Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History

By Alastair Iain Johnston

Cultural Realism is an in-depth study of premodern Chinese strategic thought that has important implications for contemporary international relations theory. In applying a Western theoretical debate to China, Iain Johnston advances rigorous procedures for testing for the existence and influence of "strategic culture."


Johnston sets out to answer two empirical questions. Is there a substantively consistent and temporally persistent Chinese strategic culture? If so, to what extent has it influenced China's approaches to security? The focus of his study is the Ming dynasty's grand strategy against the Mongols (1368-1644). First Johnston examines ancient military texts as sources of Chinese strategic culture, using cognitive mapping, symbolic analysis and congruence tests to determine whether there is a consistent grand strategic preference ranking across texts that constitutes a single strategic culture. Then he applies similar techniques to determine the effect of the strategic culture on the strategic preferences of the Ming decision makers. Finally, he assesses the effect of these preferences on Ming policies towards the Mongol "threat."


The findings of this book challenge dominant interpretations of traditional Chinese strategic thought. They suggest also that the roots of realpolitik are ideational and not predominantly structural. The results lead to the surprising conclusion that there may be, in fact, fewer cross-national differences in strategic culture than proponents of the "strategic culture" approach think.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691213149

Alastair Iain Johnston

Alastair Iain Johnston is the Governor James Noe and Linda Noe Laine Professor of China in World Affairs at Harvard University.

Book preview

CULTURAL REALISM

PRINCETON STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS

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CULTURAL REALISM

STRATEGIC CULTURE AND

GRAND STRATEGY IN CHINESE HISTORY

ALASTAIR IAIN JOHNSTON

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1995 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnston, Alastair Iain.

Cultural realism: strategic culture and grand strategy in Chinese history / by Alastair I. Johnston p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-02996-2

ISBN 0-691-00239-8 (pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-691-21314-9

1. China—History—Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. 2. National security—China. 3. China—

Military policy. I. Title.

DS753.J64 1995 951'.02—dc20 95-3105 CIP

http://pup.princeton.edu

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES  vii

PREFACE  ix

CHAPTER ONE

Strategic Culture: A Critique  1

The International Security Field and Strategic Culture  4

Strategic Culture and China  22

Conclusion  27

CHAPTER TWO

Some Questions of Methodology  32

Definitions of Strategic Culture  33

Objects of Analysis  39

Methods of Analysis  49

Empirical Analysis  52

CHAPTER THREE

Chinese Strategic Culture and the Parabellum Paradigm  61

Righteous War  69

On Violence  71

On Not Fighting and Subduing the Enemy  99

Conclusion  106

CHAPTER FOUR

Chinese Strategic Culture and Grand Strategic Preferences  109

A Typology of Grand Strategies  109

Central Paradigms and Grand Strategic Preferences  117

Conclusion  143

CHAPTER FIVE

A Return to Theory  155

The Strategy of Symbols and Symbolic Strategy  156

Some Hypotheses about Ming Strategic Decision-Making  170

CHAPTER SIX

The Parabellum Paradigm and the Ming Security Problematique  175

Bingshu in the Ming Dynasty  176

Ming Security Problems Along the Northern Border  183

The Parabellum Paradigm and Alternative Grand Strategies  186

On Violence  190

Conclusion  212

CHAPTER SEVEN

Chinese Strategic Culture and Ming Grand Strategic Choice  216

Patterns in Ming Grand Strategic Preferences  217

Strategic Preferences and Coerciveness in Ming Security Policy  231

Conclusion  242

CHAPTER EIGHT

Conclusion  248

APPENDIX A

Coding Procedures  267

APPENDIX B

Terms Used to Describe Legitimate Actions Directed at an Adversary  270

Terms Used to Describe Outcomes of Actions against an Adversary  273

APPENDIX C

Map of Northern Border Areas in the Ming Period  274

REFERENCES  275

INDEX  293

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES

TABLES

PREFACE

THE CENTRAL QUESTION in this book is twofold: To what extent is there a substantively consistent and temporally persistent Chinese strategic culture, and to what extent has this strategic culture influenced China’s use of military force against external threats historically? The empirical focus is on the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). By strategic culture I mean ranked grand strategic preferences derived from central paradigmatic assumptions about the nature of conflict and the enemy, and collectively shared by decision makers.

