Foreign policies are strategies governments use to guide their actions toward other states. The foreign policy process is the set of procedures and structures that states use to arrive at foreign policy decisions and to implement them.
In the rational model of decision making, officials choose the action whose consequences best help to meet the state’s established goals. By contrast, in the organizational process model, decisions result from routine administrative procedures, and in the government bargaining (or bureaucratic politics) model, decisions result from negotiations among governmental agencies with different interests in the outcome.
The actions of individual decision makers are influenced by their personalities, values, and beliefs as well as by common psychological factors that diverge from rationality. These factors include misperception, selective perception, emotional biases, and cognitive biases (including the effort to reduce cognitive dissonance).
Foreign policy decisions are also influenced by the psychology of groups (including "groupthink"), the procedures used to reach decisions, and the roles of participants.
During crises, the potentials for misperception and error are amplified.
Struggles over the direction of foreign policy are common between professional bureaucrats and politicians, as well as between different government agencies.
Domestic constituencies (interest groups) have distinct interests in foreign policies and often organize politically to promote those interests.
Prominent among such constituencies—especially in the United States and Russia, and especially during the Cold War—have been military-industrial complexes consisting of military industries and others with an interest in high military spending.
Public opinion influences governments’ foreign policy decisions (more so in democracies than in authoritarian states), but governments also manipulate public opinion.
Democracies have historically fought as many wars as authoritarian states, but democracies have almost never fought wars against other democracies. This is called the democratic peace.
