Foreign policy is the main direction of state’s activity, aimed to guide the relations between countries. It’s a general course of the country on the international scene, which reflects it’s national interests expressed in the form of principles and objectives of the state. In order to get a deeper understanding of modern foreign policy processes, it’s necessary to examine the nature of this phenomenon. This article considers the correlation between the concepts of “foreign policy”, “international relations” and “international life”. We analyzed the hypothesis of the main schools of international relations regarding the place and role of foreign policy in the modern world. Schools of political realism, idealism, transnationalism, neo-Marxism and neo-realism express their vision in evaluating the significance of foreign policy in the international arena. Moreover, the paper examines the relevance of the ideas of realism as one of the dominant theories of international relations. Obvious limitations of some scientific school’s propositions, compensating by the ideas of others. Thus, international relations theories and conceptual categories of science interchange and enrich each other. As a result, the study tested, that the ideas of political realism meet the realities of the modern world as never before and have the ability to predict the situation in the future.
