Geopolitics

The first axis of Hermínio Cerqueira’s work is also its center of gravity: a body of strategic-analysis books, written over a short but unusually intense period, whose subject is the transition of the international system from the end of the unipolar moment to the competitive multipolarity of the 2026–2050 horizon. The reader who follows this axis in the order proposed here will soon recognize that this is not a collection of stand-alone titles but a coherent intellectual project, with its own vocabulary, a declared method, and a recurring geography: the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific, the Ukrainian front and NATO’s eastern flank, the Eastern Mediterranean — and, running through all of it, Portugal, conceived not as a spectator but as a small Atlantic state that absorbs, redistributes, and occasionally amplifies the shocks of the system. The method is constant: verifiable open sources, explicit dialogue with the international strategic literature (from Mahan and Clausewitz to Waltz, Keohane, Nye, Taleb, or Havel), a disciplined distinction between fact, interpretation, and foresight, and a deliberate choice of the Portuguese spelling that predates the 1990 Orthographic Agreement. The tone, for its part, deliberately oscillates between the treatise and the civic essay: the author writes, as he confesses in one of these books, with rigor but without coldness, convinced that thinking about geopolitics as an abstract game between powers would betray what is truly at stake. The entries that follow comment on each book in its individuality, without losing sight of the edifice they form together.

The third axis of Hermínio Cerqueira’s work descends from the scale of the great powers to the European and Portuguese scale — and it is here that the catalog reveals its most constructive face. If the geopolitical axes diagnose a world in fragmentation, this axis asks what Europe, and within it Portugal, can do with that diagnosis. The five books that make it up form a coherent program of political economy: sovereignty conceived as a sum of capabilities (Autonomia Estratégica), the critique of the budgetary rules that stifle it (O Mito dos 3%), the strategic treatise that projects it into the 2026–2036 decade (A Esperança Lúcida / Lucid Hope), the social contract that must sustain it from within (A Economia da Dignidade), and the common home that shelters it (A Bíblia do Ambiente). In all of them, the same structuring conviction: dependencies have a price, and sovereignty options — energy, technological, budgetary, social, ecological — are built or lost by decision.