<p>But the OP doesn’t need to abandon his thoughts of getting a MA in IR. Within his/her curriculum, s/he can choose electives relating to East Asia in different departments to get a feel of what discipline would be the best. That’s what I really like about IR programs as opposed to straight political science.</p>
<p>History is history. You look at everything from historical perspectives and some statistics models. You’ll go so far as recent as the 1980s. Very, very few history courses on the 1990s and early 2000s exist because historians don’t believe that the field is ready to examine those decades objectively. So if you want to look at the fall of the Soviet Union or Rwanda conflict, go for the IR masters and choose another discipline. You have to give about 20-30 years between today and then in order for those events to appear in the field and be taken seriously. So we won’t really see anyone working on the Clinton years until about late 2010s in the field of history.</p>
<p>A case in point, my history professor just finished her first semester of teaching graduate students for the FIRST time since 1984. She used a very similar syllabus with an updated book list. Back in 1984, she told me that she went as far as late 1960s in terms of course materials. In THIS class, she was able to go into late 1970s and had some final papers about the early 1980s, totally unthinkable at that time. In her concluding remarks, she said that she’s very excited to go into the 1980s and there’s so much that needs to be done now that enough time has passed for a more objective examination of that decade. She thought going into the early 1990s was just pushing it.</p>
<p>So the question is, does the OP want to spend more time looking at historical models or more contemporary ones?</p>