reading about Joe Biden's nominees for cabinet posts these days feels a little like getting your political horoscope read.

No one knows what any of these people will actually do. So instead, smart folks are reading the tea leaves, digging up old articles people have written, speeches they've given, trying to predict the future.

It does seem like Joe Biden has put a high premium on people that he has a personal comfort level with.

Peter Beinart is no astrologer. He's a historian and a political scientist.

I asked him to come on not just to speculate

about what happens now, but to build a case. Because one of the other things that's happening at the

moment is people like Peter are floating their best ideas in public, trying to shape what happens now.

Peter's expertise is foreign policy. He says he looks at

who Joe Biden has named to a variety of key positions, his preferred Secretary of State,

a national security advisor, and already he sees a pattern. I do think it's a legitimate criticism

of this team that you do not have an intellectual outlier,

somebody who I think stands outside of some of the basic assumptions that are held by the kind of foreign policy establishment of Democratic Party.

What Peter's talking about here is a kind of ethos of American power, summed up best by Joe Biden himself in an essay he wrote for Foreign Affairs Magazine earlier this year.

It was called Why America Must Lead Again.

This is a phrase that comes up again and again.

Another phrase that you hear a lot from Biden and his visors is essentially,

America has to organize the world because if we don't organize the world,

either no one will and there will be chaos or some other malevolent actors will organize it and that won't be good for us.

And I think there are a lot of problems with this way of imagining the way the world works.

First of all, I think it simply overemphasizes the amount of power that the United States has today.

That the United States share of gross, of the world's GDP is now about one-seventh, as opposed to

one quarter at the end of the Cold War and one-half at the beginning of the Cold War.

...