The Federation and "Bad" Peace
A defense of Federation non-interventionism and peace with morally icky entities.
The Cardassians circa the armistice with the Federation were known imperialists: enslaving the Bajorans, using brutal tactics to try to maintain their control in the face of an insurgency, and looting the planet of its natural resources leaving it ecologically damaged and sabotaging as much infrastructure as possible once they finally decided to withdraw.
The Cardassians perpetuated multiple atrocities against the Federation, killing noncombatants in events like the infamous Setlik III massacre.
The Cardassian Union is openly and directly governed by an unelected military command and a spy agency that use all of the classic tactics associated with descriptions like Stalinist to ensure their rule is unchallenged.
The Federation and the Cardassians fought a war over an indeterminate period in which millions were stated to have been killed. Its a bit hard to imagine this happening without a fairly hefty number of attacks on civilians or large scale ground force operations or both. Millions equates to thousands of Galaxy-class starships at a time when the "meta" of the series was that there were fewer than six Galaxy-class starships and the loss of 40 ships at Wolf 359 was a military disaster that was staggering. The point is that this number is hard to explain with just Dominion War style starship walls crashing into each other.
Given all of this heinousness, why doesn't the Federation just "do something" about the Cardassians?
I don't know what real world reference points the writers had in mind for the Cardassians. Prior to the Global War on Terror, a lot of fans seemed to be thinking of Iraq but in a shallow way: emphasizing the seeming vast chasm of capability between the two parties, but not stopping to think through why the original Gulf War coalition stopped short of trying to occupy Iraq and replace its government or why they would even permit Iraq to retain at least some military power.
For the fans for whom the virtue ethics argument that abstaining from war in the face of abjection outside of their borders isn't a selling point for the Federation, lets think through why the Federation would swallow a bitter pill:
One of the things we don't truly know is what the limits are of Federation power if it was fully and completely mobilized. The complete destruction of the Cardassian military down to the last security trooper who won't throw down his phaser doesn't seem impossible to fans who wonder why the Federation doesn't do just this, but it isn't ever established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Federation actually can muster the resources to do this.
Assuming it truly could, there is still a matter of material costs and moral risk.
Rip it out, root and stem
The most extreme scenario is the one I just described: the Federation extirpates the military, Obsidian Order, and anyone else who wants to point a phaser in the general direction of a gold shirt. The Federation takes over responsibility for the territorial defense of Cardassia against outside predation and for interior defense against looting, terrorism, and other crimes great and small until such time as indigenous security force and government can be established that the Federation feels like is 1. competent and 2. can be trusted. If the problem with the Cardassians is assumed to be innate to the Cardassians themselves, then this is the only solution available to the Federation: it will simply need to raise a generation or two of Cardassians who have never internalized the norms of the Union under the military and Obsidian Order and are fully assimilated to Federation values.
While the Federation is waiting for the Cardassians to assimilate to Federation habits of thought and behavior, every single day Federation security forces will be in situations where they will be making snap judgments about whether they need to protect themselves, who to believe in a petty dispute, and increasingly who to trust with responsibility and authority over their fellow citizens. And the Federation will morally and practically own the consequences of every decision. Make enough good decisions on balance and you end up with post World War 2 Japan and Germany in the end. Make enough bad decisions and you end up with Afghanistan and Iraq at the end of their respective occupations as part of the Global War on Terror.
Of course we want to believe that the morally enlightened and scientifically dominant Federation would make the best and most well informed choices. But what if this information dominance isn't enough? What if all that raw data when fed through Federation heuristics doesn't reliably spit out conclusions that fit neatly with Federation moral thinking? Or do it fast enough that a gold shirt manning a checkpoint knows whether that Cardassian approaching and ignoring orders to bring their hover craft to a complete stop is planning to ram the checkpoint or just drank too much kanar with a faulty universal translator?
Find a useful idiot to rule
Short of that extreme scenario above, there is the more common regime change option frequently exercised by great powers throughout history: kill everyone who doesn't agree that you are their suzerain and then find someone to personify a pretext of local rule. Then make that person responsible for implementing whatever reforms you desire. This is liable to fall well short of the moral preference of your average Trek fan. It doesn't feel good to replace one tyrant with another that's more amenable to your preferences while leaving literally everything else about the regime intact, at least for now.
I also don't see Federation citizens feeling like this was worth some portion of Starfleet waking up in a cold sweat reliving the moment they vaporized their first Cardassian trooper. A rather foundational experience that left deep scars on Miles O'Brien..who might also be, if I'm not mistaken, the first Starfleet character to profess to having been traumatized by killing in self defense.
Whether its ultimately selfish or not, I have begun to consider the possibility that at least one component of the Federation's preference for abstaining from wars of choice and trying to find an early off ramp when war comes to the Federation anyways, is that on some level, maybe even a very explicit level, it is understood that a familiarity with and comfort with the use of violence can erode utopia. Traumatized victims of violence from the predatory actions of neighbors and Starfleet officers who become conditioned to reflexively consider violence as a necessary tool before other options both represent a kind of social contagion that needs to be managed in a society that requires high levels of trust.
Prosperity in the context of Star Trek (as I think it does in our world) relies on a disinclination towards violence in order to ensure that more people can be trusted with Swiss army knife technologies that could easily be perverted into tools of destruction. Feeling safe and that peoples from wildly different cultural contexts reflexively prefer cooperation to "stranger danger" or zero sum competition. The end result is that the Federation quite obviously must protect its citizens and infrastructure from harm, but if it does so with unnecessary aggression it risks creating a culture where threat prevention and response get more and more loosely defined.
And as we've seen in the real world, sometimes you exchange one set of problems for a new set of much more disturbing and much more difficult to manage problems: such as exchanging a belligerent nation state ruled over by a brutal but fairly predictable tyrant for a hodgepodge of stateless militias willing to use suicide tactics and undertake ethnic cleansing.
With the Cardassians for instance, its not hard to imagine a situation where Obsidian Order and military remnants, finding no role for themselves in a post war society and with a long list of people that have deadly grievances with them, may wind up opting not to surrender and continue to wage an increasingly desperate and increasingly amoral insurgency and especially focusing on civilian casualties to demonstrate Federation and Cardassian successor state inability or unwillingness to provide for the safety of noncombatants.
Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should
One of the friction points I've experienced in the Star Trek fandom over the years is over the foreign policy of the Federation, especially between The Undiscovered Country and the Dominion War. The Federation gets dinged heavily by some fans for its many and problematic peace deals with known bad actors.
The Cardassians in particular are a recurring theme in large part because the Klingons and Romulans are understood to be polities of such power that while the Federation might prevail in direct conflict, that victory would taste like ashes. With the Cardassians, this has never really been explicitly communicated. They exist in an awkward position where they are clearly powerful enough that the Federation takes them seriously but on almost every occasion we see them confronted with a first rate starship like the Enterprise or the Nebula-class USS Phoenix, the Cardassians get clobbered and it doesn't even seem particularly close. Later, we'll see the Defiant rip through what we are led to presume are the best of the best of the Cardassian navy.
In the mind of a Trek fan who isn't really thinking things through all the way, this intrinsic weakness of the Cardassians when taken with their moral odiousness: their imperialism, their willingness to kill civilians, and commit other atrocities, their military dictatorship with a vicious police state, it turns a Trek fan into the Romulans of the Balance of Terror: arguing that the very weakness of another party is itself a moral reason to subjugate them. After all, it would be quick, easy, clean, and for the Cardassians' own good right? Right?
