For a time in the early 1980s, extreme forms of certain generalizations about Soviet and U.S. societies provided the intellectual justification for the refinement of nuclear warfighting strategies in the United States. The former Soviet military was said to exhibit a preference for preemptive, offensive uses of force that was deeply rooted in Russia’s history of external expansionism and internal autocracy. The United States, on the other hand, tended to exhibit a tendency towards a sporadic, messianic and crusading use of force that was deeply rooted in the moralism of the early republic and in a fundamental belief that warfare was an aberration in human relations.’
Such characterizations of the superpowers’ strategic predispositions have been examined under the analytic category of “strategic culture.” Although the term remains loosely defined, the past decade has seen a growing amount of research on the relationship between culture and strategy. The characterizations noted above had obvious policy implications at one time, and thus imply shortcomings in ahistorical and non-cultural structural models of strategic choice at the heart of mainstream international security studies. Thus it seems worthwhile to take a closer look at the analytic value of strategic culture.
This article assesses the progress that has been made in studying strategic culture, examines the conceptual and methodological problems in the literature, and offers some possible solutions. It also suggests some caution about using strategic culture as an analytic tool. I begin by reviewing the literature on strategic culture and argue that the dominant approach to strategic culture is at the same time under-determined and over-determined, and has so far been unable to offer a convincing research design for isolating the effects of strategic culture.2 On the basis of this critique, I then offer a definition of strategic culture that is observable and falsifiable, and suggest a number of ways of conceptualizing its relationship to behavior. Finally, I suggest that the link between strategic culture and behavior should be approached with a great deal of care. Research on the symbolic elements of strategy suggests that strategic culture may not have a direct independent and societal-specific effect on strategic choice. At the same time, literature on group formation and in-group-outgroup differentiation suggests that a wide variety of disparate societies may share a similar realpolitik strategic culture. Thus strategic culture may have an observable effect on state behavior, but contrary to much of the existing literature on strategic culture, it may not be unique to any particular state.
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