federation policymaking had meant few in the Palais de Concorde considered war with the Klingon Empire even imaginable. The official business of the day for the President on May 11th (the day hostilities began at the Binary Stars) involved a meeting with the Federation Secretary of Commerce, a call with the First Minister of Tellar Prime followed by a state dinner with the United Earth Security Council. The Palais de Concorde would still not be aware of hostilities for an excruciatingly long six weeks due to communication delays. Despite the severity of the situation, Barreuco refused calls to form a unity cabinet with the opposition or use any of the provisions for state emergencies that existed within the articles of the Federation.[11] “I consider this flare-up in tensions to be nothing more than a return to the Klingon raiding parties and growing pains of the 2240s,” she told the press on June 16th. “Starfleet is more than capable of handling the crisis.”
By September 2256, however, it was clear that this was more than a repeat of the limited conflict of the 2240s. The Federation was engaged in an overt hot war with her neighbour, one which had been warned about hundreds of times since Jonathan Archer’s fateful trip to the Klingon homeworld in 2151, and she was barely holding her own. Barreuco was suddenly under major pressure from her own caucus to step up the war effort, with Earth Ambassador Siobhan Tilly calling for a “Total Mobilisation of the Federation” to counter the Klingon war effort. The President baulked at the prospect, completely opposed to the massive concentration of state power. Time and again Barreuco refused the demands of the Commission for Defence to grant them more powers. Her role, as the President understood it, was not to become an all-powerful wartime leader. Such a position had not been necessary during the Romulan War, and thus, to her mind, at least, would not be necessary now.[12]
“It is very difficult for an interstellar federal democracy to create the ground necessary for an FDR, or a Sarah Susan Eckert, or even a Kennedy to come forward to take the reins of government,” Wescott said of Barreuco’s obstinacy. “The Articles of Federation are designed to not allow that immense power to sit in one office, and the way that we are taught about our government is designed to prevent the ‘men of action’ like Churchill, Mao or Green from getting their grubby little hands all over the reins of power. That sort of mobilisation - millions of people tuned to one goal, one ambition, one vision is still possible in the UFP, but not through one office. Not from one person. It can only be achieved when the Federation is united behind its goals. It was not in 2256.”[13] Barreuco was a leader with charisma and charm, but she was not at ease with the reins of power she held, or with the prospect that his decisions could be the wrong ones. Faced with a situation where the wrong decision could bring the entire Federation down, she chose not to make any decisions at all.
Many have accused Barreuco of being weak, or worse, incompetent. These arguments – generally formed from the last two years of her administration – are ignorant of the real problems. Barreuco was a competent President, capable of consensus building, compromise, and legislative success. The immense infrastructure projects she initiated were not easy sells in the Federation Council, and their success was never guaranteed until they were signed off. Even day-to-day governance had been characterised by smooth sailing, especially when it came to balancing the disparate needs of the various federation member worlds and political factions. “It was less that Barreuco was a people person than that she was incapable of giving up.” Her charisma had always won over naysayers, even when it seemed impossible – there was a certain magnetism to her, so long as she was getting her way, but when she wasn’t that magnetism turned into a sour arrogance that made movement on any issue impossible.
Wescott was always surprised by the intransigence of the President, and her inability to compromise on other peoples’ terms. “I always thought that it was a sign of confidence, but as time went on, I began to think that Erica simply was not imaginative enough to think that other peoples’ ideas were as good as hers.” War was a crisis built entirely on unpredictability and impossible decisions, where every choice carried a price in lives. Barreuco’s certainty and self-belief were vital to her political victory, but during the war, it made consensus-building impossible. “It was one thing to convince people to vote for subspace relays, and another one to convince them to support wartime funding or security legislation.” It did not help at all that Barreuco simply did not do foreign policy. Technically, she didn’t have to, but she failed even to take up the mantle as a co-ordinator of the government.
“Barreuco didn’t really understand how the Klingon Empire worked – not because she didn’t attend the briefings, but more because she didn’t understand their worldview. The Klingon political system and war aims didn’t make sense to her, so they obviously couldn’t work.” From what evidence we have, it seems clear that the President tried to take the war seriously but couldn’t square it with the facts she could see – whatever they were. “She thought it was just a lot more raids, like Axanar and Donatu V. It really wasn’t. But she’d decided that’s what it was at the beginning of the war and was never going to be convinced otherwise.”
