Simple — there was a sizable fleet poised to attack Earth, the seat of government for the Federation and headquarters of Starfleet, and logically its most secure and heavily defended planet.
And, for all we know, bound to lose. Except terrorist raiders would have nothing to lose, which is why they are more difficult to stop than people having an actual war. But unlike the quoted terror raids, the attack at hand appeared fairly conventional.
It just seems to me that this is a clear-cut case of deterrent at work. Klingons (of some faction, or perhaps many) wanted to hit the enemy homeworld in order to meet the ultimate victory condition - perhaps to annihilate Earth (but only T'Kumva had genocidal urges towards the UFP, and his faction had no say in the conflict at that point), perhaps to force Earth to accept surrender. But Earth (even if by proxy) said they would hit the homeworld of their enemy, too. And Earth's deterrent was the stronger one, judging by the outcome.
Since Earth's deterrent was a shady superweapon the very
existence of which was dubious, and the Klingons still agreed it was the trump card, this IMHO tells the Klingons didn't believe much in their own odds of hurting Earth.
Granted, this was at odds with the strategy meeting in the previous episode, where we were told that various Klingon houses were mostly attacking various colonies and Starbases, harrying the Federation's weakest points. And granted it turned out to be a completely superfluous plot point, just to artificially crank up the stakes, since that fleet did nothing but wait and then turn away in the end (which was also implausible, no matter what happened on the homeworld).
From what we gather, Qo'noS is the homeworld of all the factions. The Mexican standoff would affect all factions, and regardless of whether the actual warriors of each faction were suicidal or not, all would be playing with the very survival of their kind there.
Any way you slice it, the point was clearly that the Klingons (at least briefly) posed an existential threat to the Federation. And that just doesn't add up.
Well, an existential threat to Earth. But blowing up planets is trivially simple in Trek, yet basically never happens anyway. So there's a mechanism working against it, and this DSC storyline presents a plausible candidate: simple MAD.
DS9 of course showed another, by demonstrating what those oft-mentioned but previously unseen "planetary defenses" can do to a thousand attacking starships. The space between the Klingons and Earth was certainly littered with plenty of hardware, too. If taken literally, there'd be millions of starbase-sized structures around Earth (or perhaps tens of thousands, but all now clustered between the planet and the attackers). If taken less literally, we still get the impression of an impending Battle of the Line, and DS9 shows who wins those.
Which it shouldn't have. As others have remarked, there's no reason the Klingons should have posed a credible match for the Federation, especially after Kor's death.
Why not? The cloak was still undefeated, significantly multiplying the combat value of Klingon ships. The cloak would primarily hamper defense, meaning the Klingons would be a credible threat without needing to be a credible match - the UFP couldn't fight fire with fire.
The notion that the Federation couldn't win without the Discovery was contrived to make the hero ship seem more important, and unfortunately did so at the expense of plausibility and effective drama.
It's basically the same as saying the Axis couldn't win WWII without an atomic bomb of their own. There's nothing contrived about them not having the A-bomb, though. We simply witness asymmetric warfare, and as usual, Goliath is about to win. Right until the UFP gains its own Goliathizing magic potion, after which it is symmetric warfare which doesn't appeal to anybody because victory no longer is guaranteed (even though the two game-changing strategic weapons technologies aren't identical here).
Timo Saloniemi
