by Anthony Davis
The Office of the President of the United Federation of Planets was created in 2184, at the same time as the ratification of the Federation Constitution. Prior to that time, the Federation government had no centralized executive authority, and while a “president” did exist to preside over the Council, which was at that time a unicameral legislature, he/she had no real power. With the emerging threat posed by the Klingon Empire in the period following the founding of the Federation in 2161, as well as the struggles in maintaining order and cohesion under this weak system of government, the Federation’s leaders decided that a stronger, more effective government was necessary to accomplish the goals for which the Federation had been created. Thus, in 2183 representatives from the Federation’s six charter member worlds met in the city of San Francisco, California on Earth and drafted the Federation Constitution, which, besides guaranteeing certain basic rights to Federation citizens, also created a centralized bicameral parliamentary system of government that included an official head of state, the Federation President.
Although the chambers of the Upper House of the Federation Council were located in San Francisco, the Executive Office of the President was headquartered on the top floor the Palais de la Concorde in Paris, France; this was to make it more difficult for the entire Federation government to be destroyed in the event of an attack on Earth by a hostile alien force, as well as to facilitate the passage of legislation down from the President to the Lower House of the Federation Council, which was located on the bottom floor of the Palais. In accordance with Article II of the Federation Constitution, any Federation Citizen over the age of 30 could be elected president, although the Upper House of the Council usually chose one of its own for the office. The president served as head of state as well as chief diplomat of the Federation government; however, he/she was still technically a part of the Council, since the Federation operated under a unitary, parliamentary system of government. The President could be removed from office with a vote of no-confidence by a majority of the Upper House of the Council, although this only actually occurred once in the entire history of the Federation. Aside from that, there was no fixed limit on how many years a single individual could or must serve as president, and indeed, several Federation presidents served for twenty years or longer. However, elections in the Federation had to occur at least once every five years, due to a five-year limit on how long any government could stay in power.
The first Federation President, former Starfleet captain Jonathan Archer, was elected in 2184 and served an eight-year term that ended in 2192. Archer had played a critical role in the creation of the Federation as well as its wartime predecessor, the Coalition of Planets, and was considered to be the Federation’s most preeminent founding father. During Archer’s presidency, the New World Economy came into effect, resulting in the abolition of the ownership of private property and the severe restriction of the use of money in the Federation. The Council established a 100% tax on the income of all citizens, then allocated resources, goods, services, and property through the use of a system of Federation “credits” that were rationed out on the basis of need as well as one’s perceived relative importance to society.
Initially, the New World Economy was extremely controversial, and a number of worlds attempted to secede from the Federation in response to its implementation. In order to prevent the dissolution of the Federation, Archer dispatched a Starfleet militia—led by Garth of Izar, a prominent Starfleet captain who had served in the Romulan War—to force the rebels to surrender and accept the authority of the new Federation government. In 2187, Garth of Izar defeated the rebel forces at the Battle of Axanar, thereby solidifying the Council’s authority over the Federation’s member worlds and ensuring that the Federation would persevere for the next two centuries.
The tenth Federation President, former Human ambassador Hiram Roth, served the longest term of any person ever to hold the office, from 2264 to 2287. During his presidency, Roth presided over the single greatest period of expansion in the Federation’s history. The first two five-year missions of the USS Enterprise under the command of Captain (later Admiral) James T. Kirk occurred during this period, as a result of which the Federation made first contact with over one hundred new civilizations, many of which went on to apply for Federation membership. The Federation also faced a number of significant external threats during this period, including the re-emergence of the Romulans from their century-long period of isolation and an intense and volatile cold war with the Klingon Empire. Twice during Roth’s presidency, Earth was thrown into a state of planetary emergency: first when the entity known as V’Ger threatened to destroy the planet, and again when the Whale Probe posed a similar threat in 2286. Among the most controversial of Hiram Roth’s actions as president was the approval of Project Genesis, a terraforming device that many feared could be misused as a terrible weapon.
