Reddit mentions of Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order

I've been reading Charles Hill's Grand Strategies, which at first probably doesn't seem like /r/literature material, but bear with me.

If you have any interest in international relations history, then this book is something that you should pick up. Unlike straight history books or IR theory, Hill illustrates the major developments in international relations history through selections from major works of literature throughout history, from Homer's epics up through the present.

This is a humbling book. When you read it, you realize that you are not even close to well-read enough to have written something like this. Beyond just the breadth of his knowledge of literature and its historical context, the lateral connections he makes between works are unexpected and interesting. It's a book I couldn't even begin to write at this stage in my life.

I'm only a couple chapters in, but one of the effects has been that my Amazon wishlist (usually filled with international relations and history books) is filling up with classic works of literature.

Oh what specifically?

As far as East Asia/Indian Ocean stuff, Robert Kaplan is a pretty good introduction. His book Monsoon is a really good primer on the history of the Indian Ocean region, and it's ongoing (and increasing) importance in international politics. His new book Asia's Cauldron is promising, I haven't read it yet but it is a contemporary and forward looking take at the South China Sea and its role in shaping the future of international relations in the region. I actually just bought it the other day and will be reading it soon (spending the next 18-33 months abroad doing various things). Kaplan's books tend to be a very readable mix of history, personal anecdotes, and political analysis. Sometimes he can get a bit full of himself, especially in sections of Monsoon, but he does a great job at making what he writes accessible to a wide audience while still being at least interesting to read for academics.

For a primer on broad international relations, International Politics is a great starting point. This was my introduction to the field, and while it can be quite dense, it is very informative. It is a collection of essays and articles that is aimed at an intro level IR class (100 level), so while it is certainly on the academic side of things, it is still very approachable, so long as you have the patience to occasionally look up terms and concepts, for someone with no academic background in the subject.

As far as a general reading on grand strategy, I have only heard amazing things about Charles Hill's Grand Strategies. Basically it examines military grand strategy from a historical perspective, the politics behind the strategy, and also ties it into popular literature (such as Shakespeare) in order to make the concepts approachable and digestible for the average person.

For modern military theory that is applicable to today's world, and probably worth understanding given what has been going on in the world for the past decade and what continues to happen, you might be interested in David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla. Kilcullen has two major books on insurgency, one is Counterinsurgency which is a higher level approach to the topic, while Accidental Guerrilla is a distillation of his observations and studies on counterinsurgency viewed put into a framework that would be easier for the average person to understand.

Admittedly I am a bit biased, as Francis Fukuyama is a family friend, but his latest works The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay are great looks into how and why the state system arose, as well as flaws in political systems, corruption, etc.

His earlier (and more famous) book, The End of History and the Last Man is still a very interesting read, although without the proper framing it can be a bit odd in the current global political climate. It works off of a concept that I think is best described in Phillip Bobbit's The Shield of Achilles, which Bobbit terms the "long war". The grand concept of the Long War is that the game changing interstate conflicts throughout history have predominantly been between different types of states. It is a bit of a Darwinist look at state politics and political order, seeing different political models (democracy, communism, fascism, monarchy, etc) as directly competing, and there being a series of successors. The End of History works off of a similar premise, basically saying that once the Soviet Union collapses (it was originally formulated as a series of articles in the late 1980s), Liberal Democratic Capitalism would be the predominant political system, and that it would mark the "end of history" as we knew it up to that point. History had been dominated by massive regional and worldwide conflicts between states that often differed in structure, and that once all the major powers had pretty much gotten to the point of L-D-C, then interstate conflict as we knew it would cease to exist. Obviously conflict still exists, but it is much harder to imagine a World War III in todays world, despite tensions with Russian and China, than it would be just 30 years ago.

The Republic

Leviathan

The Prince

1984

Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order