US Foreign Policy Summary

The article I choose is from the journal Political Geography and is titled “The radical geopolitics of US foreign policy: Geopolitical and geoeconomic logics of power” by Julien Mercille. This article focuses a lot on the US foreign policy after the cold war. The author dives into critical geopolitics and how the US foreign policy is affected by it. Throughout the article the author uses the Vietnam War as examples of how our foreign policy was formed. The first section’s main take away was the way American policy has been shaped by cold-war politics and truly hasn’t changed much since then. He attributes this to the radical scholarship. This says that essentially the elites of our society made communism out to be a threat to America and we cam together wanting the government to take care of it either through politics or harsher means. The article goes on explaining feminist geopolitics and how it has affected foreign policy and how it puts less emphasis on the cause of foreign policy and focuses more on the result. Geoeconomic and geopolitical logics are important to foreign policy but they are also important to state policies. Geoeconomic logic relates to how essentially issues that affect economic standing in a …show more content…
His examples in regards to the Vietnam war perfectly showed how our foreign policy was definitely influenced heavily by cold-war era policies. He stated that elites in our society went after communism because it hindered their business expansion overseas. This is geopolitics at its best, one power fighting with another power over who’s best essentially. This power just so happened to be communism instead of a specific