About Dr. Jeannie Johnson
Dr. Jeannie Johnson
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Political Science Department
Jeannie.Johnson@usu.edu
Jeannie L. Johnson is an Assistant Professor within the Political Science Department at Utah State University. Dr. Johnson’s primary research interest, Strategic Culture, examines the impact of national and organizational cultures on the formation of security policy. Dr. Johnson co-edited the volume Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Culturally Based Insights into comparative National Security Policymaking and is completing a second book examining the internal culture of the United States Marine Corps and its impact on USMC led counterinsurgency operations.
Dr. Johnson worked within the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence as a member of the Balkan Task Force from 1998-1999. Her current academic work includes ongoing efforts with members of intelligence community and Department of Defense to improve cultural research methods and analysis. The cultural research methodology she pioneered with co-author Matt Berrett was featured in CIA’s June 2011 edition of Studies in Intelligence.
Dr. Johnson received her doctorate from the University of Reading in 2013.
US Blindspots in Foreign Policy
America’s strategic culture has resulted in a series of important “wins” for the United States across time. The resulting culmination of those wins is a position of unprecedented status: the US is the singular global hegemon. Hegemonic status of this sort threatens to validate favorite foreign policy practices, whether those are a strategic asset to the US in its global leadership role or not. From our earliest engagements in foreign lands, the US has followed a number of patterns, patterns born of American culture, perspective, and ambition. Some of these have yielded great benefit for both the US and for the world. Some have not. Given the deeply rooted nature of these patterns, even disastrous outcomes abroad have done little to alter their repeated use. Examining these perennial foreign policy blindspots with real intent, and with a repertoire of strategically informed alternatives at hand, offers the only hope of breaking debilitating cycles of national habit that continue to eat away at American political and economic power across the globe.