The article examines the experience of the United States in developing their foreign policy strategic planning system. Based on the analysis of acting public laws, norms and regulatory framework, as well as on documents of partisan, strategic, conceptual and policy nature, the author has developed a model of how the American state machine develops its strategical logic in foreign policy. The author comes to the conclusion that the evolution of this mechanism was manly fueled by a serious complication of economic and military aspects of international relations. The article describes influential interest groups, competence of the executive bureaucracy, social development trends and presence of political will as main driving forces of the goal-setting process. The gradual escalation of United States competition with great powers on global scale and the emergence of new economic and technological challenges increased the risks of making poor-quality political decisions with unfavorable long-term consequences. The author demonstrates a step-by-step functioning of the strategic planning mechanism of the U.S. diplomatic and foreign aid policies: from Democratic and Republican party platforms to joint quadrennial plans of the U.S. State Department and the Agency of International Development. The model may be useful in determining a degree of continuity of the U.S. foreign policy approaches, as well as evaluating the effectiveness of their practical implementation.