The world has always been a lunatic asylum. The only difference is that previous generations of lunatics have been tidied into history textbooks, where their madness looks orderly and even inevitable. Ours has not yet had that privilege.

A superpower claims sovereignty over an allied neighbor's territory. A sitting president is kidnapped from his own country. Civilian populations on every side of every conflict are ground between millstones they did not build and cannot stop. Wars are waged not to achieve victory but to sustain the industries and political careers that depend on perpetual conflict. And through it all, every leader, every faction, every revolutionary movement operates according to a single imperative so obvious that it is almost never spoken aloud: the pursuit of power.

The Madness of World Politics strips away the rhetorical camouflage of international affairs to expose the structural machinery beneath. Drawing on formal theories of complex systems—phase transitions, institutional corruption, managed chaos, and the dynamics of deception—Boris Kriger reveals that the apparent insanity of global politics is not random but patterned. The same mechanisms that drive a narcissistic relationship drive the behavior of empires. The same structural forces that make corruption inevitable in underfunded bureaucracies make war inevitable between mismatched civilizations. And the populations caught in between—in Gaza and Tel Aviv, in Kyiv and Moscow, in Caracas and Washington—are always hostages, never players.