My money is on the Dominion. I don’t think the Borg would be able to assimilate a gelatinous blob of goo anyway.
Tough call if we ignore First Contact and the Borg’s demonstrated ability to travel back in time to eliminate opposition retroactively, an ability they seem to have later lost or forgotten.
I vote Borg, but it depends which Borg. The problem is overtime the Borg became more and more of a joke as they were the feared unbeatable foe for the writers, that kept getting beaten. By the time Voyager comes along, the Borg are a joke.
But if we ignore the show for a moment, and just look at the two powers as imagined, I think the Borg have it.
The Dominion wins.
The Borg are fearsome but they aren’t very good thinkers. They win by brute force, just Zapp-Branniganing their enemies until they manage to assimilate enough of them to turn the tide.
Every time the Borg are defeated, it was because they were outmaneuvered by wily Starfleet tacticians.
The Dominion are perfectly content to play the long game and let plans develop piecemeal over hundreds or even thousands of years. They probably have sent Founders to the Delta quadrant and back and know all about the Borg already. They no-doubt have the Vorta scientists working feverishly on a forgotten out-of-the-way planetoid somewhere reverse-engineering Borg technology and figuring out how a Changeling could infiltrate the Collective and infect their programming. All you need is a little targetted bit-twiddling and all of a sudden the entirety of the Borg species is programmed to recognize you as their Gods.
I bet it comes down to a buffer overflow.
They wouldn’t be able to assimilate the Founders, but the Jem’Hadar and Vorta (and all the other solid races that were conquered by or aligned with the Dominion) would be vulnerable.
I’d give it to the Borg…the Dominion lack both the Federation (and Romulan, Klingon, etc)'s ability to discuss and decide between multiple options - the Founders say it, and it must be so - and the unity of the Borg - the Jem’Hadar and Vorta both worship the Founders, but generally hate each other, and the subject races have the ability to rebel.
The Borg are also likely to be less conflicted about using the Morphogenic Virus against the Founders, if they assimilated someone with knowledge of it, or discovered it on their own.
But would the Founders have the knowledge of the anti-Borg virus Picard refused to use? Plus, how much damage did Admiral Janeway’s mind virus do at the end of Voyager, seeing as it was injected into the main Queen? Maybe that’s even more powerful.
The main thing is that I think the Founders would be willing and able to hide, and thus have infinite time to try and defeat the Borg.
As for time travel abilities, I think that is sufficiently explained by the temporal departments in the 26th and 29th centuries. They are monitoring incursions in the timeline. They only don’t get involved when they have to–when it won’t be cleared up. (I’d say they don’t get involved if changing things might make them not exist, but Voyager (and. to a lesser extent, First Contact and “The City on the Edge or Forever”) reveals the existence of temporal shielding, preventing the timeline from changing in a particular location.
Though where these time cops were in Star Trek 2009, I have no idea. Maybe the timeline was corrected, but we continued following the altered timeline instead.
I’d say the Borg, because if Starfleet was able to adapt to the Dominion’s strategy and technology (like the longer-range transporter or the phased polaron beams), so too could the Borg. And God help us if the Borg actually did figure out a way to assimilate a changeling. (In a DS9 relaunch novel, a Borg tried to do just that, and the changeling countered by crushing the nanoprobes.)
I don’t think it was ever clear cut that the Federation was going to beat the Dominion. They only won because Odo convinced them to stop their bull shit.
By canon, the Federation would win.
I voted Borg, but, in the round-robin tournament of life and death, the Feds ultimately prevailed in every encounter.
Doesn’t matter how - a win is a win*.
That’s the strength of the Federation.
*and a Weyone is a Weyoun. I crack myself up…
Yep, it was a truce, not a true defeat. The Founders are still in control of their territory, they still have the Jem’Hadar and the Vorta working for them, and all the other allied Gamma Quadrant powers under their thumb. The victory at the end of DS9 just meant that they were giving up their attack on the Federation/Klingon/Romulan(/Cardassian) alliance.
The Dominion. They actually embrace battle tactics and strategy. Admittedly, their infiltration techniques would not work against the Borg, but they have other tools in their toolbox. It took the Feds, Klingons, and Romulans together to defeat to.Dominion; the Feds twice beat back Borg incursions in their own.