This book, then, is about ideas and their relationship to behavior. Despite the centrality of this relationship to political behavior, it is an exceedingly difficult causal connection to show empirically. Perhaps for this reason, the dominant neorealist or realist school in international-relations theory has avoided the problem by trying to construct a theory of state behavior that privileges the incentives and constraints created by particular configurations of power in the international system structure.¹ The notion of strategic culture, in principle at least, poses a significant challenge to structural realist claims about the sources and characteristics of state behavior by rooting strategic choice in deeply historical, formative ideational legacies. I do not claim to provide any dramatic conceptual or methodological breakthroughs. This book is merely an effort to see whether strategic culture as one set of ideational inputs into behavior is a useful analytic tool with which to explore the broader relationship between ideas and behavior in international relations and strategic studies.

To this end, however, I do try to avoid the pitfalls that critics of political culture argued were inherent in this focus on ideational sources of behavior, namely tautological definitions of culture, a mechanically deterministic conceptualization of the relationship between culture and behavior, and flawed research designs that do not even attempt to distinguish between the influences of culture and structure. I spend a fair amount of time trying to develop a notion of strategic culture that is falsifiable, whose formation and development can be traced empirically, and whose effects on strategic choice can be, in principle, weighed against the effects of other nonideational influences. I argue that strategic culture consists of two basic elements: (a) a central paradigm that supplies answers to three basic, related questions about the nature of conflict in human affairs, the nature of the enemy, and the efficacy of violence; and (b) a ranked set of strategic preferences logically derived from these central assumptions. These central heuristics and accompanying strategic preferences must be congruent across relevant objects of analysis (e.g., strategic texts representative of a formative period in the development of strategic thought and practice) for a single strategic culture to exist in any particular society. Moreover, one must show, in the historical period of interest, that these heuristics and preferences are consistent across a significant portion of decision makers socialized in this strategic culture before drawing any conclusions about the effect of strategic culture on behavior. Then patterns in strategic behavior must be shown to be consistent with those predicted by the strategic preferences held by these decision makers.

The results of this three-step research process in the Chinese case are a rather complex set of conclusions. In essence I argue, contrary to my initial expectations, that there is evidence of two Chinese strategic cultures, one a symbolic or idealized set of assumptions and ranked preferences, and one an operational set that had a nontrivial effect on strategic choice in the Ming period. The symbolic set, for the most part, is disconnected from the programmatic decision rules governing strategy, and appears mostly in an habitual discourse designed, in part, to justify behavior in culturally acceptable terms. The operational set reflects what I call a parabellum or hard realpolitik strategic culture that, in essence, argues that the best way of dealing with security threats is to eliminate them through the use of force. This preference is tempered by an explicit sensitivity to one’s relative capacity to do this. In other words, at its simplest, the operational strategic culture predisposes those socialized in it to act more coercively against an enemy as relative capabilities become more favorable. This is consistent with what Vasquez calls an opportunity model of realpolitik behavior, where states need no special motivation to threaten or use force; rather they are always predisposed to do so, unless restrained by contextual variables (Vasquez 1993: 115). What predisposes states (at least the Chinese state, since this is not a cross-national study) to act this way, however, are not anarchical structures generating realpolitik self-help impulses, but rather the parabellum strategic culture that, I argue, persists from very early formative periods in Chinese strategic thought and practice up through the Ming dynasty across different strategic structures and objective contexts. In other words, I treat realpolitik decision axioms as cultural in that their content over time is largely independent of interstate structures, and is collectively learned and transmitted through socialization in the parabellum approach to conflict. This finding suggests that while strategic culture exists and plays a role in strategic choice, there may be fewer cross-national differences in strategic culture than many of the users of the concept expect. However, precisely because realpolitik behavior may be strategic-culturally rooted, these systemwide strategic predispositions may also be more mutable and susceptible to purposeful change than realists may expect.

Broadly speaking, I had a number of goals in mind when I started this project. One was simply to try to understand and demystify Chinese strategic thinking. Most of my previous academic work had focused on contemporary Chinese security affairs, arms control, nuclear doctrine, and the like. It was clear to me from reading in this area that much of the Western and Chinese literature accepted that contemporary Chinese strategic thought was to an important degree influenced by ancient traditions in philosophy and statecraft, and that these traditions were unique, or at least substantially different, from what are portrayed as Western traditions. Yet to this point very little systematic work had been done on isolating exactly what elements of this tradition had persisted and how. The notion of strategic culture, which appeared in the international-relations and international-security literature in the 1980s, offered at least the beginnings of a conceptualization of this process.

