The E wrote:
Here's a thought though: The Alignment has already won.
The Alignment has two big primary objectives. One, the dissolution of the League. Two, the abolishment of the Beowulf Code. The first goal is already mostly accomplished, and most of the groundwork for the second is already laid in. Think about it: The Renaissance Factor worlds will already have lots of stuff in place to make them receptive to voices calling for an amendment to the Beowulf code. Even if left alone, those seeds will grow and, with a little intervention here and there, turn these worlds away from the accepted baseline.
Now, in the original plan, the Alignment wanted Beowulf isolated. No more League, and no Manticore to help spread the Gospel; but I wonder if the formation of the GA will actually change matters all that much. The Alignment is far too deeply entrenched, and has had far too much time to influence cultures for its influence to go away completely. Whatever the state of the galaxy will be after the fall of the League and after the GA has defeated the Alignment's forces (presumably), there will be successor states that will carry on the Detweiler legacy, that will work towards more overt transhumanism.
I entirely agree with this assessment. Manticore is not going to stop the RF from coalescing into a united polity. What Manticore might be able to do is prevent the RF from coalescing into a united polity the size of, or even a significant fraction of, the Solarian League.
The whole idea was the entire League would fall apart, and the RF would present to the remaining League members a remnant of the stability and protection that they had enjoyed under the League. All the remaining single-system polities would flock to the banner of the RF, which would give Mesa's transhumanist ideology a platform that was not only overt, but hegemonic within the human diaspora.
With the Grand Alliance (and Maya) around, though, the GA is going to be offering stability and protection also, which means all those desperate single-system polities won't necessarily flock to the RF's banner. Many undoubtedly will, but others will choose to group together and form the smaller (but still substantial) political units that Honor said should be Manticore's goal for the collapse of the Sollies.
I still think inevitably we'll see the formation of the RF, which will comprise a significant fraction of the former Solarian worlds, enough to become the galaxy's largest polity.
The one thing that both Manticore and Mesa don't want is for the Solarian League's collapse to be arrested. The only thing that could do that, now, is a giant Grand Alliance wrecking-crew like strike; the wrecking of a few dozen Solarian industrial economies. That would provoke everyone who is not really invested in the League's ongoing survival to become invested in it, and suddenly the inevitable collapse isn't so inevitable.