Washington’s Elbridge Colby Problem is Elbridge Colby’s Washington Problem
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As Un-Diplomatic’s readership has grown to a size I never expected, I’m mindful that a growing share of readers has never heard of Elbridge Colby, Trump’s Undersecretary of Defense War for Policy (USDP). If you don’t already know who Colby is, part of me wants to advise you to read no further.
But he’s at the center of a political contest with real consequences, so if you’re invested in understanding global power politics or halting the advance of the far right, the controversies swirling around him matter.
What’s “Bridge” About?
Colby has been a loud and proud reactionary intellectual the past decade. In a previous life, we worked at the same think tank, in the same little office space. But then I evolved in one direction and he in the opposite. His politics saw him join the Trump administration during its first term; the distance between us obviously grew with every passing year.
Since entering Trump 2.0, Colby has been completely absent from the public spotlight. No public appearances at all in nearly a year…until last week’s speech in South Korea, where he publicly praised the country as “the first treaty ally of the United States, outside of NATO, to commit to the 3.5% standard President Trump has set.”1
Despite his low profile, Colby has drawn a heap of scathing attention from mainstream media and Capitol Hill. To wit, Politico just published a piece with the top line reading:
Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby has succeeded in the rarest of feats: uniting a dysfunctional Washington against him.
Oof.
What’s the Controversy?
Earlier this year, when the Pentagon undertook a review of AUKUS—a controversial arrangement with Australia and the UK that Colby opposed because it would sell Australia nuclear-powered submarine at the expense of US naval production—it was Colby who ordered the review. AUKUS enjoys bipartisan popularity in Washington (and pretty much only in Washington).
When the Pentagon said it would remove an army brigade from Romania—which had been positioned there to support Ukraine’s war against Russia—it was Colby who signed off on the decision. Colby made a name for himself as an early opponent of military aid to Ukraine, on the grounds that it came at the expense of optimizing for war with China. Whatever the analytical merits of leaving Ukraine to its own devices, it rather conveniently aligned Colby with Trump’s early preference for choosing Russia over Ukraine, which in turn helped Colby lobby for the job he now occupies.
There was also media reporting about pausing some military aid to Ukraine earlier this year, a decision widely attributed to Colby…and which put him on the wrong side of a Trump flip-flop (Trump reversed himself and decided that aid to Ukraine should continue, leaving Colby looking like he was at cross-purposes with his boss).
And in September, the Washington Post reported that Trump had canceled $400 million in military assistance to Taiwan. Social media buzzed that the blame resting on Colby’s shoulders.2
Perhaps the biggest conflict has been over the National Defense Strategy (NDS) itself, which was soft-launched several months ago but has still not been released, in part due to the supposedly radical shift of prioritizing the Western Hemisphere and “Homeland” conflicts the Pentagon is helping to cause above the China threat.3
Making Sense of Why Colby’s in the Barrel
I think Colby has politically miscalculated on several occasions, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find he’s a bad manager.4
The totality of the aforementioned changes has led to Colby making enemies on seemingly every front, but only because he is seen to be challenging the choices of the US foreign policy establishment and its horrifically stunted imagination (that doesn’t vindicate Colby’s choices btw).
Members of Congress from his own party have publicly criticized the office Colby runs as the most dysfunctional in the Trump administration, which is really saying something. The liberals who love Ukraine and Taiwan and AUKUS and anything with a missile attached to it have always hated Colby, and are relishing what they hope is his comeuppance now that mainstream media is shitting on him.
Beltway think-tankers, meanwhile, have a fraught relationship with Colby. The think-tank agenda is the liberal hawk agenda, and Colby comes from the DC world of think tanks. Those are his people. So when the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace hosted a book talk for Elbridge Colby in 2021—after he publicly indicated sympathy for the Capitol Insurrection and much else that was verboten—it caused quite a stir, with some Carnegie employees even boycotting the event…but Carnegie did the event anyway. Such is Washington when you’re an insider, and he’s an insider.
On the other hand, the liberal hawk agenda that most think tanks espouse is not just about facilitating arms sales for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s also a commitment to global primacy that requires the US to try and be the jingo of choice for capitalist governments—whether liberal or authoritarian—all over the world. Colby is a primacist when it comes to guns, bombs, and World War III with China, but one who’s more selective about US security commitments than what the think tanks lobby for (because he believes that prepping for war with China requires the singleminded sacrifice of everything else).
But the issue is not just that Colby finds himself in the barrel because he’s a contrarian. He’s a contrarian because he decided that he should be the embodiment of MAGA ideology at the level of policy and that’s why he’s been setup for failure.
Colby is an agent of ideology, as are most technocrats who pledge their services to power. If you haven’t experienced the mainstream think tank world first hand, it’s hard to convey how much it’s a world where you swim in political ideology and the real world of consequences don’t impact you personally at all. How could it when your life mostly consists of sitting on panels, dining at Old Ebbitt Grill, and having extremely inconvenient meetings with government officials where you spend as much time commuting and getting through security as you do actually talking to someone?
It’s worth recalling that the MAGA ideology that has crystallised in the form of the America First Policy Institute, Heritage’s Project 2025, and sychophants like Colby and JD Vance did not exist 10 years ago. Everything that these folks Stan for now is stuff that was a byproduct of rationalizing Trump’s improvisations. Do you think the coalition of oligarchs and white nationalists—or the mass of workers it exploits—hinges on whether we sell Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine? No, that’s made-up shit by policy geeks who are trying to calibrate themselves to Trump’s whims.
What has taken shape as MAGA’s policy agenda is the reactionary technocrat’s attempt at slavishly trying to impose coherence on the whims of a mad king who does not feel beholden to the form or content that the new technocrats treat as religion. It’s that very truth that finds us in a moment where the MAGA coalition may be collapsing from its contradictions right now.
Colby made a bet with his career: Be the policy expression of the “MAGA voice.” It got him his current job. But it also got him his current troubles.
3.5% is an arbitrary military spending benchmark and an absurd amount of money for any country to devote to war prepping. South Korean conservatives love-hate Colby; they know that when the US finally leaves South Korea, it will be because of people like Colby, but they love his public record of rather brashly arguing in favor of South Korea obtaining nuclear weapons.
Colby no doubt has a hand in the suspension of aid to Taiwan, but his position, the USDP, is but one player of many in a foreign military sales process that’s officially run out of Rubio’s State Department.
All the reporting and social media speculation about the NDS has been incorrect but I have to explain why another day.
People probably don’t remember this but when he got hired as a deputy assistant secretary in Trump 1.0, it was because Republicans had no A Tam, B Team, or C Team—they were scraping the talent barrel because most Republican foreign policy hands and publicly declared themselves #NeverTrump. I only mention that now because Colby’s current position is a very powerful one, endowed with far more responsibility than he’s ever had in his privileged life.