(Part 2) Best products from r/IRstudies

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives

by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Zbigniew Brzezinski tackles the United States grand strategy on maintaining American preeminence in the twenty-first century.

> Central to his analysis is the exercise of power on the Eurasian landmass, which is home to the greatest part of the globe's population, natural resources, and economic activity. Stretching from Portugal to the Bering Strait, from Lapland to Malaysia, Eurasia is the ”grand chessboard” on which America's supremacy will be ratified and challenged in the years to come. The task facing the United States, he argues, is to manage the conflicts and relationships in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East so that no rival superpower arises to threaten our interests or our well-being.The heart of The Grand Chessboard is Brzezinski's analysis of the four critical regions of Eurasia and of the stakes for America in each arena—Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and East Asia. The crucial fault lines may seem familiar, but the implosion of the Soviet Union has created new rivalries and new relationships, and Brzezinski maps out the strategic ramifications of the new geopolitical realities. He explains, for example: Why France and Germany will play pivotal geostrategic roles, whereas Britain and Japan will not. Why NATO expansion offers Russia the chance to undo the mistakes of the past, and why Russia cannot afford to toss this opportunity aside. Why the fate of Ukraine and Azerbaijan are so important to America. Why viewing China as a menace is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why America is not only the first truly global superpower but also the last—and what the implications are for America's legacy.

It should be noted Trump is reported to have stated in an, as of now unreleased, interview that he will not adhere to the One China policy without concessions from China. That's...a dangerous stance.

As for recommendations, first it's cross-straits. But also China and Taiwan (Goldstein 2015) is a strong summary and starting point.

http://www.thediplomat.com is an excellent news site for Asian news, and CSIS/Brookings have excellent seminars (that they put on Youtube if you can't catch them in person) and free publications that discuss current events.

I think this is important, but I think it's also misleading in several ways. Kissinger was never a 3rd image structural realist. Like most Classical Realists he was driven more by historical interpretation than by social science theorizing. Most classical realists have ontologically heterogeneous arguments that span all three of Waltz's levels of analysis.

I do find it misleading for the author to imply that Kissinger 1) had a significant change of heart, and 2) that he was somehow (even if implicitly) influenced by Wendt or Katzenstein.

Finally, I think it's worth pointing toward scholarship like Barkin's Realist Constructivism that argues that the two schools are not mutually exclusive. Further, constructivists like Richard Ned Lebow have looked at some classical realists – Thucydides, Clausewitz, Morgenthau – in an appreciative light.

Slaughter wrote a very concise summary of the main IR theories.
Simply look-up and read the main articles referenced in that text/of the authors, and you'll have a solid entry into the theoretical backbone to IR.

With regard to textbooks: I read The Globalization of World Politics before I started my studies and felt it was quite accessible as it split up the main theories, mid-range theories, as well as different issue-areas into nice digestible chunks in a very accessible manner.

If you enjoyed the Slaughter summary and want to truly dig into the academic side of it all: Theories of International Relations was my favourite IR textbook. I got to admit that quite some of our class thought it was at parts too dense, but that is exactly what I was looking for. Given that you will be doing IR for at least three years, this book should come in useful more than just once.

Sure, the basics, but for advanced information gathering consider using SPSS. Andy Field gives a good introduction if you're interested.

"World Making: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy"
By David Milne

Pages: 625
Publication Date: September 22, 2015

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VE7D7GC/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

"[T]he story of the hundred or so years when a sequence of public intellectuals shaped the discourse and practice of U.S. foreign affairs" - Richard Aldous, The Wall Street Journal

Currently reading. Wouldn't mind starting over. Great insight into the intellectuals and the relationships that shaped American Foreign Diplomacy since the 20th century.

We used International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity in the IR class I was assisting in and I thought it did a pretty good job of presenting the main theories. If for some reason you can read French, I would also recommend Théories des relations internationales by Dario Battistella.

The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria is always a good place to start for some of this stuff. Also, a unique look at globalization and democratization (or at least, the profusion of knowledge from democratic systems to non-democratic ones) can be found in critiques of the World Bank or of the trade policies of large bodies such as the EU and the US.

Also, I love that a person going by gingerballz asks questions regarding IR. This is why reddit rulz.

