All the more powerful paywalls and my no longer following blogs or anything have totally wrecked my knowledge of the "elite" writers and their wonderful life sustaining drivel.
Wikipedia says that Stephens is a neoconservative, but...he can't be since he's obviously too young, but he is ethnically Jewish via his grandfather, so...
Reading the part about foreign policy does remind me of something I had noticed a few weeks ago on a separate project, the complete clusterfuck that foreign policy and IR writing has become under the Trump regime. There's no simple frame like how Obama was weak and apologized for America or whatever. It's just a mess, so almost every article starts out by saying "presuppose this frame of how I want U.S. policy to be so it makes sense" then argues their view about what to do with [Z].