During the negotiations with the Cardassians on the Enterprise Riker loudly exclaimes “the Federation will not start a war.” Oh please, the Federation have started almost every war we know they’ve had. Especially the Dominion War.

Burnham started the Klingon war and Starfleet started the Dominion war.

Focusing on the Doninion War, Starfleet discovers a stable wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant and starts exploring it. Fine, fair enough.

However in 2371 the Dominion warns Starfleet to stay on their side of the galaxy, stop planting colonies and stop violating Dominion territory. Again, fair enough.

After all would the Fedetation allow the Romulans to explore Federation space freely? Of course they wouldn’t. But the Federation expects to explore the territory of others freely because Starfleet believes they have a RIGHT to explore the galaxy and if that means crossing borders then so be it.

The Federation then gets all pissy when the Dominion sees them as such a threat they ally themselves with Cardassians to establish a permanent presence in the Alpha Quadrant. All this happens outside of Federation space so they have no rights to interfere as per the Prime Directive.

But do they leave the Cardassians to run their civilisation as they see fit? Of course not. They mine the wormhole which starts the war.

So as far as the Dominion War goes, the Federation were the clear aggressors. And let’s not get into the attempted genocide of the Founders.