Follow us on social

Elbridge Colby

Realists cheer as Elbridge Colby named top DoD official for policy

Trump rounded out his E-Ring Sunday night offering a rare pick for those in the restrainer camp

Analysis | QiOSK

Elbridge Colby, who worked guiding Pentagon policy in first Trump administration and is an advocate of building up military assets and deterrence as a way to avoid future U.S. wars — particularly with Chinahas just been named the incoming Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

It is an important role, and one that realists and many restrainers are all too happy to go to Colby, who is the most representative of the realist approach to foreign policy that Trump has nominated or selected since winning the White House in November. Colby has openly said he opposed the Iraq war and every U.S. conflict/overseas intervention since, and has been a vocal critic of U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. He has supported Ukraine's campaign to defend itself, but says the war is not a first priority interest of the United States and warns that continuing Washington aid and weapons at the current pace won't make a difference there, while sapping U.S. resources for its own defenses.

His pick has realists, particularly on the Right, cheering, comparing him to an older tradition of U.S. foreign policy practitioners.

"Bridge Colby is arguably the leading conservative realist in U.S. defense and foreign policy today," notes Reid Smith, vice president of foreign policy at Stand Together, tells RS. "He hails from an intellectual tradition defined by statesmen like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, who prioritized power and pragmatism over gauzy moralizing or rigid ideology. At the same time, his approach signals a generational shift toward a foreign policy grounded in reason, mindful of constraints, and informed by the lessons of past mistakes."

What Colby believes is the chief security interest of the U.S. is China and that is where some restrainers peel off. Colby has said Washington must preserve its weapons, and shift its energy and focus for accelerated defense industrial production, on China. While he wants to avoid, war, he believes, "(Chinese) are actively preparing for conflict. My view is to prevent them from dominating Asia without a war. But the only prudent way is to be prepared to fight to show Beijing that there is nothing to gain by initiating conflict.”

In that vein he sees Taiwan as the flashpoint. As he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in September:

"For about the past decade, I have been arguing in every available format that we should prepare ourselves to defend Taiwan. But my argument has always been that Taiwan isn’t itself of existential importance to America. Rather, our core interest is in denying China regional hegemony over Asia. Taiwan is very important for that goal, but not essential.

The key is to make Taiwan defensible at a reasonable level of cost and risk for Americans. This is a theme I developed at great length in my 2021 book. The sharpness and insistence of my arguments have been motivated by this precise fact: To make Taiwan defensible, America must focus on preparing for Taiwan’s defense and Taiwan must do more."

Some restrainers, even realists, believe that China's "desire to dominate Asia" is in itself a realist position for China and one that does not threaten the U.S. and therefore would not require the power projection that in fact might provoke the very war that Colby claims to want to avoid.

Interestingly, Colby's only serious detractors have been pro-Israel types who say he is "too dovish" on Iran, citing a column in 2012 taking a realist point of view on the debate over whether the U.S. should attack the Islamic Republic, or not:

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?” (Matthew) Kroenig and other advocates for war note, correctly, that a strike against Iran could do substantial damage to Iran’s program. But they fail to explain how the United States will prevent Iran from simply restarting its program, this time in deadly earnest.

These critics, who cite Colby's 2021 co-written essay on reducing the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East as another datapoint in his "dovishness," fail to note that he has firmly stated his support of Israel's security, protecting Americans from the threat of transnational terrorism, and preventing "the domination of the oil-rich Gulf states by a potentially hostile power" as the three main U.S. interests in the region. In the same stated essay he says:

These (U.S.) interests can be served through a far more scoped and modest approach than the United States has pursued over the last generation—most notably through the “freedom agenda” but also through its efforts to broadly stabilize the Middle East. The United States should therefore reduce its military engagement and presence in the region, shifting burdens as much as possible to other, primarily 76 regional, actors. This last goal can best be pursued by supporting and bolstering the capabilities of Israel and regional states like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt, whose interests on key issues broadly align with the United States.

Colby, during the Trump administration, also advised Trump to be cautious in sliding into war with Iran, which, despite the administration's assassination of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani in early 2020, did just that. This was seen as a win for realists/restrainers in the Trump orbit like Tucker Carlson and Colby, who at the time wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "As the U.S. protects its interests in the Middle East, it must not allow its military focus to be wrested away from Asia." So again, his real sites are laser pointed eastward.