When I started this project I had no particular reason to think that standard views of Chinese strategic thought—embodied for instance in Confucian-Mencian denigration of the role of violence in state security, or Sun Zi’s alleged emphasis on non- or minimally violent routes to strategic victory—might be inaccurate, misleading, or plainly wrong. I was fully prepared to find that, indeed, Chinese strategists through the ages did think differently from those in the West about questions of war and peace, and that the differences should show up in behavioral patterns substantially different from what, say, a standard structural realpolitik approach might suggest about strategic choice. But as I delved into the classic texts in Chinese strategic thought, every now and then looking at indicators of the frequency with which military violence was used throughout Chinese history, I was struck by two things. One was the prevalence of assumptions and decision axioms that in fact placed a high degree of value on the use of pure violence to resolve security conflicts. The other was the existence in these texts—and even more so in recent scholarship on these texts—of a Confucian-Mencian discourse as well, but one that was more obviously divorced from the strategic preferences that emanated from the classics on strategy. One of the subthemes in this book is what the substance and role of this symbolic discourse is in the context of a predominant emphasis on hard realpolitik or parabellum strategic preferences. The problem with this finding is that it makes testing for the effects of a strategic culture on Ming security policy rather difficult, since the parabellum strategic-culture model does not make significantly different predictions about behavior from that of a simple structural realpolitik model. Grappling with this methodological problem is also, as it turns out, a subtheme I did not anticipate.

Another even broader goal, or perhaps motivation, reflects my interest and training in both China studies and international-relations theory. I have long been interested in examining some of the dominant assumptions about the role of culture or cultural variables (in this case a subset, strategic culture) in political behavior used in area studies and international-relations theory. The assumption, often unspoken, behind area studies, and China studies in particular, has been that unique cultural variables will generate different, and more accurate, predictions about the behavior of a polity than if culture were left out. Put another way, Chinese political behavior cannot be understood without reference to historical and cultural precedent. Almost invariably, when issues in the China field are put this way, the conclusions stress China’s uniqueness or differentness. This assumption applies to both domestic politics and external relations. The dominant paradigm in international-relations theory—neorealism or structural realism and its subvariants—reaches a very different conclusion; namely, that culture does not add any significant explanatory power to ahistorical and acultural models of state behavior. This argument—plus the positivist methodological bias in international-relations theory—leads scholarship to proceed from the assumption of sameness across cases.

I do not claim to resolve this conflict here. (Indeed, those on both sides may find my conclusions somewhat disturbing—there is a Chinese strategic culture, but its principal components are not self-evidently unique.) But one of my interests has been to examine both sets of assumptions, using the tools and methods of both fields to examine the role of strategic culture in Chinese behavior. In part I have in mind an even grander goal—a vision thing to quote a former American president: to make the discussion of China’s external behavior across history, its patterns of conflict resolution, its strategic doctrines, etc., as common in international-relations literature as discussions of the German, French, American, British, and Russian cases. I see this study as one small step in that direction.

There are innumerable people and institutions I should thank for emotional, intellectual, and financial support. To begin with I thank Felicity Lufkin for her love, and for reminding me that there is life beyond the academy, particularly when Jackie Chan movies are on at the Brattle. I want to thank my parents, Antony and Margot, and the rest of the Johnstons for being a very, very fine family. Heartfelt thanks go to the members of my most excellent dissertation committee: Kenneth Lieberthal, Michel Oksenberg, Robert Axelrod, Albert Feuerwerker, and Paul Forage. My gratitude goes as well to my graduate-student colleagues, and others who helped me gather material, sift through ideas, and who provided intellectual support and friendship: Abigail Jahiel, Arthur Waldron, Bruce Dickson, Charles Glaser, Chen Peixiong, Cheryl Shanks, Dale Copeland, David Shambaugh, Ding Zhaoqiang, Edward O’Dowd, Gao Dianfang, Gerald Sorokin, Harold Jacobsen, J. David Singer, Jack Snyder, James Tong, Jason Hu, Jeff Ritter, John Gaddis, Karl Eikenberry, Kate Campbell, Kent Jennings, Kidder Smith, Li Ling, Liang Liu Chun-hua, Liu Di, Liu Qing, Ma Dazheng, Martha Feldman, Nico Howson, Pan Jiabin, Patrick Regan, Paul Godwin, Peter Katzenstein, Ren Li, Samuel Barnes, Shen Mingming, Thomas Christensen, Wang Jianwei, Wang Zhenhui, Wei Rulin, Wei Xiuyun, William Zimmerman, Wu Rusong, Wu Zhemin, Xu Xin, Yang Kai, and Yu Zemin. I am also indebted to institutional, intellectual, and/or financial support from: The Center for Chinese Studies, The Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan; the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Social Sciences Research Council/MacArthur Fellowships in International Peace and Security; the Institute of International Relations, Taiwan; the Peking University History Department, Beijing; the Institute for the Study of World Politics; the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies; the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and the Department of Government at Harvard University.

¹ The claim that neorealist theory addresses international politics and not foreign policy seems somewhat disingenuous. Neorealism does make predictions about what individual states do or ought to do to pursue their interests within the constraints of polarity and particular distributions of power. Small, weak states, for instance, combine to balance against rising hegemonic power by pursuing foreign policies aimed at alliance building and intra-alliance negotiation.

