Katrina Manson opens her essay with Linda Thomas-Greenfield. She is part of  ‘A global team of respected professionals’ at Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington, D.C.

https://www.albrightstonebridge.com/

Mr. Biden can respect a fellow self-promoter! Joe Biden & Son is a Corporation with a Vision for the Future!

After Thomas-Greenfield makes her appearance garnished with home-style kitsch, comes the appearance of ‘a senior Republican congressional aide’. Nothing adds to the piquancy of a political commentary like an anonymous source.

Next in order of appearance is part of a tweet from ‘Marco Rubio, the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee’

Then Joe Biden’s appearance on NBC pronouncing that a Biden Administration is not an ‘Obama Third Term’.

The utterly amorphous ‘Some in the US foreign policy establishment’ makes its formulaic appearance. This rhetorical strategy makes possible the opinions of a ‘reporter’ – it adds a necessary strategic distance from the writer.

The next ‘walk -on’ is ‘Washington foreign policy veteran Tony Blinken’ For the particulars on Blinken. see America’s Political Gossip Sheet Politico:

https://www.politico.eu/article/nine-things-to-think-about-antony-blinken/

Blinken is a partisan of The American Empire, and its ‘Middle East’ ally of the Zionist State. ‘talked of a need for “equal measures of humility and confidence” on the world stage while also praising America’s history as the “last best hope on earth”.

More walk-ons:

Jake Sullivan: Mr Biden’s pick for national security adviser, pledged to be “vigilant in the face of enduring threats, from nuclear weapons to terrorism”.

Karim Sadjadpour, a foreign policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador now at the Council on Foreign Relations,

Charles Kupchan, an informal Biden adviser during the campaign

Andrew Bacevich the last and most valuable comment, to be quoted in this essay, not a member, but a dissident to this collection of Foreign Policy Technocrats: who express a full, but chastened faith in the Manifest Destiny writ large of the American Empire.

“The notion that we are called upon to be the world’s moral leader is presumptuous,” said Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a non-partisan think-tank that advocates for greater restraint in US foreign policy.

https://www.ft.com/content/7b687a78-109c-416e-9795-793bb017f964

Note that the Foreign Policy Technocrats are afflicted with a sclerotic conformity. How could a possible critic, of American Exceptionalism, rise from within that academic lock-step? All those who might supervise a dissertation, that takes a critical stance to the myth of American Exceptionalism – where might they be?

The most prominent critics of that ‘Exceptionalism’ are Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald,  Chris Hedges, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté etc. None of these writers/thinkers are members of that Foreign Policy Establishment, which is what makes them so utterly valuable, as critics of this toxic mythology!

Old Socialist