A “Distinct Strategy”?

Stephane Roussel is assistant professor, Canada Research Chair in Foreign and defence Policy, Department of Political Science, Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM). Charles-Alexandre Theoret is an MA candidate at the same university.INTRODUCTIONLeaders of any state are going to find themselves, at some time or other, having to make fundamental choices in the realm of security and defence. Should they create armed forces? If so, of what size and for what missions? Should they pursue an alliance-based strategy or opt for neutrality? If the former, with whom should they ally? And when they do make commitments to international institutions, how binding should these be? Responses to these various questions can be grouped under the rubric of that is, the coordination of the state's political, diplomatic, and military resources in the promotion of its international interests.To be sure, it is only rarely that state leaders get called upon to make such fundamental choices, which explains why we tend to know so little about how the decisions are actually taken. Nevertheless such decisions tend to have long-lasting effects, binding governments far into the future. But what determines, or drives, the decision-making process in respect of grand strategy? Many analysts have attempted to answer this question.For instance, certain adherents of action models will tell you that the decisions are a logical consequence of the careful, indeed scientific, weighing of costs against benefits--all within the context of an objective and rigorous examination of the environment.(1) Others put the emphasis upon the balance, at times precarious, between the various bureaucratic entities that constitute the decision-making milieu in pluralistic governments.(2) Both approaches certainly help us understand a great deal about the decision-making surrounding grand strategy, yet each leaves much out. For instance, political leaders, along with other entities in the decision chain, never really do possess the complete information they would need to make perfectly rational choices between competing alternatives; they always operate with some degree of ignorance of their total environment.With this in mind, we hypothesize that the decisions that make up grand strategy are at least as likely, if not more likely, to be a reflection of ideas that leaders already possess about the world and the role therein that military forces do and should play. We can sum these ideas up under the category of strategic which can be taken to be a coherent and permanent set of symbols, concepts, metaphors, assumptions, and analogies constituting a discourse on security.(3)There is a growing literature on the concept of culture, and the latter has been put to different heuristic purposes by different analysts. For some, it is an independent variable, while others take it to be either a dependent or an intervening variable. Here we use it in the latter sense, as an intervening element that complements rationalist explications. On the one hand, we employ it as a means of restricting the range of options that can and do get put to the cost-benefit test; thus only those options that possess a coherent resonance within the prevailing culture merit our examination, while propositions stemming from alternative strategic paradigms (or countercultures), we summarily dismiss. On the other hand, culture enables us to fill in the gaps resulting from incomplete information; here it constitutes a handy default option. Ergo, when political leaders are unable to rely upon cost-benefit calculations, they resort to the dominant discourse, so when the environment is particularly murky and hard to decipher, culture attains its greatest decision-making prowess.This article is part of a larger research program that seeks to both demonstrate the existence, and study the influence, of Canadian culture. …

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