What the heck were the Romulans thinking?

[Marie1]

Recall that the Dominion and the Cardassians joined forces- after that attack on the supposed Founder home world, and after the female founder warned Garak "Cardassia is dead"- they did it for convenience- they'd have taken them all out eventually if they had won.

 

[bintak]

Hah, I've always thought the Rommies had it dead right. The fact that the Dominion were obviously a threat was apparent in The Jem'hadar. The Feds created the threat by refusing to stop using the wormhole, which endangered the entire quadrant.

The Rommies were probably working on their invasion plan with the Cardies for a while (the Obsidian Order machinations mentioned in The Defiant) but tried to close the wormhole as a less radical option. When the Feds screwed that up, the Rommies went to Plan B, which probably would have worked if their ranks had not been infiltrated.

I want to know what they were thinking when they signed the non-aggression treaty with the Dominion.

By then their efforts to defend themselves had been confounded and they were going to Plan C. I can hardly blame them for "stabbing the Feds in the back" considering that the Feds had created the Dominion threat in the first place by a) finding the wormhole, b) refusing to stop using it despite clear warning from the Doms and c) interfering with the Rommie's perfectly intelligent plan to collapse the wormhole in self-defense.

Maybe some of the Senate who approved the treaty saw it as payback for the dumbass Feds. But the aftermath of In The Pale Moonlight implies that Vreenak and the pro-treaty crowd also had enemies. I don't believe for one minute that nobody could figure out that Vreenak's last pit stop was at DS9. But with his death, his allies were in disarray and the anti-treaty types had ascendancy. There was no reason for them to want the truth exposed...

From the Rommie perspective the war was 75% started by the Feds, 25% started by the Doms and 0% started by the Rommies, who were only trying to defend themselves from chaos breaking out due to the blundering of a couple truly loose-canon empires in their midst. If I'd been a Rommie, I'd have been hopping mad about the whole mess.

Quite a good summation!

 

[EEE]

I want to know what they were thinking when they signed the non-aggression treaty with the Dominion.

I'd guess the same thing Stalin was thinking when dealing with Hitler.

 

[Timo]

...Although Stalin's archives would suggest the dictator actually trusted Hitler, right until the latter started his invasion of the Soviet Union.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[superstring01]

I want to know what they were thinking when they signed the non-aggression treaty with the Dominion.

That was dumb. IT wouldn't take an idiot to see that the Dominion would have attacked the Empire the second they were done with the Klingons and the UFP. That said, it did precipitate the best DS9 episode, IMHO, "In The Pale Moonlight."

~String

 

[Marie1]

Maybe this is slightly OT- but in The Jem'Hadar- the Dominion's complaint was the the Feds were violating Dominion space- so Dominion space obviously isn't the entire GQ- so why didn't someone just get a map and tell everyone to stop going into Dominion territory. I mean, I wouldn't have stopped using the WH per se (well... unless it'd prevent a war and millions of deaths.... but thats another story) because for Odo to get home, the GQ would technically have to have an interaction with the AQ in a manner of speaking.

But it seems like the whole problem could have been avoided by a nice sign... "Private Property"

 

[Photon]

Maybe this is slightly OT- but in The Jem'Hadar- the Dominion's complaint was the the Feds were violating Dominion space- so Dominion space obviously isn't the entire GQ- so why didn't someone just get a map and tell everyone to stop going into Dominion territory. I mean, I wouldn't have stopped using the WH per se (well... unless it'd prevent a war and millions of deaths.... but thats another story) because for Odo to get home, the GQ would technically have to have an interaction with the AQ in a manner of speaking.

But it seems like the whole problem could have been avoided by a nice sign... "Private Property"

Adding to that the Ferengi were trading w/the Dominion-they didn't seem to mind. The whole idea were you coming through to do business w/the Dominion or just coming through.

 

[Enterprise1981]

One thing never fully addressed was the fact that Romulans joined the Federation-Klingon fleet in "By Inferno's Light." Where did they go afterwards and why the sudden change of heart?

The non-aggression pact was just another case of two seperate enemies with two separate agendas feeling each other out. In fact, the augments in "Statistical Probalities" projected that the Romulans would break the treaty within a year. A similar situation arose in Nemesis when Tal'Aura, Donatra, and Suran each had their own motives for helping Shinzon assassiante the rest of the Senate, further addressed in the Titan and TNG relaunch novels.

 

[Timo]

One thing never fully addressed was the fact that Romulans joined the Federation-Klingon fleet in "By Inferno's Light." Where did they go afterwards and why the sudden change of heart?

We might speculate that they initially thought, like everybody else, that the Jem'Hadar would come out in a glorious frontal assault directed at the entire Alpha Quadrant. It would probably have been easy to crush that assault at the wormhole bottleneck, thereby delivering a devastating blow to the Dominion. So helping out the Alpha fleets there and then would have been advantageous to Romulus.

