ABSTRACT
Foreign policy orientations are never the function of a one-shot policy decision. Instead, orientations emerge through a “series of cumulative decisions” made over a period of time in order to adjust perceived goals, interests and values to the reality of the internal and external settings. The adaptive perspective on external behavior can be quite suggestive in conceptualizing foreign policy orientation in terms of its basic function. In a sense, the bureaucratic politics model is an advanced variant of the organizational process model. The bureaucratic politics model takes a political view of the making of decisions. The influence of Congress on foreign policy has been primarily one of legitimizing or amending certain aspects of the policy that have been decided by the executive branch in response to an external situation. Foreign policy should be viewed more as an action-reaction chain rather than a one-dimensional process divided into different parts and made up of independent and dependent variables.
