ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses international state behaviour and foreign policy decision-making at the level of domestic bureaucratic politics, but does not follow the dominant institutionalist approach, with its structural perspective of organizations-as-actors engaged in constant interagency tasking, coordination, competition, bargaining, accommodation and compromise. Rather, a basic distinction is made at the very outset between officialdom and officials, between bureaus, bureaucracy and governmental machinery, on the one hand, and the solitary bureaucrat. While Kissinger was too high up on the government totem pole to qualify as an auxiliary player or Proximate, and far too prominent a public and media figure, nonetheless he serves nicely to reopen the fundamental question in foreign policy-making of who really is the master manipulator and who the puppet. Better still, the superior-subordinate conventional model is mirrored in the terminology of bureaucratic politics. In the domestic handling of foreign and diplomatic affairs, Proximates possess far more leverage than they are usually given credit for at the time.
