A certain medieval gentlemen from Alamut would beg to differ. One does not need a standing army and nuclear weapons so much as the ability to inflict your politics on others credibly and unavoidably. There are many ways to do that, not all of which necessarily involve violence.
Put another way: There are many minority populations throughout history and up to this very day that have managed to carve out a niche in their host population without necessarily employing mass violence to do it.
It does make Clausewitz's saying about war being "politics by other means" back in context when you put it that way.
But really politics is just about "one person causes another to act". This can be through persuasion. It doesn't have to be force (or fraud for that matter).
Consider the persuasion of making a sale. That's not force. People can sell political ideas in the same way, they can spread virally.
EDIT: Also I consider economics, politics and marketing as basically "mass psychology". Hence all the problems with replication in those fields.
EDIT 2: And with these things being psychology, there's a big "default biological drives" component. A lot of the motivations for political etc actions are internal to each person.
The replication issues in those fields are partly attributable to the fields inability to explain behavior in terms of the biological imperative.
There is the theoretical rational actor which while very misunderstood is also subject to the stochastic and entropic reality. The 'internal motivation'
Persuasion can be divided into carrot and stick. The stick the implication of force against the individual and the carrot the promise of the ability to use force against other actors. This can be further expanded to negative force inherent from a relatively worse off position for not taking the carrot.
With some creativity all behavior can be formulated from a few simple primitives.
Interpersonal actions can be "win-win", "win-lose" (of which zero-sum is a subset) and "lose-lose". No force is needed to enter into a win-win arrangement.
I don't find that particularly relevant to my line of thinking. My goal is to build layers of abstraction up from automata to where all behavior can have a rational basis or aberration thereof from a stochastic and entropic process.
If you think that all politics is violence then you're always going to be woefully ineffective at it. Never bring a shotgun to a negotiation when a well-placed fact (or fiction) will do.
Put another way: There are many minority populations throughout history and up to this very day that have managed to carve out a niche in their host population without necessarily employing mass violence to do it.