Should seeking to prioritize threats to US national security disqualify officials from leading policy positions? The campaign underway to prevent former Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby from gaining a senior position in the Trump administration certainly suggests so. Colby made his name in the first Trump administration working to reorient US defense policy toward competition with China, an effort that has since become widely embraced across the political spectrum. Since then, he’s continued to argue for rigorous prioritization of a US grand strategy to handle great power competition with Beijing.
All of which is to say that his views are anathema to those who would prefer the United States embrace the sort of neoconservative primacy that informed much of US foreign policy over the last three decades. Most directly, Colby has come under criticism over the previous 48 hours by unnamed sources for supposedly being soft on Iran (and insufficiently pro-Israel). The evidence behind this claim is weak: consistent with his calls to focus on China, Colby has argued that a nuclear Iran could be deterred and contained, and, thus, the United States need not threaten war with Iran for the sake of stopping Iran from going nuclear. Still, the pushback has been pronounced. As one unnamed source put it, “I don’t know how you how you put a man who says he’s OK [sic] with Iran having a nuclear weapon in charge of any serious defense or national security job.”
There is something amiss here. To be sure, Colby himself may be overstating the China threat; we should not take his views as writ. Still, after three decades of American adventurism in the Middle East, mounting budget deficits, demands for domestic investment in the US, and a growing recognition that—so far as the US faces external threats—China is the pacing candidate, it is telling that Colby is being attacked for…trying to integrate US ends and means. Once again, it reminds those of us calling for a prudent, sustainable, and—above all—realist strategy that neoconservative primacy will not go gentle into the good night.
As importantly, suggesting that Colby is unreliable because he accepts that deterrence and containment can hold vis-à-vis Iran reveals a stunning inability by critics to reflect on the United States’ own experience. Not only did deterrence and containment thrive against adversaries such as the Soviet Union and Cold War-era China, but the alternative—risking war for the sake of Tehran’s denuclearization—echoes the sort of politicized analysis and strategic myopia that led to the Iraq War.
If critics of a strategic course adjustment want to make the case for continued American adventurism, they should at least have to grapple with facts, evidence, and the failures of their own prior policies.
Ultimately, to commit to keeping war with Iran on the table the litmus test for senior positions amounts to a kind of McCarthyism that poorly serves US national interests. Colby may not be the right voice to lead on China. Still, to spike his suitability for office for trying to avoid US adventurism against a middling adversary when other options are on the table would be the height of folly.
As the Trump administration staffs up, it should avoid filling its ranks with the same hawks and primacists that drove US strategy over the last three decades, at a time when the United States’ margin for error in world affairs is not what it was even ten years ago.