Foreign Backing

The Cold War was fought inside other countries' politics. In Atomic Dawn a foreign power can sponsor a faction in another country, a party or a non-party movement, by sending Diplomats to support it. A country that does so becomes that faction's foreign backer. Backing gives the faction strength, gives the sponsor leverage over the faction's government, and is the precondition for steering a faction toward a coup.

How backing is built

Support reaches a faction through four Agitator directions under the Back a Faction card (see Diplomatic Missions), each needing its own talent and occupying its own diplomat:

• Propaganda raises the faction's political influence.
• Funding pays a recurring sum each 30-day cycle: $1,000,000 plus $500,000 for every $1 trillion of the target country's annual GDP. Payment is made up front, never refunded, and may run the sponsor into debt; the events that follow decide whether the money becomes influence or is diverted.
• Arms ship weapons from the sponsor's own stockpile to a non-party movement. If the stockpile runs short, the mission ends without a partial delivery.
• Military Advisors, unlocked after arms, go to a foreign non-party faction already arming for a rising or a coup (at least 50% agitation) and make its brigade training faster and cheaper (see Military Advisors).

One sponsor can run one of each type toward the same faction, and several sponsors can back the same faction at once. Propaganda and funding share a cap on how much influence one sponsor can hold in one faction (20 points). When support ends, the influence it built fades by 6 points a year, more slowly with Network Durability. Agitation Effectiveness and Funding Efficiency increase what each productive cycle delivers.

Covert work abroad runs from the sponsor's embassy, so backing needs an ambassador in the faction's country unless the diplomat is trained for clandestine insertion. A mission left without an embassy is orphaned: it is riskier, and it no longer keeps the country a backer.

A living stake

Backing is specific to each sponsor and lasts only while that sponsor keeps a stake. A country becomes a backer when its propaganda, funding or arms first reach the faction; no other power inherits that network. It stays a backer:

• while it runs a support mission for the faction,
• for a year after it last delivered support, and
• while that support's influence lasts, up to two years after the delivery.

After that the network goes cold: the backing ends and the sponsor is told. A backer's stake is its remaining support in the faction plus a share for each support mission it runs. The sponsor with the largest stake is the faction's leading sponsor, and only the leading sponsor can use Back a Coup to open a coup plot through it (see Coups and Power Struggles). While a faction has any backer it carries the Foreign Backed modifier, which slowly grows its influence.

Backed factions also give their sponsor leverage over the faction's government, at the treaty table and in crisis bargaining (see Treaties).

What the target government sees

A government always sees that foreign money and agitation are at work in its factions, but not necessarily who is behind them. A faction's mission panel shows its backers as you know them: your own support, rivals your dossiers have named, and a warning when unnamed foreign backers are active. At home this is the cue for counter-intelligence work (see Espionage):

• Compile Dossier and Root Out Foreign Agents missions can identify the sponsor and, through network disruption, withdraw its backing.
• With a dossier, a government can expose the sponsorship (the sponsor loses 5 prestige and the faction loses influence but keeps its backing), confront the faction privately, or confront the sponsor and demand it withdraw.
• Demand It Sever Foreign Ties presses a faction to break with its leading sponsor. It complies if the pressure outweighs its reliance on that sponsor; refusal makes it more agitated and names its patron publicly. A demand from a country below great power weighs half as much. See Faction Actions.

An AI government whose counterintelligence names a foreign sponsor of one of its factions expels that sponsor's ambassador, unless it answers to that power or regards it as a friend (opinion 25 or more). A non-interference treaty forbids all of these missions between its signatories.

Cold War sponsorship by the AI

AI governments back their ideological allies abroad. Each bloc leader's camp, the leader and every country in its sphere, backs a set of ideologies:

Great powers reach anywhere. Every other country backs movements only in its own region or across its borders, and never inside a great power, unless its foreign-policy posture gives it global reach: Active Internationalism, the activist neutral's posture that Sweden starts with, or Revolutionary Internationalism, taken up by a communist government outside the Soviet bloc in Europe. The default, Regional Diplomacy, keeps a country to its region.

A sponsor only looks at factions of a backed ideology that are outside their country's government, in countries outside its own camp and within its reach. It prefers strong, restless factions under weak governments, especially in the rival bloc. A proxy someone else already funds is hard to steer: each rival-bloc co-sponsor cuts a faction's appeal to a quarter, any other co-sponsor to half. The AI never funds a party of an opposing ideology, and it keeps its funding running to hold its proxies.

AI agitators head for the talents this work needs: funding first, then propaganda, then arms. Two superpower diplomats start with that experience, a Soviet veteran of the interwar party networks and an American with wartime information-service experience. So from 1946 the Soviet Union backs communists in Western Europe, Greece and Iran, while the Western camp courts the opposition in Eastern Europe and in weak states.

Backed movements are where many disputes begin: an agitated faction with strongholds and a foreign patron can turn to insurgency, with its backer as the dispute's claimant (see Stand-offs and Flashpoints).