However, when the Jem'Hadar didn't attack right away, but instead steered away from the fleets, allied with the Cardassians, and set shop at their home system, the Romulans realized that their original plan was the more beneficial one: let the Dominion gain a foothold, let it destroy its enemies one by one, and then stab everybody at the back when the time was right. So the Romulan "direct action" fleet was withdrawn from Bajor for the time being.

If I were a Romulan, I'd have been worried about the fact that I was the second name on the Dominion blacklist from "The Die is Cast". But then again, Cardassians were the first name there, and the Dominion was now best buddies with them! So there would probably still be time for machinations there. Perhaps the Romulans expected that the Dominion would initially hold Romulan aggression down through the fear of the "TDiC" threats while dealing with the other Alphans in a more direct manner - which would have suited Romulus just fine.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[EEE]

...Although Stalin's archives would suggest the dictator actually trusted Hitler, right until the latter started his invasion of the Soviet Union.

I'm aware of that take, but it's still highly debatable and debated amongst historians and scholars alike.

 

[Timo]

Quite so. It should perhaps be stressed that the conventional view used to be that Stalin was expecting a backstab from Hitler, and was simply late with his own counter-backstab. Archives discoveries then revealed the extent to which Stalin was personally devastated by Hitler's traitorous launching of the invasion, which lent credence to the idea that he had truly trusted the Nazis. On a more material level, it has always been known that Stalin neglected many preparations against a potential Nazi betrayal, and it has been difficult to tell whether this was because he wanted not to alert his future victim, or was overconfident with existing preparations, or indeed thought that he would be fighting alongside rather than against Hitler for at least half a decade more.

It's doubtful that any Romulan, leader or not, personally trusted the impersonal Dominion. Also, in light of "Inter Arma", it doesn't seem that Romulus was ill led by a single central political figure who was then deposed, or heroically got his act together, or anything like that. The struggle between those in favor of the alliance and those against seems to have been on the level of senator-to-senator squabbles only, and Vreenak's death was just another typical twist in such squabbles.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Marie1]

They probably were worried that they were the second on the list initially- but when the Dominion used the Cardassians as their foothold, the Romulans thought they could bargain way into an arrangement where they wouldn't be wiped of the galactic map too- not seeing the big picture were they??? But they may also have realized that some of the Dominion hostility was their fault, so they had the responsability to step up.
|

 

[Jono]

One thing never fully addressed was the fact that Romulans joined the Federation-Klingon fleet in "By Inferno's Light." Where did they go afterwards and why the sudden change of heart?

We might speculate that they initially thought, like everybody else, that the Jem'Hadar would come out in a glorious frontal assault directed at the entire Alpha Quadrant. It would probably have been easy to crush that assault at the wormhole bottleneck, thereby delivering a devastating blow to the Dominion. So helping out the Alpha fleets there and then would have been advantageous to Romulus.

However, when the Jem'Hadar didn't attack right away, but instead steered away from the fleets, allied with the Cardassians, and set shop at their home system, the Romulans realized that their original plan was the more beneficial one: let the Dominion gain a foothold, let it destroy its enemies one by one, and then stab everybody at the back when the time was right. So the Romulan "direct action" fleet was withdrawn from Bajor for the time being.

If I were a Romulan, I'd have been worried about the fact that I was the second name on the Dominion blacklist from "The Die is Cast". But then again, Cardassians were the first name there, and the Dominion was now best buddies with them! So there would probably still be time for machinations there. Perhaps the Romulans expected that the Dominion would initially hold Romulan aggression down through the fear of the "TDiC" threats while dealing with the other Alphans in a more direct manner - which would have suited Romulus just fine.

Timo Saloniemi

Only that the Romulans didn't appear when the Jem'Hadar came through. It was still somewhat of a surprise move and no one had gathered sufficient forces to DS9 yet, shown by the fact that all the went to meet the fleet was the Defiant, runabouts and Dukat's BoP.

If I'm remembering it correctly the Klingons are the first to mass there after they are forced to retreat from Cardassian space. I don't recall any number of Starfleet vessels when the battered Klingons decloak. Starfleet is then soon to add their weight to the fleet.

The Romulans don't appear until around 10 minutes before the false Dominion fleet is due to arrive in the Bajoran system when they decloak around DS9 and ask to join the fleet.

So they were willing to help keep the AQ wormhole entrance out of the Dominion hands at that point. I doubt they would have been terribly happy when the Federation then sits on its hands for 5 weeks and lets the Dominion just build up its force. With that in mind the more time the Romulans wait the stronger the Dominion becomes, so it offers/takes up a non-aggression pact while the Dominion is still "fairly" vulnerable and willing to make deals.