General explanations of war tend to stress either internal or external factors. They locate the source of war in something within the state – for example an economy requiring imperialism or a militaristic culture – or find it in the external relationships of a state with other states – for example, one state may desire to check the growing power of another. Neorealists, in the discipline of International Relations, aim for a parsimonious theory of state behavior and argue that external factors have predominant explanatory force. The primary evidence for this view – which may initially be shocking to most historians – is the similarity of the basic foreign policy decisions made by a wide variety of states: “all sorts of states with every imaginable variation of economic and social institution and of political ideology have fought wars”; “events repeat themselves endlessly.” Crucial to this argument's plausibility is the fact that it only tries to explain basic foreign policy decisions. Neorealists candidly admit that “Structures never tell us all that we want to know. Instead they tell us a small number of big and important things.” Historians typically aim for a more complete explanation of a particular war: they pay careful attention to the nature of the states involved and how this shaped the course of events. Some theories of imperialism or militarism reverse the Neorealist position and attempt exhaustive internal explanations.