That's the great thing about the latest update, you can genuinely stay in your corner and be peaceful and when that criminal syndicate on the other side of the galaxy wrongs you, you can just infiltrate the governments of the empires with the strongest militaries to goad them into a proxy war against that criminal syndicate.

Though as someone chronically bad at being evil in stellaris I usually end up just using it to make everyone focuse the crisis aspirants before they can snowball.