Global Strategy Amidst the Globe’s Cultures: Cultures in Individual Cognition, States and the Global System

December 2019 No Comments

“Global Strategy Amidst the Globe’s Cultures: Cultures in Individual Cognition, States and the Global System”

Speaker: Wright, N. (Intelligent Biology)

Date: 5 December 2019

Speaker Session Preview

SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Dr. Nicholas Wright (Intelligent Biology) as a part of its Future of Global Competition & Conflict Speaker Series. Dr. Wright’s presentation focused on how the US can make global strategy in a world both vast and rich with cultural diversity. He first stated that ‘global strategy’ involves important activities and interests in all the continents that contain a significant fraction of the world’s population. He clarified that global strategy is not synonymous with grand strategy, and it is not just international strategy, as the global system differs from the sum of its nations. Dr. Wright explained that we can think about the global system through four different dimensions/lenses: a political lens (i.e., the ‘global order’), an economic lens (i.e., the ‘global economic order’), a social lens, and a cultural lens. Dr. Wright focused on the political lens as he discussed his examination of the history of ‘global confrontations’—conflicts that meaningfully involve all of the world’s continents on which significant fractions of the world’s population live. He presented four lessons learned from this examination: 1) Great power confrontations have been increasingly global, and that will likely continue; 2) Great power protagonists have been increasingly culturally non-European; 3) Global system effects matter, and the US must look out particularly for third parties that end up being the real winners of global confrontations; and 4) Whether or not a global dimension to strategy pays dividends depends on identifiable factors (e.g., third parties, self-restraint, loopholes in blockades). Ultimately, Dr. Wright determined that a nation can create a global strategy by 1) adopting a global mindset and 2) by using global system effects, not just actor-specific effects. Next, Dr. Wright discussed why strategy should consider global cultural diversity. He defined culture as the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a group of humans that reflects ‘how things are done around here.’ He then discussed the two deep dives that he conducted on culture, one of which examined culture in an individual’s mind and the other of which examined whether these cognitive differences relate to strategic thinking. To conclude, Dr. Wright stated that strategy should consider global cultural diversity by 1) applying a framework integrating cultural insights from multiple disciplines in order to anticipate competitors’ decision-making and how to influence the global swing states crucial to success in global grey zone competition; and 2) recognizing that cultural commonalties between the world’s humans greatly outweigh differences, but specific differences (e.g. context dependence) can provide operationalizable tools to cause intended, and avoid unintended, effects.