Have you done a lot of US-China or have any kind of IR background? Lots of people recommend starting out with reading the first couple chapters of Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics in order to get a sense of how things work at the macro scale, I think that the first two chapters of Thomas Schelling’s Arms and Influence are neat but it’s pretty old.
I don’t know if you intended it this way, but I read this comment as saying “the author of this post is missing some fairly basic things about how IR works, as covered by introductory books about it”. If so, I’d be interested in hearing you say more about what you think is being missed.
I’m not really the right kind of person to be commenting on this here, I thought I might end up being the only person responding (this was the first comment) so I left a comment that seemed significantly better than nothing. The helpfulness of my comment was substantially outclassed by subsequent comments.
Mearsheimer still makes for a good base, especially for someone whose main exposure to international affairs and military/government was from reading the news and high school civics class (e.g. constitutional checks and balances), which unfortunately is the level that many non-international focused regulation-specialists in EA are still at. I don’t think this speaks badly to their skill level and certainly not their potential, just that they start out in a really unfair circumstance, with a head filled with a bunch of bullshit that just needs to be thrown out as cleanly as possible, and Mearsheimer is a great way to do that. I don’t remember much about the benefits from reading my first IR textbook, but I remember feeling extremely confused and disoriented, whereas Mearsheimer left me with a clear model that I could tweak and criticize and add gears to.
Mearsheimer starts you out with “yes, this is how it is, and the stuff you grew up with and still see in the news is total bullshit and you’re going to have a bad time trying to build a solid model off of that” and people can’t do well with modelling international affairs unless they’re prepared to bite the bullet and do that at some point. Mearsheimer’s model itself is of course insufficient on its own, but its empirical base and predictiveness are strong, and it sets up the student to add in their own gears (a big one being information warfare). That’s really important for being able to forecast how slow takeoff will disrupt and transform the system in historically unprecedented ways.
I don’t think this speaks badly to their skill level and certainly not their potential, just that they start out in a really unfair circumstance, with a head filled with a bunch of bullshit that just needs to be thrown out as cleanly as possible, and Mearsheimer is a great way to do that.
I’m out of the loop; what’s the bullshit from high school civics class that needs to be thrown out of my head, and why is Mearsheimer unbalanced but also a good starting point?
Have you done a lot of US-China or have any kind of IR background? Lots of people recommend starting out with reading the first couple chapters of Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics in order to get a sense of how things work at the macro scale, I think that the first two chapters of Thomas Schelling’s Arms and Influence are neat but it’s pretty old.
I don’t know if you intended it this way, but I read this comment as saying “the author of this post is missing some fairly basic things about how IR works, as covered by introductory books about it”. If so, I’d be interested in hearing you say more about what you think is being missed.
Agreed.
I’m not really the right kind of person to be commenting on this here, I thought I might end up being the only person responding (this was the first comment) so I left a comment that seemed significantly better than nothing. The helpfulness of my comment was substantially outclassed by subsequent comments.
I’m curious who you’ve seen recommending starting with Mearsheimer? That seems like an unbalanced starting point to me.
I’d personally recommend a textbook, like an older edition of World Politics.
Agreed on the choice of an older edition.
Mearsheimer still makes for a good base, especially for someone whose main exposure to international affairs and military/government was from reading the news and high school civics class (e.g. constitutional checks and balances), which unfortunately is the level that many non-international focused regulation-specialists in EA are still at. I don’t think this speaks badly to their skill level and certainly not their potential, just that they start out in a really unfair circumstance, with a head filled with a bunch of bullshit that just needs to be thrown out as cleanly as possible, and Mearsheimer is a great way to do that. I don’t remember much about the benefits from reading my first IR textbook, but I remember feeling extremely confused and disoriented, whereas Mearsheimer left me with a clear model that I could tweak and criticize and add gears to.
Mearsheimer starts you out with “yes, this is how it is, and the stuff you grew up with and still see in the news is total bullshit and you’re going to have a bad time trying to build a solid model off of that” and people can’t do well with modelling international affairs unless they’re prepared to bite the bullet and do that at some point. Mearsheimer’s model itself is of course insufficient on its own, but its empirical base and predictiveness are strong, and it sets up the student to add in their own gears (a big one being information warfare). That’s really important for being able to forecast how slow takeoff will disrupt and transform the system in historically unprecedented ways.
I’m out of the loop; what’s the bullshit from high school civics class that needs to be thrown out of my head, and why is Mearsheimer unbalanced but also a good starting point?