NATO’s Strategic Culture(s). Public Opinion on Arms Transfers in Top Five Exporting Countries

Weapons transfers to foreign countries - a proliferation of conventional coercive technologies - became politicized in Western democracies in recent years, whereby fundamental tradeoffs between security-related, economic, and normative aspects are discussed. We propose that how these tradeoffs are solved is indicative of a more general strategic culture of countries. We investigate how the public views these tradeoffs and how homogeneous the underlying preference structure in NATO's top arms-exporting democracies (the US, UK, France, Germany, and Italy) is. Using a multidimensional measurement strategy via a conjoint experiment (N~10,000), we show that normative aspects predominate for all populations when forming preferences on export policies. However, we observe that Germany and Italy are essentially divided from the other three countries, regarding whether security aspects are considered in preference formation. Building on recent (machine learning) methods, we propose that this difference can be primarily attributed to the country of the respondents, indicating different strategic subcultures.