Tragicomic Emplotment in US Foreign Policy Discourse on China, 2017–2026: Make Genre Great Again

This article develops a genre-sensitive approach to narrative analysis in International Relations by advancing tragicomic emplotment as a framework for interpreting US foreign policy discourse toward China between 2017 and 2026. It argues that successive US administrations rendered strategic rivalry with China intelligible through distinct narrative genres that organized political time, agency, crisis, and expectations of resolution. Across this period, US foreign policy discourse shifted from comic restoration under the first Trump administration to tragic responsibility under Biden before moving toward farcical recurrence following Trump’s return to office in 2025. Drawing on Hayden White’s theory of emplotment and Kant’s abderitic conception of history, the article conceptualizes tragicomedy not as humor but as a hybrid narrative form in which high stakes coexist with expectations of recovery, restoration, or redemption. Tragicomic emplotment captures how political actors continue to narrate renewal through leadership even as those redemptive narratives are repeatedly strained by contradiction, reversal, and recurrence. Empirically, the analysis examines a corpus of National Security Strategies, executive orders, presidential speeches, and authoritative statements by officials. It traces how narrative roles, crisis framings, and political futures changed across the Trump I, Biden, and Trump II administrations. In doing so, the article contributes to the narrative turn in International Relations by demonstrating how genre analysis provides a systematic framework for analyzing shifts in the moral logic, temporal structure, and credibility of foreign policy discourse. More broadly, it shows how tragicomic emplotment can be operationalized to diagnose the changing narrative foundations of strategic rivalry.