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Foreign.
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Welcome to books, to battles, where we explore academic insights for real world air and space strategy. I'm Dr. Wendy Whitman Cobb, professor of Strategy and Security Studies and Deputy Commandant at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.
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And I'm Colonel Corey Holland, professor of Strategy and Security Studies, also at sas. Before we get any further, we want to note that all opinions expressed here are ours or our guests and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Department of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or war, or the United States government. We're joined today by Dr. Wes Hutto. Wes, welcome back. Still, I see, trying to take my job.
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C
Thank you. It looks, looks, it looks different in here. Yeah, I like the new. I like the new setup.
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Yeah. So I don't know if you guys. We've talked about the, the new setup. Yeah. So we have a new studio which is.
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C
We just took over and made a land grab.
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Well, we did, we did, but which
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I was reminded I had the power to do something like that.
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Yeah. We've got a new office that we've turned into a recording studio. It's a little bit more spacious and I like it a lot better. So I'm looking forward to maybe being able to get more than four people in here very uncomfortably. But yeah, so we've got the new space, but we're here actually today to talk to both of you about a new book that just came out, the Three Body Problem in International Relations, edited by U2 and it's out of the University of Florida Press and wanted to, you know, hear about the, the genesis of the book, what you are, we're talking about. So I guess I'll just throw it out there. What is the Three Body Problem?
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Well, it is first of all a famous physics problem in terms of, of astrophysics. And when you have more than three large bodies in, in this sort of position, it basically becomes a very unstable situation and planets go around each other and it's not predictable in any sort of way. But Wes, it is also the title
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of Shisin Liu's famous trilogy, Sci fi Trilogy remembrance of Earth's Past it is the title of the first book which is turned into a trilogy that's called the Three Body Problem.
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Netflix show of the same Name Netflix
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show of the same Name and there's the Chinese version of the show that follows the trilogy more closely, which means it's kind of boring for television, but, but not boring. It is true to the, it is true to the, to the novels. Yeah. I came upon this series, you know, a few Years ago, maybe six years ago, I started reading the series. And as most sci fi is, there are a lot of overlapping connections with the practice and theory of international relations, because you're dealing with big universe with, like, units, and how do you theorize about how those units may or may not engage with one another? And there just seems to be a lot of overlap with the discipline of international relations and the theories within it. And it's just as true for Shi Sen Liu's book. And as I was reading through it, you know, all of these ideas were coming to me for, oh, man, I could write this or, oh, man, this sparks this idea.
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It sparked joy.
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C
Yeah. And then I'm eating lunch in the lunchroom over at the Air Command and Staff College one day, and there's a copy of Strategic Studies Quarterly, God rest its soul. And I pick it up, and I'm flipping through it, and I see Wendy and Whitman Cobb, the Three Body Problem and Strategy. I curse Wendy's name several times. And I'm reading through this, and I'm getting madder and madder as I'm reading through it.
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Why are you. Are you getting mad?
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Because she beat me to the punch.
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Oh, okay.
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C
Yeah, she beat me to the punch.
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I've been there that, you know, it's like, hey, I really wanted to write this thing, or I even wrote this thing, and then I read somebody else that did it just that much better, and I'm just like, I. I hate every. Just be bad at something. Right. I mean, that's all I want is just some folks, they just need to be bad at something so that I don't feel so miserable in their presence.
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So.
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Okay, I'm with you. I'm with you. Go ahead.
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So fast forward about a year.
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I feel attacked in this.
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How do you feel attacked? I didn't know that was an attack. That was. Yeah.
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You did a good job, Wendy.
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Thank you.
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You did too good of a job. So fast forward a year, and I've moved from ACSC over to sas, and I'm having lunch with Wendy in our faculty lunchroom, and I was telling her that I had that I was cursing her name, that I cursed her name several times, and I was telling her the reason for that, and we started talking about the series and our shared affinity for the remembrance of Earth Past series and just how much overlap there is between concepts and strategy, like the security dilemma, or in international relations theory, like offensive realism, or its ties to sort of utopian utopianism in sort of a constructivist sense of the. Of of the word. And it, it turns out, you know, Wendy's article did not cover most of the stuff that we ended up discussing.
