Articles in Foreign Affairs have always been an informative collection of opinions, which allowed understanding how the U.S., and especially its intellectuals that comment on international relations, perceive other countries and their foreign policies. Then when an international crisis comes, such as the one in Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent annexation of Crimea, one wonders if the Western analysts might have predicted such outcome. The article analyzes more than three dozen Foreign Affairs publications from 1999 to 2013 and concludes that the authors held rather close-minded views when it comes to foreign policy analysis. They did not present a holistic standpoint, but tried to answer all questions with only a limited number of tools and foci. It is also concluded that combining the realist, liberal internationalist and constructivist attitudes would have allowed for a more comprehensive analysis of the process of creation of Russian foreign policy.
The main objective of this article is to present potential research opportunities offered by the analysis of conditions, structure and instruments of the foreign policy of the country. The secondary objective is to present several potentially interesting research scenarios using the presented approach. For the purpose of these analyses, selected definitions of foreign policy functioning in the mainstream of Polish science (by leading researchers of international relations) and included in English-language publications of renowned foreign publishers will be presented. Then, the authors’ definition of foreign policy will be proposed based on these publications. In the following subsections there will be a presentation of selected elements of foreign policy analysis in the form of its determinants, structure and instruments. In their research, the authors used secondary research material in the form of scientific articles in Polish and English. The method used in the research is the method of content analysis.
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