Cultural explanations for geopolitical behaviour have long been scoffed at-but they offer insights today

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 calculations, policy marksmanship, emergence and chance. The outcome is a complex product of a mix of many factors. So culture plays a part, and that can change over time and circumstances. Broadly speaking, we could say that the global wave of liberal internationalism in the years following the fall…