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B
Oh, and I knew that.
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C
Yeah, of course. And yeah.
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And so I remember. Let me pick up the story here. Okay. You looked at me, I remember this, and you said, you know, you could do a whole book about this. And I said, sure. You wanna?
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C
Yeah. And I was like, yeah, let's do it, let's do it. How about an edited volume? And that.
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And then I said, and then I said, are you sure you wanna work with me? Because if I say I'm gonna do something, it's gonna get done. And I am not a procrastinator. To those who have co authored with me before. Are you sure about. Sure you know what you're getting yourself into?
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When I said, did you know what you were getting yourself into?
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I said, no, I don't. But yes, I'm still willing to do this. And like within 48 hours, I think Wendy had put together a rough draft of a book proposal. And within a week from there, we had sort of a description of the market and what our book, how our book would fit into the sci fi and political science market, which is a growing genre of books. And we had some ideas about where we thought it could fit. And probably two weeks after that, I think we had half of the authors or the volume lined up because it
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turns out there's a lot of IR folks like us that read the book, read Three Body Problem and its sequels and loved it. There were several SAS faculty members before we even started out on this project who all, you know, I had talked about the article with them and how much we loved the series. So we knew that there was a lot of, a lot of folks out there who were really passionate about this series. And so I don't think it was a surprise to either one of us that how many people raised their hands or were like, absolutely, count me in.
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Actually, the person that introduced me to the, to the book to begin with, he, Greg Miller, who is the dean of space education for the U.S. air Force up at SAIS. He was the one that introduced me to the three body problem. And he's got a chapter in this book as well.
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Well, it looks like it's, it's, it's basically split up into kind of four sections, three main ones, and then sort of the introductory portion of it. So why don't you just sort of talk us through the arc of the book and then, you know, just bring out some of the highlights there's some of the. Of the articles that. That you have.
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C
Sure. So what I. What I think is special about this edited volume is that typically when you pick up a volume with an assortment of chapters in it like this one, the idea is that you can flip to any one of them and read them independently of the rest of the book and sort of glean some insights. You can do that with our book. But the chapters are organized in such a way that there is a narrative arc of this editorial volume. So the first section looks at the Three Body Problem in the discipline of international relations. So you've got. I authored a chapter in that section on John Mearsheimer's offensive realist theory and its overlap with the Dark forest deterrence theory of the Three Body Problems. Second book by the same name, the Dark Forest. This part deals with interpretations of the Three Body Problem that are primarily from a realist perspective, whether it be neoclassical realist, offensive realist, or neorealist. The second part of the book turns to the practice of international politics. So it's more of a strategy section and using the Three Body Problem as culling sort of lessons and overlaps for the practice of strategy. And that is. Wendy has a chapter in that section.
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It's actually. Yeah, it's the reprint of the original article that inspired all of us.
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Oh, okay.
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Right, right, right. Our own past SAS faculty member Mark Jacobson has a chapter about Clausewitz and the Clausewitzian overlaps with the Three Body Problem. Malia Feinenstiel, another past SAS instructor who is now at sams, the School of Advanced Military Studies. She's got an article with Luke Harrington on military clients and insurgencies. There's a section of the book that deals with when the aliens get to Earth, they quarantine all Earthlings onto the Australian continent and there's an uprising. And so they glean some lessons from that and some overlaps with this discipline and study of strategy. Jay Sankaran, who is at the LBJ School at Texas, is also another past sas.
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We definitely, definitely went to that.
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Well, yeah, he was a visiting professor for a year here, and he has a chapter on technology and strategy as well. So that's the second part. And then. So you have this build up from overlaps with the realist tradition in international relations, overlaps with sort of the strategic studies tradition, which is a subfield, I would say, of realism for the most part. And then in part three, we turn the table and we have critical readings of the book, critical readings of Shisun Liu's book. But Also critical readings of earlier interpretations of shifts and Liu's book, which we get to in parts one and two. This. Yeah, go ahead, Wendy.
