That would have been true regardless of who showed up along with Spock. She was ready to sacrifice anyone of his friends in mortal combat, rather than let Stonn take him on while he was in the plak-tow (as he evidently wanted to do).
She had no way of knowing beforehand that Kirk would even be there. It was dumb fool luck that he was, but I think her actions were premeditated rather than spontaneous.
Stonn’s surprise when she deviated from their earlier plan indicates that she just didn’t want to clue him in on her true intentions. It was like that scene in Start the Revolution without Me:
LOUIS XVI (Dressed like a chicken):You told me it was a costume ball!
MARIE ANTOINETTE (A complete bitch):I changed my mind.
She knew he was leaving. And she knew he had almost no chance of winning. Spock was ENORMOUSLY stronger than Kirk, who lasted as long sd hr did because Spock on some level was fighting his own. And she knew that whoever showed up with Spock would be a close friend and would therefore hate her guts if she forced him to kill Spock. The only way a victorious Kirk was marrying T’Pring was if that allowed him to legally kill her. He certainly wasn’t ever going to fuck her; he wouldn’t trust her enough to be alone with her when she was holding as much as a spoon.
Vulcan society at the start of Enterprise was pretty militaristic, too, but in the cold-war Henry Kissinger-esque sense, constantly spying on the Andorians. While I don’t recommend watching the entire series, the last season of Enterpise has some good episodes on the topic. Culminating in…
…a revolution where the more militaristic government is replaced with the more pacifistic government that presumably is still in place during TOS.
As for Vulcan SAS, I imagine that they wouldn’t have such things, relying more on spies and technology to get the job done. Vulcans don’t seem like the kind of people who would risk lives when they don’t have to, and trek-level technology can get a lot of things done without “boots on the ground”.
It was only in its last season (maybe last 1.5 seasons) that Enterprise was juuust starting to be what it should have been all along - the backstory and intrigues of how humans became a major spacefaring race and how the Federation got cobbled together. Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites should have all been major influences from the first episode. Actually, it might have been funnier if each of the three thought they could manipulate the relatively newbish humans for their own ends only to see humans adapt so rapidly that they started to take the lead in space-naval power, driven in part by a characteristically human drive to rapidly colonize everywhere within reach and smush anybody that gets in the way.
Even if the Vulcans were pacifist as a matter of policy, they can have a self-defence force [as Japan has] in distinction to a military that can take over someone else’s land [as Japan did].
Successful ‘pacifist’ states in the shadow of big violent neighbours do so through focus on clever and complex diplomacy. The city state Ragusa [mod. Dubrovnik] was able to maintain itself as an entity like a limpet on the side of a big, and often aggressive Ottoman empire, by leveraging its benefits - it provided competition against Venice, gave Ottomans access to luxury western goods, provided a back channel for all manner of things, paid top dollar levies to cash-strapped satraps etc.
Or think of Switzerland sandwiched between Germany, Italy and Vichy France and stuffed to the brim with gold and loot during WWII. Isolation and invasion would not have been hard, but its other values were worth more than the contents of its banks.
Vulcan may have a top-rate diplomatic corps, with a small force that provides personal security, embassy detail, ceremonial etc. Like the Pope’s decorative Swiss guards, they would be probably also trained to give people a good kicking in the alley next to the dumpsters if and when required.
Frankly, Japan should have nuclear weapons of its own. Then they can at least develop their own Godzilla-creation industries instead of relying on American nuclear testing.
I’d imagine Vulcan troops would be pretty fearsome, as they’d have iron disicipline, little chance to break and run, and they’d probably be totally up for the noble self-sacrifice when the situation logically called for it. However, they’d be awfully hard to get to do anything that wasn’t logical. They’d be less likely to fight to the last man, or stand their ground if there wasn’t a logical reason, than normal troops might. OTOH, if that’s the logical thing to do, they’d be damn near immovable, or implacable on the attack.
As such, I think they’d favor war of maneuver over anything static- they could attack and defend at the logical points, and have plenty of room to work stratagems, etc…