Having twice had a rather long answer to an ask about whether Aerys’ grand schemes had any merit gotten eaten by Tumblr, I’m stubbornly trying again.
So here’s the thing about Aerys’ grand schemes: they all fall victim to the same flaw of monumentalism. They’re all huge, incredibly expensive, and very difficult projects ultimately chosen more to satisfy Aerys’ grandiose self-image than they are on their individual merits, and they would eat up resources that would probably be better spent on more prosaic, but also more useful and more likely to succeed projects:
“His Grace was full of grand schemes as well. Not long after his coronation, he announced his intent to conquer the Stepstones and make them a part of his realm for all time. In 264 AC, a visit to King’s Landing by Lord Rickard Stark of Winterfell awakened his interest in the North, and he hatched a plan to build a new Wall a hundred leagues north of the existing one and claim all the lands between. In 265 AC, offended by “the stink of King’s Landing,” he spoke of building a “white city” entirely of marble on the south bank of the Blackwater Rush. In 267 AC, after a dispute with the Iron Bank of Braavos regarding certain monies borrowed by his father, he announced that he would build the largest war fleet in the history of the world “to bring the Titan to his knees.” In 270 AC, during a visit to Sunspear, he told the Princess of Dorne that he would “make the Dornish deserts bloom” by digging a great underground canal beneath the mountains to bring water down from the rainwood.” (WOIAF)
Starting with the worst ideas, trying to conquer the Stepstones or to fight a naval war with the Braavosi for the hell of it are both terrible ideas. As we saw with Daemon’s War for the Stepstones, such conflicts would be very long, very expensive in blood and treasure, would be unlikely to succeed in the long-term due to the difficulty of maintaining forces abroad, and would definitely see the Iron Throne drawn into a broader Essosi war as the various Free Cities reacted negatively to the aggression of their neighbor.
Next tier down, building a new Wall in the North would be hugely expensive to construct, would definitely involve a brutal war against the wildlings, and at the end of the day would gain you 300 miles of territory that’s mostly non-arable let alone fertile. By constrast, resettling the Gift would effectively extend the kingdom north by some 150 miles, would allow for the expansion of production due to the superior arability of the land south of the Wall, and (by expanding tax revenue coming out of the Gift) would allow for an expansion of the Night’s Watch which at the moment can barely staff the Wall they have let alone a second one.
Similarly, building a whole new capitol down the road, a la Springfield in the Simpsons episode “Trash of the Titans,” is horrendously expensive, because you’re basically taking a complete loss on all of the built-up real estate in the old capitol. By contrast, investing in public infrastructure in King’s Landing is somewhat prosaic, but better water and sewage systems, paved streets, a public sanitation department, etc. would be a much more efficient solution for the capitol’s miasmic probems.
Finally, while expanded irrigation of Dorne is key to its economic development, trying to dig a tunnel through the Red Mountains and then lay an aquaduct through that tunnel is almost certainly beyond the means of the Iron Throne. It would be hard enough to divert the Torrentine, allowing for the irrigation of the western third of Dorne, but that project would be far easier than trying to tunnel through hundreds of miles of rock by hand.
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