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No, I was just gonna say, actually I was gonna talk about the introduction sections because I think one other thing that's in this final section, it kind of comes ties back to the beginning and that is, you know, this is a Chinese science fiction series. And China actually has sort of a stunted developmental history with science fiction as a piece of literature because of the Mao and communism and the Cultural Revolution, science fiction was not always in favor in. Under that regime and was sort of put discouraged. And so science fiction from a Chinese perspective has only really taken on this resurgence in the past couple of decades. And so that's one of the really interesting things about the series and what sort of lessons we can glean from it is because it is being written from this Chinese perspective. And. And so the introduction kind of places some context in terms of thinking about it as a. As a. Not just Chinese science fiction, but in terms of what we can sort of take as strategic lessons. And we return to that, you know, in some of these critical thinking, critical readings with, you know, thinking about within the context of the Three Body Problem, there's a set of fairy tales and one of them talks about a princess and this, the sea that she can't quite get across, but she has to get to an island to rescue her brother. And one of our authors, Dante Earle, who's a SAS grad, looked at that as a. A sort of allegory for Taiwan, China and Taiwan. We talk about Chinese developmentalism in that section. And then we finish with sort of turning all of this on its head and say maybe Three Body Problem isn't necessarily a realist interpretation of. Of international relations or international relations at a galactic scale. Galactic relations, I guess. But maybe it is a utopian one in some sense.
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How do you differentiate between those two
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without spoiling too much? By the time you get to the last book in the trilogy, everything in the universe has been set up as fairly static, Right. Planets and civilizations are so distant from one another that there's no. There can be no trust between them. And if you can talk to another planet, then you can destroy it. And the mere threat that it can destroy you makes you take the initiative first and destroy them.
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This is sort of classic security delay.
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Exactly. This is sort of the inherent logic of the first two books in the Three Body Problem. Stephen Dyson, who's at Connecticut and has written from a realist perspective about the Three Body Problem offered to sort of write a critique of his earlier perspective. And he makes this argument. When you get to the final book, you start to see, for various reasons, that I won't go into here because I don't want to spoil it for our listeners. You kind of see that the universe is much bigger than that static notion, or was much bigger at one point than that static notion of the security dilemma or the galactic security dilemma, as Wendy might say. And that realization opens up an incredible number of possibilities for how the universe got to where it was recognized in the first two books and the contingencies required to get it there. Meaning that there are other potential futures for the universe. There are other potential futures than the security dilemma, sure.
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But there are also infinite number of fan fiction threads that can be pulled as well in a multitude of different directions, so folks can sort of go and play in Xin Zi Liu's universe.
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Actually, there is a fourth book that is not written by Lou, but written by a fan, and it is sanctioned by him, but it is a sequel to the trilogy. And you see what happens. You pull one of these threads and see what happens in one of those contingencies. It's a very fascinating book. Obviously not one that we talked about within our volume, but to your point, it is one of these threads, and it did arise out of this fan fiction. And so, you know, we're not fiction authors, but this was sort of being fans of the book. This was our fan nonfiction response.
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You know, I'm obviously a huge Star wars nerd, and like you guys say, this is in an emerging market. I think it might have started. I'm sure there was something before this. But the first one that I really remember, making it big, was Strategy Strikes Back. Right. And then there was Winning Westeros after that, and then came to boldly go and then power up, all from the same group of authors led by Steve Leonard.
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Yep. We've got a blurb from one of the authors to power up on our back cover.
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So excellent. There's also Harry Potter and International Relations.
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Yeah.
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Is an excellent.
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So this is sort of a. A known thing. Well, in the Star wars universe. Right. Lucas has been very clear that the original script story that he told was an allegory for Vietnam. And then he realized he had way too much for one movie, so he broke it up. He broke it into this what we now call a New Hope, which originally was just the Star wars and the Star Wars. While it was sort of grounded in that Vietnam experience, Lucas was not a strategist or a military expert or anything like that. But still, reading back into it, you could see a lot of that in there. How much was Louis, the source author of this, influenced by or knowledgeable of IR theory, strategic studies and these sorts of things?
