I’ve been re-reading some Thomas Schelling, and reminded of how much insight there is on nearly every paragraph of every page (as has been said: “whole careers in international relations have been built out of codifying a few sentences in Schelling”).
Some excerpts, below.
First, The Strategy of Conflict (1960):
On the (then) paucity of strategic studies:
“[M]ilitary services, in contrast to almost any other sizable and respectable profession, have no identifiable academic counterpart … Within the universities, military strategy in this country has been the preoccupation of a small number of historians and political scientists, supported on a scale that suggests that deterring the Russians from a conquest of Europe is about as important as enforcing the antitrust laws”. (p8)
On trying to persuade someone you’ll carry out an irrational threat:
“And one can suspend or destroy his own “rationality”, at least to a limited extent; one can…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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