Elbridge Colby and the Return of Republican Realism

The leading theorist of America First foreign policy has his work cut out for him

by Alexander Zaitchik

This story is co-published with Drop Site News and Truthdig

Elbridge Colby speaks at the National Conservative Conference in Washington D.C., Tuesday, July 9, 2024 / Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images

On November 13, Elbridge Colby appeared on CNN to discuss and defend Donald Trump’s selection of Peter Hegseth to run the Pentagon. The role of explaining the president-elect’s foreign policy ideas had by then become a familiar one for Colby, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the first Trump administration. Throughout the summer and fall, he was a go-to guest for cable news segments on what an “America First” foreign policy would mean for the world. As he described it to CNBC in July, it did not signify a turn inward, toward isolationism, but backward, toward an older “practical, common-sense approach” to statecraft that included “sparing” use of the military and an Eisenhowerian attunement to the economic costs of security competition. It became a ritual in these appearances for Colby to coyly deflect speculation over his own possible role, fueled by his presence on shortlists for national security advisor and secretary of defense.

Following Trump’s victory, this speculation became aggressive advocacy on the part of Colby’s supporters. On November 10, Tucker Carlson began an in-person interview with the 45-year-old veteran of the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence by describing him as “one of the very few people with deep experience in national security who shares the president's priorities on national security,” and expressed his desire for Colby to play a “big role” in the administration. The Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan urged the president-elect “to appoint Colby to a senior national security position, perhaps as Secretary of Defense or CIA director.” Sharing the Carlson interview on X, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote: “More than most of the FP appointments, what happens with [Colby] will be a sign of whether the Trump WH is aiming for strategic coherence and an explicit ‘realist’ commitment this time around, as opposed to a more ad hoc team of ideological rivals.”

Within the week, the defense and CIA posts were off the table, as was national security advisor, each handed to figures with less experience and more hawkish records. As the weeks stretched on without the anticipated call from Mar-a-Lago, it seemed possible that a campaign by Iran hardliners to block Colby’s appointment —waged publicly and behind the scenes—was working. All the while, Colby dutifully continued to field booking requests from Christine Amanpour and Piers Morgan, and took to his social media battlements to defend the integrity of Hegseth’s Jerusalem Cross chest tattoo.

Finally, on December 26, Trump brought Colby in from the cold, announcing on Truth Social his appointment as under secretary of defense for policy. The appointment, a plum one straddling strategy and policy, certifies Colby as the GOP’s ideas man; among its duties is overseeing the production of the National Defense Strategy. Colby will be tasked with coalescing a realist foreign policy framework fit for a post-Blob era. To do that, Colby will harken back to older iterations of Republican foreign policy that preceded what he describes as a post-Cold War “primacist alliance” of interventionist liberals and neoconservatives. Primacists “have led us to a situation in which we're overextended, we're on the brink of war in multiple theaters,” Colby told Carlson. “You need peace through strength. But that that term has become cheapened and distorted to become basically an excuse for an aggressive, expansionist approach to foreign policy.”

So What Is Colby’s Worldview?

Rejecting the “absurd hubris” of the primacists, Colby has spent the last eight years attempting to systematize the anti-interventionist themes Trump has espoused. The result is a China-focused, national-interest realism that accepts the need for tradeoffs and limits in the exercise of U.S. power, and rejects adventurism and “democracy promotion” through regime change. Its principles have broad public support and helped Trump defeat a Democratic party that embraced the Cheney family in November.

The question is whether these principles will be allowed to guide the next administration. Not everybody on Trump’s national security council shares Colby’s views, and Trump himself remains a wild card. These ideological fault lines are most visible when it comes to the Middle East, a region that Colby sees through a realist lens as a secondary theater, but that others in Trump World, including his possible boss at the Pentagon, understand as a theater for realizing New Testament prophecy.

In the first Trump administration, Colby devoted a two-year stint as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development to pushing a doctrinal shift away from terrorism and toward China. As the lead writer of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, he also scrapped the longstanding goal of preparing the U.S. military to fight two major wars simultaneously, again placing the focus on China.

Colby expanded on that document’s recommendations for Asia in his 2021 book, “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict,” which presents a case for “blocking” China’s rise as regional hegemon and argues for a U.S.-led alliance that accepts and prioritizes members based largely on the defensibility of their territory. Although in many ways a traditional academic international relations treatise, “Strategy of Denial” is streaked through with a signature concern of America First realism: reviving the U.S. industrial economy. “If China could establish hegemony over Asia,” he writes:

it could then set up a commercial and trading bloc anchored in the world’s largest market that would privilege its own and subordinates’ economies while disfavoring America’s. The resulting drain on American businesses, large and small, would be most keenly felt by the workers, families, and communities who rely on those businesses for jobs, goods, services, and the other benefits that come with a vibrant economy. The steady erosion of America’s economic power would ultimately weaken the nation’s social vitality and stability.

This concern over the domestic economic impacts of Chinese dominance echo the warnings made 30 years ago by John Mearsheimer, the prominent realist whose criticisms of post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy anticipated and influenced those of Colby. In the 1990s, Mearsheimer warned that the U.S. should not accelerate China’s rise with policies that encouraged the outsourcing of its industrial base to a potential rival. Now that the rivalry is real, Colby believes that only a long-term commitment to a policy of “denial” can give peace a chance. The belief that war can still be avoided puts Colby on the sunnier side of the street from Mearsheimer, for whom the tragic logic of security competition condemns the U.S. and China to fight a hegemonic war. (Despite their differences, Colby has expressed admiration for Mearsheimer, who likewise has been described as a “Colby fan”.)

