An Anti-Imperialist Father and His American Diplomat Son that Malley’s appointment would constitute Biden’s “first foreign policy blunder.”
The suggestion that Malley is outside the Beltway mainstream is false. In fact, he’s a denizen of the American foreign policy establishment: credentialed by Yale and Harvard Law school, a clerkship on the Supreme Court, and stints on Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s National Security Councils. Prior to joining the Biden administration, he ran the International Crisis Group, a prestigious conflict-resolution think tank based in Washington, DC. What distinguishes Malley is not his radicalism. Instead, as this previously unpublished June 2008 lecture reveals, it is his willingness to grapple with radicalism in particular the radicalism of anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and for the most intimate of reasons.