The original plan had also called for reading a piece by Stephen Peter Rosen from the Winter '01 Naval War College Review, but that seems to have been taken down from their website.
As overview pieces into the study of security, particularly culture and regimes, I found them interesting. I've always had a semi-conscious distrust of the very idea of "strategic culture," because it seems to often to lend itself to Orientalist statements about the "true nature" of another culture, often forcing our own pre-conceptions (and usually some degree of barbarity) onto them. At the same time, I know there is a great deal of concern about the possibility that the opposite tack, ascribing universal principles and ideals (a la game theory) is just as bad, because it tries to make everyone think like Westerners.
This came up for me during my thesis defense in '07, because I had used a traditional, game-theoretic view of deterrence and relationships to inform it, and my advisor (a Chinese political scientist) point blank told me that he wasn't sure you could really apply this kind of theoretical model to anything involving China, due to its cultural differences. I wish I could tell you that I had some masterful answer as to why deterrence was still applicable, but I honestly stumbled through that question. (He still gave me an A.)
And that is one thing I want to keep in mind as the semester progresses. It's really easy to get locked into thinking, "Oh, well, the Chinese/Japanese/etc. have this value system, and so we can expect them to do this." It's much more difficult to keep in mind the variations within each state, and that culture is important without necessarily being the dominant factor.
As for Jervis, I can admit to not thinking much about regimes previously. I had some trouble getting through it, but it should be obvious that the security regimes are not very strong in East Asia. The SCO was shown to be a bit of a joke last year with the Russian invasion of Georgia, largely seen to be in support of the kind of separatism that the SCO is supposed to help prevent. I know much less about ASEAN (which is why it's on my list of things to read about this year), but I've not heard too much positive about its security efforts.
At the same time, I don't know that there is much push for regime building in East Asia. The presence of a rogue state seemingly unwilling to play by most international rules (North Korea) along with a rising superpower (China) seems like it could make it difficult to get any kind of regime in place.
In short, it was interesting background, but I'm eager to get to the more concrete stuff.
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