Roleplay, realpolitik and ‘great powerness’: the logical distinction between survival and social performance in grand strategy

States exist in an anarchic international system which survival is the necessary precursor to fulfilling all of their citizens’ other interests. Yet states’ inhabitants – and policymakers they empower also hold social ideas about ends that state should value how it pursue them: ‘role’ expect ‘play’ politics. Furthermore, such role-performative impulses can motivate external behaviours inimical security-maximization thus for future interest-fulfilment. This article therefore investigates tensions between roleplay realpolitik grand strategy. It does so through interrogation four mutual incompatibilities realpolitikal understandings ‘Great Powerness’, a core but conceptually contested international-systemic ordering unit, thereby demonstrating logical distinctiveness. The argument illustrated with brief case studies on United States, China, France, Kingdom, Germany Japan. Identification security-imperilling role motives buttresses neoclassical realist theory; specifically, as account strategic deviation from security-maximizing baseline. Such conclusions carry important implications both scholarship statecraft, meanwhile. For once we recognize are necessarily distinct incentive structures, motives’ advocates no longer claim discharging performative preferences bolsters prospects too.