CULTURAL REALISM

Chapter One

STRATEGIC CULTURE: A CRITIQUE

THE SOVIET MILITARY exhibited a preference for the preemptive, offensive use of force that was deeply rooted in a Russian history of external insecurity and internal autocracy. The United States has exhibited a tendency towards a sporadic and reluctant though messianic and crusading use of force that is deeply rooted in a fundamental belief in the aberrance of warfare in human relations and the moralism of the early republic. China has exhibited a tendency for the controlled, politically driven defensive and minimalist use of force that is deeply rooted in the statecraft of ancient strategists and a worldview of relatively complacent superiority.

Obviously these are sweeping generalizations that could (and should) be challenged thoroughly on the basis of counterevidence. But all of these generalizations have been proposed in more or less similar fashion by respected students of Soviet, American, and Chinese strategic behavior. Such assessments can all be subsumed under the broad analytic category of strategic culture. While the term remains remarkably undefined, those who use it explicitly or implicitly tend to mean that there are consistent and persistent historical patterns in the way particular states (or state elites) think about the use of force for political ends. That is, different states have different predominant sets of strategic preferences that are rooted in the early or formative military experiences of the state or its predecessor, and are influenced to some degree by the philosophical, political, cultural, and cognitive characteristics of the state and state elites as these develop through time. A historical or objective variables such as technology, capabilities, levels of threat, and organizational structures are all of secondary importance: it is the interpretative lens of strategic culture that gives meaning to these variables. Strategic choices, therefore, are less responsive to changes in the objective strategic environment, since the weight of historical experiences and historically rooted strategic preferences tends to constrain the effects of environmental variables and to mute responses to environmental change. As a result, if strategic culture does change, it does so slowly, lagging behind changes in objective conditions.

This does not imply that the strategic-culture approach rejects rationality. Indeed, strategic culture is compatible with concepts of limited rationality, under which strategic culture-based heuristics are employed to simplify reality; process rationality, under which strategic culture determines the most rational process of choosing between options; and adaptive or learned rationality, under which historical choices, analogies, metaphors, and precedents are invoked to guide choice.¹ The strategic-culture approach does seem potentially incompatible with the contingent nature of strategy in game rationality or classical rational choice-expected utility models. Whereas strategies in games focus on making the best choice depending on expectations about what other players do (Schelling 1980: 3), strategic culture, as it has been used to date, implies that a state’s strategic behavior is less responsive to others’ choices.² 2 There is, instead, a historically imposed inertia on choice that makes strategy less responsive to specific contingencies. Thus, in the view of some American analysts of Soviet strategic culture, the Soviets did not adopt American MAD-based deterrence doctrines, as U.S. policymakers had once predicted, since Soviet strategic culture-based preferences historically preceded the emergence of the nuclear era and the American nuclear doctrine.

Rather than rejecting rationality per se as a factor in strategic choice, the strategic-culture approach rejects an ahistorical, acultural realist framework for analyzing strategic choices.³ The latter would seem to discount the accumulated weight of the past in favor of a forward-looking calculation of expected utility. The dominant neorealist paradigm assumes that states are functionally undifferentiated units that seek to optimize their utility (Waltz 1979, Keohane 1986, Buzan et al. 1993). Utility is usually defined as power, often as capabilities and resources. Hence states will act to expand their capabilities as long as the resources or opportunities to do so exist. Strategic choices will be optimizing ones, constrained only, or largely, by ahistorical and acultural variables such as geography, capability, threat, and a tendency of states to refrain from behaviors that clearly threaten their immediate survival (Bueno de Mesquita 1981:29-30, 64).⁴

This is not to imply that analysts of strategic choice ignore constraints imposed by nonobjective variables, including the past. The literature on misperception, deception, and limited-information bargaining, for instance, usefully relaxes assumptions of ahistorical and acultural rationality. But there is a tendency in this literature to avoid looking at deep historical and cultural roots of (mis)perception and limited information. Instead, the limitations on rational choice are attributed either to eccentric characteristics of particular leaders or, conversely, to universal characteristics of decision makers and decision situations (Jervis 1976, Snyder and Diesing 1977, Lebow 1981). Many also acknowledge organizational constraints on strategic choice, under which organizational missions and decision routines are in some sense historically derived (though usually from not too distant antecedents). But often this organizational perspective is an auxiliary theory used to explain gaps in an essentially neorealist framework.