The Empty Office
By March 2257 it was clear to the Palais that Starfleet had lost its grasp on the war, and that soon the core worlds of the Federation would be at direct risk of Klingon attack. Panic began to spread within the inner colonies as more and more trade routes were cut off, and Starfleet presence began to ebb away as the Presidio fought to keep as much of its strength space worthy for the assumed “final attack on earth.” The President, however, remained resolute that the four core worlds would never be attacked, and that while the threat was severe, Starfleet was up to the task of holding the Klingons at bay. Even as more and more member worlds found themselves behind Klingon ‘lines’, Barreuco refused to push beyond her peacetime powers. She referred to this stance as “governance according to principles, not panic;” the Times of London, however, caught the public mood when they referred to it as “A Crisis caused by a strategy of deliberate indecision.”[14]
It was not an unfair assessment. During the Romulan War, President Nathan Samuels had been the core of a ‘war cabinet’ that combined the civilian leadership with that of Starfleet, the UESN and MACO corps, allowing for total control and direction of policy. Barreuco made no attempt to replicate this arrangement in any way whatsoever. Arguably, it may have been impossible; the Federation is arguably too large and autonomous for the immense state control required for the proper conduct of total war. There was, however, a desire for that sort of “national coordination”, especially amongst the Federal Commissariat and many members of the Council.[15] Barreuco simply wouldn’t take up that role. “The President wasn’t afraid of taking up a leadership role. She just didn’t get why she would have to do it in a wartime setting.
There was no glory for her in being a war leader. Her principles baulked at the concept of exerting state control over the member worlds, even when they were actively begging for national direction. While some of her rejections – such as refusing to activate the Arcturian “war born” clone soldier force – were sensible decisions, other more logical options were ignored. There was no “war plan” within the civilian government; no question of war aims, or what would be asked of the Klingons if they could be brought to the negotiating table as they had been after Donatu V. All those measures were too “militarist” for Barreuco. “I have beliefs in how to govern,” she told Wescott. “I’m going to stick to them, war or no war.”
It wasn’t a sensible stance, and even for Wescott, it was clear that voters and representatives alike had begun to lose patience with the president. Organised opposition, already fierce, began to form mainly around two figures: Tellarite Ambassador Nafraos Xaall and Andorian Ambassador Byss Th’Rhahlat. Both men had been supporters of the President during her run for election and early premiership, but the turn of the war had been extremely damaging for their constituents and their allies in the Council. They each represented wings of Federation political thought that had characterised the political battles of the first century of its existence, a deadlock that Barreuco had managed to break only in 2254 (with their help, admittedly).[16] However, their connections to their political ideologies were always going to supersede any loyalty to an individual.
Xaall, fierce if laconic by Tellarite standards, was a longstanding veteran of vicious, convoluted and sometimes-concerningly overzealous Tellarite Parliamentary System, but had graduated from that in the 2240s to a career in the Federation Civil Service on Earth. Said job in the Federal Department of Aid Control (FEDAC) had served only to cement his position that the bureaucracy of the Federation was unfit for its purpose - a cause he’d then championed since 2251 as the Councillor for Tellar Prime, arguing for more devolution to Federation member worlds on a wide number of issues.
Byss Th’Rhahlat, however, was a firm Archerite, putting strength in the institutions of the UFP and their ability to be “greater than the sum of their parts”. A thin, sallow thaan, he was a quiet individual who liked to enjoy the finer things in life and appreciate things – whether they were fine food, classical music, or romantic partners he was not currently married to – to their fullest. As a politician, however, his tendency to muteness was not a curse, but a weapon. When he spoke, he spoke fiercely and passionately, demanding attention from those who would prefer to ignore his demands for colonial rights and stronger governmental bodies. Much of this had to do with his upbringing in the Andorian colony world of R’vel and his experience of the collapse of its ecosystem in the 2230s. The severe loss of life, he argued in his biography, would have been avoided if both Starfleet and the Federation had been empowered not only with the resources to tackle crises in the distant colony worlds, but the legal jurisdiction to act without having to consult the parent worlds of frontier planets.[17]
Unlike Xaall, Th’Rhahlat had stayed out of politics until 2246, when the disaster at Tarsus IV compelled him to action. The Tarsus disaster, as well as toppling the poorly-run Qasar Administration, galvanised the discontent those who lived on the Fringe had with their political representatives.[18] Th’Rhahlat’s rise to the council had been supported by the emergent Outer Systems and Frontier Party, which had rapidly risen as the key political group advocating for constitution reform. He summed up the OSFP’s beliefs in his maiden speech in the 2249, when he argued that “if the colonies had real representation - real, direct representation on the council, not diluted by far off assemblies on ‘parent planets’ - then men like Kodos would never end up ruling with an Iron fist and a thirst for blood.”[19]
Th’Rhahlat saw the combination of strong government tied into with direct representation as the only solution that would prevent division, and it was that message that saw him win his seat on the Federation Council in 2253. He had been a strong supporter of Barreuco during the campaign and her first year, helping push his landmark communications and infrastructure projects through the council and earning himself a reputation as somewhat of a kingmaker. However, as time went on, Th’Rhahlat became disillusioned with the Barreuco administration. The President’s foreign and defence policy (or lack thereof) was of increasing concern to Th’Rhahlat, who along with the Rigellian Ambassador and others were the lone voices in the Security Council calling for increased security in the Klingon Border Area. Unlike, Xaall, however, Th’Rhahlat had backed the president for much of the war’s duration despite his concerns. In a time when more and more councillors were cheering Xaall on in the Council debates, the Andorian Ambassador remained a fierce defender of the President’s conduct.