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Yeah, I'm not sure that he was necessarily very interested in that. But what comes across in the trilogy is clearly a reflection of the Chinese experience of the Cultural Revolution. The very opening scene of the. Of the three body problem in the American version. And I make this clear because I'll come back to that a second is a scene that takes place during the Cultural Revolution solution of one of the main characters. Father. Father. He's being. He's at, you know, one of these punishment sessions essentially, and he's. He's being tortured into renouncing. He's a physicist. He's being tortured into renouncing physics as a tool of the capitalist system and, and not consistent with communism. And he absolutely refuses to give in. He's eventually killed by a group of very young Red Guards and. And they. The main character witnesses this and. Yeah, and that motivates her later actions in contacting or attempting to contact, which turns into actual contact alien civilizations.
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Now is this. It's set in the Cultural Revolution, so
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we're talking 19, 1970s. Yes. Yeah. So the first part is in this cultural. And it fast forwards, but the driver of the action, the thing that initiates the storyline that, that, that takes place over the course of three books is this Cultural Revolution experience of seeing her father tortured, eventually killed, and then she eventually goes to a work camp herself and she see, she sees the harms that we are not only doing to one another, but to the environment. And so she becomes sort of a disenchanted humanity. Yes. Not just communism, but with humanity as a whole. And interestingly enough, that opening scene in the Chinese version of the book is not the opening scene. It's buried within. It's actually in a different part of the novel. It's buried in the middle. And part of that is he's trying to get around the censors. If he had loaded that front up.
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Allegedly. That's.
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Allegedly. Yeah. If he had put that right up front, you know, how are you getting that through?
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Because they're definitely going to notice that.
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Yeah. So I think while he's probably wasn't very influenced by, you know, strategic studies, I think he is writing from a deeply Chinese perspective and experience and history. And that, I think is suffused throughout the series.
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C
Yeah, it's hard to know exactly. You Know my chapter on Mearsheimer and dark forest deterrence. It's hard to know whether or not Shisin Lo has ever read John Mearsheimer because it is so close to John Mearsheimer's reading of what international. Of how international relations look like. Look looks. The tragedy of great power politics is expanded into this tragedy of galactic politics for Shisunliu. And this is kind of a trope. I sort of mentioned this earlier. This is kind of a pattern of science fiction over time. Is there's a lot of overlap with theories of international politics because essentially it is very much unlike domestic politics, because the similarities are there is no universal hegemon to control the space. Well, control the space, adjudicate disputes between states, adjudicate disputes between planets. Right. Isaac Asimov was very interested in empire and empire building internationally. That overlapped a lot with studies of colonization and imperialism from the early 20th century. Right. And Sissen Liu is interested in the anarchy of the universe. And consequently that overlaps a lot with the anarchy of the international state system. So I don't know if the connections are purposeful, but they are certainly there just by the nature of the subject matter.
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A
And it's interesting that. That it goes toward that realism, you know, from a assumption of an anarchical universe that there is no, you know, there's no Dune, Great Emperor. Right. But that it then goes toward the. Therefore you can't trust anyone. If you can talk to them, they can kill you, which means you have to kill them first, as opposed to going in a number of other directions that also assume a fundamentally anarchical international order. Does. Do you guys explore that or is that for volume two of the three body problems? Would that be the six body problem or the.
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The nine body?
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The nine body. I'm not exactly sure how that works.
