Dozens of states in world history have been capable of revising the international status quo, yet only a few have actually done so. Under what conditions do states challenge the international order? What drives the intensity of revisionist foreign policy in world politics? Current literature suggests that the key to the variegated revisionist state behavior lies either in the international structure or in the hearts of individual leaders. Instead of focusing on a leader-level dispositional account that perceives revisionism to be a kind of trait, or showing how situational parameters influence state behavior, this paper explicitly investigates how the two sources of revisionism interact coherently to shape states’ orientation in ways that stack the deck in favor of system-destabilizing foreign policy strategies. Focusing on leader dissatisfaction with the two dimensions of the international order—constitutive and distributive dissatisfaction—I propose a nuanced typology of four ideal types of revisionists and their strategies in the international system: status-quo leaders, who pursue active institutional engagement; distributive revisionists, who seek rules-based reform; constitutive revisionists, who are inclined to pursue isolationism; and radical revisionists, who are the most likely of all to engage in hegemonic violence. To test the validity of this theory, I introduce a new dataset on world leaders’ speeches to capture the time-series cross-leader variation in the nature and intensity of dissatisfaction. Along with quantitative data on conflict outcomes over time, I show that leaders’ diverging perceptions of and interactions with the two dimensions of the international status quo can manifest themselves behaviorally as pressure for different kinds of foreign policy strategies across time and space.