Of particular significance during Hiram Roth’s presidency was the Federation Supreme Court case Plasus v. Kirk, in which Plasus, the High Advisor of Stratos, the capital city of Federation member world Ardana, sued Captain James T. Kirk—and by extension, Starfleet—for the role that Kirk had played in dismantling that planet’s rigidly stratified class system, which Plasus claimed was a violation of the Prime Directive. The court however ruled in Kirk’s favor, declaring that the Prime Directive did not apply to Federation member worlds and that the government of Ardana was obligated to provide each and every one of its citizens with equal protection under the law and all of the rights guaranteed to them in the Federation Constitution. Although this ruling resulted in positive social change in favor of the oppressed Troglyte citizens of Ardana, it also greatly increased the power of the Federation’s central government over its member worlds, to the point where the last remnants of internal autonomy among the member worlds was permanently erased.
The eleventh Federation President, Ra-ghoratreii, was the first person to hold that office who was from a planet that was not one of the six charter members of the Federation (Earth, Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, Rigel, and Denobula). Ra-ghoratreii, an Efrosian, was his own race’s ambassador to the Federation Council and served as president from 2288 to 2300. Ra-ghoratreii is most noted for having negotiated the Khitomer Peace Accords with the Klingon Empire in 2291, which very nearly resulted in his assassination by a conspiracy of Klingon officers and members of Section 31. He was also president during most of the third and final five-year mission of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A) under the command of Captain James T. Kirk, which led to the establishment of diplomatic relations with a number of races with whom the Federation would have extensive dealings in the 24th Century, including the Cardassians, the Talarians, and the Breen. For his many accomplishments, Ra-ghoratreii is considered to be one of the greatest presidents in Federation history and is seen as the individual who guided the Federation into the 24th Century.
The sixteenth president of the Federation, Grazerite Ambassador Jaresh-Inyo, was elected in 2367, as the Federation was still reeling from its stinging defeat by the Borg at the Battle of Wolf 359 the previous year. In stark contrast to Ra-ghoratreii, Inyo is widely regarded as one of the worst presidents in Federation history, due to his incompetence, indecisiveness, and clear lack of leadership ability, as well as a number of controversial actions taken during his presidency that had catastrophic consequences for the entire Alpha Quadrant. As a Grazerite, Inyo abhorred all forms of conflict and desperately sought to bring an end to the period of violence that the Federation had been enduring for the past several years and to usher in new era of peace and prosperity in its place. Instead, however, Inyo’s term in office was marred by increased violence, internal turmoil, the collapse of the Federation-Klingon alliance that Ra-ghoratreii had helped to create, and the overall diminshing of the Federation’s standing in the eyes of the rest of the galaxy.
Shortly after taking office, Inyo signed an armistice with the Cardassian Union, which quickly proved to be tenuous and unstable as the Cardassians demonstrated that they could not be trusted. Inyo also took a stance of official neutrality in the Klingon Civil War, forcing Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) to undertake more surreptitious methods to ensure that the Federation’s interests were protected. When the Cardassians wihdrew from Bajor in 2369, Inyo extended the hand of friendship to the new Bajoran Provisional Government, arranging for Starfleet to take control of the former Cardassian space station in orbit of the planet, which was subsequently renamed Deep Space Nine, and for the Federation to aid the Bajorans in the rebuilding of the world, with the goal of eventually admitting Bajor as a member of the Federation. However, in 2370 Inyo signed a second treaty with the Cardassians, negotiated by Admiral Alynna Nechayev, and per the terms of this agreement, he ordered the forced relocation of Federation colonists in the newly-formed Demilitarized Zone in 2370; this action ultimately led to the Maquis Uprising, in which former Federation citizens who refused to abandon their homes in the DMZ took up arms to defend themselves against their Cardassian occupiers.
Upon the discovery of the Bajoran wormhole, Inyo, under pressure from Starfleet, authorized and encouraged the exploration of the Gamma Quadrant, with the intention of eventually establishing colonies and outposts there and expanding Federation influence into that region of space. This policy brought the Federation into direct conflict with the Dominion, which claimed suzeranity over the Gamma Quadrant and viewed the Federation’s attempts to establish a presence there as intrusive and threatening. Official first contact between the Federation and the Dominion occurred in 2370, when the USS Odyssey was destroyed by the Jem’Hadar in the Gamma Quadrant while on a mission to investigate the Dominion threat. Concurrent with this incident, a Vorta representative of the Dominion transported onto Deep Space Nine and issued an ultimatum to the Federation, demanding that they cease and desist in their efforts to explore the Gamma Quadrant or face reprisals by the Dominion. Starfleet ignored this warning and instead began preparing for war; Inyo, though at first receptive to the prospect of trying to meet the Dominion’s demands, ultimately relented under pressure from Starfleet Command and the Federation Council, who were determined not to appear to show weakness by attempting to appease the Dominion.
