1. Yes, absolutely.
2. In spirit yes, although the execution is different. You can pretty much take any option at any time... circumstances permitting. If you have really angered a race, for instance, a lot of political deals with them are just closed off, etc. And a lot of things require Bargaining Power, which you have a finite amount of. And typically taking one action has several consequences, some good and some bad. So you typically wind up opening some doors and closing others with a series of actions.
There are very rarely actions where it is like "don't do this or something bad happens." In a cheesy sort of timer-like fashion. Rather, there's a whole simulation going on, and if two races are at war, you can do various things to help or hinder one of them in various ways. Or you might ignore them. But you can watch the war, and intervene in ways that are optimal to you, while it happens. So that's time limited, but not in a sense of "oh, there's a timer running." It's just a matter of how long it takes for the war to go on, and what else happens during it.
There are a couple of "do this before the timer runs out" cases, but they are exceedingly rare. Most of the time it is a race that is taking some sort of desperate destructive last-resort action, like blowing up their planet or strapping rockets to a moon to send to another planet. You might actually be fine with them doing those things, so in that case not acting before the timer runs out is fine. Or you may very decidedly NOT be okay with that, in which case you need to intervene in some way -- either help encourage other races to kill them off before they can complete it, or help them back out of said corner so they call it off themselves, etc.
