Suppose you've any interest in military history or just strategic thought in general. In that case, you can't go wrong with the great courses "Masters of War: History's Greatest Strategic Thinkers" taught by Andrew R. Wilson.
So if you're like me, you find war to be terrible but fascinating. Wars are like thunderstorms in that regard, only interesting if you've got some sort of separation from the actual event. For instance, you might watch a thunderstorm from your window and be entranced, unless, of course, it turns into a tornado and blows your house down. Then it's just terrible. Both storms and wars kill people, and choosing to not understand them isn't actually a defense.
Strategic thought, however, is a lesson the history of war can teach you, and luckily it can be divorced from national death contests to enhance other aspects of your life. I think people commonly go wrong when they read things like "The Art of War" is because they then equate everything to a "war" like business or negotiation. But the real lesson and the point is to see things as a strategic puzzle to be solved. Domination is only one sort of solution and often not even the best. War hawks fall into that fallacy because they can't ever imagine solutions other than violence.
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