A Long Coalition
What if…? A question which canon Star Trek tackled several times.
What if Archer never reached Earth in time?
What if Spock were never born?
What if the ill-fated Enterprise-C never fought at Narendra?
What if Jean-Luc Picard failed to prevent the Borg temporal incursion?
What if Harry Kim never got stranded in the Delta Quadrant?
The less-canon Star Trek literature tackled these questions in the novel series “Myriad Universes” even more frequently.
“The Romulan War” and “Rise of the Federation” series offered one possible insight into the events which lead to the formation of the United Federation of Planets. Trust was built and rebuilt hard. But it led to a formidable alliance which endured through crises like the Battle of Wolf 359 and Dominion War. In the “Typhon Pact” series, Federation broke that trust by not assisting one of its founding members with their reproduction crisis. The fundamental brick of the alliance was broken and Andorians seceded.
But what if that trust had been broken in the first place, a long time ago, at the very sunrise of what should have been the United Federation of Planets.
Throughout the Earth-Romulan War, Vulcan took the back seat under the pretext their technologies were more vulnerable to the Romulan telecapture system. While that was also true for Andorian and Tellarite fleets, Vulcans were harboring a dark secret. Earth and her allies eventually prevailed following the Battle of Cheron, forcing the ever secretive Romulans to negotiate. But something quite different happened in this timeline. Romulan negotiators knew that trust between Earth and Vulcan was the fundamental building block of the Coalition of Planets.
But it could also be a weakness.
In a flash of inspiration, Romulan negotiators went against Praetor Karzan’s orders to conduct the talks via subspace radio only and revealed themselves to Earth and its allies. While the negotiators had met the pointy end of Karzan’s Honour Blade for defying his orders, their act of desperation struck at their heart. Romulans’ relation to Vulcans was discovered.
Andorians, with memories still fresh from the incident with V’Las administration and fueled with anger for Vulcans’ back seat policy during the war, convinced the Tellarite government to put diplomatic pressure on United Earth. In spite of their best efforts, Earth had to comply eventually. The Confederacy of Vulcan was expelled from the Coalition of Planets. Few Vulcans, like Ambassadors Soval and Solkar at Vulcan Embassy, Solkar’s son Skon, who was a guest researcher at Cochrane Research Institute of Alpha Centauri, were allowed to remain. But because Skon remained on Earth, he never again met his wife T’Rama, mother of his son in our universe - Sarek.
Without Vulcan diplomatic influence, the Coalition was swayed more by Andorians towards becoming a defense alliance, and not a inter-planetary union. By mid 23nd century, Coalition expanded to include Rigelian systems, Denobulans, Antarans, Caitians and the like while the more peace-oriented or science-oriented folks like Deltans, Trill or Betazoids were protectorates in order to keep Klingons, Cardassians and Tholians at bay.
Much like in TAS: “Yesteryear”, Thelin th’Valrass served as the First Officer to Captain Kirk aboard USS Enterprise. Given their more militaristic culture, over the course of decades Andorians were able to find common language with Klingons, even though skirmishes between Coalition forces and individual houses still occurred. Because the Klingon war machine was not in full production, over-mining of Praxis did not happen. Earth still kept ties with Vulcan, but the former allies were isolated by most of quadrant’s community. Andorians made sure to paint Vulcans as traitors.
Meanwhile, Andorians negotiated a defense pact with the Klingons on behalf of Coalition and its protectorates as a loose version of Khitomer Accords. As the Prime Directive (a successor to non-interference protocol originally devised by Vulcans) was not as strict, Trill, Tellar and Betazed petitioned the Coalition Council to intervene on behalf of Bajor after Trill observers witnessed the horrors of Cardassian Occupation.
Coalition declared war on Cardassian Union, but the conflict itself went almost as bad as the Earth-Romulan War nearly a century earlier. Bajor and a few neighbouring systems were snatched away from Cardassians and a demilitarized zone was established some time in the 2330s. Bajor became another protectorate of the Coalition, but it eventually recovered and became a full member. In the meantime, other notable events like the Tomed Incident and Treaty of Algeron still occurred. As Humans were not as prominent as they would be in a more centralized alliance like the Federation (Coalition of Planets no capital world), Q’s interest was not piqued and the Borg focused on Romulan Star Empire as a more formidable opponent.
A Romulan version of Wolf 359 was about to occur and the Star Empire reached out to the Coalition and the Klingons. As Andorians vetoed rendering assistance to Romulans, it was Earth alone and Vulcan who sent their ships. Klingons rendered support given House Duras’ affiliation with the Star Empire. In the meantime, because Federation’s own Wolf 359 never occurred, Jennifer Sisko did not die and Ben Sisko did not visit Bajor for several more years. This did not trigger the discovery and opening of the Bajoran wormhole and all the Dominion fustercluck that came along with it.
Upon the end of Romulan Wolf 359, the Romulan Senate was split between two major factions - those who wished to align further with Klingons through House Duras and potentially crush the Coalition in the long run, and those that considered some form of cooperation with Coalition through Humans and maybe Vulcans. The latter possibility somewhat angered the Andorians, causing rifts within the Coalition. The second Borg incursion into Romulan space, however, prompted the Coalition and both Empires to sit down and jointly tackle the Borg question. As they were about to meet on Earth Space Dock, the conference halls were bombed.