In 2371, following the failed attack on the Dominion Founders’ homeworld in the Gamma Quadrant by the Romulan Tal Shiar and the Cardassian Obsidian Order, the military-run government of the Cardassian Union collapsed, replaced by the democratically-elected Detapa Council. Klingon Chancellor Gowron, suspecting that the Dominion had infiltrated the new Cardassian government, launched an invasion of the Cardassian Union and requested the assistance of his Federation allies. Rather than support the Klingons however, Inyo condemned the invasion and instructed Starfleet to remain neutral in the conflict. In response, Gowron withdrew from the Khitomer Accords, destroying the Klingon-Federation alliance that had existed for almost thirty years.
In early 2372, a Changeling agent of the Dominion carried out a terrorist attack in the city of Antwerp, Belgium on Earth that killed 27 people and made Starfleet aware that the Dominion had somehow managed to infiltrate the Federation homeworld. Presented with evidence of this infiltration by Starfleet Admiral James Leyton and Captain Benjamin Sisko, Inyo reluctantly decided to declare martial law on Earth and began ordering Federation civilians and Starfleet personnel to undergo forced blood screenings to prove that they were not Changelings. In doing so, Inyo played right into the hands of Leyton, a Section 31 agent, who was plotting to overthrow the Federation’s democratically-elected government in a military coup d’etat—a plot which was later foiled by Sisko and the crew of the USS Defiant. Once the crisis was resolved, these actions scandalized Inyo’s presidency and caused massive public outcry; seeking to avoid the political fallout and in desperate need of a scapegoat, the Federation Council gave Inyo a vote of no confidence and made him the first Federation President to be forcibly removed from office.
The seventeenth president of the Federation, Bolian Ambassador Min Zife, had been one of Jaresh-Inyo’s chief political opponents in the Council and led the charge to have him removed from office after the Changeling Scare. Upon becoming president, Zife issued a formal apology to those Federation citizens who had seen their civil liberties violated by the previous administration. He then began the process of mobilizing the Federation for war against the Dominion, which had been made inevitable by his predecessor’s policies, while simultaneously contending with renewed aggression on the part of the Klingons, who declared war on the Federation in 2372, and the Borg, who launched an invasion of Sector 001 in 2373. Zife is best known as the president who guided the Federation through the Dominion War, although during this period the influence of Starfleet was so strong that the de facto leaders of the Federation were Admiral William Ross and Captain Benjamin Sisko. Zife was one of the primary signators of the Treaty of Bajor, which officially ended the Dominion War in 2375. After the war, Zife’s primary focus was on rebuilding the Federation’s defensive capability, which again included strong support for Starfleet. Also, it was during Zife’s presidency that the Federation first began to explore and attempt to extend its influence into the Beta Quadrant, incurring the resentment and hostility of many species native to that region of space, who began to see the Federation as an imperialistic and hegemonic threat to their sovereignty and the preservation of their religious and cultural identities.
One of the most controversial actions taken by the Zife administration, in conjunction with the Federation Council and certain members of Starfleet Command, was the attempt to forcibly and secretly relocate the inhabitants of the Ba’ku homeworld in the Briar Patch so that the Federation and its allies, the Son’a, would be able to exploit the rejuvenating properties of the metaphasic radiation given off by the planet’s rings. Zife and the Council determined that, because the Ba’ku already possessed warp drive (even if they chose not to use it), were not native to the planet, and numbered only around 300 people, this action did not constitute a violation of the Prime Directive and that the Federation was in its rights to remove the planet’s inhabitants so long as it was for a purpose that served “the needs of the many.” However, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-E) exposed the Federation/Son’a plot, prevented the forced relocation of the Ba’ku, and ultimately halted the Federation’s efforts to take control of the planet. Thankfully for Zife, the incident in the Briar Patch was very scarcely reported by the the government-run Federation News Service (FNS), the only mainstream media conglomerate in the Federation, and thus his popularity was not effected in any way.
