US Foreign Policy Essay

Mandelbaum believes that U.S foreign Policy has failed since the end of the cold war through different factors. Mandelbaum makes a strong case ideologically crusading into regime change, which invariably fails regardless of how virtuous the intent is. We first need to define what foreign policy and the cold war is in order to evaluate Mandelbaum and whether he thinks U.S. foreign policy has failed or not. He mentions that the years of 1991-2014 were very distinct from any previous period in American history and prior to this odd time period, the U.S foreign policy focused on the nation's security, rather than transforming other countries’ domestic arrangements. Foreign Policy or foreign affairs is explained as a government’s strategy in dealing with other nations to safeguard its national interests to achieve certain goals within its international relations(CITE). The Cold war is explained as a state in which there is political hostility between countries characterized by threats, propaganda and other measures short of open warfare (CITE). An example of the cold war is when there was a state of political hostility that …show more content…
One problem is that America tried to transform other countries to adopt a certain lifestyle, more specifically their culture. Mandelbaum states that in all human endeavors, their culture matters and the cultures of the U.S. was confronted with difficult conditions or a weak basis for building and sustaining a modern state (169). What the U.S. hoped would occur actually failed, in which they required certain behaviors that were unacceptable to the people, but the societies in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were dominated by social and political loyalties too narrow to support the development of a modern state. Arguments in which political culture is hard to disapprove and at the same time unsatisfying was due to the fact that the term culture is hard to