International Relations

Fukuyama himself, thirty-plus years after the original essay, correcting the popular misreading Unit 3 opens by correcting: that he predicted the end of conflict rather than the exhaustion of serious ideological rivals to liberal democracy. Hearing the author restate his own thesis in his own words, under direct questioning about how it holds up against the years since 1989, is the single best primary-source check on whether Unit 3's careful, fair restatement of the essay matches what its author still says he meant. Assign directly after the unit's opening section, before the out-of-sample scoring exercise begins.

Dr. John Nagl and Col. Chase Metcalf work through 'the changing character of war through the study of the Russia-Ukraine War' from the institution whose actual job is training the officers who will fight the next one — the professional-military register this course's audience overlaps with directly. This sits squarely at the junction of Unit 6 (alliance credibility, European security architecture) and Unit 10 (the changing character of war, force generation), delivered as a public lecture rather than a classified briefing, which is itself notable: the Army War College routinely puts its own faculty's live analysis of the standing laboratory in front of a public audience.

A 2026-dated assessment of exactly the force-generation-versus-equipment distinction Unit 10 draws formally: Perun separates what's actually arriving, what's promised, and what remains genuinely uncertain about Ukraine's air-defence and fighter pipelines, modeling the evidentiary discipline (claim, source, confidence level) this course asks students to bring to every dated claim about the war. Pairs directly with Unit 10's force-generation section — equipment resupply is only half the constraint the unit identifies, and this video is explicit about which half it is and is not addressing.

Perun's own dating convention — 'the war economies of Russia and Ukraine going into 2026' — is the exact discipline Unit 10 asks you to practice: every claim about the war carries a point-in-time stamp because the laboratory is still live. This briefing runs the full force-generation, air-defence, and 'will to continue' assessment Unit 10 builds formally, using publicly sourced production and casualty data rather than battlefield narrative. Watch the Economics chapter (50:33) against Unit 10's cost-exchange-ratio argument, and the Will to Continue chapter (58:43) against Unit 5's sanctions-adaptation material — this single video touches both units' live case data more directly than any documentary released before the war reached its fourth year.

Perun spent a week inside a live NATO command wargame testing a fictional invasion scenario against new multi-domain command concepts — a rare firsthand look at exactly the institutional wargaming discipline Unit 6's alliance-credibility material and Unit 2's Waltz-and-security-dilemma material both gesture toward abstractly. Watch the 'Game Played Out' chapter (26:40) for a live demonstration of how a professional military actually reasons through an Article-5-adjacent scenario under uncertainty, rather than how a treaty text describes it on paper — the exact gap Unit 6 opens with.

The scholars behind Unit 5's central theoretical framework, interviewed together on how weaponized interdependence has moved from an academic argument to the organizing logic of Western economic statecraft since their 2019 article. This is close to primary source: Farrell and Newman explain the chokepoint and panopticon effects in their own words and extend the framework past the Russia sanctions case into the broader 'economic security state' both scholars argue has emerged since. Watch this after Unit 5's SWIFT and correspondent-banking material — it supplies the theory's own architects reasoning about where the framework generalizes and where it doesn't, which is exactly the caution Unit 5 asks students to hold about de-dollarization claims.

Kotkin's single appearance in this library, honoring the course plan's personal exemption for his evidence-first register while holding the line against further Hoover concentration elsewhere in the collection. Kotkin works through how both sides have, in his reading, already lost strategically regardless of battlefield outcomes, and reasons through several negotiated-settlement pathways with the same archival-detail-first, generalize-cautiously discipline Units 1 and 5 borrow from him directly. Pairs with Unit 1's capability-counting material and Unit 9's authoritarian-durability question — Kotkin applies the identical unglamorous, mechanics-first method to both.

Farrell and Newman's book-length treatment of weaponized interdependence, discussed in a long-form public forum that gives the argument room the 2019 journal article couldn't — including direct historical case-study material on the Russia sanctions regime that Unit 5's Recommended Resources cites as the fuller elaboration of the founding article. This is the deepest single video treatment of Unit 5's central theoretical framework in the entire library; watch after the unit text as the extended version of the argument the unit necessarily compresses.

Bellingcat researchers demonstrate a specific, current technique — using flight-simulator terrain rendering to cross-check geolocation candidates — that extends the MH17 workflow Unit 7 walks through step by step into the tool discipline the organization actually uses today. This is the method in current practice, not historical case study: watch it as a live demonstration of Unit 7's chain-of-custody and multiple-independent-confirming-feature standard, applied with 2020s-era tooling to whatever the organization's researchers happen to be verifying that week.