One of the defining characteristics of Min Zife’s presidency was that for the first time in Federation history, a strong movement in opposition to the existing political establishment began to develop, in the form of the New Essentialists led by Pascal Fullerton. Beginning as a small group of dissidents best known for their attempt to sabotage the weather control network on Risa in 2372, the New Essentialist movement grew during and after the Dominion War, as many Federaton citizens, particularly young people, became disillusioned with the Federation and began seeking alternative lifestyles. The New Essentialists promised a return to the core values upon which the Federation had been founded, which meant, among other things, the rejection of the New World Economy in favor of a return to a capitalistic free-market system, the restoration of planetary sovereignty that had been lost since Plasus v. Kirk, and a non-interventionist foreign policy guided by a strict interpretation of the Prime Directive. By 2377, New Essentialists numbered in the millions on planets across the Federation and had become powerful enough to organize themselves into the Federation’s first true political party, the New Essentialist Party (NEP), led by Fullerton. In response, the Federation establishment created the Social Federalist Party (SFP) to represent its own values and interests and to keep the NEP from getting the upper hand and taking over the Council; the SFP chose Zife as their first leader and candidate for president in the election of 2377. Although the SFP won the election decisively, the NEP did manage to capture more than a quarter of the seats in the Federation Council; from this point forward, partisan politics would define how the Council worked, and the next president of the Federation would be known as soon as the election results came in.
In 2378, less than a year after being re-elected, Min Zife was abruptly forced to resign as President, after the Tezwa crisis scandalized his presidency and made a vote of no confidence in him by the Federation Council almost inevitable. Shortly after resigning, Zife and several other prominent figures within the Federation government were privately assassinated by agents of Section 31, while Admiral Ross watched, powerless to do anything to stop them.
The eighteenth president of the Federation, Cestan Ambassador Nanietta Bacco, succeeded Min Zife after his resignation in 2378. Bacco, the only female Federation president in the 24th Century, had considerably more executive experience than either of her two predecessors, having served as Governor of Cestus III for eleven years prior to being elected to the Federation Council. Consequently, Bacco’s administration was far more smoothly run, centralized, and efficient than that of Min Zife or Jaresh-Inyo; her imperial style and extensive delegation of responsibility mirrored that of Ra-ghoratreii, and she was initially therefore greeted with great praise and high expectations, especially after the corruption and disappointment that the previous two administrations had brought. Although Bacco maintained consistent public support during this period, the unexpectedly slow reconstruction of the Federation’s post-war infrastructure—especially in comparison to the rate at which Starfleet was rebuilt—earned her many political enemies and further fueled the rise of the New Essentialist movement.
In May of 2378, not long after Bacco’s election, the Federation celebrated a momentous and unexpected event: after seven years lost in the Delta Quadrant, the USS Voyager returned to Earth, seemingly miraculously. In the process, the crew of Voyager dealt a crippling blow to the Borg Collective, insuring that the Borg would pose no threat to the Federation for many years to come. Furthermore, Voyager brought back a number of significant technological advances from the Delta Quadrant, including replicator technology that was exponentially more efficient than that currently used by the Federation, Borg-enhanced bio-neural circuitry technology, ablative hull armor, transphasic torpedoes, and even the technology to build a rudimentary transwarp drive system. Bacco greeted Captain Kathryn Janeway in person when Voyager landed in San Francisco and presented her and the rest of her crew with commendations for their actions and their service to the Federation. However, Admiral Nechayev, fearing Janeway’s newfound popularity and still considering Voyager’s Maquis crew members to be fugitive criminals, placed Janeway under arrest shortly thereafter and quickly arranged for her and her crew to be court-martialed for the allegedly criminal actions they had committed in the Delta Quadrant.
