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The article investigates how Australia’s and Poland’s different alliance relationships with the United States influenced their decisions to share the burden in the major warfare coalitions under the leadership of the United States during the twenty-first century. By taking a comprehensive approach to alliance politics, the article examines how four different forms of alliance politics, including risk of abandonment, opportunity for gain, security dependency, and common values, affect burden sharing. It concludes that alliance politics influenced Australia and Poland in very different ways, largely depending on the state’s alliance relationship with the United States.

Whether there are differences between the drivers of great power foreign policy and the drivers of small state foreign policy has been the subject of debate for many years. This article contributes to this debate, by showing that the foreign policies of one great power, the United States, and one small state, Sweden, regarding the humanitarian military intervention in Libya in 2011 can be explained by the same combination of factors. Although key decision-makers in both states formulated their preferences on the basis of similar circumstances, the United States, as a great power, could shape these circumstances to a greater extent and was less constrained by the situation, compared to Sweden.

This article contributes to theoretical integration in foreign policy analysis, by integrating two explanatory concepts that have mainly been used separately, namely the strategic culture of elites and the operational code of individual decision-makers. The explanatory power of using both concepts is illustrated in a case study of Australian foreign policy regarding the multinational coalition against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The main argument is that strategic culture can provide a reasonable explanation for Australia's overall military engagement in the coalition. However, to explain Australia's approach to the coalition, strategic culture must be complemented with the operational code. The article suggests that the character of strategic culture can influence the opportunities for decision-makers to have an individual impact on foreign policy.

This article aims at clearing up a widespread misunderstanding in previous research that the classical strategic perspective, based on the writings of Carl von Clausewitz and his contemporary followers, shares ontological assumptions with realism. Although both perspectives perceive a constant state of disharmony in international politics, they differ substantially in their assumptions about state-centrism, actor behaviour, and the role of unpredictability. As the relationship between the perspectives is ambiguous, the article argues that scholars should treat them as two separate theoretical entities. The greater scholarly relevance of the article lies in its contribution to conceptual clarity.

This article introduces supervised machine learning to the study of German strategic culture, analyzing both how German strategic culture has changed and the impact of strategic culture on Germany’s military engagement between 1990 and 2017. In contrast with previous qualitative research on strategic culture, supervised machine learning can yield measurable and empirical insights into strategic culture and its effects at any given point in time over a very long period, based on the reproduction of human coding of a very extensive set of security policy documents. The article shows that German strategic culture has changed slowly and in a nonlinear way after the Cold War, and that strategic culture, when controlling for confounding variables and the temporal order, has a measurable impact on Germany’s military engagement. The article demonstrates the analytical value of machine learning for future studies of strategic culture.

This article investigates how strategic culture influenced the decision-making of Australia and Poland regarding the global coalition against the Islamic State. In the coalition, Australia has followed its tradition of active participation in United States-led operations, while Poland has embarked on a more cautious line, thereby breaking with its previous policy of active participation. The article examines how Australian and Polish responses to the coalition were shaped by five cultural elements: dominant threat perception, core task of the armed forces, strategic partners, experiences of participating in coalitions of the willing, and approach to the international legality of expeditionary operations. It finds that Australia and Poland differed on all five elements but that the major differences are found in dominant threat perception and core task of the armed forces.

This article contributes to an explanation of why Poland, after a period of almost two years’ hesitation, decided to dispatch military forces to the United States-led coalition against the Islamic State in June 2016. The Polish case is examined by applying the concept of strategic culture, taking into account a state’s core military strategic beliefs and the historical experiences on which these beliefs are based. The case study shows that strategic culture shaped the Polish decision-making on the coalition, by predisposing the decision-makers toward a typical Polish behavior in international military operations, namely to exchange security benefits with important allies. The article also has implications for the general study of strategic culture, by specifying the relationship between historical experiences and strategic culture.

This article integrates literature on strategic culture with literature on the domestic politics of foreign policy, illustrating how the interaction of culture and domestic political calculation can influence government foreign policy on participation in international military operations. Empirically, the article investigates the decision made by the Government of Finland to refrain from participation in the military intervention in Libya in March–April 2011. The Finnish decision-making illustrates that domestic politics, in particular the factor of election timing, can strengthen the feeling among decision-makers that they should follow the country’s strategic culture. The article ends with theorization on the domestic political conditions under which decision-makers are more or less likely to deviate from strategic culture.

This article investigates the Swedish decision to participate in Operation Unified Protector in Libya and the Finnish decision to refrain from the same operation. It takes as its theoretical point of departure the concept of strategic culture and argues that differences in the strategic culture of the two countries contributed to the differences in behavior toward the Libya intervention. The Finnish and Swedish strategic cultures differ with respect to the core tasks of the armed forces, willingness to use force, and with respect to what types of operations and organizational frameworks Finland and Sweden find it appropriate to participate in.