Decision making.

The foreign policy process is a process of decision making. States take actions because people in governments choose those actions. People whose job it is to make decisions about international relations decision makers have to go through the same kinds of processes, in one way or another, that anyone would go through even in deciding what to eat for dinner.

Decision making is a steering process in which adjustments are made as a result of feed-back from the outside world. Decisions are carried out by actions taken to change the world, and then information from the world is monitored to evaluate the effects of actions. These evaluations along with information about other, independent changes in the environment —go into the next round of decisions.

The steering process, with its external feedback, is based on the goals of the decision maker. Along the way to these goals, decision makers set objectives as discrete steps to be reached. Objectives fall along a spectrum from core, long-term objectives to very short-term, practical objectives.

(Text taken from Understanding International Relations, 1994; p 157)