I never did elaborate on this the way I meant to but. I should note that I’m not even thinking of General White here— I am thinking of pre-wedding Snow, the politician and peacemaker.
Part of this is analysis of canon and part of it is headcanon about her background and personality. I’ll write this to progress from what’s most grounded in canon to what relies more on interpretation, extrapolation, and finally personal opinion.
While Jonny says that Snow and Rose have little in common, I think it’s important to take into account what we know about Snow’s background. She is the daughter of one of the noblest families of a fascist galactic empire. She represents a nation that canonically sends political dissidents to die in forced labor camps, utilizes biomechanically engineered child soldiers for the personal defense of its king, and continually expands its imperial holdings.
Snow’s family benefits from and contributes to all of this. They are deeply embedded in the upper echelons of this power system, and it’s highly unlikely Snow was raised to have any level of significant criticism for it. Frankly, it would take an immense amount of awareness, will, and active effort for Snow to develop a political ideology that meaningfully challenges this status quo. Even if she had that, we know that she works within the system of Zantine’s most powerful as a politician with access to the “aging warmongers” of Cole’s government. If she has an actual understanding of what the Empire is, she is certainly making a great deal of compromise in order to maintain access to mainstream politics. This is a tradeoff that may have understandable motivations from her point of view, but that significantly limits her ability to be anything but actively complicit in the Empire’s crimes.
We know that Snow is a peacemaker, in contrast with her later philosophy of violent resistance as General White. Taking into account what we know of the Empire and her political approaches, I find it a lot more likely that Snow opposes the hard power her sister represents but leans into the Empire’s soft power. If General White is a complete about-face from Snow “believ[ing] in peace”, it stands to reason that Snow is uncomfortable with overt violence in any form, including the violence of the oppressed in resistance to the oppressor. She may stand against new wars and conquests, but I doubt she grasps the extent of the violence Cole inflicts on the galaxy through means outside of the military.
At the very least, it is entirely grounded in canon to assume that Snow’s politics of peacemaking fail to adequately address the threat her own government poses to peace across the galaxy, and that in her position she is unable and/or unwilling to meaningfully resist the economic and social aspects of imperialism. At worst (and this is the interpretation I lean towards), she assumes that a status quo of benevolent imperialism in which conquered peoples thrive under Cole’s rule is both possible and desirable.
In short, given her background and position, I find it deeply unlikely that she genuinely believes in and resists the harm that Cole’s empire causes. Her worldview and politics are most likely just a softer facet of Rose’s military enforcement of the Empire.
In the realm of pure headcanon, I also think it makes sense for Snow to be a little bit of a mean girl. She holds a lot of social power, and I can absolutely see her having a level of clique-iness and plausibly-deniable interpersonal meanness. She’s not a disney channel, bullying psa caricature or anything, but I think she has a tendency towards the passive-aggressive digs that are hard to even place as mean if you aren’t aware of it, which she refines and hones through her political education in her teen and young adult years. She can be very nice, and I think she appears kind and gentle, but frankly I would call Rose the more consistently, genuinely kind one between them.
