The Alliance with the Federation

1. Overview

The Federation and the Klingon Empire have been formal allies since the Khitomer Accords of 2293. For a century before that they were enemies, and for most of the century since they have been friends of a kind neither side quite expected. The alliance was sealed in blood at Narendra III in 2344, when the USS Enterprise-C died defending a Klingon outpost from Romulan warbirds. It broke once, in 2372, and was restored a year later when the Dominion gave both powers the same enemy. In the Dominion War Starfleet and the Klingon Defense Force fought side by side, and in many places in the same fleets.

In 2393 the Klingons are allies who are on the Federation’s side and difficult to work with, both at once. This article tells the story of the alliance, its high points and its strains, and how it works on the Romulan border today. For Klingon history in full see History of the Klingon Empire, and for dates see Klingon Timeline.

2. A Century of Enmity

Earth first met the Klingons in 2151, when a Klingon courier crashed on Earth and the first Earth starship of its kind carried him home. The contact was not friendly for long. Over the following century relations between the two powers ran from suspicion to open hostility. The Federation and the Empire fought in skirmishes and battles along a border that neither fully accepted, among them the Battle of Donatu V in the 2240s, and by the 2260s each regarded the other as its chief rival.

In 2267 the two powers came to the edge of full war. It was prevented by the Organians, a people of great power who forbade the fighting and imposed a peace. The Organian Peace Treaty that followed did not make the two powers friends. It turned their rivalry into a contest of influence over disputed worlds, conducted under rules both sides resented. A Klingon Neutral Zone separated them. Through the rest of the 2260s and into the 2280s incidents came often, and few on either side imagined an alliance.

3. Khitomer (2293)

The change came from disaster. In 2293 Praxis, a Klingon moon and a key energy-production facility, exploded. The explosion damaged the ozone of Qo’noS itself and left the Empire facing the loss of its homeworld’s atmosphere within about fifty years. It could no longer afford to spend its strength on rivalry with the Federation. Chancellor Gorkon reached out to the Federation for peace.

The peace had enemies on all sides. Gorkon was assassinated aboard his own ship, Kronos One, and two Starfleet officers were falsely convicted of the crime. A conspiracy of Klingon, Federation and Romulan officers, among them General Chang and the Romulan ambassador Nanclus, worked to stop the talks. It failed. At the peace conference on Khitomer the plot was exposed and an attempt on the life of the Federation President was stopped. Gorkon’s daughter Azetbur, who had succeeded him as Chancellor, went on with his work.

The Khitomer Accords followed. They ended the long hostility between the two powers and began the formal alliance. They also redrew the border between them. A Federation-Klingon Neutral Zone remained as a buffer between the two powers, along a line set by the Accords, and it still exists in 2393. It is quiet, and it is seldom spoken of, but it is there, and Starfleet officers posted near it are reminded that even allies keep a line between them.

4. The Alliance Grows (2293 to 2366)

An alliance made out of need took decades to become one of trust. In the years after Praxis the two powers learned, slowly, to work together. Much of that process is not recorded in any detail the Federation has published. What is clear is that by the 2340s the two powers were allies on paper and in practice, though not yet warm ones, and that an act of one Starfleet crew did more than any treaty to change that.

4.1 Narendra III (2344)

In 2344 Romulan warbirds attacked the Klingon outpost on Narendra III. The USS Enterprise-C, under Captain Rachel Garrett, answered the outpost’s distress call and fought to defend it. The ship was destroyed. To the Klingons, a crew that died defending Klingons it had no duty to save had shown honour of the highest kind, and it changed how many Klingons saw the Federation. Narendra III is still remembered in the Empire as the place where the alliance was sealed in blood, and the Klingons have neither forgotten what the Romulans did there nor forgiven it. The site is now the base of the Defense Force’s Narendra Command, rebuilt as a fortress and a memorial. See The Klingon Defense Force.

4.2 Khitomer (2346)

Two years later a Romulan attack on the Klingon colony at Khitomer killed thousands, helped by a Klingon traitor who gave the Romulans the colony’s defence codes. Among the few survivors was a Klingon boy found in the ruins by a Starfleet crewman, who took him home and raised him on Earth. That boy later became the first Klingon to serve as an officer in Starfleet. To many in both powers, his career stood for what the alliance could be.

5. Strains and Tests (2367 to 2371)

The alliance was tested hard in the late 2360s, and both powers’ enemies knew it was worth testing.