Xaall’s opposition movement, despite its growing numbers, was still limited even as Starfleet’s conduct of the war fell apart at the seams. Federation politics was consensus-building by design, and the attitudes of most councillors preferred a protracted negotiation towards consensus over a vicious adversarial battle. The tipping point, however, was the fall of Starbase One, whose position from Earth was measured in mere AUs. Even at this moment, Barreuco called demands for maximum mobilisation an “overstatement of our position”, referring to the Klingon raid as “an exception, not the rule.”[20] While behind doors she took the crisis seriously (even endorsing Admiral Cornwell’s plans to make direct peace overtures with the then opposition leader L’Rell), in public her calm demeanour just came off as dangerously uninterested.[21]
When the war did come to an end with a full ceasefire by the Klingons (who withdrew to their ‘claimed areas’ beyond Axanar), Barreuco declared ‘victory’ for the UFP. “The light of liberty,” she told the Federation Council, “has flickered, but will now shine brightly throughout the galaxy.”[22] Her sentiment was not shared widely. Xaall is supposed to have leant over to the Beta Rigellian Councillor and replied, “it’d be shining brighter if she hadn’t poured all that water over it.”[23] President Barreuco did no favours for his popularity when she followed this speech up with the formal pardon and decoration of Commander Michael Burnham, whose arguably illegal actions had precipitated the war in the first place.[24] As far as the president was concerned, The Klingon war was just another crisis, comparable to the Tholian incursion or the Orion police actions. “The way I see it,” she told Wescott in late September, “this war hasn’t been that bad. We shouldn’t change course just because we took a few knocks and bumps. A steady hand on the tiller is what the Federation needs, not Xaall and Th’Rhahlat pulling us every which way over every little thing.”[25]
Wescott was unimpressed with this outlook. “I don’t know whether she didn’t care, or didn’t want to listen, but it was clear the President had been avoiding looking at the state of the Federation on the ground. Mainly because if she did so she’d be proved wrong.” Barreuco achieved her victories by trusting her political instincts and hunches even when everyone around her had lost their heads. It had won her countless votes in the United Earth Assembly and put her in the Palais de Concorde. It had got her landmark bills through the Council and made her popular as a leader who got the job done. But when it came to the war and how people felt about it, she was completely off the mark and refused to accept any information that didn’t fit with his own worldview. “After the war ended, she stopped attending Starfleet briefings entirely, because the Admirals were telling her things she didn’t want to hear. It was unprofessional, and frankly dangerous. Sometimes it felt like there wasn’t even anyone in that big Palais office of hers.”[26]
As 2258 began, President Barreuco’s administration was swamped by the rising tide of public discontent at the administration’s failures, which were all too apparent to Federation citizens whose lives had been upended by Klingon warships. Xaall’s opposition movement entered the new year in a far more coherent state than most expected. Despite some flirtations with more dangerous elements of Federation politics, such as the Kumari Group or the remnants of various parochial xenophobe parties, she had not succumbed to the dangerous radicalism that had come out of the shadows during the war to demand drastic and illegal activities to fight the Klingons.
