"Well, of course they are, Captain." Houseman's tone was just short of impatient. "But the best way to do that is to settle the locals' differences. The potential for instability and Havenite interference will remain as long as their hostility does, whatever else we may accomplish. Once we bring them together, however, we'll have two friends in the region, and there won't be any temptation for either of them to invite Haven in for military advantage. The best diplomatic glue is common interest, not simply a common enemy. Indeed," Houseman sipped his wine, "our entire involvement in this region stems from our own failure to find a common interest with the People's Republic, and it is a failure. There's always some way to avoid confrontation if one only looks deep enough and remembers that, in the long run, violence never solves anything. That's why we have diplomats, Captain Harrington—and why a resort to brute force is an indication of failed diplomacy, nothing more and nothing less."
Major Tomas Ramirez, commander of Fearless's Marine detachment, stared at Houseman in disbelief from further down the table. The heavyset, almost squat Marine had been twelve years old when Haven conquered his native Trevor's Star. He, his mother, and his sister had escaped to Manticore in the last refugee convoy through the Manticore Wormhole Junction; his father had stayed behind, on one of the warships that died to cover the retreat. Now his jaw tightened ominously as Houseman smiled at Honor, but Lieutenant Commander Higgins, Fearless's chief engineer, touched his forearm and jerked a tiny headshake. The little scene wasn't lost on Honor, and she sipped her own wine deliberately, then lowered her glass.
"I see," she said, and wondered how the admiral tolerated such a nincompoop as his second in command. Houseman had a reputation as a brilliant economist and, given Grayson's backward economy, sending him made sense, but he was also an ivory-tower intellectual who'd been plucked from a tenured position in Mannheim University's College of Economics for government service. Mannheim wasn't called "Socialist U" for nothing, and Houseman's prominent family was a vocal supporter of the Liberal Party. Neither of those facts were calculated to endear him to Captain Honor Harrington, and his simplistic notion of how to approach the Grayson-Masada hostility was downright frightening.
Book is David Weber's The Honor of the Queen
I've always thought that kind of "Humans are just a small fish in a big pond" kind of Sci-fi is really underdone. It's pretty much always just "Unimaginable cosmic horror: we aren't the center of the universe."
It's a rough read but the concept behind Claire Coleman's second novel, the old lie, is that humans are the most recent addition to some sort of interplanetary Federation, admitted because we are seen as particularly savage and therefore make good soldiers, to fight in their war against another faction. The novel is about the horrific racism experienced by the human characters. The author is a Nyungar woman (the Nyungar people are the traditional owners of parts of western Australia and were of course colonised by the British). Her work is all extremely consistently anti imperial. I wish I liked The Old Lie because the concept is fantastic, but for whatever reason it just didn't grab me.
Her debut, terra nullius, is however a good read with a fantastic twist that I won't spoil, although it doesn't have the military angle really. It's unfortunately a YA novel, which sucks because the concept could absolutely stand up to a more mature treatment, but I recommend it regardless. It's deliberately pretty disturbing at times and the twist is genuinely thought provoking. I also really liked Enclave, which is again unfortunately a YA novel but also very much worthy reading imo, has some interesting and challenging themes and some of the most satisfying and cathartic violence I have ever read, right at the end.
Thanks for the recommendations! I'll be sure to check those out.
Star Control and its sequel are an interesting example of this. The background story involves Earth (which at the time hadn't even achieved interplanetary travel) getting a message from an alien race who are like "hey there are these imperialists subjugating the galaxy and you're unfortunately in their path, we're building an alliance against them, wanna join?" Humanity's main contribution ends up being the fact that it's the only species to have built a bunch of nukes and left them lying around, and said nukes just so happen to be quite effective against the enemy's warships.
And then some do a fake-out and that start as: "Humans are just a small fish in a big pond" but then careen straight into, "Unimaginable cosmic horror: we aren't the center of the universe." combined with, "Humans are special, actually."