Power politics, or Machtpolitik (borrowed from German), is a state of international relations in which sovereigns protect their own interests by threatening one another with military, economic, or political aggression. The term was the title of a 1979 book by Martin Wight, which the Times Literary Supplement listed as the 18th most influential book since World War II.

Power politics is essentially a way of understanding the world of international relations: nations compete for the world's resources and it is to a nation's advantage to be manifestly able to harm others. It prioritizes national self-interest over the interest of other nations or the international community.

Techniques of power politics include, but are not limited to, conspicuous nuclear development, pre-emptive strike, blackmail, the massing of military units on a border, the imposition of tariffs or economic sanctions, bait and bleed and bloodletting, hard and soft balancing, buck passing, covert operations, shock and awe and asymmetric warfare.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (born November 24, 1946) is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Bueno de Mesquita earned his BA degree from Queens College, New York in 1967 and then his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He specializes in international relations, foreign policy, and nation building. He is one of the authors of the selectorate theory, and is also the director of New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy.

He has founded a company, Mesquita & Roundell, that specializes in making political and foreign-policy forecasts. Bueno de Mesquita is discussed in an August 16, 2009 Sunday New York Times magazine article entitled Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?. He is also the subject of a History channel two-hour episode entitled "The Next Nostradamus".

Stephen Joseph Harper, PC MP (born April 30, 1959) is the 22nd and current Prime Minister of Canada and leader of the Conservative Party. Harper became prime minister when his party formed a minority government after the 2006 federal election. He is the first prime minister from the newly reconstituted Conservative Party, following a merger of the Progressive Conservative and Canadian Alliance parties.

Harper has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for the riding of Calgary Southwest in Alberta since 2002. Earlier, from 1993 to 1997, he was the MP for Calgary West. He was one of the founding members of the Reform Party, but did not seek re-election, and instead joined, and shortly thereafter led, the National Citizens Coalition. In 2002, he succeeded Stockwell Day as leader of the Canadian Alliance (the successor to the Reform Party) and returned to parliament as Leader of the Opposition. In 2003, he reached an agreement with Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay for the merger of their two parties to form the Conservative Party of Canada. He was elected as the party's first non-interim leader in March 2004.