For old guard & neocons, Colby is an 'America First' bridge too far

In an interview conducted three days after the election, Elbridge Colby told Tucker Carlson, “I was out [at]a thing a few months ago and this young guy came up. Strong guy, whatever.”

Colby continued, “And he said, ‘Hey, Mr. Colby, I’m going into the Marines and I just want to say that all the young Republicans love what you’re saying.”

“And I said to him, like, well that’s good because all the old Republicans hate it.”

Colby added, “He was like, ‘yeah, that’s the point.’”

Colby, President Donald Trump’s pick for undersecretary of defense for policy, is an advocate for a more sober approach abroad, one that prioritizes the security and interests of American citizens over the democracy promotion/regime change agenda of the neoconservatives who once defined Republican foreign policy.

As Donald Trump has positioned himself away from this Old Guard, there are still Republicans desperate to keep the GOP half of the War Party intact.

Many wondered if this tension might prevent the confirmation of Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense. Ditto for Tulsi Gabbard — who once called Hillary Clinton as “queen of warmongers.” But she was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence last week, with the help of uber-hawks like Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), whose support was a gamechanger for getting her nomination out of committee.

But now Sen. Cotton and others are reportedly voicing issues with Colby, as if too many “America First” realists in the administration might actually threaten their longstanding grip on U.S. foreign policy.

A conservative lawmaker close to Cotton told Breitbart that the senator “has policy concerns with some of Elbridge Colby’s statements on our policy towards stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

“Cotton has and is discussing with the White House,” the report noted.

Punchbowl News reported, “Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) recently acknowledged that some Republicans have concerns about Colby. But sources cautioned that this shouldn’t be interpreted as a statement of opposition.”

The magazine Jewish Insider got the anti-Colby ball rolling in the anti-Colby campaign back in November when it suggested Colby's "dovish views" on Iran had sparked opposition to his potential pick for Team Trump. Another more recent piece about his nomination in JI says "his views align him with several other isolationist picks" in the new administration.

Here are Colby's exact words in the National Interest, circa 2012:

The reality, however, is that attacking Iran without provocation is a dangerous course. The arguments for avoiding military strikes are well known: deterrence, while neither easy nor cheap, can work; the costs of likely Iranian retaliation outweigh the likely benefits, perhaps markedly; and the United States (and its allies) have considered preventive attacks against adversary nuclear programs before, thought the better of it and come out tolerably.

But perhaps the most important argument against attacking Iran has received less attention. That is that none of the attack proponents can give a sensible answer to the question General David Petraeus posed at the beginning of the Iraq war: “How does this end?”

Furthermore he is blasted for wanting to reduce the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East.

According to his own writing, Colby said in 2021:

“...retaining the large legacy U.S. force posture and habits of employment in the region, much of which is oriented toward (putatively) ‘deterring’ Iran and defending the Gulf states, is both unnecessary and dangerous. It is unnecessary because it is beyond what is needed to achieve these strategic goals. The United States can pursue these goals more efficiently by bolstering the military capabilities of its partners in the region. And, if need be, it can always flow forces in to assist such defenses and eject any invading Iranian forces, should the need arise. Because of Iran’s weakness, Washington does not need to worry about the fait accompli in the way it does with respect to China in Asia and Russia in Europe.”

In his own way, Trump has supported many these arguments since he first campaigned for president in 2016 and then wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria during his first presidency. After greenlighting the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in 2020, the Iranians reacted with a limited retaliatory attack on U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. But Trump refused to take it step further with an all-out war on Tehran, despite the urgings by the same folks who are trying to tank Colby’s nomination today.

Colby’s backers, starting with J.D. Vance, recognize that Colby’s nomination represents the last gasp of the Old Guard.

“Bridge has consistently been correct about the big foreign policy debates of the last 20 years,” Vance wrote on X Sunday. “He was critical of the Iraq War, which made him unemployable in the 2000s era conservative movement.”

This position has gained purchase with conservative pundits like Charlie Kirk, who wrote on X on Sunday: “The effort to undermine President Trump continues in the US Senate @SenTomCotton is working behind the scenes to stop Trump’s pick, Elbridge Colby, from getting confirmed at DOD.”

“Colby is one of the most important pieces to stop the Bush/Cheney cabal at DOD,” Kirk added.

Donald Trump Jr. offered perhaps the most full throated support of Colby in Human Events on Tuesday.

“For years, my father has been trying to restore an American foreign policy that puts Americans first. Since he began his 2015 campaign and even before, he saw that the foreign policy we had pursued for decades had led us to unnecessary and costly wars…”

“Yet for many years my father was essentially alone,” Trump Jr. noted. “In fact, in his first term he was surrounded by many who pretended to agree with him, only to work at cross-purposes behind his back. This is why he has repeatedly said that the biggest lesson for him of his first term was to get the right people to implement his America First foreign policy vision. These are people who actually believe in that foreign policy and have the integrity and strength of character to push it through in the face of the opposition of the failed establishment that has tried to use every tool to frustrate and even jail him.”

“No one fits this category better than Elbridge Colby”

Donald Trump himself has said that during his learning-on-the-job first term, he regrettably chose people who refused to work for him and even worked against him, and seems determined not to repeat that mistake again.

Tom Cotton is the kind of Republican who might like to see the president make that mistake again.