The Pentagon's Policy Guy Is All In On China

The Atlantic

a day ago

Elbridge Colby believes that China is the only country on the planet that has the ambition, resources, and military might to knock the United States off its pedestal as the world's leading superpower.
Most in President Donald Trump's administration agree. But even by the standards of MAGA world, Colby is a divisive figure. And the Pentagon policy master's prescription for how to counter China's rise explains why. The only way to stop Beijing's bid for global dominance, he has argued, is for the U.S. to pour everything it can into securing the western Pacific, even if doing so comes at the expense of combating Russia or maintaining U.S. influence in the Middle East.
That is, to remain superpowerful, the U.S. may need to temporarily stop superpowering.
Colby didn't always think this way. During Trump's first term, he wrote a strategy document that advocated continuing to try to do it all, as superpowers do. But his attitude has evolved, and along the way, he has amped up the ire among his enemies—including fellow Republicans and U.S. allies abroad.
Colby's worldview was at the root of U.S. indecision this summer over whether to provide Ukraine with badly needed weapons. When the U.S. military canceled an expected shipment late last month, catching even the White House off guard, the blame—and the credit—went to Colby.
It was an unlikely moment in the spotlight for a policy wonk whose stances had, until recently, been little-noticed beyond the world of Beltway think tanks. Some on the right, including hawkish GOP senators, seized upon the decision as evidence that Colby should be ousted, and began pushing the White House to act. Others in the MAGA movement cheered the suspension—Tucker Carlson is a longtime Colby fan —and described the move as evidence of a truly 'America First' national-security strategy.
Both wings of the movement were ultimately disappointed: Within days of the pause, Trump not only reversed it, he went a step further in providing new support to Kyiv. And far from being fired, Colby appears secure in his position at the Pentagon, his influence undiminished.
In some ways, Colby personifies an ongoing shift within the Republican Party. Trump has moved away from positioning the U.S. as defender of the post–Cold War order and toward preserving its resources for threats that directly affect the U.S. homeland—with China at the top of the list.
During Trump's first term, Colby led the development of the 2018 National Defense Strategy. The document concluded that the U.S. must be prepared to confront a wide range of threats beyond China, including from Russia, and also must be able to 'counter rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran, defeat terrorist threats to the United States, and consolidate our gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach.'
More recently, Colby has come to the view that to meet the supreme challenge of China, other priorities will have to be sacrificed.
'We see with Colby's recent comments a shift towards a military almost entirely focused on one region and one opponent,' Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told us. 'And the question is: What drove that change? The only thing that seems to have changed is the political zeitgeist within the Republican Party.'
During an October speech at Dartmouth, Colby argued that the threat from Beijing was paramount—and that the U.S. was ill-equipped to deal with it. The U.S., he told the audience, faces 'the possibility of a World War III in the coming years. We're not prepared.' America needs 'to prioritize the potential for a conflict with China precisely in order to avoid it.'
The 45-year-old Yale and Harvard graduate—who goes by 'Bridge,' speaks animatedly, and is known for his thick head of blond hair—comes to the role of Pentagon undersecretary with a pedigree as a consummate Washington institutionalist and foreign-policy intellectual. The grandson of former CIA Director William Colby, he spent part of his childhood in Japan and much of his adulthood cycling between government and think tanks, at times working across bipartisan lines on issues including nuclear-weapons policy and the Middle East. He wasn't always a Trump supporter—but was never a Never Trumper. Now he has gone all in for Trump and the president's norm-breaking approach to world affairs.
Over the past decade, China has developed a bigger navy, launched more sophisticated cyber warfare and missile systems, and expanded its global footprint, all while the U.S. has been divided over how to stop its advances. Under Colby's strategy, the U.S. can both focus on China and deploy troops to protect the homeland. But it likely can't do those missions and also sustain air-defense systems and naval ships in the Middle East, not to mention tens of thousands of troops in Europe. Those regions need to do more for themselves, Colby has said.
Since taking over the Pentagon's No. 3 position in April, he has argued that support for allies such as Israel and Ukraine risks coming at the expense of U.S. interests in Asia. He has proposed moving Pentagon funding away from the Army toward the services that would spearhead the fight against Beijing—the Navy and the Air Force. That suggestion has forced the Army to scramble to prove its continued relevance. Colby advocates withdrawing forces from Europe and redistributing them around the Asia-Pacific region. The nation's main geopolitical goal, he believes, should be deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan—and defending the island if deterrence fails.
His critics have been unnevered by some of his early moves. After taking the post, Colby told his British counterparts that the Royal Navy should focus on threats from Russia and leave the U.S. Navy to lead in the western Pacific, defense officials told us. Colby also helped trigger a review of former President Joe Biden's multibillion-dollar U.S.-U.K.-Australia submarine pact, out of concern that the Australians might not deploy U.S.-provided submarines during a U.S.-led campaign on Chinese forces in the event of an assault on Taiwan. (Lawmakers from both parties have urged the Pentagon to go ahead with the deal.)
Detractors charge that Colby wants to jettison an international-security approach that has held for the past 80 years and replace it with an overly simplistic alternative.
'His belief is that we can only accomplish one thing at a time and that we can't maintain troops or defensive positions worldwide,' one Senate aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told us. 'That is counter to what most national-security experts believe and what the U.S. has done since World War II.'
Threats from China and Russia are too intertwined to have a strategy for one nation but not the other, European officials told us. Russia's war in Ukraine and China's push in the South China Sea reflect their shared territorial ambitions. Allied diplomats bristle at the idea that they should leave such a massive part of the world to the Americans when Europe has its own economic and security interests in Asia that must be defended.
'We agree on the basic principle that we in Europe should lead our security. We also feel we have a role in the Asia-Pacific,' one European official told us.
