How and why do some foreign policy crises end successfully and efficiently, but others do not? Do democracies deal better than non-democracies with foreign policy crises? Focusing on both the outcome and the duration of foreign policy crises, this article employs event history (survival) analysis to model and test three models of foreign policy crisis derived from realist, liberal, and constructivist theories and the level-of-analysis framework. The dataset in this article is drawn from the International Crisis Behavior Project, 1918–2007. The analysis indicates that democracies are more likely to solve a foreign policy crisis successfully and efficiently than non-democracies. While the involvement of international organization during a crisis has a negative effect on a state’s goal of ‘winning’ a crisis more quickly, the increasing power of a rival also hinders and prolongs the achievement of success in a crisis. Finally, the more violence a state uses during a crisis, the more difficult it is for this state to solve the crisis in a timely manner.