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If someone has tech to do interstellar trips in a reasonable time, we already lost any war against them.
The good news is, they probably don't need anything that we have, so the list of reasons to engage in war is kinda limited. Yay!
About communication, they would have an advantage understanding us, we are broadcasting into space for more than a century with radio signals carrying content of many of our languages.
The movie Arrival does an quite OK job showing how could be an effort to bridge the communication gap with aliens (besides the fiction), and is a good movie as well.
"Oh hey, you guys have liquid water? We'll take that!"
"Well I guess we could trade you a few thousand liters..."
"Trade? Liters? No, we'll just take it. All of it."
Biomass is just about the only thing you couldn't find out in the asteroid belt, and there's little reason a species from a different biosphere would want any of our biomass.
Alas, it turns out that human cerebrospinal fluid is heroin to their biology. We're going to get farmed like opium poppies.