In general, then, neorealist theory has little theoretical room for the strategic-cultural dimension of strategic choice. The range of strategic choices presented to and decided upon by decision elites can be explained mostly by so-called structural variables such as the nature of power distributions between states in the here and now, where these distributions are given their particular cast by geography, technology, and military capabilities. The decision by elites to choose one from their range of options is framed generally by a calculation of national interest that is, for the most part, universal, or perhaps determined by organizational interests, but certainly not culturally specific. Any particular set of elites placed in a similar situation ought to make a similar choice.⁵

Most of the proponents of the strategic-culture approach, however, would disagree fundamentally with this conclusion. Rather, they might counter, particular sets of elites socialized in different strategic cultures will make different choices when placed in similar situations. Thus the strategic-culture approach challenges ahistorical and acultural explanations of strategic choice by rooting strategic preferences deep in history and culture, and not predominantly in system structure, or the distribution of state capabilities. Since strategic cultures are unit-level attributes and vary across states or societies, we should expect similar strategic realities to be interpreted differently. So the problem for culturalists is to explain similarities across cultures in strategic behavior when cultures vary. Conversely, the problem for structural realists is to explain cases of differences in strategic behavior when structural conditions are more or less constant. While there is no a priori reason for predictions about strategic choice derived from strategic culture to be different from predictions derived from ahistorical structural approaches (any differences depend on the content of a strategic culture), there is no a priori reason for them to be the same either. The possibility of different predictions about state behavior underscores the potential analytic value of understanding the concept of strategic culture.

What, then, does the literature on strategic culture suggest about the sources of a state’s strategic choices, and about the ways in which states use force for political ends? What follows is, first, a discussion of the concept of strategic culture in the international-security literature, followed by a look at the literature on Chinese strategic culture. This leads to a final assessment of the conceptual and methodological problems in the current work on strategic culture. It is important to spend some time on these questions because, given the under developed state of the concept, any useful rethinking and testing of strategic culture depends heavily on understanding the flaws in present conceptualizations.

THE INTERNATIONAL SECURITY FIELD AND STRATEGIC CULTURE

Traditionally, the question of culture has not attracted much attention in international security studies and international-relations theory. As Joseph Nye and Sean Lynn-Jones concluded in a report on the state of the field, strategic studies has been dominated for too long by American ethnocentrism and a concomitant neglect of national styles of strategy (Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 14-15)—a criticism echoing that of a number of scholars who used strategic culture or a variant in their own research (Booth 1979, Ermarth 1981: 52, Lord 1985: 269-270).⁶ Nonetheless, in the last ten to fifteen years, there has been a growing interest in strategic culture (and culture in general) as explicative of the security behavior of states, so much so that the American Academy of Sciences held a workshop on strategic culture—the first of its kind—in May 1990 in an effort to refine a definition of strategic culture and to discuss the potential contributions of strategic culture to the analysis of states’ strategic behavior. The workshop brought together participants from a number of disciplines—social historians, anthropologists, area specialists, and mainstream neorealist strategic analysts. Since then there have been several conferences related broadly to cultural or ideational sources of strategic choice,⁷ a number of books that explicitly incorporate strategic culture into their analysis (Jacobsen 1990, Zhang 1992, Kupchan 1994), as well as a growing number of scholarly articles.

The research so far on strategic culture—or, more broadly, cultural and ideational influences on strategic choice—can be divided into three generations.⁸ The first generation, which emerged in the early 1980s, was composed mostly of security-policy analysts and Soviet area specialists, rather than international-relations theorists. It focused mostly on trying to explain why the Soviets and the Americans apparently thought differently about strategy in the nuclear age. It attributed these differences to variations in deeply rooted historical experiences, political culture, and geography, among other variables. In other words, the independent and dependent variables were diffuse, sweepingly broad, and the arguments highly determinist. The second generation, appearing in the mid 1980s, focused as well on the superpowers, but argued essentially from a Gramscian perspective. This generation recognized the possibility of a disjuncture between a symbolic strategic-cultural discourse and operational doctrines, the former being used to reinforce the hegemony of strategic elites and their authority to determine the latter. The third generation, which is just beginning to emerge, has been more conceptually and methodologically rigorous. It has narrowed the focus of the dependent variables in order to set up more reliable and valid empirical tests for the effects of strategic culture, and has looked at a wider range of cases. This generation has tended to study the role of strategic and organizational cultural norms in strategic choice in an effort to explain choices that do not fit with the dominant neorealist explanations.

The First Generation

The direct inspiration for the initial analyses of strategic culture came from Jack Snyder’s short 1977 RAND study on Soviet limited nuclear war doctrine, in which he coined the phrase strategic culture. Ironically, Snyder’s definition and use of strategic culture was far more restricted conceptually than those who took up the term, and he has since tried hard to disassociate himself from the first generation of literature (Snyder 1990).

