How Elbridge Colby Can Vanquish America-Lasters
A battle for the country’s foreign policy future is heating up.
One week after President Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet appointees—Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—sailed through the Senate with near-unanimous Republican support, a lower-profile nomination has surfaced deep divisions within the GOP over foreign policy. Though the nominee has garnered less media attention than Kennedy and Gabbard, he will, if confirmed, handle matters of paramount importance for U.S. national security.
What’s more, the nomination battle could determine whether the United States pursues calculated restraint on the world stage or clings to a strategy of global domination ill-suited to an age of multipolarity.
The nominee is Elbridge Colby, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense during the first Trump administration, and the position he would fill this term is undersecretary of policy at the Pentagon. Colby is a conservative realist who opposes “primacism”—encompassing neoconservatism and other variants of hawkism—and who advocates prioritizing China to prevent its dominance of Asia and deter a Taiwan invasion. Since prioritizing China would entail shifting relatively scarce military resources away from Europe and the Middle East, Colby’s views have stirred controversy among hawks focused on Russia and Iran.
Some Republican lawmakers, including Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have privately objected to Trump’s nomination in December of Colby, according to new reports. Looking to obstruct the appointment, they have questioned Colby’s views on Iran and especially his idea that America could still contain Tehran even if it obtained a nuclear weapon. But Colby hasn’t been without backers in the GOP, and this week the behind-the-scenes infighting burst onto center stage.
Prominent MAGA conservatives have excoriated Cotton and defended Colby. Charlie Kirk, the CEO of Turning Point USA, wrote Sunday on X that Cotton was working to “stop Trump’s pick” and called Colby “one of the most important pieces to stop the Bush/Cheney cabal” at the Pentagon. Hours later, Vice President J.D. Vance weighed in. “Bridge has consistently been correct about the big foreign policy debates of the last 20 years,” Vance wrote, using Colby’s nickname. The vice president raised the question of “why a serious realist was shut out of the dominant institutions of the American Right in the late 2000s.”
Donald Trump Jr., who vowed in November to keep neocons out of the second Trump administration, published an op-ed Tuesday supporting Colby. “What are Colby’s views and why do they fit so well with America First?” Trump Jr. wrote in Human Events. “Well, he starts off in exactly the right place—with the concrete interests of the American people, not abstractions like ‘the rules based international order’ or spreading democracy in the Middle East.”
Colby’s confirmation, Trump Jr. argued, is imperative because Trump Sr. “was surrounded” in his first term “by many who pretended to agree with him, only to work at cross-purposes behind his back.”
Junior is right. In Trump’s first term, National Security Advisor John Bolton engineered a hardline Iran policy at odds with the president’s opposition to forever wars; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo orchestrated a whole-of-government anti-China strategy that undercut Trump’s efforts to find a modus vivendi with Beijing; and the Syria envoy James Jeffrey slow-walked a troop withdrawal, deceiving senior leaders about how many soldiers remained in the country.
Compared to the war-hawk saboteurs from Trump’s first administration, Colby would be more inclined to faithfully execute the president’s peace agenda. At the same time, Colby’s reputation for tough-minded pragmatism would make U.S. rivals think twice about their expansionist aims. Even for advocates of foreign policy restraint, “you probably don’t want a defense and diplomacy cabinet that is all open doves,” Jude Russo, managing editor of this magazine, told me in a conversation.
Colby is well-known for his promotion of realism—an international relations theory that focuses on great powers and their relative power positions—and for his hard-nosed, conservative twist on it. But academic differences are not the primary driver behind forces seeking to block Colby’s nomination. Rather, the Israel lobby—a loose coalition of organizations and individuals who advocate foreign policies believed to benefit Israel—don’t see Colby as a reliable partner. Semafor reported earlier this month that one group, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, wrote a letter to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee expressing “serious concerns” about Colby.
Not all pro-Israel and Jewish conservatives share those concerns, and in recent days several have risen to Colby’s defense. “I’m troubled by the attacks on Bridge Colby coming from certain parts of the Jewish community,” wrote Yoram Hazony, mastermind of the annual National Conservatism conference, on X. “I don’t see how President Trump can achieve his ambitions for countering China, while pushing Europe and Israel towards strategic independence, without Bridge Colby at his side.”
Colby’s critics often cite a 2010 Foreign Policy op-ed in which he criticized Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that “containment will not work against Iran” and thus that “the only responsible policy is to prevent [Iran] from developing atomic bombs in the first place.” Colby contended that Netanyahu “left no doubt that he advocates the use of military force to achieve that goal.” Arguing against preemptive war, Colby described Tehran as a rational actor and concluded that “containing a nuclear Iran is an eminently plausible and practical objective.”
Labeling Colby a “squish” based on this article is unfair. In the same piece, he affirmed that “preventing an Iranian nuclear capability should be the objective of Washington and the international community.” Moreover, Colby’s argument was well within the realist tradition. The late political scientist Kenneth Waltz—the father of modern realism—went even further in 2012, arguing that an Iranian bomb would stabilize the Middle East.
Colby’s opponents likely have bigger ambitions than blocking his particular appointment. As Trump paves the way for diplomacy with Russia and Iran, hawks may see the Colby nomination as the last best chance to thwart the president’s America-First agenda. Cotton has gone along with Trump’s Russia diplomacy, but evidently, Colby is a bridge too far and the senator wants to put up a fight.
MAGA Republicans are right to fight back. Trump has a mandate to end wars that erupted on Biden’s watch and to prevent World War III—solemn promises that he made on the campaign trail. During his first term, Trump successfully avoided starting new wars, despite the covert maneuvering of war hawks in his administration. With international tensions high and conflicts threatening to widen, the president will need staunch America-First conservatives in key roles if he wants to expand on his earlier success.
The dispute over Colby’s nomination is about more than a single Pentagon post. It’s a defining battle over whether the Republican Party—and the country it now leads—will leave neoconservatism behind.
The post How Elbridge Colby Can Vanquish America-Lasters appeared first on The American Conservative.
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