Colby is a major proponent of rebuilding the American defense industrial base. Trump's other pick announced last night, billionaire Stephen Feinberg as Deputy Secretary of Defense in charge of budgets, runs a major private equity firm overseeing a vast web of defense companies, so the two will compliment each other, no doubt in that regard, but the closeness of profit-making industrialists to strategy & policy is already giving some restrainers heartburn.

But Colby has had years of experience in government and in developing the intellectual firmament behind a "peace through strength" approach and many have breathed a sigh of relief that his position on China, which is decidedly more hawkish than the those who want a much less militarized posture, is not as ideologically driven and keen for a Cold War redux as others in the Republican orbit around Trump today.


Top photo credit: Elbridge Colby (CSIS/Flickr/Creative Commons)
Analysis | QiOSK
Trump ASEAN
Top photo credit: U.S. President Donald Trump looks at Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., next to Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim when posing for a family photo with leaders at the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, October 26, 2025. Vincent Thian/Pool via REUTERS

‘America First’ meets ‘ASEAN Way’ in Kuala Lumpur

Asia-Pacific

The 2025 ASEAN and East Asia Summits in Kuala Lumpur beginning today are set to be consequential multilateral gatherings — defining not only ASEAN’s internal cohesion but also the shape of U.S.–China relations in the Indo-Pacific.

President Donald Trump’s participation will be the first by a U.S. president in an ASEAN-led summit since 2022. President Biden skipped the last two such summits in 2023 and 2024, sending then-Vice President Harris instead.

keep readingShow less
iran, china, russia
Top photo credit: Top image credit: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi shake hands as Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu looks on during their meet with reporters after their meeting at Diaoyutai State Guest House on March 14, 2025 in Beijing, China. Lintao Zhang/Pool via REUTERS

'Annulled'! Russia won't abide snapback sanctions on Iran

Middle East

“A raider attack on the U.N. Security Council.” This was the explosive accusation leveled by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov this week. His target was the U.N. Secretariat and Western powers, whom he blamed for what Russia sees as an illegitimate attempt to restore the nuclear-related international sanctions on Iran.

Beyond the fiery rhetoric, Ryabkov’s statement contained a message: Russia, he said, now considers all pre-2015 U.N. sanctions on Iran, snapped back by the European signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) — the United Kingdom, France, Germany — “annulled.” Moscow will deepen its military-technical cooperation with Tehran accordingly, according to Ryabkov.

This is more than a diplomatic spat; it is the formal announcement of a split in international legal reality. The world’s major powers are now operating under two irreconcilable interpretations of international law. On one side, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany assert that the sanctions snapback mechanism of the JCPOA was legitimately triggered for Iran’s alleged violations. On the other, Iran, Russia, and China reject this as an illegitimate procedural act.

This schism was not inevitable, and its origin reveals a profound incongruence. The Western powers that most frequently appeal to the sanctity of the "rules-based international order" and international law have, in this instance, taken an action whose effects fundamentally undermine it. By pushing through a legal maneuver that a significant part of the Security Council considers illegitimate, they have ushered the world into a new and more dangerous state. The predictable, if imperfect, framework of universally recognized Security Council decisions is being replaced by a system where legal facts are determined by political interests espoused by competing power blocs.

This rupture followed a deliberate Western choice to reject compromises in a stand-off with Iran. While Iran was in a technical violation of the provisions of the JCPOA — by, notably, amassing a stockpile of highly enriched uranium (up to 60% as opposed to the 3.67% for a civilian use permissible under the JCPOA), there was a chance to avert the crisis. In the critical weeks leading to the snapback, Iran had signaled concessions in talks with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Cairo, in terms of renewing cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog’s inspectors.

keep readingShow less
On Ukraine and Venezuela, Trump needs to dump the sycophants
Top Photo Credit: (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)

On Ukraine and Venezuela, Trump needs to dump the sycophants

Europe

While diplomats labored to produce the Dayton Accords in 1995, then-Secretary of Defense Bill Perry advised, “No agreement is better than a bad agreement.” Given that Washington’s allies in London, Paris, Berlin and Warsaw are opposed to any outcome that might end the war in Ukraine, no agreement may be preferable. But for President Trump, there is no point in equating the illusion of peace in Ukraine with a meaningless ceasefire that settles nothing.

Today, Ukraine is mired in corruption, starting at the very highest levels of the administration in Kyiv. Sending $175 billion of borrowed money there "for however long it takes" has turned out to be worse than reckless. The U.S. national sovereign debt is surging to nearly $38 trillion and rising by $425 billion with each passing month. President Trump needs to turn his attention away from funding Joe Biden’s wars and instead focus on the faltering American economy.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.