Hegemonic masculinity encourages offensive military build-up and discourages defensive strategies – interstate conflict would be inevitable even after a Marxist rev

Conceptions of gender that are concerned with symbolic structure of gender, rather than the appropriate roles of men and women, argue that ‘offense’ has been gendered masculine, while ''defense" has been gendered feminine. This is due to the associations of "the offensive" with activity, aggression, strength, and boldness (concepts considered masculine in Western culture) as well as the association of "defensive" with passivity, weakness, and victimhood (considered feminine). "Offensive" strategies are preferred because of the association with positive, masculine attributes, while defensive strategies are considered "wimpy" and unmanly. Carol Cohn describes the importance of "the wimp factor" in her experiences at working with defense intellectuals in the 1980s. When certain strategic actions such as withdrawal from territory, are interpreted as "wimpy," no matter how' "rational," they are delegitimized. Playing a simulated war game with a group of defense intellectuals, Cohn's team "lost" by withdrawing troops from some areas and refusing to retaliate from a nuclear strike, even though her "homeland" and its civilian population had remained safe. Such actions become "unthinkable" in the discourse of international security even though they may be strategically beneficial and consistent with other value systems. In this way, aggression and "offense" in the international arena are legitimized through gendered discourses. Gender as a discourse defines the boundaries of acceptable options and serves as a "preemptive deterrent" to certain strategic options. Gender thus constitutes offense/defense by assigning values more value to the offensive posture than the defensive posture. This is one way in which feminists would attempt to explain the puzzle of why decision-makers have the propensity to overestimate the strategic advantages of the offensive; there is a heavy "gender deterrent" against the passive, weak, "defensive" position, even if, as military balance theorists allow, the defense usually has the objective advantage in war, and disasters like World War I can occur if the balance is misinterpreted. The militarization that is linked to offensive policies is closely connected to nationalism. The literature on offense-defense balance indicates that nationalism can affect the balance by making people more willing to fight. Nationalism is also a source of militarism and offensive strategies, as it usually entails perception by elites and military planners that conquest will be easier because of the superiority of their own soldiers. Van Evera lists nationalism as a mechanism through which the cult of the offensive can be developed, but does not explore how it is possible for nationalistic sentiment to be shaped in the direction of favoring the offensive. Though offense-defense theorists note that belligerents tend to attribute a more coherent, grand and evil scheme to their enemies than is often the case, to believe that their adversaries are more unified than is the case, and to assume that opponents' policy inconsistency is a result of duplicity or treachery rather than confusion, they do not provide a way for scholars to understand these consistent misperceptions as a matter of the gendered practices of identity and nationalism. Feminist analyses would argue that nationalism and militarism are constituted by gender discourses in both the processes of "othering" other nations as well as in the presentation of national identity and chauvinism that exist by promoting particular ideologies about gender roles.