Barreuco, in her usual aloofness, ignored most of the signs of her impending demise. As far as she was concerned, their speeches and protests were nothing beyond the usual complaints of the opposition, nothing that wouldn't be stifled without a few concessions to their arguments. One of these (barely noticed at the time by either the government or the new opposition) was Uncle Shu’s Inquiry, signed off by the President alongside a myriad of other reports as part of measures to address the "Diplomatic Shockwave" that faced the UFP after the armistice. For the large part, this went ignored - allusions to the still-distant findings of reports did little to assuage Barreuco's feeling that the crisis would pass, and that the Federation's desire for strong leadership in difficult times would see it fall behind her. “[Barrecuo] had a complete vision for her two terms,” Wescott wrote. “It was very detailed. There was no space for a war. We could barely talk about it in strategy meetings. It was as if it had never happened – or, at the very least, that it was some form of freak natural disaster instead of a crisis exacerbated by her own decisions.”
As February rolled into March, the President could no longer ignore the reality of her situation: her coalition, both in the council and in the general electorate, was on the verge of collapse. In the end, it was not the Council that set-in motion her fall from office, but as always, events. Starfleet Intelligence (despite its many flaws) had always warned that the Federation’s diplomatic hold on many of the neutral, associated and ‘protectorate’ worlds of the disputed area was far more tenuous than the Palais de Concorde believed. Even before their reform after the disaster of the Control Program, their warnings that without clear power projection or benefits many worlds would slip out of the grasp of the UFP had been ignored. “You can’t just draw a big circle on a map of the Galaxy and call it Federation Territory like some 20th-century Imperialist,” Starfleet Intelligence chief of Operations Ash Tyler pointed out (correctly) to the Security Council in late 2259.[27] “You have to actually be present in star systems and sectors. It’s not just about the Starships. It’s about the merchant marine; the corps of engineers; the bureaucrats and diplomats; the Starfleet Delta on the side of a shipping crate, or the Federation seal on dividend payments. We must make sure people know what we do and how we can help. If people don’t know who we are, what we do and don’t see us doing it, we’re just a faceless husk. They won’t trust us, and the moment they won’t trust us they’re lost to the Federation.”[28] This fundamental truth had apparently been lost on President Barreuco when, in late March, news of the Convoy PD-14 disaster arrived in Paris.
Convoy PD-14 was the first official dilithium supply convoy out of the Archanis Sector since the Klingon ceasefire. With the withdrawal of Klingon forces from deep within Federation space, attempts to return to ‘normalcy’ began to emerge. The dilithium convoys had taken a while to return to normal, as the mining outposts restarted production after nearly a year of constant raids and destruction. When they eventually did scramble enough resources and ships together to form a convoy of 20, concerns soon rose about its escort, a mere two ships. The convoy, however, had to run: its resources were needed, especially for the massive reconstruction projects on planets like Corvan II or Novo Leningrad. Everyone knew how necessary it was. Starfleet simply couldn’t spare the ships, especially considering that PD-14 wasn’t even the largest convoy running into Axanar that month. It was unprotected, incredibly risky, and was bound to go wrong, but when protests reached the Palais de Concord, Barreuco ordered it to go ahead.[29]
PD-14 was first attacked about 10 light-years out of Archanis IV by six Nausicaan raiders. For the next two days, the convoy was attacked relentlessly before the Captain of the USS Laikian gave the order for the convoy to scatter. When the last surviving ship (SS Nairobi) limped into Starbase Axanar two weeks later, it was one of a mere 5 that made it to their destination. Both the USS Wilson and the Laikian were lost to enemy action.[30] Without the vital dilithium supply, reconstruction efforts across much of the southern quadrant of the UFP were impossible. The news first broke on the core worlds on March 20th, and the President’s first reaction was to declare the incident ‘an unavoidable tragedy’, a line that (unsurprisingly) did not go down very well with the Federation Council, or the public, especially considering his (wildly optimistic) claim a week earlier that the Federation Frontier was “as safe as it had ever been”. What exacerbated the scale of the crisis was the effect the crisis had on negotiations with neutral planets on the Klingon Fringe; namely, Coridan.