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C
I do get at this a little bit, and I'll just read a couple of excerpts that I use as epigraphs for the beginning of my chapter, if that makes sure that would be useful. So this is Ye Wenzhe speaking, who is a character in Shise and Liu's book. She's the primary character. She's the one whose father was killed during the Cultural Revolution. And she's imparting this dark forest theory onto the protagonist of the second book. And she's talking about axioms of cosmic sociology. Right. And they're very simple. And she has a few. She says, first, survival is the primary need of civilization. Second, civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant. Everything's a zero sum game, right? One more thing. To derive a basic picture of cosmic sociology from these two axioms, you need two other important concepts. Chains of suspicion and the technological explosion. Those end up being incredibly important. And the chain of suspicion is this idea that you cannot trust other states, that other planets. Thank you, John Mearsheimer in his Tragedy of Great Power Politics. States. States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because other states are potential threats and because there is no higher authority to come to their rescue. Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable and alone. And vulnerable and alone are the two qualities that Earth has for most of the trilogy. And so it's these sort of overlapping descriptions of the axioms of behavior in international relations, the axioms of behavior in cosmic sociology that I sort of play off of in this chapter now. But in the last section of that chapter, my conclusion, or the other title for my conclusion is the Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, which I was very proud of for sneaking that in because that is one of my favorite albums by a band called Explosions in the sky from Austin, Texas. And it's an excellent post rock album. If you're. If you're an Explosions in the sky fan. My heart goes out to you. But the Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place. I really liked that. I was able to sneak that in there because it's in print now. No take backs. University Press of Florida. Yeah. So in the last bit of this conclusion, I sort of explore what is different about our reality on Earth than what is then. The. The. The characters in the three bodies problem. In the three body problem. Their reality. And I argue basically that while security dilemmas on Earth seem about as intractable, much of the time their intractability is mitigated by lots of things. Right. Jervis, Robert Jervis has pointed out that states can make sacrificial. Sacrificial gestures such as giving up nuclear weapons or their pursuit. We've seen this. And this lessens the likelihood of them being perceived as a threat. Uncertainty of the. The intentions of states in this world as well as cosmic sociology, as well as the galaxy, is real and pervasive. But technological developments in transportation and computation have made travel and communication effortless, whereas the. Travel and communication across the universe is. Is much more difficult. So diplomacy between states is much easier. It lessens uncertainty in our world. The interactions due to this globalization, I point out, also create patterns of interdependence between states. And there's interdependency between states. States begin to rely on each other, reciprocity emerges as, as a, As a pattern of behavior across states. This sort of happens in the book, but it breaks down very, very easily. Right. And finally, I, I make the point that in our world, humans and states only behave according to the rational dictates of these axioms a fraction of the time. And we live with our emotions, we live with our moral commitments, we live with all of these other cultural, ideological factors that inhibit our following of these rational axioms, these.
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A
So does Lou, then sort of take the. Everyone is a rational, a purely rational actor in this universe. There is no mitigating emotion or doubt or uncertainty or.
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C
Because if you can communicate, you can destroy the other civilization. Lou makes the argument that only the civilizations who take that opportunity survive.
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B
Yes. And just to connect a bit more directly back to your question in my chapter, what my second chapter in here explores a little bit of those dynamics and in the emotion of it, because while the Earth is able to establish some sort of deterrent situation, but it breaks down when responsibility for that deterrent situation is handed to a different. What they call sword holder who is, you know, this person who can literally hit a button and destroy both situations. So they've established this situation, a mutually assured destruction. There's one person who is in charge of it. And when responsibility for that is passed on to somebody different, who allows emotion to play into their calculus and moves away from that rationality, deterrence breaks down.
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A
Right.
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B
And so, you know, I think Lou is making this sort of argument that in galactic politics there is no room for that emotion and no room to allow anything but rationality.
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A
Well, and that was one of the things that always, you know, as someone who hasn't been as steeped in the theory always fascinated me was that you look at, you know, Mearsheimer, for example, and you'd say, yeah, but that's not how it actually plays out. I mean, you can't explain several phenomena. And the response that I've always received back was what he is saying is that if you do not, you are either accepting risk and. Or guaranteeing that these bad things are going to happen. Play by these rules or you're going to suffer the consequences. And Lou coming at it from the same perspective?
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B
I think so. Although again, you know, kind of in line with Dyson's chapter and sort of this rereading of Three Body in this utopian world, you know, even though emotion fails as a deterrent factor there, he. I think he still allows for some sort of emotion because again, this, this character who lets down, everybody. When she becomes the sword holder and allows emotion, she. At the beginning of all of. At the timeline at least, because the books kind of go back and forth in time. At the beginning of the timeline of these events, she actually is gifted a star by this. This man, this terminally ill man who is in love with her. And they eventually.
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A
That's only moderately creepy.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I mean, does it get.
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B
Well, it gets worse because they take his brain out of his body.
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A
Okay.
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And try to send that to the alien civilization to communicate with them.
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A
Oh, awesome. Yeah, good plan.
