In the "Request Surrender First" vs. the "Kill'em all and let The Tester Sort them out." debate, I come down firmly on the "it depends" side....
If the BF or FF forces are 40M kilometers away, you are well out of their range and presuming you have MDM in your forces along with Ghost Rider, you can hit them pretty much at will without damage--and maintain an acceleration that keeps you out of their range. So the prudent thing to do is what we've seen Mike Henke, Hiram Ivanov, Duchess Harrington, Jacob Zavala, and Aivars Therekov already do--tell them what you are going to do, demonstrate some level of capability to back yourself up, and if they cross your line, back up your words with missiles--but give them a chance to surrender.
As others have mentioned, this is a Social-Political struggle as much as it is a Military one, and slaughtering people out-of-hand is not condusive to a long and just peace. After all, the Chinese are still a bit ticked off at the Japanese over the 1930's-40's and I doubt Russians have a lot of love for Germany 68 years later.
Now the above said, if I'm guarding a wormhole with a division of SD(P)'s, 4 SAG-B's, and a whole lot of pods, and 4 Battle Squadrons of Sollie SD's hyper in 4.1M Kilometers away, I'm not asking any questions--I'm rolling pods and letting them have it with everything I got. Or if I'm escorting a convoy and 4 FF BC's come swooping in, they get (maybe) one warning then I'm engaging full-bore.
So like I say, it depends. It often does in combat.