Politics
The word comes from the same Greek word from which the title of Aristotle's book "Politics" (Πολιτικά, "Polis") also derives; "polis" means "affairs of the cities". The book title was rendered in Early Modern English in the mid-15th century as "Polettiques"; it became "politics" in Modern English. The singular "politic" first attested in English 1430 and comes from Middle French "politique", in turn from Latin "politicus", which is the Latinization of the Greek πολιτικός ("politikos"), meaning amongst others "of, for, or relating to citizens", "civil", "civic", "belonging to the state", in turn from πολίτης ("polites"), "citizen" and that from πόλις ("polis"), "city".
Power politics
Power politics (or, in German, Machtpolitik) is a theory in international relations, which contains the idea that distributions of power and interests, or changes to those distributions, are fundamental causes of war and of system stability.
The concept of power politics provides a way of understanding systems of international relations: in this view, nations compete for the world's limited resources and it is to an individual nation's advantage to be manifestly able to harm others. Power politics prioritizes national self-interest over the interests of other nations or the international community, and thus may include threatening one another with military, economic or political aggression to protect one nation's own interest.