I don’t really find the Confederacy all that plausible myself, or at least what I saw of it. I find it hard to believe that the human race decided it was going to conquer all aliens with the resources they had. It’s been shown time and time again that other races such as the Vulcans and the Klingons were more technologically advanced, and even other races such as the Romulans were at least on equal footing with them. It’s inconceivable that these aliens couldn’t have beaten the human race, much less allow themselves to be conquered, and didn’t at least form an alliance against them.
Study your history. Up until a few hundred years ago, China and the Middle East were more technologically advanced and politically/economically powerful than Europe. But Europe adopted knowledge from those more advanced cultures -- stirrups, gunpowder, printing, decimal numerals, the magnetic compass, the lateen sail -- and used that knowledge to compete with those powers aggressively, inspiring the Industrial Revolution, which enabled Europe to swiftly surpass those formerly more advanced powers and dominate them politically and economically.
Sometimes what matters is not who has more technology or power, but who
wants it more. China could've had an industrial revolution 700 years before Europe did. It had all the requisite knowledge and resources, all the ingredients. But China's economy was prosperous and comfortable, and the nation had everything it needed at home, so it didn't have a strong need to innovate or change things. But Europe was a comparatively poor region, starved for resources and territory, and thus it was driven to invent faster transportation so it could more easily reach the wealth of the Far East, and to invent new manufacturing techniques so it could create domestic goods competitive with imported porcelain, silk, etc. It was that need to advance, to compete, that drove the Industrial Revolution and let Europe come out on top.
Heck, Earth did the same thing in the Prime timeline. At First Contact, it was a backward, impoverished world compared to Vulcan or Andoria, but within 200 years it had become the dominant world in the Federation, nominally equal to Vulcan, Andoria, and the rest but politically and culturally more central. Earth rose faster because it had more incentive to catch up.
There's also the fact that Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar hated each other, so they wouldn't have formed a united front. A nascent Confederation could've exploited their rivalry and encouraged them to war with each other, then come in and picked up the pieces.
No they didn't, because it was clearly shown that Soong broke the 'Shenzhen Convention' which presumably has something to do with genetic experimentation. There was no mention of the Eugenics wars at all, or that anyone in 2024 was genetically enhanced.
I would assume that the Shenzhen Convention was a ban on eugenics that was passed
because of and in the wake of the Eugenics Wars. After all, there'd be less reason for a strict international ban on genetic experimentation if the wars hadn't happened.
We can't be sure for now that the Shenzhen Convention was a result of the Eugenic Wars. According to Matalas' comment on Twitter, it's possible that the EW are only about to begin:
"We discussed endlessly. We came to the conclusion that in WW3 there were several EMP bursts that kicked everyone back decades. Records of that 75 year period, the 90s on were sketchy. Maybe Spock was wrong? No easy way to do it if you want the past to look and feel like today."
Evidently they forgot that Khan explicitly said the
Botany Bay came from 1996 in
The Wrath of Khan. If anyone would know for sure, he would.
