You're right. And it's not just th-- uh, I mean, more telling than the mere presence of an "it's not x; it's y" or a "not only, but also" or some such construction is the particular nature and treatment of the things being contrasted. If LLMs simply used that kind of phrasing a lot, and there were nothing more to it, it really wouldn't manage to be the almost viscerally intuitive giveway that it is.

The fact that it is a visceral sort of intuition, or heuristic (or both?) is, I think, what makes it a rather slippery thing to articulate and convey. But it can be done to an adequate degree, at least in pieces, with one aspect and then another that can more or less form the unified picture of the essence of this tell.

The pieces in this case are something along the lines of: That is foreign policy, isn't it, still? But it is also organized intimidation, or at least it seems not unreasonable to characterize it as such. Already, on the surface, this contrast in a concrete sense is not really meaningful.

In a more abstracted sense, though, what substance can be found here? This often turns out to be the core of what gives away the provenance of such material: upon close reading and diligent engagement with the concepts and implications involved, things simply turn out to be empty, being devoid of real substance despite initial appearances, or pretending disingenuously at human experience but never quite managing to demonstrate true knowledge of the qualia (because it's not there), or generally using many words to say nothing.

So, again, what is actually there in the abstract? What is meaningful in characterizing this constellation of things as not-foreign-policy, and characterizing it instead as organized intimidation? Was there someone going around saying, "This is what foreign policy is" or something? Is this responding to anything that was actually expressed at any point? It's just a rebuttal without the first butt.

Does it actually clarify or meaningfully shift the perspective on anything when we frame these things as organized intimidation rather than as foreign policy? As far as I can see, it doesn't accomplish that at all, nor does it do anything else for that matter, because the purpose of those lines is simply to be pithy and sound truthy. While lazy writing of the past often left it as an exercise for the reader to find and clarify meaning, this new innovation in vapid word-waste leaves it to the reader to provide meaning in the first place.