1. I’m doing Crispy a grave disservice by presenting what is essentially marketing copy as a significant excerpt from his book. While the passage is dramatic, I feel the need to correct some bits that might be misleading.

To paraphrase several hundred pages of densely argued prose: Most of these foreign policy decisions were Fluttershy’s. When Twilight assigned her the Ministry of Kindness, Her Majesty assumed that Fluttershy would interpret her vague portfolio to ‘advance the health and wellbeing of creatures at home and abroad’ by, perhaps, reforming the aging and overwhelmed Principality Health Service. And probably opening a lot more animal shelters.

Which she did.

But her daily intelligence briefs painted a portrait of horror. A world full of war, sickness, and famine. When she and her friends had defeated the Storm King, they had prompted Emperor Raiden XIV to declare an exodus inward for the raiju people to contemplate their failures. This, in turn, led to the collapse of over a dozen corrupt-but-stable puppet governments the raiju empire had been supporting, causing war and strife where there had been, if not justice, then at least peace and stability.

She realized that she and her friends had indirectly caused all of this by doing a good deed: defeating the Storm King and saving their nation.

She could have come to understand that even the best-intentioned deeds can have complex consequences, and therefore those with power should act with great caution.

Instead, she took the counsel of her anxieties. These problems were her fault, and she needed to do something about it.

She started with a small step—sending medical teams to impartially help the wounded on both sides of the Hippogriff Civil War. This was a widely lauded move. When hippogriff insurgents made it difficult for these teams to do their work, and when the medics themselves became targets, she went in front of the Ministry Mares and asked for military protection. When Applejack and Twilight explained that sending EUP troops to Mount Erebus would be considered an act of war, she fled the council chamber crying.

Rainbow Dash comforted her, as she had so many times before. In the dark and quiet of their bed-chamber, she made an offer of ‘volunteers’ to protect Fluttershy’s medics.

Three years later, two mercenary teams rumored to be Ministry of Awesome black ops teams assassinated both the Sea Queen and the Sky King. Leaderless and reeling, both sides came to the negotiating table, where they ultimately worked out peace terms.

Deep in a secret Ministry of Awesome airship, Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash performed a musical number to celebrate their success and planned their next move. With the evidence of their success at Mount Erebus, they could be assured of Twilight’s support. Their next friendship intervention would be made in the open.

2. Caesar Musa III, widely demonized in Equestrian propaganda as a bloodthirsty tyrant, was not truly an evil creature, or even a bad ruler. The war that had imposed crippling reparations on Abyssinia happened four Caesars and three Musas ago, and it had been a defensive one to boot. Over the decades, a series of cunning Abyssinian diplomats had whittled away at those reparations, gradually shifting almost all of the economic burden of those payments onto a few poor mining provinces on the Zebraican border. Almost everycat in those regions worked in conditions of near-slavery, providing trainloads of cheap lead as raw material for Zebraica’s unique, transmutation-based economy.

If Musa was even aware of any injustice here, that awareness likely lived at the edges of his consciousness. A tragic situation, but one that helped his economy, and also one that wasn’t technically even happening in his country. It was simply none of his business.

When Equestrian-backed insurgents overthrew the Abyssinian Meowlifate for reasons completely unrelated to the plight of those lead miners (whom Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash were also unaware of), Musa III was merely annoyed. Princess Twilight had overstepped her bounds. Again. But he was on good terms with Twilight personally and diplomatically, and their two nations enjoyed a favorable trade relationship. He instructed his staff writers to prepare an ambiguous and mealy-mouthed ‘condemnation’ of Twilight’s foreign policy choices and moved on to the next item in his briefing.

It was not his country, so it was none of his business.

A week later, when the previously soaring Zebraican stock market took a high-dive into bear country, he was compelled to take notice. That cheap lead was more critical to the Zebraican economy than anyone had realized. On top of all the openly declared lead that came into the country from Abyssinia, a thriving black market existed. Corrupt mine bosses had been trading off the books with shady Zebrican alchemists, swapping lead ingots for a variety of unsafe or illegal potions. Potions of longevity, sexual prowess, and mind control were worth many times the lead offered in return. Since the potions gained their value from being proscribed and cost those alchemists almost nothing to make, they could transmute the lead into whatever other metals the market demanded and sell them at ridiculously low prices to the captains of Zebraican Industry for enormous profits. The captains of industry laundered the sketchy metal by slipping it in with legitimately sourced orders, and everyone (except the poor exploited miners at the bottom of the food chain).

