What’s the best way to get good at history – which is basically to acquire an intuitive grasp on how different systems interact in a way that’s value added for predicting our world world?

My advice is to start off by reading high quality world histories from a wide variety of frames (make notes and highlights as you read).

• “Big History”: Integrations of economics and technological development at the broadest scale, e.g. the cliodynamics literature; Morris’ The Measure of Civilization; Chanda’s Bound Together.
• The Geopolitical: The logic of state competition and the factors that determine which nations/coalitions tend to triumph in wars, e.g. Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
• The Economic: Some broad economic histories, e.g. Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Pomeranz, Braudel, Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, papers on literacy.
• Anthropology/Evopsych: How this interweaves with the human, e.g. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Cochran and Harpending’s 10,000 Year Explosion, Bloom’s Lucifer Principle, the HBD stuff if you’re up for it.

This will give you an important ability to maintain relative perspective as you expand down to regional, thematic, and period studies.

For regional studies, I would select 2-5 books. Here are some books I would consider “canonical” to include in any one country study (LLMs can populate the rest).

• United States: D.H. Fischer’s Albion’s Seed.
• China: Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past
• England: Tombs’ The English and Their History
• Russia: Malia’s Russia Under Western Eyes
• Germany: Clark’s Iron Kingdom
• Southeast Asia: Lieberman’s Strange Parallels

World War II

Understanding WW2 in a nutshell:

• Germany was overshadowed by the Allies in economic potential; approximately matched by the USSR and the British Empire, far outmatched by the US. The average Briton was richer than the average Germany, and the average American, far richer. The German gamble was to build up a continental-scale industrial base through conquest-extraction before the US could bring its economic dominance fully into play. See Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction.
• This gamble was extremely risky but it was not obviously doomed to failure for two reasons.
• The survival of the Soviet Union through the shocks of 1941-42 was a close run thing. See Mark Harrison’s work.
  • (Incidentally, Lend-Lease played a role in Soviet survival and subsequent ability to advance far greater than its modest low single-digit share in raw numerical categories like tanks contributed.)
• The German military had a 25-30% greater combat effectiveness advantage over the Western Allies, and more like a 2x one over the Soviet Union. (See Trevor Dupuy’s work or relevant data threads on the Axis History forums). This explains why, despite its economic weakness, it was so stunningly successful when the playing field was more level before 1942 – and why it lasted as long as it did afterwards, when it tilted sharply against it.
• That said Germany had no such advantage in the air or at sea, and its nuclear program was years behind the Manhattan Project. Even had it still beaten the USSR, but not by EOY 1941, the end result would have likely been one-sided nuclear Götterdämmerung. (Incidentally, same applies to an alt history US-Soviet war anytime during the 1945-55 decade).