Nechayev’s attempt to smear the reputation of the Voyager crew failed however when Lieutenant Geoffrey Henderson, a Voyager crew member who had played a critical role in the ship’s return from the Delta Quadrant and was widely regarded as a hero by the public, gave a stirring testimony in Janeway’s defense that was broadcast on the Federation News Service throughout the Federation and turned public opinion decidedly in Janeway’s favor. Based on this reaction, Bacco took the unprecedented step of intervening in an internal Starfleet disciplinary hearing, forcing Nechayev to call off the trial and granting a general pardon to all members of the Voyager crew for whatever actions they might have committed prior to entering or while in the Delta Quadrant. Nechayev begrudingly complied with the president’s demands, under the conditions that Voyager herself was to be taken out of service and transferred to the Oberon Advanced Research Facility in orbit of the planet Uranus; that none of the ship’s former Maquis crew members—including senior officers Chakotay, B’Elanna Torres, and Tom Paris—would be permitted to retain their Starfleet commissions or serve on Starfleet vessels as ranking officers again; and that Janeway would receive a promotion to the rank of vice-admiral, thereby depriving her of the opportunity to command a starship again and placing her behind a desk. Bacco and Janeway agreed to these terms, but Nechayev would nevertheless continue to harbor a deep personal resentment towards the both of them, and she would dedicate the next several years of her career to destroying them and their reputations. Meanwhile, Bacco and Janeway would go on to develop a very close relationship, with Janeway becoming the president’s most trusted advisor and confidant.
As president, Bacco’s primary focus was on continuing the rebuilding of the Federation’s defenses, namely Starfleet, and on bringing peace to a war-weary quadrant. To these ends, in 2379 Bacco signed an alliance with the Romulan Star Empire, made possible by Praetor Shinzon’s coup and subsequent defeat by Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-E). A Starfleet task force, led by the USS Titan under the command of Captain William T. Riker, was assigned to assist the Romulans in the rebuilding of their society, and Sobath, the first Romulan ever to serve in Starfleet, entered the Academy in September of 2379. However, in January 2380 Bacco’s plans for achieving peace through strength were complicated by the destruction of the Romulan colony on T’Met IV, and an attack on Earth several weeks later that wiped out nearly all of the Upper House of the Federation Council. Initially, the Remans were blamed for the attacks, and so, on the advice of Admiral Janeway—who by this time had become the senior-most officer in charge of all Beta Quadrant and eastern Alpha Quadrant affairs and had originally ordered Picard and the Enterprise on the mission that led to the opening of diplomatic relations with the Romulans—Bacco authorized Starfleet to launch an invasion of Remus and to institute a regime change that would result in the establishment of a democratic government more friendly towards Federation interests. The ensuing conflict, known as the Reman War, lasted only a matter of weeks, but it resulted in a prolonged and costly occupation of Remus that would cause Bacco’s reputation to become tarnished over time.
Furthermore, an investigation by the crew of the Titan revealed that the Beta Quadrant Resistance Movement (Beta-QRM), an interstellar terrorist organization dedicated to ousting the Federation from the Beta Quadrant and establishing a theocratic “anti-Federation” in its place as a counterbalance to the Federation/Klingon/Romulan alliance, was actually responsible for the attacks on T’Met IV and on the Federation Council, and that these attacks had been the Beta-QRM’s way of making their presence known to the galaxy. This revelation threw Bacco’s entire rationale for the war into question and cost her a significant amount of trust among the Federation people, many of whom came to see the Federation occupation of Remus as a violation of the Prime Directive. There were accusations from many in the general public, particularly the New Essentialist party, that Bacco, in collusion with Janeway, had exaggerated or fabricated the threat posed by Remus as an excuse to go to war, and that their ultimate purpose was really to acquire control of that planet’s dilithium resources. Some fringe elements within the Federation even suggested that Bacco and Janeway had conspired to assassinate the Council, thereby removing the major impediment to their initiating the war. Due to these circumstances, much of the public resentment and mistrust of Starfleet and the Federation government that had been building since the Dominion War was extended to Bacco’s administration, and her popularity began to wane.