I’ve always held that, from the POV of persons outside the temporal loop, time travel is ultimately toothless. The TNG verse wasn’t overwritten by what Nero did; he just created (or jumped to) a different timeline). All a time traveller trying to " fix" historical “changes” can accomplish is return to a timeline she or he prefers.
This is clearly the official take, since the Prime Universe is still used in some official media - specifically, the Star Trek Online MMO, which explicitly takes place after the Prime Universe portion of the movie events. (Romulus is destroyed, Spock is…elsewhere.)
Also, my personal theory is that it’s ‘jumped to’, not ‘created’…there’s too many discrepancies before Kirk’s birth (the supposed pivot point). The movies themselves don’t really have that many details that can’t be jimmied to fit (due to lack of detail in general, really), but a) a lot of it is a very uncomfortable fit if you do that (the bits we’ve seen of the Klingons, the Orions apparently being in the Federation, Starfleet’s aesthetic, arguably Khan’s movie-verse history, though the timeline on that is maddeningly vague, even including the comics), and b) the comics (generally the better incarnation of the movie-verse) have some bits that simply cannot fit (the backstories of the two universe’s versions of Return of the Archons diverge even before the Archon crashes on Beta III, just off the top of my head).
The Federation would pretty much have exterminated the Dominion if not for those little shits, Bashir and O’brien, getting the cure for the morphogenic virus to save Odo. How much damage the Jem Hadar could do before their supplies of Ketracel white runs out is another matter.
The more I think on it, the more I think that “jumped to” is the better descriptor. It just doesn’t make for exciting stories. It changes the sace-the-universe-by-breaking-your-own-heart story to a recalibrate-the-deflector-dish one.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that works within the Trek universe and what we’ve seen. Those episodes with temporal shielding pretty much indicate this. When McCoy jumped into the Guardian for Forever, only those on the planet were shielded by the effects. Starfleet no longer existed. When the Borg went back in time, only the Enterprise-E was unaffected, but the universe changed.
Plus, the existence of the various temporal departments wouldn’t make sense if everything stayed the same from their perspective. And the majority of the Borg were did not go back in time, so conquering Earth in the past would have accomplished nothing.
It would be a nice way to throw out time travel as a viable method in a show universe where time travel is established. But too many plots depend on time travel actually affecting the universe around them for this to work in Star Trek.
Far better is just that this was a different type of time travel–it’s not as if the show didn’t have quite a few varieties anyways. Why not the kind that switches you to an otherwise unconnected alternate universe?
My vote is the Dominion. They may not have been the most popular villain, but they were by far the most dangerous. Every other foe in Star trek history, including the Borg, is either a glass cannon that looks impressive but goes down when seriously threatened, and also usually a one-trick pony. The Dominion? They are smart, and even a small detachment was able to nearly conquer multiple stellar empires.
The Borg win I think, if they decide to seriously try. They may not; there’s a fan-theory I like that the Borg are “farming” the Federation and other creative races for new ideas and technology, and *deliberately *using just enough force to challenge them without destroying them. It does explain why they keep sending just one Cube, that keeps being just barely defeated. And not a hundred or a thousand.
I’m pretty sure that time travel can either cause a timeline split/universe jump or a history re-write, depending on the method.
Well that or the writers are just inconsistent, but that’s crazy talk.
Iswydt 
See, if I wrote ST:DS9, that’s exactly what would have happened. Just as the Klingon/Federation vs Cardassian/Dominion war was heating up, the Borg transwarp in and start assimilating everyone. Then the Founders, who have been in isolation, and could really care less, are urged by Odo – they have to do what’s right,even if the Solids won’t give them a fair break back. It’s juts the right thing to do.
Then that giant lake of shapeshiters bubbles, and launches itself into the air, all of them merging to form the Founder Ship – Designation: Link. Using as propulsion whatever the hell subspace warping Treknobabble allows Odo to change his mass when he shapeshifts, they fly straight into the Borg homeship, and while the Defiant and a friendly Romulan ship provide cover fire, Link morphs into a narrow sharp blade of a ship and just rams into it. “Oh, you have rotating shield frequencies? Yeah, we’re just cutting your ship, and each of you too.” The changelings just flood out, and go T-1000ing on each Borg until the Borg Nexus (Locus?, whatever) is an atmosphere venting husk, and the Borg Queen just decides, “You know what, I can do without assimilating Alpha Quadrant species, for now.” And the Founders go into hiding again.
Meh. I always say, this is why I watch Star Trek, and don’t write it.