Winner and loser in world politics?

While playing Risk during class, winning objectives were given to each team, but that is never the case with real world politics, because in real life, world politics is a continuous process; just because someone has obtained a treaty or has successfully taken over a territory doesn't mean the world ends at that point and declares a nation a winner. In reality, each action has its consequences and reactions by other parties, and by these measures, it is difficult to distinguish a black and white victory objective for a nation. Furthermore, in real world politics as it was with the Risk game, everyone has different agenda they wish to achieve. One nation achieving one of its goal doesn't necessarily mean the same thing for another nation. Therefore, the notion that there is a definite set of goals that a nation can achieve in order to be considered the "winner."

These limitations on absolute victory conditions doesn't mean that there is no "victory" in real world politics. As mentioned before, the world doesn't end at the point one nation achieves "victory" however, there are certain kinds of actions one might consider to be victory and thus, define a winner in world politics. Every state has its own agenda and list of goals they wish to achieve, whether it be obtaining trade treaties or enforcing their will in certain regions, and these agenda differs from one state to the other. Because these goal's reflect what the state wishes to accomplish, these goals can be represented as saying what each state's goal is towards "winning" in the global politics; however, with the changing environment, these agenda is continuously changing and also reactions of other states limit the extent to which these items on agenda are achieved; some will be successfully accomplished while others may have to be discarded. Therefore, it is never possible to determine one "winner" who will be winner forever because no state ever gets it their way the entire time.

To sum it up, each state's agenda reflects each state's goals, and these goal's can be seen as representing the country's objective for "winning" yet the continuous changing nature of these goals makes it difficult for one nation to be determined as winner. However, at a deeper level, the agenda does not matter. When we talk about a state's agenda, we are assuming that it has some degree of capability to achieve these goals, but more importantly, that it is autonomous; it didn't choose these goals because PTJ told them that these set of items are their goals; they chose those items because they believe it will be beneficial to accomplish them. Because autonomy plays such a vital role in determining the objective for "winning," autonomy in itself becomes an objective for a state. A state cannot be a winner without being autonomous, therefore, autonomy is the first step to determining who is a winner. Thus, it follows that at the most basic level, a "winner" is a state that is autonomous and capable enough to achieve goals that better itself rather than serving others, and in that sense, most states that we know can be considered winner, or on their way to becoming a winner, in the eyes of their citizen only, at some point in history.