SO I WAS thinking about the Vasudans while driving home, and some interesting things came about spuriously.
The first idea that knocked my head was the notion that there's a very big shift happening in Vasudaland. When the GTVA was finally able to destroy the Lucifer, a similar shift happened. This race that had a very decentralized structure and which, to Battuta's words, relishes in the complexities, appointed an emperor, centralizing the power structure to one single Vasudan, thus simplifying it. I wonder if this change has anything to do with the relationship with the humans, who were themselves always at the brink of desintegration, as a means of countering this centrifugal pressure.
Now however, there are two very different human structures to which the Vasudans have to deal with. The whole problem has increased in complexity and uncertainty. Not only the Ubuntu is an amazing structure in itself that poses lots of ideological problems to the tevs, you also have to take into account Jupiter, Mars, the Nagari incidents, Nabirasul and so on.
Not that the Vasudans like the situation, they'd rather not have the terrans be having a civil war, however this is exactly the kind of sea they are just so fond of swimming: complexity. Thus we can already imagine their kind of strategy in the whole issue: rich, decentralized, double-play, tinkering in this planet in one way, in another event the other way. To an outsider who is unaware of Vasudan culture, he would characterize it as mischievous, misleading bull****. A closer inspection however reveals a much more nuanced, nobler purpose.
The Tevs will do exactly the opposite: to turn the complex into simple. In order to do so, they will try to make the situations converge to single meaningful events to win the war. Batman gambits, Steele-like Delenda Ests. While the Zods try to play the entire battlefields of the chess board, the meta-chess and the anti-meta-chesses, the Tevs gamble everything in the Black Swan fat tail events they know they can create and fool others into them.
Ubuntu has, until now, tried too hard to make inceptions of ideas into the minds of their enemies (it is precisely this danger that made the Tevs proclaim war on them in the first place). Some of this has back fired. The apparent inability of their armed forces to deal with the Tevs forced the hand of a splinter group the Wargods to adopt the metaphysics of the Tevs, however without sufficient cunning and experience they failed miserably at the hands of a better player. The Wargods are necessarily wrong. It is the "duty" of the protagonist in WiH2 to understand this failure and that the "secret weapon" of the UEFs is precisely its own metaphysical game style which will only show how it is an amazing strategy at the very end of the arc.