In his study, Snyder referred to strategic culture as the body of attitudes and beliefs that guides and circumscribes thought on strategic questions, influences the way strategic issues are formulated, and sets the vocabulary and the perceptual parameters of strategic debate (Snyder 1977: 9). Strategic culture in the nuclear age was the sum total of ideals, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behavior that members of the national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to nuclear strategy (ibid.). Unlike operational code analysis, which tended to offer strategic axioms as hard and fast rules for behavior, Snyder suggested that strategic culture contained more general cognitive propensities. Snyder, in contrast to other writers in the first generation, did not see strategic culture as rigidly constraining strategic choices, but rather as coloring debate. Nor did he view a strategic culture as a monolithic concept. Within a strategic culture there could exist subcultures or substrains of strategic preferences (ibid., 14). Unlike other authors Snyder, did not view strategic culture as being rooted in deeply historical-cultural antecedents and formative experiences. Rather, it sprang from a mixture of recent historical experiences, ideology, high politics, organizational interests, and geography (ibid., 8, cf. Snyder 1990: 4).

Snyder’s was a sensitive and reasonable discussion of the reasons why the Soviets appeared to have had a disposition to contemplate the use of nuclear options—a disposition puzzling to those American strategists who believed that the language and concepts of the nuclear age ought to have had more or less universal meaning. Snyder also recognized, in his discussion of operational codes, the danger of mechanically deterministic explanations of Soviet strategic choices stemming from simplistic descriptions of the sociocultural and cognitive characteristics of Bolshevism. But Snyder’s own definition of strategic culture seemed to have trouble completely escaping this determinist trap. He referred at one point, for instance, to strategic culture as including ideas, emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behavior shared by members of strategic elites. As I will discuss below in more detail, this type of definition is problematic. I raise the issue now because it touches on the central empirical problems in work on strategic culture: how to measure its effects on behavior, and how to determine its explanatory value vis-à-vis noncultural explanations. By subsuming attitudes and behavior, including semiconsciously held assumptions and axioms, within the same concept, Snyder’s definition seemed to imply that there is, or can be, a one-to-one correspondence between attitudes and behavior. This relationship is rejected by many definitions of culture in other disciplines, and even seems to be ruled out by Snyder’s own critique of operational-code analysis.⁹ How does one identify a strategic culture when attitudes and behaviors diverge? By indiscriminately linking the two in this way, there is a tendency towards mechanically deterministic explanations of strategic choices that are vulnerable to easily discoverable counter-evidence.

The first generation of scholarship seems to have ignored Snyder’s fairly limited claims about the sources and effects of strategic culture; at the same time, it inherited and magnified the problem of mechanical determinism. This was evident, for instance, in the work by Colin Gray, Carnes Lord, and David Jones on U.S. and Soviet strategic culture.

Gray, who borrowed directly from Snyder’s conceptual work, defined American strategic culture as modes of thought and action with respect to force that derive from perception of the national historical experience, aspirations for self-characterization (e.g. as an American, what am I, how should I feel, think, and behave?), and from all the many distinctively American experiences (of geography, political philosophy, of civic culture, and ‘way of life’) that characterize an American citizen (Gray 1981: 22).¹⁰ Thus strategic culture is distinctive and unique, given the disinctiveness and uniqueness of these inputs. Moreover, these inputs, in contrast with Snyder’s list, had much older antecedents, deeper historical and cultural roots extending as far back as the Seven Years’ War. By 1945, the net result was a set of dominant national beliefs with respect to strategic choices. These beliefs included: a belief in the essential goodness of one’s cause, hence a reluctance to wage wars for goals that are controversial in terms of enduring American ideas of justice (ibid., 26), hence too a view that wars were aberrations from a natural rational order; a basic optimism about triumph and inevitable victory, hence expectations for total victory in war; a sense of omnipotence derived from a history of successfully fought wars; and a sense of unlimited resources that should be applied with overwhelming effect against an enemy, hence a reluctance to expend many human lives in pursuit of victory (ibid., 27-29).

Some of these characteristics were carried across the threshold of the nuclear revolution to produce a peculiarly American approach to nuclear strategy, argued Gray. This approach stressed, among other things: that nuclear wars could not be won because the high level of human casualties would erase any meaningful concept of political or military victory; an optimism about the American technological capacity to provide an effective nuclear deterrent in the face of eventual Soviet advantages in numbers and yields of nuclear weapons; and an optimism that arms-control dialogue could teach the Soviets to think and speak the American nuclear language, thus leading to converging and hence stabilizing views on deterrence and conflict management. Gray concluded that this relatively homogeneous American strategic culture differed fundamentally from that of the Soviet Union, and that Americans were in general incapable of thinking strategically. In other words, unlike the Soviets, American leaders were incapable of thinking about, planning for, fighting, and winning a nuclear war.