Coridan had been a world within the Federation sphere for longer than there had been a Federation to speak of. The planet had been a protectorate world of the Vulcan High Command before the Kir'Shara Revelation (To use the Vulcan term for what John Gill called the Surakian Counter-revolution), providing the High Command with a near-constant supply of high-quality dilithium. This factor meant it had become a contentious political football in the long cold war with the Andorians. Coridan slipped out of Vulcan’s sphere during the Romulan war when she was targeted by the Romulans with nuclear weapons to prevent Starfleet from using it as a base. The resulting destruction, while physically limited due to Starfleet assistance after the war, destroyed what remained of Coridan's fragile political system, which fractured into civil war for the rest of the 22nd century and much of the 23rd.[31] Situated just beyond the fringes of core Federation space, its status as an associate member (granted in 2231) meant that while it was technically a protected world, it was open to all comers. Thus, the depopulated planet attracted the worst of Orion and Nausicaan pirates as well as illegal mining operations from several Federation member worlds including the Tellarites.[32] Needless to say, the issue of its accession to full membership was something of a political minefield; it was hard enough maintaining the status quo on Coridan, let alone convincing the planet to favour closer union.
When the news of the PD-14 disaster broke on Coridan, the implications of a spike in dilithium demand caused an immediate crisis. Coridan, sparsely populated and without a proper defence force of its own, was now an easy target for freebooters, traders and pirates attempting to make a quick profit by mining the planet’s dilithium. The decades-long work Starfleet had done to limit Orion mining operations on the surface was undone almost overnight, with privateers dropping onto the system within weeks of the convoy attack. The fractious coalition government soon collapsed, and the planet fell into another brutal stage of open conflict: a disaster that stung severely not just because of loss of face, but because of how close Coridan had been to requesting full membership into the UFP. Federation expansion in the southern quadrant of the galaxy, already stilted by the Klingon war, was now in danger of being halted and reversed. The status of Federation colonies and allied worlds along the Klingon Fringe was now even more fragile than it had been at the war’s end. Several member worlds and associated states on the edge of Federation space, including the vital treaty port of Argelius began to wonder whether the confidence they had placed in the Palais de Concorde was well placed or not.[33]
This incident alone would not have been enough to trigger a downfall if the President hadn’t decided to blame Starfleet. This deflection made its debut in the ‘Presidential Questions’ session on the 24th of March, where she turned on Starfleet, declaring that “while Starfleet Command has performed to a high standard during the conflict and this crisis, questions must be asked as to how such an incident as PD-14 was allowed to occur.”[34] While a President coming for Starfleet was not a well-advised move in normal times, it was only a more disastrous move considering that it was well known to almost all how much the President had been supportive of Starfleet Command’s stagnation in the early 2250s. Barreuco had made opposing Starfleet expansion a core part of his foreign policy – he’d even been building his re-election campaign on it before the war had disrupted things. More importantly, this u-turn came after months of defending Starfleet’s conduct in the war. It implied more than an unwillingness to take responsibility for decisions - it suggested that Barreuco was unable to keep her story straight.
When she came to speak on the 26th on a completely unrelated issue, Barreuco was ambushed by several questions on his ‘defunding’ of Starfleet across his administration. Her attempts to backtrack and argue that she’d always been in favour of Starfleet expansion were ridiculed by an increasingly unruly council chamber, which heckled him in a manner much closer to that of the old British parliament than Federation Ambassadors. “They were angry,” Wescott wrote of the session on the 26th. “They felt like Barreuco was talking down to them. Did she mean to? That was irrelevant, really. She was trying to tell them she was on their side when they knew she wasn’t, and they were furious with her for even trying to say that.”[35] Considering the President’s place in the chamber was closer to a sitting speaker than that of a government official, the sight of her being bombarded unrelentingly by discontented representatives was a shock to many political commentators. As more and more councillors stood up to denounce the president, it became clear that what had originally begun as a mere “backbench revolt” had escalated into a full-scale attack on the president.[36]
[1] Sarek, “Memoirs, 2240-2260”. (Shikahr: Vulcan Historical Institute, 2261)
[2] A.G. Conte, The Furious Folly of Erica Barreuco, the President who lost the Peace (Harper-Collins-Ch'Rell, 2299)
[3] Estimating the population of the Federation is notoriously difficult. Despite the meticulous efforts of the Federation Census Bureau, the UFP contains an immense migratory and itinerant population, who often pass through it’s borders and throughout it’s territory at will. There are also a significant number of colony worlds and outposts whose populations are simply unknown or estimated, due to their distance from Federation Central or out of respect for their isolationist beliefs.
[4] While formal contact with the Gorn would not come until 2267, Gorn attacks on Federation colonies and shipping are estimated to have begun in the early 2240s. They would not be formally identified as an “hostile power” by Starfleet Command until 2259.
[5] While they had observer members on the Federation Council, colony worlds of Federation members would not receive their own directly appointed councillors until the Federation Reform Act of 2275.
