democracies may behave differently directly challenges a core premise of structural realism. As Waltz notes, “If the democratic peace thesis is right, structural realist theory is wrong.”37 At the policy level, few realists are comfortable with espousal by the first Bush and Clinton administrations of “democracy promotion” abroad as a vital goal of American diplomacy, at least at the rhetorical level, usually denouncing it as an invitation to hopeless crusading, or as “ international social work” worthy of Mother Theresa but not of the world’s sole superpower.38 To reconstruct how nations deal with each other, it is necessary to view the situation through the eyes of those who act in the name of the state: decision makers and the group and bureaucratic-organizational contexts within which they act. Table 2 provides an overview of three major types of decision-making models, beginning with the bureaucratic-organizational
models