As an influential advocate of counterforce war-fighting doctrines, Gray’s use of strategic culture had an obvious policy agenda.¹¹ Putting this aside, however, his definition presented analytical problems both similar to and different from Snyder’s work. First, by subsuming behavior in a definition of strategic culture (modes of action), he implies that strategic thought leads consistently to one type of behavior. How does one evaluate a strategic culture where thought and action seem inconsistent? Alternatively, is it always the case that one type of behavior reveals one set of distinctive patterns of strategic thinking? Gray’s definition led him to the sweepingly simplistic conclusion that there is one U.S. strategic culture that is incapable of conceptualizing a war-fighting, war-winning nuclear doctrine, and that this feature distinguishes it from the one Soviet strategic culture. Like most mechanistically deterministic cultural arguments, Gray’s conclusions avoided ample counterevidence; namely, the evidence that in operational terms planners in the Strategic Air Command always considered counterforce war-fighting war-winning options (Kaplan 1983, Pringle and Arkin 1983, Herken 1985, Sagan 1987).¹²

This relates to a second problem: the implication that the public is a repository of strategic culture, or that the strategic decision makers and the public at large share a strategic culture. This may or may not be the case. Even granted that the American public has a predisposition to think about nuclear war as unwinnable, and thus is unwilling to conceive of ever rationally fighting one, and even granted that a sizable portion of U.S. political elites and members of the strategic community share, or are constrained by, these predispositions, it is not necessarily the case that those in operational planning share this strategic culture. In other words, there may indeed be a close connection between strategic culture and behavior, but the strategic subculture upon which Gray focused may be less relevant for explaining how the U.S. would in fact behave in a nuclear crisis.¹³

Following closely in Gray’s footsteps was Carnes Lord’s study of American strategic culture. Definitionally, Lord seemed at first to avoid the determinist trap by arguing that strategic culture—the fundamental assumptions governing the constitution of military forces and the ends they are intended to serve— establishes a basic framework for, if they do not determine in detail the nature of, military forces and military operations (Lord 1985: 271). This basic framework appears to color debate over strategic options by injecting sometimes unconscious and unsystematic historically rooted concepts on the nature of war, the necessary preparations for war, and the methods of war (ibid., 289-290n.5).

Yet, at the same time, Lord undercut this flexible, delimiting notion of strategic culture by allowing the concept to include both traditional practices (i.e., behavior) and habits of thought by which military force is organized and employed by a society in the service of its political goals (ibid., 271). Like Gray, Lord fell into the same mechanically deterministic trap: he was unable to explain disjunctures between practice and thought, and was inclined to conclude that one set of practices reflects one set of thoughts and vice versa. The result, however, fit nicely into his policy agenda as well. American practice and American thought—influenced by geography, international system structure, political ideology, military history, civil-military relations, organizational interests, and technology—has displayed a consistent tendency towards astrategic thinking. Liberal democracies are deeply disinclined to prepare adequately for war, or to foster the institutions and types of men capable of waging it (ibid., 273). When war does break out, however, liberal democracies like the United States are "inclined toward waging war à outrance, with insufficient consideration for the political goals which should define strategic objectives and give meaning to victory (ibid.). Geography, political culture, and military history have given the U.S. a strategic culture that is fundamentally defensive" at the level of strategy, and that unfortunately, in Lord’s view, eschews counterforce war-fighting and war-winning nuclear strategies. This stands in diametrical opposition to Soviet strategic culture (ibid., 272, 277).

When the literature turned to Soviet strategic culture it accepted the amorphous definition of strategic culture offered by Gray and others in the first generation. In an essay on Russian cultural influences on Soviet strategy in a volume devoted to the application of strategic culture to the analysis of U.S. and Soviet strategic power, David R. Jones argued that there were three levels to a state’s strategic culture: its basic elements born from geographical, ethnocultural, and historical variables; the socioeconomic characteristics of society, and its political structure; and, most narrowly, the nature of contemporary interaction between military and political institutions. Together these variables interact to create a state’s strategic culture (Jones 1990: 37). This strategic culture does not just delimit strategic options. Rather, for Jones strategic culture pervades all levels of strategy from grand strategy down to tactics: Such a ‘culture’ presumably affects the whole range of a nation’s broad security and more narrow military policies, beginning with the basic goals of its diplomacy and ending with the ‘style’ or ‘whole series of proclivities’ displayed by its armed forces in peace and war (ibid., 35).

