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Anthropomorphising ET is a guess at best. Becoming interstellar likely requires putting your differences aside as a species. You can hardly pour the majority of your resources into survival (space-faring) when you are instead pouring them into extinction (war and pollution).

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One could've argued that making seafaring voyages in the 1600s requires putting your differences aside. But instead we had a bunch of barbarians going around extinguishing and enslaving the world =P

Just playing devils advocate, but another scenario might be if one side of a warring species annihilates the other, and then takes off into space. What if the Nazis won WW2, and started a space program in the 60s? There could be an alien equivalent of the Third Reich out there colonizing worlds.

War and annihilation is not a sustainable endeavour. Without an enemy and without constant war the Third Reich would likely have fallen apart pretty quickly. It wasn't exactly a utopia and their economy mostly was a large Ponzi scheme predicated on constant war.

Even arguably less aggressive and more successful (in terms of longevity) entities such as the British or the Spanish Empire weren't particularly long-lived on a large timescale.

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