Although Colby has not spoken extensively in public since taking up his new post, he has outlined parts of his approach on social media. Earlier this month, after the president's announcement that aid to Ukraine would go ahead, Colby wrote: 'Central to President Trump's common sense, America First message is that our alliances have to be fair and equitable for them to be sustainable. This is eminently reasonable but was treated for many years as heresy.'
Colby narrowly secured the undersecretary job on a largely party-line confirmation vote. Opposition from within the GOP, such as it was, came from those who questioned whether he would be tough on other adversaries aside from China. Colby was at pains to insist he could be. He had previously said that if Iran obtained nuclear arms, the U.S. could contain it, but in his hearings he insisted that Washington must avoid that possibility at all costs. In response to questioning from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, he said using American tankers and bombers to go after Iran's nuclear facilities were options that 'I would raise for the consideration of the secretary and ultimately the president.'
Colby may not be well known among the general public, but he is considered highly influential within the Pentagon. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth focuses on his TV appearances and rooting out symptoms of a 'woke' military, Colby has been working quietly in the background.
Colby has earned fans in the MAGA movement for his efforts to push U.S. allies to spend more on their own defense. His emphasis on China has won praise from within the administration and from key outside advisers including Steve Bannon. Supporters tout him as a future secretary of defense or state. But he's also made enemies among more traditionally hawkish Republicans, who fear that focusing on China will let Russian President Vladimir Putin off the hook. Those concerns were magnified when, at his confirmation hearings, he repeatedly refused to say Putin had attacked Ukraine.
The suspension of military aid to Kyiv came at a particularly inopportune moment: just as a growing number of senators from both parties had signed onto a bill calling for more sanctions on Russia, reflecting their frustration with Moscow's continued attacks on Ukraine.
Colby had in previous months led the development of a memorandum evaluating Ukrainian weapons requests and how they lined up (or didn't) with America's own needs. Officials said the framework, which was presented to Hegseth and other senior officials, was 'outcome agnostic' and contained no recommendation to pause weapons shipments to Ukraine. But Colby's critics blamed his memo for influencing the decision to suspend aid, noting that though it didn't explicitly state a position, it made clear that providing Ukraine more weapons could put a strain on missions elsewhere, a position Hegseth ultimately adopted.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the former majority leader, who opposed Colby's confirmation, complained to the White House about the pause. Other Republicans, including Cotton, have also expressed unhappiness, an administration official and another White House aide told us. 'The strategic incoherence of underfunding our military and restricting lethal assistance to partners like Ukraine is measured in the avoidable erosion of American credibility with allies and the mounting deaths of innocents,' McConnell said in a statement at the time of the pause.
Since reversing the move, Trump has adopted a tougher approach to Russia—for now. No evidence suggests that Trump held Colby responsible for temporarily suspending the aid, and Colby's allies in the administration were quick to absolve him of blame.
Although Colby declined to speak to us for this story, multiple administration allies and GOP senators sent us unsolicited quotes of support once we reached out to the White House for comment. 'President Trump has an extremely knowledgeable and fiercely loyal advisor in Elbridge Colby,' Vice President J. D. Vance, who introduced Colby at his confirmation hearing, told us in a statement. 'The commitment Bridge has demonstrated to President Trump's foreign policy goals is unmatched throughout this administration, and we are incredibly grateful to have him as a part of our national security team.'
Christopher Landau, Marco Rubio's deputy at the State Department, called Colby 'a creative thinker in fields that haven't seen a lot of creative thinking in decades.'
A White House official suggested that the flap over the Ukraine memo was shrugged off internally and was instead simply evidence of Colby—'a consummate policy guy,' the official told us—presenting a series of options in line with Trump's views.
Trump-administration officials working on Asia are sometimes divided into three categories: 'primacists,' who believe that the U.S. must lead the global response to threats around the world, a onetime Colby position; 'restrainers,' who want a foreign policy based primarily on U.S. economic interests; and 'prioritizers,' which Colby is frequently described as personifying. Prioritizers want Washington to focus above all on threats from China, and move away from concerns over Russia and Iran.
Those who have worked with Colby—who bears the name of his great-grandfather, an Army officer who served in China—describe his views as an amalgamation of the three approaches. He is not an isolationist, they say, but rather a proponent of a precise use of American assets with the goal of defending its economic and military interests across Asia. He believes that the U.S., more than any other nation, should lead the world effort to combat threats from China, which he sees as singular.
Colby's defenders say that Trump likewise encapsulates all three tendencies, advocating the use of force in discreet ways and leveraging U.S. influence to get allies to take up more of the shared defense burden.
Colby's advocacy of moving away from legacy American missions in the Middle East and Europe has an impact on U.S. policy in the Asia-Pacific region, opponents argue. They note that if the U.S. doesn't support Ukraine and allows Russia to prevail, it will diminish American credibility with allies like Japan and South Korea, which are key to combating threats from China.
Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, where Colby worked between Trump terms, told us there is broad agreement across the administration that the United States must devote greater resources to Asia and do more to prioritize the threat posed by China's military rise.
But some—whom he put in the 'Asia only' camp—would be more willing to accept risk or trade-offs in other areas, such as the Middle East and Europe. Those people, Fontaine told us, 'seem to dismiss Europe as a distraction from the real game, which is in the Indo-Pacific.'
Of course, there may be another way to contain China while maintaining American commitments elsewhere. Colby's approach, the Hudson Institute's Clark explained, presumes that the U.S. can halt Beijing's advances only through a large-scale deployment to the western Pacific. But less military power, he told us, could be equally effective: 'The U.S. just has to be smarter about how it deploys and orchestrates its power.'