In 2381, Bacco extended a “free association” status to Bajor, whose leaders were still very wary about becoming full members of the Federation, given both the perceived threat that the Federation’s secularism posed to Bajor’s theocratic system of government and the fact that Benjamin Sisko, whom Bajorans regarded as the Emissary to their Prophets, had not yet returned from the Celestial Temple and rescinded his decree that Bajor should not join the Federation lest it be destroyed. The free association status allowed Bajor to maintain its sovereignty while creating numerous economic and political ties between Bajor and the Federation and placing Starfleet in charge of the planet’s defense. Furthermore, once the free association pact had been signed, the Bacco administration decided to outsource the responsibility for the rebuilding of Cardassia Prime to the Bajoran militia, since Starfleet’s resources were now needed elsewhere, particularly in the Beta Quadrant to deal with the growing Beta-QRM threat. Thus, in an ironic twist of fate, 13 years after the end of the 50-year-long Cardassian occupation of Bajor, the Bajorans were now occupying Cardassia.
In 2383, the SFP nominated Bacco as their candidate for president, while the NEP nominated Pascal Fullerton for a second time. Despite the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction on Remus (Nechayev had in fact arranged through Section 31 for the weapons to be removed from the planet before the Federation invasion, as part of her plan to humiliate and discredit Janeway and Bacco)—and the fact that the Federation occupation of Remus had turned into a virtual quagmire, with an ever increasing number of Starfleet officers being killed in guerrilla attacks by Reman insurgents—the Social Federalists managed, just barely, to hold on to a majority of seats in the Upper House of the Federation Council, thereby securing Bacco a second term as president. The Social Federalists did however lose control of the Lower House of the Federation Council to the New Essentialists, creating a divided government for the first time in Federation history and making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Bacco to get any of her agenda passed.
As the Beta-QRM gained strength and support among various rogue states opposed to the Federation throughout the Beta Quadrant, particularly during the occupation of Remus, it began conducting increasingly bold attacks against Federation colonies, outposts, and interests in that region of space. This included the attack on the USS Viking in the Phoenix Cluster in 2383, in which over 700 Starfleet personnel were killed. In 2386, the launch of the powerful battleship USS Commodore—widely perceived as an aggressive, escalatory move by Starfleet—and the subsequent violent encounters with the Remans, Dominion, and numerous other races, many of which were allied with the Beta-QRM, further reinforced the public’s perception of Bacco as a warmongering President, incompetent and out of touch, who had reneged on all the promises she made when she was originally elected to office, and whose policies had made the Federation less safe and less respected in the galaxy. Her approval rating went into a freefall, eventually sinking below 30%.
In 2388, Bacco announced that she would not seek another term as president, hoping that by doing so she would increase the chances of the Social Federalist Party retaining control of the Upper House of the Federation Council. Instead, the SFP nominated former Starfleet admiral William Ross as their candidate. Nevertheless, the New Essentialist Party soundly defeated the SFP in the Election of 2388, capturing 67% of the seats in the Lower House the Federation Council as well as 52% of the seats in the Upper House of the Federation Council. This outcome brought an end to what had in essence been 204 uninterrupted years of Social Federalist rule.
The nineteenth president of the Federation, former Human ambassador Jeremy Armstrong, was the first—and last—president elected from the New Essentialist Party, which had in the course of only 15 years grown from a small fringe movement into the dominant political force in the Federation. Armstrong was also the first Human to hold the office of President since Hiram Roth, although his tenure in the office ultimately turned out to be far shorter and much less distinguished.
A suave, handsome, smooth-talking man with endless charm and a tremendous talent for persuading others to follow him, Armstrong emerged as the new face of the the New Essentialists in 2388 when, to the shock of political commentators throughout the Federation, the NEP ousted its founder and longtime leader, Pascal Fullerton, from power despite his immense popularity among the public. At the time, Armstrong was a relative unknown who, despite his tremendous charisma and impressive oratorical skills, was a political lightweight with virtually no executive experience. The party’s rationale was that Fullerton’s shady past, along with his age (over 70 by this time) would make him a less attractive candidate for President to more moderate, independent voters as well as young voters than the SFP candidate, William Ross, thereby causing him to become a liability to the party as a whole. In fact, however, the decision to replace Fullerton was greatly influenced by Alynna Nechayev, who had become a very prominent, powerful voice in the party since joining it after resigning from Starfleet at the beginning of the Reman War. Armstrong was essentially Nechayev’s man, and the party leaders judged that they could not afford to alienate her or her supporters by nominating Fullerton a third time. Nevertheless, many New Essentialists still loyal to Fullerton were outraged by his removal, causing a major schism at the convention with nearly a third of the delegates threatening to walk out in protest. Ultimately, however, Fullerton stepped out onto the convention floor and publicly endorsed Armstrong, managing to retain at least enough cohesion within the party to confirm his nomination.
