Change at the level of the international system as a whole has always been a challenging subject matter in IR. This is especially true with regard to the link between foreign policy agency and systemic transformation—processes of societal re‐creation at the global level of interacting states, societies, and human beings which are significantly shaped by socialized foreign policy agents. In IR and foreign policy analysis, this link is largely taken for granted. At the same time, the connections between foreign policy agency and systemic transformation are widely considered to be essentially intractable in epistemological and methodological terms. As a result, the link has been surprisingly undertheorized. In this article, I will try to show how a Deweyan (or pragmatist) understanding of social action in general and of causal analysis in particular might help to theorize the link. More specifically, I will mobilize Deweyan notions of situated creativity, historical contingency, and event‐processes as sites of interaction which emphasize the “existential” character of systemic transformation and agential resocialization. The article also reviews available methodological tools of disciplinary inquiry in order to show that many of the necessary tools to examine the links between foreign policy agency and systemic transformation are actually at hand.