In 2367 Romulan agents tried to break the alliance by programming a Starfleet officer to kill the Klingon governor of Krios. The plot was found and stopped in time. The same year Chancellor K’mpec, dying of poison, named a Starfleet captain, Jean-Luc Picard, as Arbiter of Succession, to oversee the choice of the next Chancellor. It was a mark of the trust the Empire then placed in the Federation. Gowron became Chancellor.

His rule was challenged at once. The House of Duras rose against him, and the Empire fell into civil war from 2367 to 2368. The Federation refused to take sides in a Klingon internal matter. But the Romulans were secretly supplying the House of Duras, and Starfleet ships formed a tachyon detection network along the Klingon and Romulan border that exposed the Romulan convoys. The Romulans pulled back, and Gowron won. The Federation had kept the letter of its neutrality and still helped decide the war, and Klingons on both sides understood that. The Romulans did too.

6. The Break of 2372

The alliance broke in 2372. Changeling infiltrators of the Dominion were at work in the Alpha Quadrant, and one of them had replaced General Martok, an adviser close to Gowron. When a coup on Cardassia brought the civilian Detapa Council to power, the Klingons claimed the Council had been replaced by Changelings and invaded Cardassian space. The Federation condemned the invasion. Gowron answered by withdrawing the Empire from the Khitomer Accords.

What followed is called the Federation-Klingon war of 2372 to 2373, or simply the break of 2372. Klingon ships attacked Deep Space Nine, where the Federation had given shelter to the Detapa Council, and were driven off. Klingon and Starfleet ships clashed along their shared borders. It was never the all-out war that both powers could have fought, but it was real, and lives were lost on both sides. Officers who served through it remember a strange war against people who had been allies the year before and, as it turned out, would be allies again a year later.

The break ended in 2373, when the Dominion revealed itself. Cardassia joined the Dominion, the Jem’Hadar drove the Klingons out of Cardassian space, and the impostor posing as Martok was exposed. The real Martok, who had been held in a Dominion prison, escaped. Gowron restored the Khitomer Accords, and Klingon ships came to the defence of Deep Space Nine. The Dominion had given both powers the same enemy.

7. The Dominion War (2373 to 2375)

For the rest of the war the Federation and the Empire fought together more closely than ever before. A Federation and Klingon force destroyed the Dominion shipyards at Torros III in 2373. A Klingon fleet joined Operation Return in 2374. Klingon and Starfleet ships fought side by side at Chin’toka and through the long campaigns along the Cardassian border. From 2374 the Romulans fought beside them.

Some Allied forces were combined into joint Federation-Klingon fleets under shared command, with officers of each service on the other’s staffs. One was called the Fourteenth Joint Fleet. The details of these fleets are not on the public record, but many Starfleet and Klingon officers who served in them speak of them with pride. They were the closest the two services have ever come to being one force.

The war’s worst moment for the alliance came in 2375. After the Breen weapon destroyed the Allied fleet at the second Battle of Chin’toka, Klingon ships were for a time the only Allied ships able to fight it. Chancellor Gowron took personal command of the Klingon forces and ordered a series of attacks that cost many Klingon lives. He was killed in combat, and Martok became Chancellor. Under Martok the Klingons fought to the end of the war at Cardassia. For the Defense Force’s part in the war see The Klingon Defense Force.

8. After the War

8.1 Martok’s Empire

Martok has led the High Council since 2375, and still does in 2393. His rise brought to the chancellorship a warrior who had fought beside Starfleet and owed his life in part to Starfleet officers, and the alliance has been steadier under him than at any time since the 2360s. After the war a Starfleet officer of Klingon birth served as the Federation’s ambassador to Qo’noS, and the Federation keeps diplomatic staff there, including attachés, in 2393. Martok’s long chancellorship now has the great houses thinking about who comes next, and the Federation watches that question closely. See The High Council and the Chancellor.

8.2 The joint recovery (2377 to 2386)

In 2377 the Federation, the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire set up a joint recovery initiative to clear the battle zones along the Cardassian border. Each power gave twelve ships, and the whole was led by the USS Viola. For most of a decade its crews dismantled derelicts, recovered material and returned the dead to their homeworlds. Klingon crews served alongside Romulan ones, which few would have thought possible a few years earlier. The initiative stood down in 2386. It is remembered in Starfleet as plain, decent work shared by three powers, and in the Empire as a duty to the honoured dead.