Running on a nebulous campaign of “hope” and “change”, Armstrong served as a far more effective spokesperson for the NEP than Fullerton had been, winning the support of enough moderate and independent voters to swing the election of 2388 in the NEP’s favor. However, once elected, Armstrong found that delivering “change” was much harder than he had imagined. Armstrong’s confirmation process, ordinarily a formality in Federation politics, was disrupted when a faction of New Essentialists in the Upper House of the Council still loyal to Fullerton refused to cast their votes him, instead choosing either to abstain or to cast their votes for Ross. As a result, the Council remained deadlocked in a tie for several days, unable to garner the votes necessary to actually confer the powers of the office of President upon the President-Elect, until finally several Social Federalists, after making closed-room deals with the incoming administration through Nechayev, Armstrong’s new chief of staff, crossed party lines to vote for him. By the time Armstrong was able to assemble a governing coalition, he had made so many concessions to the other side that the domestic policy of his new administration was barely distinguishable from the previous one, thwarting most of the New Essentialists’ hopes for change before his presidency even began.
This, however, turned out not to be that great a concern for Armstrong, despite what the rhetoric of his campaign had suggested. Like most politicians, Armstrong’s concern was to remain popular and in power, and he pursued any policy he believed would aid him to that end, even if that policy violated the NEP platform or was a direct continuation of SFP policies he and other New Essentialists had previously condemned. Uninterested in the minutiae of being a chief executive, Armstrong allowed most of the policy-making for his administration to be crafted by his aides, in particular by Nechayev, who became his Chief of Staff, and her small staff of Palais de la Concorde officials, many of whom were secretly affiliated in some way with Section 31. Armstrong meanwhile, enjoyed most of the perks of the office of the President, spending most of his time womanizing, playing sports and acting-out holonovels in the Palais’s auditorium-sized holosuite, or consuming illicit substances acquired through presidential privilege. Despite all this, Armstrong was shielded from public criticism, both by his immense popularity and by the fact that FNS was engineered to provide positive coverage for him and his administration. Under Armstrong’s inept, largely indifferent leadership, the NEP began to lose its way, gradually becoming little more than a lightweight version of the SFP.
One set of New Essentialist reforms that Armstrong did implement, shortly after the Federation’s disastrous first contact with the Fen Domar in July of 2388, was to reorganize the structure of the Federation’s military by commissioning the creation of the Federation Defense Force (FDF), a separate military entity designed to compliment Starfleet’s traditional role as the sole armed forces of the Federation. The Federation’s first real army, the FDF was placed directly under civilian control, with the Federation President as its commander-in-chief. Also, the FDF was initially composed entirely of volunteer soldiers rather than Academy-schooled cadets; these recruits were trained specifically for combat, not science, and in the field they were led by generals, not admirals, who had no interest in exploration. The Armstrong administration sold the FDF to the public as both a necessary tool for the defense of the Federation in the wake of the glaringly obvious threats posed to the Federation by outsiders and as a response to public distrust and antipathy towards Starfleet, whose power and influence many felt had grown too great in the years since the Dominion War. The public eagerly embraced the idea of the FDF, and Starfleet was made subordinate to that new civilian institution. This effectively put an end to Starfleet’s exploratory activities and made the Commander-in-Chief of Starfleet, Admiral Jean-Luc Picard, into little more than a powerless figurehead who took his orders directly from the President. Meanwhile, Captain Benjamin Sisko, who had recently returned from his thirteen year sojurn with the Bajoran Prophets, was given a promotion to Admiral and appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, thereby placing him in command of the FDF and placing Starfleet at his disposal. The USS Commodore, which had been assigned to the Beta Quadrant as the Federation’s first line of defense in that region, was reassigned to the Alpha Quadrant and placed under the authority Admiral Sisko, while Admiral Janeway was reassigned to be Superintendant of Starfleet Academy.
