The qualitative analysis of USA's strategic culture through national security strategy documents

The use of the concept of Strategic Culture has emerged in a report which has been drafted about the Soviet Union in 1977 by Jack L. Snyder. Then, it has been widely used as a keyword for analyzing strategic visions of countries in security studies. The main purpose of using this concept is to have a scientific prediction about the strategic vision of countries which has no sufficient and open data about them. Therefore Strategic Culture studies include multidisciplinary approaches by using history, sociology, philosophy, and aim to catch distinctive stylistic predispositions by their past experiences. The National Security Documents NSD (White Book), on the other hand, began to be released as a foreign policy declaration of the USA under the Cold War conditions and it has been official customary to be publishing in the first six months of Presidential term. This dissertation aimed to use these two-concept and approaches together for analyzing the general tendency of US foreign policy. In this context, the seventeen NSD which has been released between 1987 and 2017 has been analyzed by using of Strategic Culture approach. The ultimate goal of this work is to understand any correlation between Strategic Culture and NSD and to determine how strategic culture reflects on the NSD. As a result, it has been determined that the USA's strategic culture is created by his geography, political culture, and material capacity and shaped by American exceptionalism, spreading of democracy, the principle of liberal economy, international law, human rights, and freedoms. Besides, the USA perceives all kinds of challenges as a threat to these values, and the USA takes care of international collaboration to spread these values. The USA's perception of itself as a source of these values is reflected as dominance on international relations and constitutes the source of American hegemony. Key words: USA, National Security, Strategic Culture and National Security Strategy Documents