8.3 The officer exchange and training

Starfleet and the Defense Force have exchanged officers since at least the 2360s, when a Starfleet officer served as first officer of the Bird-of-Prey Pagh. The exchange continues in 2393. Starfleet doctors have also served aboard Klingon ships under it. After 2383 a Defense Force contingent trained with Starfleet on Mars in fighter tactics. These links are small in numbers but large in effect: the officers who go through them become the people each service calls when it needs to understand the other.

9. The Romulan Border: Help That Is Real and Dangerous

9.1 The raids of the 2380s

After 2379, when the Romulan Senate was killed and the Romulan Empire turned inward, the Romulan side of the Zone was thinly held. From about 2382 to 2390 young warriors of lesser houses, many of them sons of the House of Gharvel, and some Klingon ship captains raided Romulan border holdings. They raided for old grievances, for glory and for plunder. The High Council neither sanctioned the raids nor stopped them. When Romulan patrols returned to the Zone, from 2387 and in strength from 2389, the raids grew costly and tapered off after 2390. The Romulans have never forgotten them, and some of them hold the Federation partly to blame for its ally. See Klingons and Romulans.

9.2 The tri-border talks (2390)

The clearest recent picture of the alliance under strain comes from the tri-border near Starbase 24, where the Federation, Klingon and Romulan borders meet, close to Khitomer. In 2390 a makeshift freighter outpost called the Hub stood there, and raiders were striking Romulan and Klingon shipping. The Romulans blamed the Klingons, who had been crossing into Romulan space on raids of their own for some time; the Klingons blamed the Romulans; and both demanded that the Federation act. The USS Ragnarok was ordered to patrol in Federation space and to disable rather than destroy any Romulan or Klingon craft it met.

Talks were held aboard. The Romulan Ambassador V’rel came, and so did the Klingon General T’Sok. T’Sok was a good diplomat, for a Klingon. He accused the Federation of violating Klingon borders with its sensor sweeps, and he told the Federation that the Klingon Empire can protect its own borders. He left saying that the Federation has no honour. The talks failed on every side. For the Federation the lesson was that even an ally will take Federation help as an insult if it comes in the wrong form. Starbase 24, being rebuilt at the time, has since been completed. For the Romulan side of the same events see The USS Ragnarok and the Romulans.

9.3 Managing the ally in 2393

On the Romulan border in 2393 the alliance works, and it is hard work. Klingon ships of the Narendra Command, under General Kortaq of the House of Vreth, hold the stretch of the Zone that Starfleet calls the Nevrha stretch, where the Zone runs nearest to Klingon space and Narendra III lies within reach. The Romulan garrisons opposite look two ways, toward the Federation and toward the Klingons. See The Klingon Defense Force and The Klingon Frontier in 2393.

A Klingon captain near the Zone shares the Federation’s adversary but not its methods. Where Starfleet sees a treaty to uphold and an incident to defuse, a Klingon commander often sees an enemy to be answered and honour to be reclaimed, and has little patience for being told to stand down. Starfleet analysts believe that some Romulan provocations on this border are aimed at the Klingons, in the hope that a Klingon answer will force the Federation either to restrain its ally or to take the blame for what the ally does.

Klingon help on this border is real and valuable. Klingon ships can be where Starfleet ships are not, and a Klingon squadron on the line is a fact the Romulans must plan around. But that same help is prone to starting exactly the war that Starfleet on this border exists to prevent. Managing the ally can be harder than managing the adversary. Starfleet’s guidance is to treat Klingon officers as the allies they are, to speak to them plainly and with respect, to share what can be shared, and never to ask a Klingon captain to back down in a way that costs him honour before his crew. A Klingon who has been given a way to act with honour will often take it. One who has been shamed will not forget it.

The politics of the High Council shape all of this. The House of Vreth wants a harder line with the Romulans. The House of Tarkesh, with its shipbuilding and mining interests in the outer colonies, wants the alliance kept steady. As the houses look ahead to the end of Martok’s long chancellorship, which way the Council leans on the Romulan question matters on this border as much as anything said in the Federation Council. See The Great Houses.

10. See Also

The Klingon Empire · History of the Klingon Empire · Klingon Timeline · The High Council and the Chancellor · The Great Houses · The Klingon Defense Force · Klingons and Romulans · The Klingon Frontier in 2393 · Romulans and the Federation · The USS Ragnarok and the Romulans · The Neutral Zone (2393)