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Theoretically, civilizations which can manage interstellar travel would be locked in MAD because if you can accelerate a ship to relativistic speeds and decelerate it into orbit, you can accelerate a very large rock into relativistic speed to crash into the planet and wipe out all life therein with no possibility of defense, orbital mechanics being generally well understood.
If you have an interstellar civilization based around some manner of FTL travel, whatever exotic technology is in use would also probably provide weapons of mass destruction- Alcubierre drives as currently understood could generate a massive gamma ray burst fairly easily, and that’s assuming that Alcubierre drive operation can’t be used to directly tear planets apart. A civilization which can build krasnikov tubes or artificial wormholes can also probably launch relativistic kinetic weapons, the energy requirements to build the other end being if anything more impressive.
I had considered going into the details of why defense might have some asymmetry, like maybe it's pretty easy to put a dead man's switch type deal that makes a defended star system unusable if threatened. Really it doesn't seem like the kind of thing we'd be able to predict with current day physics knowledge, maybe dark matter can be used as a relativistic shield of some sort.
A relativistic bombardment would also make a planet unusable on less-than-geologic timescales, right? It seems like it should(although a gamma ray burst probably wouldn’t, even if it requires a planet get re-terraformed). No doubt sci-fi ftl changes the equation because faster than light sensors can give much more of an early lead time on relativistic bombardments, but any kind of shielding that works against, say, a dinosaur killer at .7 C is beyond physics as commonly understood.
I have to admit, I now kind of want to see the motte coming up with a hard sci-fi universe of its own centered around some kind of interstellar Cold War.
The dark forest looms large in such a discussion, but I do think it got the game theory wrong. I think in general in the space future a lot of civilization leaves the gravity wells and never returns.
Why? Everything a civilization needs is in gravity wells- energy, materials, resources. Given interstellar travel times it makes more sense to stick near a source of fuel and materials when you can.
Gravity wells will be used and mined but they're too easy of targets. And the friction of escaping the well to trade is going to be very important.
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