Have a look at Bad Samaritans. In short, the World Bank perpetuates economic neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies promote the liberalization of trade, which means that developing countries are not given the chance to nurture the infant industries that could make them competitive in world markets. Essentially, the World Bank is in the business of ensuring that developing countries never develop.

Currently I have on order "Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History" by Robert D. Kaplan. It is under 400 pages. It was recommended to me today by a friend when discussing past issues with the Balkans in preparing for next week's UN Security Council meeting dealing with Kosovo Independence. https://www.amazon.com/Balkan-Ghosts-Journey-Through-History/dp/0312424930

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order – by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. 352 pages (audiobook available, though I'm unsure of length).

>A must-read for the new American president and all who are concerned by the state of the world and the prospect of things getting worse. Richard Haass takes the reader galloping through the last four centuries of history to explain how we got to where we are, and then offers an insightful and strategically coherent approach to coping with and managing the challenges before us. Practical and provocative: a book that sets the policy table.

–Robert M. Gates, former United States Secretary of Defense

>This is a thought-provoking book that suggests the new foreign policy 2.0 requires more global engagement.

–The Huffington Post

>A valuable primer on foreign policy: a primer that concerned citizens of all political persuasions -- not to mention the president and his advisers -- could benefit from reading.

–The New York Times

Man, the State, and War by Kenneth Waltz.

Even though Waltz is a realist [or a founder of "neorealism"], this books gives you a good idea about the three levels of analysis that basically inform all theoretical thought in IR.

My personal opinion on Kissinger's Diplomacy is that it is a little slow and roams a lot. It could have been a lot shorter and more informative.

Edit: Clarity.

I think the discussion here has been pretty thorough, but if this is a question which has been buggin' you, I highly recommend Buzan's International Systems in World History where he traces the development of international systems (defined as broadly as possible) back into prehistory.

This is relevant to your question because if we say that the global order in which we now live is a condition of our time, rather than an enduring feature of the international system, it makes sense to go back and look at how various international systems evolved.

I posted this over in the Hillary Clinton sub. I don't expect anyone over there will appreciate because it's a rather loud echo chamber...

The thing is that Trump is not completely wrong (although he would have been a bit more correct about the currency manipulation a few years ago). The Japanese, South Korea, Taiwanese... and now the Chinese got rich protecting their own markets/currencies and selling to markets in North American and Europe (they did it by applying variations on what's called the 'developmental state" model). You could buy a South Korea car in the US long before you could buy an American car in South Korea. Their explicit national policy was to prioritize their growth over and above any "free market" considerations. In other words, they ignored the rules of free trade when it suited them. This is in fact not free or fair, and the costs of these policies are often borne by a concentrated unlucky few (even though everyone else benefits).

There is a fairly established literature on the politics surrounding trade, if anyone is interested. (I always tell people to start here and here to get in the proper analytical mindset). Notice that that NYT article never really quoted political economists, but only economists? That because the math of economics pretends the political consequences of trade do not exist. Trade absolutely needs to be accompanied by a generous welfare state to compensate the losers and keep them invested in the process. And when it no longer benefits a country, they abandon it.

more to the (IR) point. People need to get it out of their heads that trade is universally good. Trade is no more universally good than alliances are universally good. You can talk all you want about Pareto frontiers, but the truth of it is that trade that deprives you of an industrial base weakens your defense capability and is therefore bad on that metric.

Actually, even the EU is a good example of what I was talking about. It's true the EU has surpassed the expectations of many and achieved a surprising amount of cooperation among previously perpetually warring states.

However, there is a limit to the degree of integration they can undertake. No European state wants to fully relinquish their sovereignty to the EU lawmaking process. A roadmap for slowly achieving this also doesn't exist, because there is no reasonable path to reach that "end state". For the EU to progress politically, there will have to be quite enormous shifts in European or world politics for it to occur. The book "After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order" by G. John Ikenberry covers the topic of the creation of new "international systems" in a lot more detail.

OP: have you read Hopf's work? It's really great analysis of identity and comparative foreign policy. You might consider using that study as a model for your own. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801487919/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_ohYvybARG140M

I had the same issue after my BA, Making Sense of International Relations Theory was an interesting book that I still go back to occasionally. It is nicely split into all the theories and has multiple texts on each of them

Amazon Link

Edit: formatting

Amazon got the hook up, as always

Link: https://www.amazon.com/China-Henry-Kissinger/dp/0143121316