#irregular warfare

The inkblot test aspect of it comes down to how different members of the audience think about state level warfare and irregular warfare, aka insurgency, and maybe even terrorism.

For instance the Maquis, or at least Michael Eddington's faction, will wind up crossing the line that most people seem to think is the line between insurgency and terrorism: namely the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and noncombatants. Although a disturbing feature of debates about fictional and non-fictional peoples and movements can include some litigation of who is really a non-combatant and whether the moral protection that status confers can be stripped away by mitigating circumstances like being the beneficiary of state violence or being an accessory to atrocious acts without actually directly carrying them out.

At the same time, we also know that the Federation's attempt at a lasting peace with the Cardassians was doomed from the start: brazenly insincere on the part of the Cardassians, purchased by the Federation with a high price in moral credibility, and ends in the Cardassians welcoming the Dominion into the Alpha Quadrant. This line of thinking often ends in a presumption that since efforts to secure peace ultimately failed, those efforts were wholly a waste, preemptive violence should have been undertaken, and anyone who acted as if the failure of peace wasn't preordained was a blind fool.

Knowing where the story ends doesn't mean we can't still debate the Federation's degree of culpability for not intervening sooner to ensure that things don't reach a point where indiscriminate targeting of noncombatants by ex-Federation civilians is imminent.

A big part of what makes this an inkblot test is because it almost assuredly is a reflection on which analogies loom largest in the mind of the viewer. As it turns out, your preferred reference point for understanding war may strongly influence who you are sympathetic to and how you interpret the risks and ethics involved in any course of action chosen by the Federation and Maquis.

Understanding the Maquis

What I am going to do is, look at three main ideas that I think are most critical for seeing different sides of arguments around the Maquis, the Federation, the Cardassians and how each is understood by fans in terms of sympathy or malice, and in some instances, how they might be understood differently depending on how said fans process stories of state and irregular violence.

The social context of how different fans (and Trek writers) think of state level warfare and irregular warfare.

What was actually happening in the Trek universe around this time and to what degree the Maquis narrative encourages treating its storyline as existing outside of any other broader context.

The competing interests of the state to protect the many vs the rights of the few to defend their homes and way of life.

These are going to get elaborated on in subsequent posts, but very quickly here's a summary of the main points:

Social Context

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, this has become a dominant metaphor for understanding the Federation - Cardassian relationship. Suffice to say, those for whom this metaphor has the most power understand this as an unambiguous contest of moral systems wherein the Federation is guilty of abdicating responsibility for victims of an expansionist autocracy with numerous atrocities on its record and no extenuating circumstances that reduce the magnitude of the Federation's guilt.

Prior to 2022, it is my observation that several other metaphors might have applied: the Kurdish resistance to ISIL (another metaphor that strongly favors the Maquis and condemns the Federation), the Afghan Mujahideen (a cautionary tale in which the nurturing of a sympathetic resistance movement facing oppression has unintended consequences, i.e. 9/11), and finally Cold War dovishness. Cold War dovishness I would describe as not so pacifistic as to be unwilling to engage in any amount of armed conflict but a deep wariness of it. This is an idea that conflicts between a great power and a lesser may be much more challenging than expected, pose escalation risks that could become existential, and even if carefully managed the conflict may have second and tertiary consequences that neutralize, even harm the agenda of the greater power: i.e. "blowback."

I bring this guy up a lot, but I do think there was an episode or two where Tomalak might have been the Romulan Vasily Arkhipov. The Soviet officer who arguably saved the world by defying standing orders to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis when certain conditions were met. I bring up Arkhipov a lot, along with Stanislav Petrov (a second Russian who may have saved the world) because I think he's incredibly important to understanding how Pre-Dominion War Trek understood state level conflict and why a power like the Federation that constantly signals about how important it thinks universal sentient rights are might sign away some inhabited planets to move down a few steps on the escalation ladder.

