Just as the ideas of arms control comprise a picnic basket for sunny international weather, so much of the allegedly ‘new thinking‘ on strategy and security claims to have ‘matched us with His hour’.1 The challenge, purportedly is between realist and ‘transformationist‘ approaches to security,2 between national security and common (or global) security,3 and – of course – between old and new thinking. We are told that ‘[t]here is scope to change the strategic culture of world politics’.4 Some of us old thinkers are a little puzzled by the content of a quotation such as that, since the same authors have written breezily and optimistically, albeit contingently, to be fair, that ‘[t]he “nature” of the [international] system would be changed because of the changed conceptions – strategic cultures – of the units‘.5 The relationship between strategic culture and cultures would stand some careful discussion, while the merit in the claim that there is scope to change ‘the strategic culture of world politics’, whatever that very big idea may mean, remains to be seen.6
Shrikant Paranjpe, India’s Strategic Culture: The Making of National Security Policy
