There's so much that one could say about the piece < https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/T-paper-series-Tango-FINAL-508.pdf>, but I have things to do and obligations to keep, so y'all only getting a short thread. https://twitter.com/profmusgrave/status/1290105662605680640

I mean, yes, there's a lot. To take but one example, it's handling of late 1980s and early 1990s constructivism is... interesting (check out what it offers as an 'alternative' ontology on page 13).

What's most interesting about the paper is that it's a more... something... entry into a developing genre, one that telegraphs the strategy for rehabilitating Trump foreign policy. In it, Trump is a realist correction to an interregnum of idealism between 1992 and 2016.

Obama, in particular, stands out in his idealism – with the Prague Nuclear Agenda, "responsible stakeholder" approach to China, and I suppose in the larger literature The Reset – which brought the US to the precipice of disaster before the Trump administration course corrected.

In this context, think about how the 2017 NSS watchword "Great Power Competition" (or "GPC") is really just a reinvention of small-r realism for multipolarity.

In the paper, "pseudo-constructivism" is utopianism, the "Sowellian tragic perspective" is realism (to mix my analogies, Sowell is standing in for Niebuhr), and what we have at the end of the day is an effort to reconstruct Carr.

Call it "The Thirty Years' Crisis".

Anyway, this is the the story the GOP foreign-policy hands who threw their lot in with Trump have crafted (see here for a less... philosopher-heavy... variant: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/consider-possibility-trump-right-china/609493/). It's also the story that everyone rushing to declare an era of GPC risk buying into.

I say "risk" because there's a ton of gaslighting going on – from the JCPOA to the point of treaties like New START – and a real danger that we let a trite characterization of the Obama years function to sanitize a truly disastrous period fo US foreign policy. /fin