Debate Over Elbridge Colby
Levan Ramishvili
The GOP Senate has whisked through the confirmation of President Trump’s cabinet nominees, but a revealing debate has opened up over an important if obscure sub-cabinet post. Elbridge Colby, who faces the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, has become a lightning rod in the fight between the GOP’s peace-through-strength wing and its retreat-from-the-world faction.
Some Senators have reservations about Mr. Colby, the nominee for under secretary of defense for policy. The post includes developing and articulating national defense strategy. Mr. Colby has spent his career in government and think tanks, and he did a stint in the Pentagon during Mr. Trump’s first term. He’s qualified for the job in that sense.
But Mr. Colby has consciously made himself the intellectual front man for a wing of the political right that argues the U.S. should retreat from commitments in Europe and the Middle East. He wants the U.S. to focus on the Asia-Pacific and says the U.S. lacks the economic and political resources to do more.
Mr. Colby is right that the U.S. isn’t currently prepared for a showdown over Taiwan and could, for example, run short on long-range missiles within days of a war’s start. His 2021 book sharpened public attention on the risk that Beijing may attempt to subdue the island in a fait accompli assault.
But look closely and his argument is less about restoring American power and more a counsel of U.S. decline and retreat. His description of the Middle East as a “tertiary region” has unnerved supporters of Israel, and ditto for suggestions that the U.S. could tolerate a nuclear Iran.
There “is good reason to believe that Washington, Tel Aviv, and their associates can deter Iran from transgressing their vital interests even if Tehran gets a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Colby has written. Mr. Trump, by contrast, recently signed an executive order restoring his maximum pressure campaign on Iran, “denying Iran all paths to a nuclear weapon.”
And that urgent race to defend Taiwan? “Taiwan isn’t itself of existential importance to America,” Mr. Colby wrote last year. That sounds like advice against defending Taiwan if the island doesn’t clear some unspecified standard of investing in its own defense.
Mr. Colby has also warned South Korea that the U.S. might not be there in a pinch. “I think we need to have a plan that is based on reality. If you are assuming that the United States is going to break its spear, if you will, fighting North Korea, that is an imprudent assumption for us to make or for you to make,” he told a South Korean news outlet. Sounds like Dean Acheson before the Korean War.
Taken together, this echoes the Barack Obama crowd’s view that the U.S. is an exhausted power and its decline must be managed by accommodating Chinese and Russian power. Mr. Colby could deploy his knowledge to persuade the public that real U.S. rearmament is required. Instead he laments that the “American people, they are not jonesing to do a Reagan buildup” of the U.S. military, “whether we want it or not,” as he put it on a think-tank podcast.
Mr. Colby has courted Tucker Carlson and others in the isolationist wing of Mr. Trump’s coalition, and it’s striking that they are picking a fight before any Senator has raised a discouraging public word. Charlie Kirk, the MAGA enforcer, has accused GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of working against Mr. Colby. This is the same Sen. Cotton who shepherded Tulsi Gabbard to confirmation.
President Trump’s son Don Jr., who is Mr. Carlson’s White House ally, followed up with an op-ed demanding Mr. Colby’s confirmation. The threats are probably bluster since voters are unlikely to care about a second-tier nominee. But Senators should care because they’ll need allies at the Pentagon to make the case for reviving America’s military strength and global deterrence.
Another point of concern is that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is letting the Pentagon fill up with neo-isolationists who make Mr. Colby look like Paul Wolfowitz. The minimum price of confirming Mr. Colby should be exile for staffers such as Michael DiMino, who has been named deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. “Does the Middle East still matter?,” Mr. DiMino mused on a panel last year. “The answer is not really.”
Voters elected Mr. Trump because he promised to restore deterrence against a growing alliance of adversaries. Mr. Colby doesn’t hail from the GOP tradition that produced Mr. Trump’s first-term successes like the Abraham Accords. Senators who scrutinize Mr. Colby’s views are doing the President a favor.