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 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
So you mean they should militarize harder in an off chance that an intervention of snarky and irresponsible being with godly power will bring them into the conflict with previously unknown and militarily vastly superior genocidal entity?
I probably wrote that very sloppily, but I was more pointing out the federation had always been on some incredibly shaky ground morally speaking.
Edit: the charitable interpretation is that Wolf-359 was the reality check to get Starfleet to stop using the Miranda class.
Harder than early tng? Yes, but that doesn’t take much.
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.