Diplomacy often requires you to offer carrots, but always bring a stick!

This quote is going to need some explaining. Diplomates can be summed up
as either carrot people or stick people. You can offer someone a carrot.
They may accept, or they may not care. They may be offended at the idea
that they need charity, or they may worship the cabbage and find the
carrot offensive. But no one likes to be hit with a stick.

However, carrot people tend to find that governments who are offered
carrots feel rewarded for their actions. You can always muscle a carrot
person into offering you carrots if you offer them sticks when they
don't offer you carrots.

Stick people, however, tend to come off as aggressive and evil. However,
rarely are they attacked by other stick people, unless those stick
people are massively superior in strength, or they are followers of a
religion that provides them with a superior sense of strength.

Both approaches, by themselves, will encourage either swindlers or
destroyers. A diplomat must master both.

- RT

Penned by my hand on the 6th of Glacian, in the year 387 AF.