A direct tutorial on Bellingcat's own OpenStreetMap search tool, built specifically to speed up the terrain-and-street-furniture geolocation method Unit 7 teaches as a worked example. This is the organization showing its actual current workflow rather than narrating the MH17 case retrospectively — assign it as a hands-on companion to Unit 7's geolocation exercise, since the tool it demonstrates is the direct current-generation descendant of the manual cross-referencing method that cracked the MH17 case in 2014-2016.

Applebaum delivering her Autocracy Inc. thesis as a formal academic lecture rather than a media interview — the register that most directly matches Unit 9's careful, mechanics-first treatment of her argument. This is the fullest single-video statement of the networked-kleptocracy-not-ideological-bloc claim Unit 9 builds its entire structure around, distinguishing her framework from Cold War-era models of autocratic solidarity in exactly the terms the unit's opening section uses. Watch before Unit 9's financial-plumbing section for the theoretical frame the rest of the unit's mechanics fill in.

The exact opening lecture Unit 1 draws its central argument from directly: Snyder's claim that Ukraine 'must have existed as a society and polity' before February 23, 2022, or its population could not have collectively resisted invasion the next day. Watch this alongside Unit 1's section on Snyder's argument — the lecture is the primary source the unit's prose paraphrases and cites, delivered by Snyder himself framing the entire 23-lecture course around the war as a live historical question rather than settled history.

Spaniel's own Lines on Maps channel, not his game-theory channel — the geopolitics register the course plan specifically asks for. This walks the founding-member logic and every subsequent accession wave against the same bargaining-and-information framework Spaniel applies throughout his channel, directly complementing Unit 6's close reading of Article 5's actual legal text with the political logic of why states seek that legal text's protection in the first place, including the specific procedural and geographic obstacles (the North Macedonia dispute, geographic restrictions) that have kept some applicants out for years.

Recorded within three months of both countries' accession applications, this is Perun applying his defense-economics register to Unit 6's central natural experiment: two states with decades of careful non-alignment abandoning that posture within weeks, in direct response to observing how Russia treated a neighbor. Watch the 'Balance of Power' chapter (27:31 onward) against Unit 2's realist material on why states respond to shifts in relative power even absent direct aggression against them — Finland and Sweden's decision is a textbook illustration of the security dilemma's mirror image: reassurance-seeking rather than escalation.

Spaniel's bargaining-model account of the war's early months treats the conflict as an information problem exactly the way Unit 1 does: Russia's failed assumption about Ukrainian resistance is reframed as bad information entering a bargaining game, and the war itself as the (extremely costly) mechanism by which that information gets corrected. Watch the 'Russia Learns It Was Wrong' chapter (4:14) directly against Unit 1's capability-counting material — Spaniel is making the identical point in formal bargaining-theory language that Unit 1 makes in Kotkin's evidence-first prose register.

Recorded in the war's first week, West Point's Modern War Institute convened a panel including CNA's Michael Kofman and a West Point Department of Social Sciences professor to assess the invasion in real time — a direct historical artifact of exactly the kind of prediction Unit 1 asks students to score against later evidence. The 'Sanctions' and 'Currency Reserves' chapters (6:18-11:20) preview Unit 5's central case months before the frozen-reserves scale was fully understood, and the 'First Four Days' chapter is a professional-military real-time read of precisely the capability-counting failure Unit 1 dissects afterward.

A Naval War College professor of national security affairs works through NATO's founding 'unsustainable bargains' and burden-sharing tensions in a short, public-facing faculty-spotlight format — a useful contrast in register to Perun's longer defense-economics treatment of the same alliance-credibility questions Unit 6 raises. Watch the 'US NATO burden' and 'political bargains' chapters directly against Unit 6's free-rider and audience-costs material; Gvosdev is naming, from inside the institution that studies the alliance professionally, the exact tension Fearon's academic framework formalizes.

Dr. Antulio Echevarria, the Army War College's Director of Research, works through Clausewitz's Trinity and principles of strategy as part of the institution's long-running Perspectives in Military History series — the exact primary-source theoretical grounding behind the Clausewitz quotation ('war is merely the continuation of policy by other means') this course cites in Units 1 and 10. This is the professional-military register applied to classical strategic theory rather than to the live Ukraine case specifically, giving students the fuller theoretical background the course's Clausewitz citations assume but don't have room to unpack.