Measuring Discursive Strategic Alignment: A Panel Dataset Derived from National Strategy Documents

Abstract

Strategic alignment is a central concept in international relations, yet it remains difficult to measure independently of the political, economic, and military behaviors it is often used to explain. We introduce the first publicly available dataset of discursive strategic alignment derived from national security strategies and related strategic documents. The dataset draws on a corpus of 736 strategic documents from 100 countries spanning approximately seven decades and provides comparable country-year measures of strategic alignment toward the United States, China, Russia, NATO, and the EU. We generate these measures using transparent and reproducible text-as-data procedures and make both the underlying corpus and replication materials publicly available. We validate this new measure against other indicators of geopolitical alignment, examine whether it reproduces well-known changes in countries' strategic orientations, and illustrate how it can be used to study relationships between strategic discourse and observable political behavior. By measuring alignment through discourse rather than behavior, the dataset enables researchers to investigate the dynamic relationship between strategic preferences and state behavior over time. The resulting corpus, data, and replication materials provide a foundation for future research on strategic alignment, alliance politics, international organizations, strategic culture, and great-power competition.