Most political commentary asks the wrong question.
It asks: what should the world look like? I ask: what does it look like? That sounds like a small shift. It is a fundamental one.
My name is Ludwig J. Marx. I am a political scientist with a background in international relations and political theory, a former soldier, and a private banker. That combination is not accidental. It means I have spent time in institutions where reality has consequences, where getting the world wrong is not an intellectual error, but a practical one.
When I studied the theorists who actually explain how international politics works, Waltz, Mearsheimer, Schmitt, Münkler, something became impossible to ignore: the world they describe bears little resemblance to the world discussed in most Western media and parliamentary debates. Not because that world is wrong. Because it is incomplete. Sanitized of what is uncomfortable.
States do not act out of morality. They act out of interest, fear, and the drive for self-preservation. That is not cynicism. It is the precondition for understanding power at all. Those who ignore it do not become idealists. They become objects of other people’s decisions.
This applies everywhere. Why does the Arab League, a bloc sharing language, religion, and history, produce almost no collective action? Why did the Soviet Union hold together for seven decades and then dissolve in months? Why does ASEAN maintain stability without ever becoming a sovereign actor? Why did Philadelphia 1787 succeed where the Articles of Confederation failed? The answers are not moral. They are structural. And they follow the same logic whether you are looking at Rome, the Indo-Pacific, Latin America, or the halls of Brussels.
This Substack is built on that logic. I write to explain why things happen in international politics, not what should happen, but what does happen, and why. I draw on a theoretical framework developed over years, one that takes structural realism seriously while going beyond it: an original model for understanding when and why collective sovereignty succeeds or fails, tested against two thousand years of political history.
The goal is not academic. It is clarity. For anyone who wants to understand the world as it is, and what that means for the decisions being made right now, in Washington, Beijing, Brussels, and everywhere in between.
What you will find here
Power and Order, always free
The theoretical foundation. Long-form essays drawn from the framework behind this Substack, and the book it is built on. No news hook, no current events. Just the structural logic of international politics, explained from the ground up: why states behave the way they do, what sovereignty actually means, and why some collective projects endure while others collapse. If you are new here, start with Power and Order.
The Situation Room, twice a week
One current event. One structural argument. No outrage, no commentary for its own sake. The Situation Room applies the framework to what is happening right now: a conflict, an election, a diplomatic move, an economic decision. Short, pointed, and designed to leave you with one clear idea about why something is happening, not just that it is.
The Briefing Room, once a month
Once a month, I step back from the individual events of the past weeks and ask what they add up to. The Briefing Room synthesizes the eight preceding Situation Room analyses into a single, larger argument, grounded in the theoretical framework of Power and Order. This is where the pattern behind the news becomes visible. Where Rome, Philadelphia, the Soviet Union, and the Indo-Pacific stop being history lessons and start being tools for reading the present.
If you think that is the wrong question, read anyway. Good arguments deserve disagreement.
