Elbridge Colby Is Right

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.