Checking out the latest issue of "Foreign Affairs"

Even Foreign Affairs apparently can't resist a bit of both-sides-do-it-ism when it comes to Trump's foreign policy. The latest issue (97:133; 2018) has a piece by political scientist Randall Schweller, "Three Cheers for Trump's Foreign Policy: What the Establishment Misses." It's about as enthusiastic a praise for Trump's policies as you're likely to find this side of Rudy Giulani.

And totally superficial. He writes that Trump's "worldview is fundamentally realist in nature." This about a guy who is a serial fabulist.

Schweller also seems to be completely clueless as to even the basics of how the US trade deficit works.

I guess it's useful in that its probably a more coherent statement of praise for Trump's foreign policy than we're likely to see out of the White House. Certainly not from Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

At least he doesn't talk about the Deep State. Instead he talks about "the Blob".

I think their standards at Foreign Affairs may be slipping a bit. Fun fact: Foreign Affairs first published 1910-1919 as The Journal of Race Development.

This tweet by Michael Toomey also works for me:

As soon as I thought about who would write something like this and get it published in Foreign Affairs, I clicked on the article and had my suspicions confirmed. Randall Schweller never fails to disappoint.

— Michael Toomey (@michaelfjtoomey) August 16, 2018

The issue also contains a piece by one-time End of History theorist Francis Fukayama, "Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy." It reads like it was phoned in. But it's a weighty piece compared to Schweller's Trumpist true-believer screed.

Fukayama's article is actually a highbrow piece of liberal concern trolling. With the requisite complaining about how Mean Libruls pushed all this here political correctness stuff and thereby created the Trump white nationalist movement. Also strangers-in-their-own-land sympathies for the white working-class voters who feel ignored by the Mean Libruls and it really hurts their feelings.

Until recently, activists on the left had little to say about the burgeoning opioid crisis or the fate of children growing up in impoverished single-parent families in the rural United States. And the Democrats have put forward no ambitious strategies to deal with the potentially immense job losses that will accompany advancing automation or the income disparities that technology may bring to all Americans.

Both of which can scarcely be addressed with Republican free-market extremism. But Fukayama spins it as a unique problem for the Democrats.

The Mean Libruls are to blame, you see.

Someone should really explain to poor Fukayama that white backlash against minorities, progress, and good manners has been going on since approximately the day of Marse Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

History may have resumed. But Fukayama doesn't seem to have lost his faith in the endless virtues of neoliberal economics.