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B
Which does sort of eventually work better than you think. Yeah, it works. By the third book, it works moderately well. And they actually are able to establish this form of coded communication which allows the Earth civilization to sort of understand what their alien counterparts are doing and what the plans are, and he's able to, in a coded way, get that information back to her. But there is this sort of love there that is able to make those connections. And we find out that the original sword holder also has a very deep love of humanity and has been out on Pluto trying to save the remnants of Earth civilization. And so I do think, even though Lou is arguing for this intense rationality and the primacy of rationality, I think he does allow for emotion to play some sort of role. I don't think he's too fond of it, but I think, you know, in the very last book and sort of the last events that are happening, there is a role for love and emotion in determining what happens to the universe.
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A
Now, I also found it interesting that you talked about cosmic sociology versus intergalactic interplanetary relationships, Right? Because sociology assumes that we are all part of one sort of defining thing. It's a society, right. The study of society. Whereas international or interplanetary relations can assume fundamentally different things. So is Lou making the assumption that every living being in the three Body problem universe is fundamentally the same?
- [31:59]
C
It's a way. And this is why it lends itself so easily to overlapping with discussions about neorealism. In particular, Mearsheimer's offensive realism is because one of the enduring characteristics of a neorealist world is treating states like. Like units, right? If we assume billiard balls, if we assume that every state kind of looks the same, right? If we assume that power matters, if we assume that every state can achieve offensive capabilities, then we can make a lot of claims about what we think states will do based on the distribution of power in the international system. So when Ye Wen Jay gives the protagonist of the second book, whose name is Escaping me at the moment. When Ye Wen Jie gives him these three axioms of cosmic sociology, what she's essentially saying is if you assume that the universe is very big, if you assume that states cannot communicate with one another,
- [33:15]
B
you're much better at pronouncing the names than I am.
- [33:18]
C
Yeah. If you make these assumptions, then we can infer so much about how states are going to behave. And the inference, what it ends up being from Luo Ji's perspective, is that if you find another state in the universe, if you find another planet in the universe with a civilization that is having these technological explosions where they are able to reach out and communicate with you, and if they know where you are, then you are in terrible, terrible danger. And the only way to get out of that danger is essentially to destroy them before they destroy you.
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B
And to the sociology part, I think, I think that's actually maybe more descriptive of international politics than perhaps international politics, because I mean, at the end of the day, what we're studying in IR is how societies behave, especially how they interact with one another. And that is sociology. It's the study of a society. And so when we think about cosmic sociology, it's a study of how cosmic civilizations behave and interact. And really we're just theorizing about what behavior is going to emerge as a result of these interactions. And so I think there's a very deep relationship between the study of sociology and the study of societies and the study of what they do when interacting with one another.
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A
I think it's also interesting in that if you make these assumptions. Was the preface to a lot of what you just said was, you know, if you make these assumptions about this is the way that the cosmos is ordered true, then all of these things follow from it. Yes, that is, that is not a logical fallacy. That is a correct, correct sort of reasoning chain. But if you have different assumptions or if you have evidence against the assumptions that you do have, now all of a sudden everything changes, right? And now there is a completely different sort of order that you're going to, to have to deal with. Does, does Lou ever sort of address that of, or are these assumptions just sort of taken as pass down wisdom that is unexamined and, or just proven by hard fact?
- [35:42]
C
Well, the assumptions of cosmic sociology in the books turns out to be the case. It turns out to be an accurate description of how planets deal with each other. In one section of the book, you're introduced to an alien named Singer, and he's the one that eventually, spoiler alert, Destroys the Earth. Right. And he works. He's a bureaucrat.
- [36:06]
B
He doesn't destroy it, he just flattens it.
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C
He flattens it, which effectively destroys it. He's a bureaucrat. He's a bureaucrat that is looking for patterns. He's looking at data and he's assessing patterns. And he's looking for technological patterns of civilizational development. And when he sees a particular pattern, they call him singer because he sings while he works. And when he sees a particular pattern, he has a thing that he's supposed to do, and it's like a little paper airplane. It's described as a paper airplane in the book that he sends off. And it's. It's something. It's an interplanetary weapon.
- [36:44]
B
A dimensional strike.
- [36:45]
C
Yeah, it's a dimensional strike. Thank you, Wendy. She remembers the books much better.
- [36:49]
B
I don't know about that.
- [36:50]
C
And it flattens the entire solar system.
