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

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