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Strategic Cultures and Security Policies in the Asia-Pacific
JEFFREY S. LANTIS
Abstract: Reflecting the culturalist turn in security studies, this special issue shows how one of the most powerful tools of security studies illuminates the origins and implications of the region’s difficult issues, from the rise of China and the American pivot, to the shifting calculations of other regional actors. Strategic culture sometimes challenges and always enriches prevailing neorealist presumptions about the region. It provides a bridge between material and ideational explanations of state behaviour and helps to capture the tension between neoclassical realist and constructivist approaches. The case studies survey the role of strategic culture in the behaviours of Australia, China, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and the United States. They show the contrast between structural expectations and cultural predispositions as realist geopolitical security threats and opportunities interact with domestic elite and popular interpretation of historical narratives and distinctive political-military cultures to influence security policies. The concluding retrospective article devotes special attention to methodological issues at the heart of strategic cultural studies, as well as how culture may impact the potential for future conflict or cooperation in the region. The result is a body of work that helps deepen our understanding of strategic cultures in comparative perspective and enrich security studies. As disputes intensify over territory and resources, as regional militaries develop and leaders adjust their strategic calculus and defence commitments, the dovetailing of culture and politics in the Asia-Pacific shows through.
As president I have, therefore, made a deliberate and strategic decision: as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future … So, let there be no doubt: in the Asia-Pacific in the 21st century, the United States of America is all in.
Barack Obama1
China will stick to the road of peaceful development but never give up our legitimate rights and never sacrifice our national core interests … No country should presume that we will engage in trade involving our core interests or that we will swallow the bitter fruit of harming our sovereignty, security or development interests.
Xi Jinping2
The security architecture of the Asia-Pacific region is in the process of a profound transformation … As the region adapts to the new strategic circumstances and policy-makers attempt to construct new, multilateral arrangements and structures for enhancing security cooperation, there is a need to confront cultural legacies which both constrain some possibilities and suggest more positive avenues for policy making.
Desmond Ball3
I am pleased to introduce this special issue of Contemporary Security Policy, which features an original collection of articles on strategic cultures in the Asia-Pacific. This offers a timely account of strategic cultures in conjunction with the rise of the region to new prominence in world politics and the emergence of more complex security challenges. Globalization, the ascendance of China, and North Korean nuclear ambitions (to name but a few factors) have impacted many countries in the Asia-Pacific in the past decade. President Obama revived American engagement, calling the region a top priority for national security policy. The United States stepped up joint military exercises and training with allies, and negotiations regarding future basing and strategic partnerships.
As tensions increase, many governments in the region have entered into debates about identity, tradition, and security policy choices. Contributors to this special issue argue that while international relations theories tend to interpret such developments broadly as structural transformations, strategic culture adds a valuable perspective to understand security policy choices taken by states in the region over the past decade. Articles address theory and policy implications of different national identity conceptions. They also describe the indigenous development of national strategic cultures, critical historical perspectives, the various actors and institutions that have shaped strategic cultures, and the mirroring effects on cultures when dealing with regional security partners and rivals. Several articles also explore epistemological and methodological questions related to strategic culture, and draw insights from the comparative approach of this study.
This project follows in the tradition of other significant works on comparative strategic cultures, most notably Desmond Ball’s comparative project at the Australian National University and the comprehensive study edited by Ken Booth and Russell Trood.4 Indeed, we adopt the basic definition developed by Alan Macmillan, Booth, and Trood – strategic culture as ‘a distinctive and lasting set of beliefs, values and habits regarding the threat and use of force, which have their roots in such fundamental influences as geopolitical setting, history and political culture’ – as a common foundation for this new project.5 Other scholars have also written independent studies of Asian countries’ ways of war and their link to issues such as WMD policy and territorial disputes.6 Comparative strategic culture projects focused on other regions of the world, such as the European security and defence identity debates, and Latin American foreign and security policies, have also been influential in this study.7
At the same time, we seek to extend on these works in several ways. First, articles incorporate advances in recent scholarship to interpret security policy outcomes through the lens of strategic culture. As Peter Schmidt and Benjamin Zyla have argued, strategic culture appears to offer a powerful explanatory tool to explore these dynamics because it ‘allows conceptual and theoretical elasticity, and thus promises to be inclusive of a variety of scholars and theoretical traditions in international relations’.8 Authors identify primary keepers of a nation’s strategic culture (including the role of strategic subcultures), explore the impact of strategic culture on security policy behaviour, and address questions of continuity versus change. Second, because the notion of strategic culture is sometimes invoked as shorthand and dismissed as deterministic, this project sets out to capture the reflexive ways behaviours can be linked to beliefs and ideas about when, where, and how countries might consider actions including the use of military force.9 Mindful of warnings that strategic cultural studies with disparate definitions and epistemologies could muddy the intellectual waters, this study highlights areas where it may provide added value, or an explicative understanding of select Asia-Pacific case studies.10 Third, articles address a fascinating range of strategic cultures in both leading and emerging players in the region, including Australia, China, South Korea, the Philippines, Japan, and the United States. These were selected as countries facing similar security dynamics in the 21st century, yet representative of a range of competing historical narratives, experiences, backgrounds, and traditions.11
A comparison of these articles suggests the likelihood of greater conflict in the region as a function of deep and serious socio-cultural animosities and differences, the relatively narrow set of keepers of strategic culture in many of these societies, the importance of strategic subcultures, and the complexity of modern challenges these countries face. The authors frame developments in the region as much more complex than simply balancing or bandwagoning between China and the United States, however. They contend that conflicts are likely between and among great powers (who sometimes may be fooling themselves and their adversaries, according to our authors), middle powers, and small powers in the region. Indeed, to some degree, these articles suggest that despite the American pivot to Asia, smaller powers in the region are pursuing their own determined foreign and security policy paths. They face serious internal divisions over questions of the use of force, humanitarian intervention, immigration crises, and terrorism in their own backyards. Attention to the multiple actors, conditions, and ideational constructs at work yields a richer scholarly understanding of the complicated paths of Asian security policies.
Geopolitics and the Changing Asia-Pacific
This project explores origins, patterns, and implications of the changing security dynamics in the Asia-Pacific through the lens of strategic culture.12 Because strategic culture is commonly compared with neorealism, and because rationalist interpretations of developments in the region abound, a brief survey of material considerations ‘on the ground’ seems in order.13
Policymakers in the Asia-Pacific region face numerous challenges and opportunities today. For instance, globalization has drawn a number of powers into the region. The United States is working to foster a new Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade and investment platform to include major economies of the region that would counter Chinese influence in ASEAN. In the realm of military/security affairs, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense stated in its 2013 White Paper that the country must address ‘multiple and complicated security threats’.14 One of the most common interpretations of developments in the region in the past decade is that it is undergoing structural transformation with predictable outcomes.15 For example, Randall Schweller and Xiaoyu Pu argue that ‘[t]he dramatic rise of China and India among others has set the stage for a fundamental rethinking of world politics in an a...
