My own journey in the world of foreign policy has been richly rewarding and while I have learned much I have truly only scratched the surface. In understanding any one given area there is an incredible amount of relevant information, from history and ethnicity to politics and religion. If I had to describe the task at hand one word would more than suffice: intimidating. But in the spirit of encouraging, edifying, and guiding anyone looking to become more informed, I wanted to put together a small list of tips that can help you master any foreign policy area.
Getting off on the right foot when it comes to consulting good resources to follow is a good practice no matter what field of study one is engaged in. Luckily, in the modern media age, we don’t have to satisfy ourselves with old guard periodical pieces and filtered, curated opinions. The internet provides a myriad of different media-forms and convenient tools with which to process them.
News sites and blogs are an obvious, more traditional source. News aggregators like Antiwar.com provide a broad but central repository for keeping informed on current events and researching historical news as well as serving to provide a filter with which to group and understand foreign policy perspectives. Other typically trustworthy sources for written web content are libertarian and paleo-conservative news sources and blogs, such as Zero Hedge, the Mises Institute blog, and, a personal favorite, The American Conservative magazine/blog. These resources do not solely focus on foreign policy, but when they do, they track closely with a non-interventionist viewpoint.
More modern media avenues like YouTube channels, podcasts, audiobooks, and Twitter can provide even more versatile ways to learn from and interact with those who specialize in foreign policy. The Ron Paul Liberty Report and The Scott Horton Show are great examples of resources that can be consumed on demand especially in circumstances which are not conducive to dedicated reading, like at work or during commutes.
And there are plenty of tools to help manage all of that content. Podcast apps like Apple Podcasts and Stitcher help organize and track podcast listening progress and I personally use Feedly as a blog aggregator to help me organize and consume blog and news sources. The moral of the story here is to dive in, find a trustworthy resource, and start learning. The podcasts and blogs that I follow today are not what I first started following and as your interests focus and your expertise advances, resources gain and lose their relative usefulness. Don’t be afraid to look for new resources or drop old ones.
One of the best pieces of advice that I can share with anyone from my experience in studying foreign policy is that you will never feel informed enough to understand half of what you read or hear at first. So embrace it! Early on, whether one is reading news reports from foreign correspondents, op-eds from this or that pundit vying for page views, or even the odd Twitter post, it can easily feel like you are reading a foreign language. But the key goal here is to simply take it all in. It can seem nonsensical at first to surround yourself with information that you only partially understand but the constant immersion is part of the process. You will very quickly find that the language, the terminology, the people, places, and events being referred to become part of the fabric of your understanding.
Another great advantage of purposefully studying broadly is that it helps to ignite fascination and interest in an organic way. Much like man, no subject in foreign policy is an island and understanding any one subject can easily involve a multitude of other related areas. For me, this is one of the great thrills that make studying this area of knowledge so satisfying.
I know, this seems contradictory, but hear me out. The universal fact about any one event, any one notable person, is that history never happens in a vacuum. One person’s life intersects with another, one event occurs as a culmination of events prior. And so, studying any one portion of history or foreign policy can almost never be done without at least touching upon the events and conditions that surrounded it.
For instance, a year or so ago, in pure late ’20s fashion, I decided to embark on reading the biographies of the U.S. presidents. Since much of formal American history takes place against the backdrop of the presidency, it made sense to me to understand the men and the events that surrounded their administrations. And while those biographies did give me particular knowledge about each president, I was surprised by how much that study actually affected my understanding of the timeline of American history even more. By studying each of these men deeply, it was impossible not to learn about the places they were from, the events that they presided over, and the people that they surrounded themselves with.
We must also consider the fact that, as you become more acquainted with the material, you will undoubtedly wish to specialize in some particular region, person, people group, event, etc. This is one of the great factors that drives passion in study; the desire to know something more deeply and to gain mastery of that knowledge. By all means, don’t restrain that passion simply because it doesn’t suit the goal of acquiring broad knowledge. Follow that passion, see where it leads. And you will likely find that your knowledge increases in ways that you did not expect.
The truth is that studying broadly and studying deeply complement each other enormously in creating real, recallable knowledge of any subject, especially diplomatic history and foreign policy. I think of this learning process as being similar to getting to know the layout of a town after having moved there. There are some obvious landmarks that one begins with, like ones’ house, ones’ workplace, and the coffee shop in between. Everything else is a massive jumble of people and places. But slowly and surely those landmarks help to serve as launching points for understanding the geography and organization of everything else around them.
I hope that your fears about getting started or going deeper in understanding foreign policy have been assuaged, even just a bit. In part two, I will share some additional tips that have not only helped me to become more knowledgeable but have actually changed how I view the world and provided me skills useful for foreign policy and life in general.