New Delhi, Oct. 4 -- The study of strategic culture to explain geopolitical behaviour has been controversial primarily because its critics argued that culture was mostly explanatory in retrospect, and in any case, less informative than calculations of realpolitik.

Yet, culture itself has enjoyed a new prominence in public discourse over the past decade, with prominent commentators saying thing such as "politics is downstream from culture." This is palpable to ordinary people. So it cannot be that culture only influences domestic politics and somehow stops at the water's edge.

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 e...