Nau, Henry R. 'International Relations Theory.' Online video clip. SAGE Publications Ltd, 14 Jan.
• 00:11 PROFESSOR HENRY NAU: Well, it's about the efforts of peoples from different cultures, histories, backgrounds, languages interacting and trying to work with one another. Sometimes, of course, coming into conflict with one another. It's really politics at the highest level, and the most dramatic stage, you could • 00:31 PROFESSOR HENRY NAU [continued]: say, of political interaction. So it has enormous excitement to it, I think. I actually didn't start out in the field, I started out in science. Caught up in the Sputnik era, went off to study engineering.
• 00:55 PROFESSOR HENRY NAU [continued]: But learned in the first few years that I really wasn't too excited by laboratory work. I come out of a background where my father was both an historian and a philosopher. So there was some interest in these subjects of politics, and history, and economics. So I decided after serving in the army-- and after having read, by the way, the Churchill volumes, • 01:18 PROFESSOR HENRY NAU [continued]: Winston Churchill's accounts of the Second World War, which got me very excited, I thought to myself, gosh, this is the kind of thing I'd like to study. So I went back to graduate school in political science and international relations. And it was a great to a decision on my part. Because while I kept some interest in science and still do, it would not have absorbed me • 01:41 PROFESSOR HENRY NAU [continued]: the way that the field of international affairs has.
I think it was the human drama. I mean, this is sort of novels of reality. Students always tell me how much they enjoy reading novels, and I have a wife who loves to read novels. And I say, well, then you've got to study international affairs. It's the most interesting novel you can think of.
It has every aspect of what we like in novels. • 02:04 PROFESSOR HENRY NAU [continued]: Romance, tragedy, death, inspiration, success, failure. It's all there.
And, of course, it tells us how we got to where we are. So it's actually even more important than just simply enjoying a very good novel that introduces us to human feelings and perceptions, but doesn't really • 02:24 PROFESSOR HENRY NAU [continued]: help us to understand exactly how the world got to be the way it is. Yeah, I studied under were very prominent one, Robert Osgood, who was a very inspirational teacher. And preeminent scholar in the early postwar period, • 02:44 PROFESSOR HENRY NAU [continued]: along with people like Henry Kissinger and others who had to confront this question of how does the world deal with nuclear weapons. And also with, of course, the confrontation with the Soviet Union.
So he wrote some wonderful books, idealism and self interest in American foreign policy. And so he was had a big inspiration on me. • 03:04 PROFESSOR HENRY NAU [continued]: So did a professor of political science, Norman Padelford at MIT, where MIT had a little burgeoning school of international affairs in the late '50s and early '60s when I was there. And he got me working on the UN in connection with a project that he was doing, and that also sparked my interest.