No more slavery meant no more black market meant no more cheap metal meant economic cataclysm for Zebraica. Stock brokers self-defenestrated. Factory pistons groaned into stillness. Dinner tables went empty.

Desperate, Musa III’s put the crisis before his cabinet. They had a solution—Yakyakistan. They pointed out it was a technologically backward nation, with a tiny population, no standing army, and range after range of mountains containing vast untapped mineral resources. Musa III protested that the terrain was terrible, the weather was worse, and that even the most creative pretext would struggle to disguise an invasion so far outside Zebraica’s normal sphere of influence as anything but an act of unprovoked imperialistic aggression.

The advisors countered by putting forward plans for their own 'friendship intervention'. Over the winter, Zebraican agents would assist whatever political factions they could find in staging a series of terrorist attacks. As soon as the sea ice melted next summer, a small task force of Zerbrica’s most elite and well-equipped troops would land and begin ‘restoring order’. Utilizing shock and awe and surgical strikes, they would cow the simple-minded natives. By seizing control of several strategic mountain passes, they could have the capital and the most desirable mining regions under their control in a matter of days, before the yaks could organize an effective defense or the international community raise a meaningful protest.

Musa III was reluctant, but his country was in need. He grilled his advisors, looking for flaws in the plan. He found none. He concluded that while it was an evil plan, it was a good one.

He was only half right.

The first flaw in the plan was a misunderstanding of yakkish politics. While they were a contentious people, prone to butt heads over matters as simple as the balance of vanilla extract in baked goods, they were also a companionable and loyal people, who typically resolved disputes by literally butting heads. Whoever had the worse headache afterward was declared the loser, and the loser cheerfully abided by the results of the duel. Absolutely nocreature, especially not the yaks, believed that they had a homegrown terrorist movement, and the wave of tragic bombings they endured only drew them closer together and created international sympathy.

The second flaw was a misunderstanding of the yakkish will to fight. There was no excuse for this except for wishful thinking on the part of Musa III’s advisors. While Yakyakistan technically had no standing army, that was because every yak, male and female, rich and poor, from the cradle to the edge of the grave, was trained to fight, both in single combat and in groups. When one yak was presented with a threat, every healthy yak nearby would drop what they were doing and use their personality and special gifts to help stomp that threat. Only a few creatures—griffins, dragons, raiju—were as fierce, and none of them were as well organized.

The third flaw was a misunderstanding of Yakyakistan’s weather patterns. The Zebraican invasion timetable was based on average daily snowfall in the region. Any yak old enough to talk could have explained to Musa about the spring blizzards that dumped all that snow during a few days, rather than spreading it across the season in manageable clumps. One of this year's blizzards passed through shortly after the initial Zebraican landings, locking them in their beachheads when they were supposed to be seizing strategic mountain passes. By the time the weather cleared, the passes had been fortified by yaks equipped with the finest and most advanced Equestrian weapons.

The fourth flaw was a single pony—Pinkie Pie. This was also inexcusable. Musa and his advisors should have taken into account that she was an intimate friend of Prince Rutherford. They should have remembered that she had introduced Harmonism to Yakyakistan, a religion joyfully embraced by its creatures to the point where many revered her as a saint.

Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy confronted Twilight Sparkle. They demanded that Equestria intervene in this fight. It was a gross injustice, and they could not let it stand. Not advisors, not ‘volunteers’, but the full might of the EUP—which, under the guidance of a group of mares who had seen its weak late-Celestian incarnation crumble before the might of the Storm King, had grown into a force to be reckoned with.

Twilight Sparkle, backed into a corner, discovered that she simply did not have the strength to say ‘no’ to her friends.

3. ‘Crystal Math’ is the street name for a mineral compound that would later become the active ingredient in the Mint-Als line of products.

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