[6] Barreuco received 54.2 percent of the vote, to his opponent’s 45.4 in the popular vote. Archerism was the dominant political ideology of the first half of the 23rd century, built around strengthening Federal power while limiting the military strength of Starfleet.
[7] The Caucuses on the Federation Council are not directly based on species but gained their name from how the Council initially split along the lines of the founding races as new members joined according to the policy priorities of said members. For example, the ‘Terran’ Caucus was mainly concerned with the expansion of the Federation’s colonies and the protection of said worlds, while the ‘Andorian’ Caucus was concerned with maintaining the defensive arms of the Federation and protecting her core worlds.
[8] Kenneth Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais: My Journey to the Concorde.
[9] Paulo Liverno, The End of Money: How United Earth ended the Age of Capital. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2296)
[10] The Orion Neutrality Area had been created by the Rigel Neutrality Zone Commission in 2246, with the Federation compromising on the massively unpopular Orion Neutrality Act of 2222. The Act declared that the Rigel system and all the Orion Colonies were unaligned with any space-faring power and had the right to trade with whoever they wished, whatever they liked, on their terms and without having to say how or where the goods came from. At the cost of increased border tensions with the Federation, it preserved interstellar trade with the Orions, and what little political power they had. In 2246, the Federation declared specific boundaries for the jurisdiction of the act (much to the Botchtock Congress’s displeasure) but were unable to end the practice of slavery within the zone.
[11] Article 14 and all subsequent subsections give the President the right to, amongst other things; federalise the defence forces of all Federation members, turn over civilian shipyards and facilities to Starfleet Command; suspend the Federation Council’s right to review all Security Council Directives. No measure within Article 14 would be enacted until September 2257, when President Barreuco federalised the United Earth Defence Force and UESPA to defend the planet.
[12] A.G. Conte, The Furious Folly of Erick Barreuco
[13] Kenneth Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais: My Journey to the Concorde. (New York: Penguin Books, 2275)
[14] The Times, May 10th, 2257 (Times Archive; Memory Alpha).
[15] The Federal Commissariat is another term for the Federal Cabinet of Ministers.
[16] Richard Ch’Rella, The End of Indecision: Federation Politics from Richard Morville to Lorna McClaren (Khartoum; Andorian Political Annals, 2290)
[17] Byss Th’Rhahlat, Frontier Democracy, (Laikian; The Imperial Printer’s Office, 2257)
[18] Zane CP Hosht, "The Political Ramifications of Tarsus IV". (Paris: Federation Political History No.14/3, 2273)
[19] Th’Rhahlat, Frontier Democracy
[20] Hansard, Emergency Session of the Security Council of the United Federation of Planets, 22nd August 2257
[21] Claims that Admiral Cornwell (and thus the President) signed off on backing L’Rell’s coup d’etat have never been proved and are firmly denied by all parties involved.
[22] Hansard, Special Session of the Council of the United Federation of Planets, 5th September 2257
[23] Gamoolead, Terra Memoirs,(Rigel IV Planetary Press, 2272)
[24] Lena S. Revell, “Michael Burnham, The Battle of the Binary Stars, and the Legality of the ‘Vulcan Hello’” (Oxford: Oxford Journal of Interstellar History, October 2295)
[25] Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais
[26] Ibid.
[27] Quentin Hawk, The Official History of Starfleet Intelligence, 2161-2301 (San Francisco: Starfleet Press, 2311)
[28] Ash Tyler in The Official History of Starfleet Intelligence
[29] Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais
[30] Walter Grayson, Purple Gold: A History of the Dilithium Belt (New York: Beta Quadrant Histories, 2308)
[31] Stanley Wilkinson, Learning to Fly: The First Ten Years of the United Federation of Planets (London: Harper-Collins-Ch’Rell, 2290)
[32] S. Ivenist, The Coridan Conundrum (London: Reed Press, 2296)
[33] While this was not known at the time, recent records have emerged that prove that several fringe member planets (including Sauria, New Paris and Kobax VI) considered opening negotiations with the Association of Free Worlds. It is unknown how far these negotiations went.
[34] Hansard, FC Deb 24 March 2268 vol.013
[35] Wescott, From Pittsburgh to the Palais
[36] Barreuco, to Wescott in From Pittsburgh to the Palais. A “backbench revolt” is an Old Earth term for a minor political revolt by unimportant representatives.