Although Colby’s version of containment is not as aggressive as some, it’s not a policy of détente, either. One could argue that the belief that the U.S. should be ready to fight a major war to block China from dominating its backyard is its own kind of primacism, one with a soft underbelly of debatable assumptions about the nature of Chinese aggression, ambitions, and the threats they pose to the U.S. A war fought under a realist flag of global stability and national interest comes with the same cost as one fought under a neoconservative flag of freedom and democracy.

“At what point does ‘denial’ become escalatory?” wonders Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “We have to be careful. Building up U.S. military assets in the South China sea and aggressively pursuing bloc formations in China’s sphere of influence may provoke the very confrontation that Colby insists he doesn’t want.” She adds that observers calling for a less interventionist foreign policy are “cautiously optimistic” that Colby is not an ideologue and appears open to debate, including on the subject of how hard to push China. This is a welcome contrast, she says, to American primacists of the left and right who, in recent decades, have treated foreign policy discussions like a “members-only club that shut everyone else out.”

Colby’s tolerance for risk drops precipitously after China’s first island chain. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he has ruffled feathers in what he calls the Imperial Capital by using his frequent media appearances to criticize Washington’s blank-check support for Kiev as an unwise use of U.S. resources and a strategic folly that runs an unacceptable risk of nuclear escalation and a direct NATO-Russia war. In a Politico profile published a year into the Russia-Ukraine war, a GOP senate aide described Colby as “far and away leading the charge” in changing the party’s thinking on NATO and Ukraine, including “historically hawkish senators such as Sen. Marco Rubio.”

Colby versus the hawks

Colby has had less impact on Trump World’s approach to Iran. Although he has publicly praised each of his fellow appointees to national security posts, his realpolitik view of the Middle East contrasts sharply with the Biblical politics of people like Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, as well as the neoconservative records of Michael Waltz and Marco Rubio, Trump’s picks for national security advisor and secretary of state, respectively.

Mearsheimer, who is not constrained by political considerations, is able to deliver the realist’s assessment of Trump’s picks that Colby cannot. “The group of people he has appointed to almost all the most important national security positions are all super hawks on Iran,” Mearsheimer said in late 2024. “John Bolton is ecstatic about the appointments of Waltz, Hegseth, Rubio, because they’re neoconservatives like him.” Some Trump officials are already salivating at the prospect of bombing Iran.

As this team of Iran hawks was being formed, Colby’s enemies did their best to make sure he didn’t ruin the party. On November 13, Jewish Insider reported that a number of “conservative pro-Israel activists” and anonymous “foreign policy experts” were “raising concerns that one potential candidate for a senior national security job could create ideological friction in the incoming administration, particularly on Iran and the broader Middle East.” The article, titled “Rumored for a Trump posting, Elbridge Colby’s dovish views on Iran stand out,” highlighted a 2012 article Colby co-wrote for the National Interest titled “Why Not to Attack Iran.” In the piece, Colby argued “a perpetual-strike campaign” would fail to stop Iran’s nuclear program, as well as fail to provide

a reasonable and plausible answer to the ultimate question Americans want answered before the United States goes to war: How does this end? Stealthy air strikes and massive earth-penetrating bombs are only tools, not answers. The United States cannot responsibly attack Iran and leave it at that, simply hoping for the best. A firm and resolute containment may be costly and risky, but it is a lot better than that. It’s probably best not to start down a road that has no end in sight.

Days before the election, Colby reiterated these points. “The U.S. has every interest in avoiding yet another major war in the Middle East,” he said on X. “How do you propose the U.S. can launch major strikes on Iran and avoid exactly that, especially if Iran retaliates against U.S. forces and other allies and partners, including Israel?” Elsewhere he has criticized U.S. missile attacks on the Houthis, members of the Iran-aligned “Axis of Resistance,” as wasting resources on “a tertiary target in a tertiary region.”

The day after the Jewish Insider hit-piece, Neal Urwitz, a friend of Colby, pushed back in a response essay for the National Interest titled “In Defense of Elbridge Colby.” In the piece, Urwitz called the criticisms unfair and urged detractors to read Colby’s book as well as “his voluminous tweets.” But the rearguard action by Urwitz and others had a resigned quality to it. For Rapture-ready evangelicals and Iran hawks worried about a realist turn in Republican foreign policy, no amount of careful re-readings of Colby’s tweets will bring them around. The battle against his influence will now be waged within the administration, where the stage has been set for a consequential contest over the limits, uses, and purpose of American power.

It will be woeful if Colby, who has worked on nuclear strategy and arms control, finds his views overwhelmed in this contest, and not just because of the stakes of a disastrous war with Iran. In a time of alarming nuclear tensions, the world would be well served by Colby’s appreciation for the unpredictable logic of nuclear escalation and the terrible power of nuclear weapons.

In Colby’s conversation with Carlson, he lamented the disappearance of the “salutary fear” of nuclear war that once informed U.S. policy. “A lot of the people who are calling for no-fly zones over Ukraine and intervening against the Russians and escalating and allowing U.S. weapons to be overtly used to attack Moscow and Russian strategic forces … that is obviously crazy,” Colby said, describing this as “one of the ‘touch grass’ kind of things.”

Referring to Bob Woodward’s reporting that the Biden administration almost found itself in a nuclear exchange with Russia in 2022, he added: “People who are blithe and insouciant about it, that is incredibly irresponsible. And they should not be near serious decisions.” Wistfully, Colby reminded Carlson that “the biggest thing” Ronald Reagan did was to meet with his Soviet counterparts about nuclear weapons. ”We should be afraid of these things—you know, salutary fear,” he said.

In “Strategy of Denial,” Colby put an even finer point on it. “Peace does not come from some unfocused readiness to be unpeaceful,” he wrote, “but only from a willingness to imagine and consider what a war would actually be like.”