Elbridge Colby is apparently a troubled man. Bloomberg calls Colby, current undersecretary of defense for policy, a “deep state thinker in a shallow Pentagon”. The Telegraph claims he is a “little known” Pentagon officer who blindsided Trump on Ukraine weapons freeze. POLITICO ran a hit piece on him. Jewish Insider is obsessed with him. The Daily Beast says he’s “pissing off” almost everyone with “rogue” decisions.
The accusations—and in the case of the British daily, the utter ignorance—stem from the fact that Colby takes his job seriously. His prime folly, as POLITICO and a recent Financial Times article point out, is to ask tough questions to his allies.
To refit a meme, what did y’all think “America First” meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Colby needs no introduction, and his credentials need no defense. He is an intellectual star of the realist right, and perhaps the only such to hold a top position since at least the days of James Baker and the first Bush administration. He wrote the 2017 National Defense Strategy elaborating on the return of “great power competition.” As an official, he was one of the first to focus on the rise of China, and wanted to act on it instead of merely talking about it. His book is about a defense of Taiwan in extremis, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, in which he coined the titular strategy. (While I disagreed with some policy parts of the book, it is a logically sound doctrine in its own merit.) I know him personally and he is polite, responsive, and appreciative of disagreements, including from his critics!
The main contention against Colby comes from a section of entrenched interests who claim that he disgruntled American allies. Well, so what? Apparently he was brusque to the British when they performatively mentioned sending the HMS Prince of Wales, one of their two aircraft carriers, to the Pacific; he asked whether it was too late to turn it back. The Japanese cancelled their July 2+2 meeting when he asked them to raise their defense spending, and the Australians and Japanese both were taken aback when he asked for concrete logistical plans from their militaries in case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. He was also one who asked for a review of weapons being sent to Ukraine, given the shortages at home.
Let’s take these issues one by one. The British and French have legitimate interests in the Pacific, including bases and treaties. But none of them will be capable of changing the balance of power in the region on their own during conflict. If the British were really serious about helping the Americans or genuinely wanted to instantly increase their naval power, they would do one of the two things. First, they would focus on their core region, and home theaters in Europe, Atlantic, Mediterranean, and the North sea, rather than going to Asia. In the last great-power total war, the Royal Navy prioritized Europe after their prestige fleets were at the bottom of the sea at the hands of the Japanese. As Justin Logan wrote, “This is a very reasonable policy argument—secure your own neighborhood before you go gallivanting around the globe pretending to deter China.” Second, if the Royal Navy desires to be a global power, an easy way for them to do so is, as I wrote previously, initiating a joint CANZUK naval command that will instantly double the tonnage of their surface fleets and make them independent of NATO command. They of course will do neither. The performative nature of this is evident because sending a lone European warship to Asia is Europe’s way of keeping America engaged in Europe. Colby rightly argues for a better zonal burden sharing, and that is anathema to the European strategic elite.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
The case for Japan and Australia is even stranger. The rise of China and potential Chinese hegemonic threat, if it truly materializes, will affect Japanese and Australians a lot more than it will affect Americans. It is absurd for them to throw a hissy fit at a mere request for clarity and a defense budget increase. As for Ukraine, much ink has been spilled, including by yours truly in this esteemed publication; doubling down on a peripheral theater is a total betrayal of the people who elected Donald Trump.
There is a separate question. Is the president aware of those who are not only ideologically aligned but have the intellectual chops and process knowledge to implement his agenda? Because if he were, he would promote Colby. The opposition to Bridge, as he is known among friends, reminds one of the opposition to Henry Kissinger in his time. Kissinger was hated by both liberals and neoconservatives alike for his amoral realism.
Colby is the most prominent official to question the status quo, and for that reason he is judged guilty by the sophisticates who were the architects of the policies that resulted in the precipitous decline of a hegemon’s relative power in a quarter century.