In January of 2389, only a matter of months after Armstrong took office, terrorists belonging to the Beta Quadrant Resistance Movement hijacked two Civilian Transport Vessels and, bypassing Earth’s defenses from within, crashed them into Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco and the Palais de la Concorde in Paris, resulting in the deaths of nearly 42,000 civilians, including almost all of the Lower House of the Federation Council (a third CTV had also been hijacked and was headed for the Federation Council Chambers in San Francisco, but this ship was intercepted and destroyed by the USS Commodore before it could reach its target). For several days after the attacks, Armstrong’s whereabouts were unknown to the general public; most people assumed he was being held in an undisclosed location for security reasons, and this idea was reinforced by FNS. In truth, however, Armstrong was buried alive, trapped beneath the rubble of the Palais along with several surviving members of his staff. Eighteen hours after the Palais crumbled to the ground, Nechayev and some of her aides found the president, gravely wounded and unlikely to survive if moved. Nechayev recognized how valuable Armstrong was to the implementation of their goals, and she knew how the loss of their beloved new leader would devastate the morale of the Federation people; however, rather than attempting to rescue him, Nechayev shot Armstrong with a phaser set to kill. She then had his consciousness transferred into a computer and resurrected him as a sentient isomorphic projection, keeping him in place as the figurehead leader of a Federation government of which she—and by extension, Section 31—was now actually in control. From this point forward, Armstrong would occasionally be trotted out by the administration to act as the mouthpiece for the government’s policies, but he had little to no input in any of the actual decision-making process, his movement was severely restricted (unless he was provided with a mobile emitter), and Nechayev could turn him on and off at will.
In response to the attacks on Earth, Nechayev had Armstrong order the FDF—and by extension, Starfleet—to launch a retaliatory strike against the Ktarian Republic, whose theocratic leaders, the Shimars, were among the primary supporters of the Beta-QRM and were known to be providing its leaders with safe haven. Angry and thirsty for vengeance, the Federation people wholeheartedly supported this action, and the Federation Council authorized the new war with little debate on the matter. A fleet of Federation starships, led by the USS Commodore under the command of now-Captain Geoffrey Henderson, invaded the Ktarian system and quickly dispatched the Ktarian and Beta-QRM defense forces there. As the fleet surrounded Ktaris, Nechayev ordered Henderson to carry out Starfleet General Order 24—the complete destruction of all life on the planet’s surface—unless the Ktarians agreed to hand over the leaders of the Beta-QRM. Believing the Federation to be bluffing, the Ktarians refused; however, Henderson, himself so blinded by anger and hatred towards the Ktarians dating as far back as the death of his brother aboard the USS Viking, actually carried out the order, against the advice of his first officer and another prominent member of his crew. The Federation fleet bombarded Ktaris with transphasic torpedoes, destroying most of the planet’s major cities and causing the Ktarian government to collapse. Over 700 million Ktarians were killed in the assault, in comparison to the nearly 42,000 people who had died in the attack on Earth.
As intended, the Federation assault on the Ktarian homeworld broke the back of the Beta Quadrant Resistance Movement. Federation forces occupied the planet and began hunting down the remnants of the Beta-QRM leadership, as well as the Ktarian Republic’s theocratic leaders, the Shimars. However, even after the Beta-QRM collapsed, a number of other significant threats to Federation security remained. In March of 2389, a terrorist group known as the New Maquis hyjacked a Federation Civilian Transport Vessel on its way from Mars to Earth. The New Maquis intended to crash the CTV into downtown San Francisco, killing tens of thouands, in retribution for the attack on Ktaris. Two passengers however, Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres, who themselves were former members of the original Maquis, managed to stop the terrorists with the assistance of the USS Commmodore—but not without they themselves being accused of having been part of the plot first. Two months later, the Borg, who by this time had fully recovered from the damage caused to the collective by Admiral Janeway’s neurolytic pathogen, launched another invasion of the Federation, this one so successful that the FDF and Starfleet would be forced to fight the Borg on the surface of Earth, in the planet’s major cities. The Borg were ultimately defeated, but at a tremendous cost in life and infrastructure.