Can we also discuss how mind numbingly pants on head stupid Sylvanas’ original plan was? It’s really a wonder the rest of the Horde leadership didnt immediately begin questioning whether her brain had rotted out of her head.
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If anything can be said about the Story Forums, it’s that I’ve learned more about WW2 here than I ever did in school.
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The hilarious thing is that Sylvanas says this herself in A Good War.
“If you want your enemy to bleed to death, you inflict a wound that cannot heal. That is why I need you to make the plan, High Overlord,” Sylvanas said. “The moment our strike begins, there will be no turning back. We can divide the Alliance only if the war to conquer Darnassus does not unite them against us. That only happens if the Horde wins an honorable victory, and I am not blind—the Horde does not trust me to wage war that way.”
Bolded for emphasis.
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It’s almost as if she has some ulterior motive, and secret heinous scheme, or something 
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I sincerely hope whatever it is makes these stupid decisions seem practical.
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… wait, no, hold onto that theory. Could be correct.
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I just cant really wrap my head around the hurculean leaps in logic her original plan required.
Leaps proven by Elegy to be wholly false, thus rendering her strategy doomed to failure from the very start.
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I feel like I’m walking into the wolves’ den with this one, but… what if you believe that war is immoral?
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That’s a strange position for an American to take.
Just because I’m from the US (not that I chose to be born here) doesn’t mean I’m not my own person with my own opinions, so I’m not sure I understand why this is strange.
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Knowing is half the battle!
The other half is violence.
The United States has always reserved the right of first strike as a tool of resolution. The War of 1812, the invasion of Canada, the Vietnam War, Grenada are all wars that the United States entered into on a first strike basis.
Okay? So in order to live in the United States, I have to agree with our military policies?
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No, but most Americans in my experience are supportive of them.
Many are, for sure. I’m personally not one of them.
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So your point is what?
Or was there no point beyond “I feel like making what is obviously an oversimplified generalization based upon my clearly anectodal evidence and use it as some bizare insult.”
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This may come as a shock, but people are individuals, not locations. Including Americans.
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And arguably it made some sense if they’d stopped at taking Ashenvale and Darkshore (or any other night elf lands) and driving the night elves out. That would arguably be a regional conflict over land and resources (specifically lands and resources that had long been points of contention), over which the rest of the Alliance might balk at committing to a global war so soon after the war against the Legion and instead pressure the night elves to sue for terms of peace, possibly leading either to that very thing or to the night elves leaving the Alliance and weakening it in the process.
As soon as Sylvanas burned Teldrassil, it guaranteed a global conflict would ensue because an invader that erases the capital city of an already-defeated enemy is dismissing all basis for negotiation. The burning of Teldrassil was tactically unnecessary and was carried out when the night elves were no longer effectively resisting the Horde. From the Alliance point of view, those circumstances made it a threat by Sylvanas to do the same thing to the rest of the Alliance. Except without presenting any terms under which she won’t do so, which changes it from a threat into a promise.
By basically showing the Alliance that she’s willing to eradicate her enemies’ civilian populace wholesale after their defeat, Sylvanas removed any grounds for surrendering or otherwise ceasing hostilities from the table. A promise of annihilation in defeat from an active aggressor forces the night elves and the rest of the Alliance to pull out all the stops and resist to the last. Especially against the Horde; as an intercontinental agency itself, the Horde isn’t a localized power that can be fled, so by effectively declaring a moratorium on the night elves themselves - to the point of destroying an entire city to snuff them out - it’s practically promising to hunt them down even if they flee the lands they’ve lost.
Even in trying to avoid the pitfalls of Garrosh’s methodology, Sylvanas still plunged headfirst into one of the biggest ones. Instead of staging a war pointed toward forcing terms of enemy surrender, almost immediately she’s turned it into a war that demands the utter destruction of the enemy because that’s the only outcome she’s presented them. Garrosh thought he could push the night elves out of Kalimdor too; by the end his mission to do so had turned into a mission of extermination in which securing Kalimdor would require the destruction of the Alliance in the Eastern Kingdom as well. Because that’s what happens when instead of conditions for the enemy’s continued survival in defeat, all you present them with are the terms of their inevitable destruction in defeat.
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Sylvanas’s strategy was fine. Her tactics were horrible.
She was right. She should have left it to Saurfang.
The British Empire blockaded the US’s ports, were enslaving any US citizens they caught, and giving weapons to all the US’s enemies and telling them to attack undefended US civilian settlements.
So the US officially declared war on the sweet innocent Empire…those first striking bastards.
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