Literally the only demand made by the dominion was they stop going through the wormhole and making incursions into.their sovereign space. The federation has a neutral zone with the romulans that has lasted like 100 years or more by that point, but if there’s a wormhole it’s somehow their god given right to poke around someone else’s territory? Not even to mention the Cardassian/Romulan pre emptive attack on the Founders homeworld. Prior to that they just sent spies and harrased ships in the gamma quadrant. Seems like a more than reasonable cause for war to me.
Also interesting how the Shape Shifters were previously oppressed by Solids, but had to go imperialist in order to protect themselves and live their own life.
I’m gonna point out that the original allies against the Dominion, the Klingons, were fighting an aggressive war against the weakened Cardassians as the Dominion showed up.
The last two seasons of DS9 feels a bit like NATO shit.
Also if intervention was justified because the Dominion subjugated it’s citizens, what does that say about how the federation’a lack of action during the Bajoran occupation?
If I recall, the whole thing why the federation and cardassian cold war didn’t really go hot (like sure they were skirmishes here and there) was because Starfleet was still firmly in recovery mode from Wolf-359 at the time. Which eventually led to the demilitarization zone between the federation and cardassia, and which caused the federation and cardassian colonists in said dmz to start their own war themselves.
The whole thing with Bajor ended up falling into that because again, Wolf-359 really fucked Starfleet up.
Starfleet probably shouldn’t have been so complacent beforehand anyway. They were getting pretty pompous prior
I also forgot something else, during this time in trek there were some let’s say very interesting interpretations of the prime directive. So if the federation and Starfleet knew about the cardassian’s brutal occupation of Bajor before Wolf-359 even happened, I wouldn’t be surprised one bit if they publicly took issue with it and privately didn’t do much because it would be “messing with an internal matter of another nation”. Which is one of the things the PD prohibits doing.
Edit: Good god do I want to go on a rant at how useless the prime directive is on a morality level.
Halp, someone posted something wayyyyy too Invovled to quickly look into:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/1e8mmmn/comment/lebrfor/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
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Yes but I don’t think the show portrays this as a positive or even neutral thing. The Founders’ rule is brutal and even the slightest resistance is put down with an iron fist. The Founders have this almost almost irrational fear based on this history - or at least, even if it’s rational, they are recreating their own trauma on a thousand (or whatever) other worlds.