- [36:54]
B
It takes what was three dimensions into two. And it turns out this had been done previously, that our universe is what
- [37:00]
C
we find out in the third book,
- [37:02]
B
that our universe had once existed in many or ten dimensions, many dimensions. But over the course. Course of all these generations, multiple dimensional strikes have been carried out to reduce the known universe to just three dimensions.
- [37:17]
C
And so Dyson plays with this idea in his chapter about the social construction of interplanetary politics and asks the question whether or not the universe in the future. Lou, in the end of the book, basically gives us an. An open question about whether it could be different. And he describes the new growing universe in very beautiful, poetic terms. At least it's poetic through the translation. I don't read Chinese, so I don't know if it's poetic Mandarin. It's very beautiful and it's poetic. And it's a grow a new growing universe, a new opportunity to interact with each other on a peaceful basis, to interact with each other on a cooperative basis. And Dyson sor. Of takes this and thinks about the Three Body trilogy as a piece of utopian international thought. Break, break. What I would. Another thing that I would like to say about this. This. This book is the contrary.
- [38:23]
A
This book being the 1. The 3 body problem that you. Your volume. Your volume. Okay.
- [38:29]
C
Another. Another thing that I'd like to say about our volume is it is not intended as a piece of scholarship that builds out the political science or the international relations or the strategic studies canon.
- [38:42]
A
Right?
- [38:42]
B
We're not treading new ground. We're not discovering new theories or we are.
- [38:46]
C
We are simply attempting to use the three body problem as a Teachable book about the. The discipline of international relations and strategic studies.
- [38:57]
A
And. And I love when folks do that because it would, you know, if I were trying to teach strategy or air power theory to, you know, someone who did not have that as part of their experience growing up and which, you know, frankly, some of our students at SAS do not have the historical grounding for the lexicon or the lexicon to be able to talk about air superiority, air supremacy, or how, you know, all the air power theorists works or military theory, you know, clause with Germany and all of. All of these guys. But they've all seen Star wars. And so I can talk about, hey, look at. Remember at this particular point, operational planning in the Return of the Jedi. It's like, hey there, this is a great. A horribly botched operation that could have gone great if they had just done these, you know, number of things. But I don't have to spend all the time doing the history. And I like the books like this that are. We are trying to apply these academic insights into science fiction that is accessible to everyone, which now will maybe bring you more into our world. And you can see how the academic insights now think about this as it applies to the actual Earth here now in 2026.
- [40:25]
C
Yeah. So this is very much a book that's written for undergraduate students, majors in international relations, graduate students or master's students that are specializing in this to clarify the concepts that they're getting from other readings in their curriculum. It's also, I think, a book that anyone could just pick up, especially a fan of the series.
- [40:45]
B
Yeah.
- [40:46]
C
If you're gonna pick up and think about, oh, how does this apply? How do. How do these ideas in this sci fi series apply to my world?
- [40:55]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think it enriches that experience, having this sort of companion reader to the series to, oh, here's the topic, here's what they're talking about. Here's what, like, it actually means and looks like. And we might ha. Here's how we might think about it. So, yeah, I think it's definitely a companion to those three, those fans.
- [41:13]
C
It's a recruitment tool for new international relations theorists. How much do you like these ideas? Well, let me give you their Darren story.
- [41:22]
A
I think that is probably the best place that we can end this for this week. So, Wes and Wendy, thank you so much for the work that you have done in putting this book together. It was a lot of fun and for.
- [41:35]
B
It was nice working with you, Wes. I hope I wasn't a pain.
- [41:38]
C
No, not at all. It was fantastic.
- [41:40]
A
And thank you for coming on and retrieving your word and talking about it and getting this the message out to everyone again. The book is called the Three Body Problem and International Relations from the University of Florida Press. Thanks to all of our regular listeners and we will see you next week.
- [41:56]
B
Thank you for tuning in to Books to Battles. We hope you enjoyed today's discussion. If you liked today's episode, please be sure to like and subscribe and even tell a friend about us. Also, don't forget to send us any questions you'd like answered or or suggest future episodes. You can contact us at bookstobattlesau af edu. For Colonel Corey Holland, I'm Dr. Wendy Whitman Cobb. And don't forget, strategy doesn't stop at the page.