The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
Hard-power realism, stated without sentiment.
Mearsheimer argues that great powers are structurally compelled to maximize their relative power regardless of domestic ideology — that the tragedy is not individual malice but systemic logic. For anyone building financial infrastructure in the space between competing hegemons, this is required reading: the neutrality of technical systems is an illusion, and the geopolitical context in which infrastructure operates is not a background condition but a design constraint.