Astropolitical Context

The careful viewer recognizes that the Cardassians are far from the only problem the Federation has and thus, while we are not explicitly reminded of these issues, they are important context for the Federation choosing a bad peace over waging what many fans perceive to be a virtuous and largely consequence free war. After signing the peace treaty with the Cardassians, these problems are also likely explanations for why the Federation seems to dither and pursue largely diplomatic solutions to the Maquis crisis with the Cardassians rather than throwing its weight around or even directly siding with the Maquis.

The Borg are a known unknown: they are an existential threat if they choose to be, the Federation lost more ships in one battle than had ever been previously mentioned as being in one place at one time in Trek history. We can massage this to fit with later canon by assuming the Borg were, to borrow an Ian Banks term, an "Outside Context Problem." It had been a while since some inscrutable, unstoppable weird alien thing had bypassed every patrol and defensive position to menace Sol directly (although there was that time where it happened twice in the span of a decade) and the Federation had grown so dramatically that it really couldn't afford to have more than forty ships within 48 hours notice to cover Sol, including ships just fitting out, under refit, or in ready reserve.

The Klingons fought a civil war that ultimately exposed ties between the Romulans and the now disgraced, but previously deeply influential Duras Family. Schisms like that don't necessarily heal cleanly or swiftly. The allies of the Duras were shamed and likely had to pay lip service to unity, but they almost certainly had ideological and pragmatic reasons for aligning with the Duras, a disdain for the Khitomer Accords being among them.

The Romulans are another known unknown. They certainly want the Federation to think that they're willing to risk an existential conflict over particular disputes but play their actual motives close to the vest. The fact that these conflicts don't actually spiral into war at least seems to strongly suggest that the Romulans are paranoid, not suicidal, and that their imperialism is tempered by pragmatism. We're never privy to any info dumps on Starfleet's intelligence assessments about their relative power compared to the Federation, but logically even a weak Romulan Star Empire is capable of a lot of mischief up to and including inflicting massive civilian casualties if it desires.

I'm open to correction on this if someone with a more recent engagement with the Maquis arc thinks I'm wrong, but it's my contention that very little of what I just wrote found its way into the foreground as part of the Federation's rationale for accepting a peace with the Cardassians. By foreground I mean cited as reasons for the peace or for siding against the Maquis by Federation characters.

I don't think making peace with an authoritarian regime is the sole reason why the Federation gets held up as an example of why the Federation is a more cynical and "US-coded" actor than it likes to pretend, but even I was surprised at just how exculpatory the broader context is. I expected to wage a rhetorical fight to defend peace on its own merits and wound up being shocked at how during the same period the Federation is trying to maintain the peace with the Cardassians, how many near misses the Federation has with open war with powers that had the potential to decisively win against the Federation, and in the case of the Borg, not just subjugate but utterly annihilate the Federation.

Which many, whose needs?

The argument you very rarely see these days, especially in a post 9/11, post Russian invasion of Ukraine world is that the Federation should have just removed the settlers and called it a day. The irony here is that from a strictly utilitarian, harm reduction standpoint this might actually be the right move.

However, two extremely valid critiques are that this is rooted in presentism: we can argue that there are reasons to suspect the peace with the Cardassians isn't worth the isolinear chips its encoded on but the principle actors can't know for sure in the moment it's all going to be pointless.

It also flies in the face of Trek's ethos that, while consequentialism is highly important, it's tempered by the notion that virtue ethics has its role to play as well. That is to say that some actions are just or unjust, good or bad simply because they are. Thus I cannot think of a lot that would be less Star Trek than a forced relocation of people from their homes. Of course one might also say that it's not especially noble to risk interstellar war and billions of lives over attachment to said homes.

Whether the same Star Trek ethos demands that these people be protected is a nastier business that circles back to what metaphor we use to think about state and irregular warfare in Star Trek but also whether we as fans lean more towards the virtue ethics side of the equation or the consequentialist side.

What makes the Maquis interesting is that, like so much of DS9, the writers refused to provide the sort of easy, positive sum solution that Trek, or at least TNG, was/is known for. There is no scenario in which risks are not undertaken. No scenario in which an empathetic being is going to walk away with a clean conscience. One way or another, either the safety of the settlers is being used as a commodity, their rights revoked entirely, or the other trillion odd beings in the Federation are asked to be in solidarity with the few and risk everything.