Realists cheer as Elbridge Colby named top DoD official for policy

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 China — has 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.