This book began its life over a late-night beer in a hotel in Taiwan in 1997. We two authors – one a political scientist with a background in international relations theory, the other a former diplomat and policy-maker – discovered that we were each interested from our different perspectives in the same questions. Why do international relations theorists and foreign policy practitioners see the process of making foreign policy in such different ways? Why has so little of the writing about foreign policy in Australia successfully reconciled the theoretical approaches to the subject with the actual, erratic, contingent way in which foreign policy making takes place?

In contrast with other areas of public policy – microeconomic or social policy, for example – the gap between foreign policy academics and practitioners is large. They speak different languages. Empirical to their bootstraps, foreign policy practitioners tend to regard theory as an artificial template imposed on an uncertain world. For their part, international relations theorists consider practitioners dangerously limited by their failure to understand, or to have regard for, the broader patterns shaping international events. We consider some of the reasons for this gap in Chapter 1. One important objective of this book is to clear away some of the dust and to help practitioners and theorists see each other more clearly.

Foreign policy is a subject worth taking seriously. If it is conceived and implemented effectively, foreign policy delivers to a country benefits as tangible and significant as those produced by good economic policy. If it is done badly, the consequences are frequently serious and can eventually be calamitous.