Strategic culture matters more in an uncertain world

This is from The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint. The study of strategic culture to explain geopolitical behavior has been controversial primarily because its critics argued that culture was mostly explanatory in retrospect, and in any case, lower than what calculations of realpolitik would suggest. Yet culture itself has enjoyed a new prominence in public discourse over past decade, with prominent commentators saying thing such as “politics is downstream from culture”. This is palpable to ordinary people. So it cannot be the culture only influences domestic politics and somehow stops at the water’s edge. One reason why cultural explanations get a bad rap is because some of their proponents offer them as cultural determinism: that only culture matters and explains everything. That’s obviously not true. Political phenomena and decisions have multiple causes: in addition to culture we can think of context, constraints, ideological preferences, electoral…