Reddit reviews Politics Among Nations

I support the development of a fully enforceable rules-based system of international law which would form a proper foundation for the effective eradication of genocide, etc. - but no such system currently exists. Accordingly, at present the best approach is the one very systematically detailed by Hans J. Morgenthau in Politics Among Nations.

IR graduate student here. There's some fairly important context that surrounds these comments. It looks to me like what he's doing is contrasting power politics with more ideational ones. For a long time, people viewed international politics as fundamentally different from politics within nations. The difference was that politics within the nation could involve concepts like right and wrong, and politics between them were all about power, specifically military power. These people call themselves realists, and they're losing ground in the field of international relations after being the dominant paradigm for decades. For realists, good policies were those that are aimed towards balancing power and bad policies were the ones that ignored the importance of power. He refers to Kissinger's book, and Kissinger was a major proponent of this way of seeing the world. Hans Morgenthau, a predecessor of Kissinger's and a major realist, wrote a book called Politics Among Nations. A professor of mine once referred to it as the "State Department Bible". He spoke to State department officials, and the argument is that the rise of information flows have made traditional approaches to diplomacy and international politics less relevant. It's a common theme in the international relations literature.

Check out Politics Among Nations by Hans Morgenthau for a detailed look at the basics of geopolitics. He was the quintessential father of modern "realism", but he describes the significance of many factors you are thinking of. Somewhere this PDF is available online.