In a sense this conceptualization attributes to a state’s formative historical experience an even more rigid hold over strategy and tactics than perhaps even Gray would admit. Like others in the first generation, however, Jones’ determinism runs into problems of logic and evidence. In the first place, there is no room in his definition for multiple or competing cultural inheritances. Like Richard Pipes (1977, 1980), Jones assumed that Russian history and culture embodies only one set of strategic beliefs, assumptions, and preferences, which manifests itself in one set of consistent strategic choices across different technological and threat contexts. But then the strategic culture argument becomes tautological: Soviet military doctrine was the inevitable product of Russian/Soviet strategic culture because the strategic culture is rooted in a historical-cultural milieu that embodied similar perspectives and approaches to violence. Since only one set of historical-cultural perspectives exists, then Soviet strategic culture must necessarily have reflected these. There was no room for competing strategic-culture tendencies or strategic choices. There was no room for competing explanations of strategic choice. There was no room for the possibility that different strategic choices can emerge from similar strategic-cultural backgrounds. Strategic culture becomes unfalsifiable.

Second, accepting the possibility that Russian/Soviet military leaders consciously put their own thinking in the context of deep historical traditions, it does not automatically follow that Soviet strategic behavior reflected the influences of premodern Russia. It is possible that these leaders misinterpreted these traditions—as, for example, today’s Sun Zi specialists in China and Taiwan exaggerate the role of nonviolence in traditional Chinese military thought. As the literature on cultural symbols and political power suggests, traditions are constantly redefined and reinterpreted by successive generations of elites with a political interest in highlighting or downplaying particular traditions. These redefinitions, however, are invariably cast as true and accurate recreations of the past.

Third, simply because different societies have developed under different historical and geographical conditions, this does not mean that any strategic culture produced in these conditions is necessarily unique. It is logically possible for different circumstances to produce similar strategic cultures because two different societies may face similar strategic problems. Since strategic conditions and experiences are also sources of this amorphous notion of strategic culture, it is possible that the strategic predispositions derived from particular geographical or historical conditions could be inconsistent with those derived from particular strategic problems. This opens up the possibility that the diversity within any particular society’s geographical, political, cultural, and strategic experience will produce multiple strategic cultures, a possibility excluded by the narrow determinism of the first-generation literature. Why expect that such a diverse range of variables should produce compatible elements of a strategic culture, given that, considered on their own, each variable might make different predictions about strategic behavior? Britain as an island nation was at different times an expansionist imperialist power and a defensive balancer. Britain as an emerging democracy in the late nineteenth century was a defensive balancer in Europe, while the U.S., as a liberal democracy in the latter half of the twentieth century adopted an offensive strategy of global anticommunist containment. China as a large bureaucratic authoritarian empire exposed to external threats from nomadic groups from the north and west has historically eschewed, according to some, expansionist, offensive doctrines. Russia, also a bureaucratic, authoritarian empire, adopted, according to some, an expansionist, offensive approach to dealing with threats. Clearly, by themselves geography, political culture, or particular historical experiences do not lead to consistent approaches to questions of war and peace. Indiscriminately combined, they create overdetermined, hence analytically useless, explanations of strategic behavior.

Finally, Jones and others of the first generation treated strategic culture, in essence, as a constant. To the extent that there are variations in strategic preferences and behavior, strategic culture alone is not a particularly convincing explanation of choice. This is not a big problem for many of the authors because they are unwilling to admit that there is much diversity in any particular state’s strategic preferences. Yet at one point in his essay Jones admits that in the nuclear era the Soviets have interpreted Clausewitz’s dictum about war as a continuation of politics to justify the use of nuclear weapons during war and to reject nuclear war as incompatible with rational political ends (Jones 1990: 43). How does a single, constant, deeply rooted strategic culture produce such a dramatic variation in strategic nuclear preferences?

The first generation of literature on strategic culture, then, falls short of showing that historically and culturally based approaches to strategy do affect strategic choice in any appreciable way. Unfortunately, the work of this generation has tended to dominate the debate over the relationship between culture, strategic culture, and strategic choice.¹⁴ In addition to problems in specific studies, the serious flaws in the strategic-culture approach developed in this literature are conceptual, methodological, and empirical. For the moment, let me address the former two issues, since it is against these problems that in the next section I reconstruct and juxtapose a more useful conception of strategic culture.

One set of problems is definitional. For the first generation, the elements of strategic culture are quite diverse, yet its effects are extremely constraining. Technology, geography, organizational culture and traditions, historical strategic practices, political culture, national character, political psychology, ideology, even international system structure, among other variables, are all considered to be relevant inputs into this amorphous strategic culture. In this sense, the first-generation arguments are at once both overdetermined (strategic culture as an independent