Abstract

Strategic culture provides a good starting point to explain Canada's goldilocks grand strategy. But it also has important theoretical shortcomings. This article offers an important reconceptualization of strategic culture. It synthesizes the insight from strategic culture and cybernetic theory to better account for Canadian strategic behavior. It introduces the notion of standing operational doctrines—continental soft-bandwagoning and defensive weak-multilateralism—through which Canada's strategic cultural beliefs, attitudes, and inclinations are standardized and regularized. This theoretical synthesis provides strategic culture with greater specificity, better use as a causal explanation, and can be potentially applied to other cases.

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