Again, your full reply is very layered. So here, my response targets just that slice of it quoted above.
I would characterize the 21st century as in transition between Realpolitik that assumes a competitive state situation, and an even more realistic Politik - given nuclear weapons, AI, global networks, and environmental planetary boundaries - in which a rules-free international competitive state system is a luxury humanity can no longer afford. If only everyone saw this through the eyes of Olaf Palme and others like that! Our transitional situation certainly complicates the analytic challenge, however. We must both analyze the etiology of the disease (world history to date, centered on state competition) as well as the proposed pathway to recovery (finding a mechanism to restrain inter-state competition, with respect to the most destructive of weapons systems, at the very least.) Analyzing how we got here - unbridled competition - is certainly not an endorsement of perpetuating these very same behaviors into the far off future! Very much the opposite. Sun Tzu put it very succinctly: “Know your enemy”. To overcome competitive statecraft, we must understand competitive statecraft. That is where the production-destruction heuristic comes in handy.
Being as realistic as possible - Hobbesian even - it’s difficult to imagine how means of destruction such as nuclear weapons can result in anything that might realistically be called “victory”, let alone “spoils”. Blowing up the world to colonize the world sounds like the stupidest idea ever. Let’s suppose all world leaders remain thoroughly enmeshed in the five passions. Greed, fear, attachment, etc. would still seem to argue against a completely irradiated planet. It does not require sainthood to consider the possibility of better alternatives. It does take imagination and vision, however, and the ability to stretch cognitive filters in shapes and directions all of our inherited cultural assumptions will prove incapable to support. Tradition may well “seed” our creative thinking about the planetary future, but that thinking itself must needs blossom into ideas humanity has barely been able to dream of . To be “rational” today, is to match our thinking to the requirements of the moment. The truly rational must in fact advance to the transrational.