A Note on Elbridge Colby’s Confirmation

A rare victory for realism.

On Tuesday, after a bruising confirmation battle, defense expert Elbridge Colby was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 54-45 to become Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Colby served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development during the first Trump administration and was the architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy. He is widely credited with leading the effort to reorient US defense policy away from Europe and the Middle East toward China.

During the Biden interregnum, Colby assiduously raised his public profile by authoring a well-received book, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict and founding a think tank, The Marathon Initiative.

Nominated to the Pentagon’s #3 position earlier this year, Colby came under immediate fire from neoconservatives like Sen. Tom Cotton, (R-AR). Opposition from Cotton, a protege of William Kristol, might have been expected.

Journalist Eli Clifton has reported that,

Cotton and Kristol’s relationship goes back to when Cotton was still in the Army and stationed near Washington. “Kristol saw a kindred spirit in Cotton’s aggressive national-security hawkishness and the men developed what Kristol describes as a ‘bond beyond pure policy,’” according to a 2014 profile of Cotton in The Atlantic.

That bond extended into financial support of Cotton’s candidacy. The Emergency Committee for Israel, a 501c4 group co-chaired by Bill Kistol and social conservative and Christian Zionist Gary Bauer, spent nearly $1 million in dark money to buy television commercials supporting Cotton in his 2014 Senate race.

That spending couldn’t legally be coordinated with Cotton’s campaign. But that doesn’t mean that the first-year senator couldn’t pay back his mentor and dark-money supporter in June 2017 by giving his son, Joe, a prime job in his Senate office.

Cotton lobbied hard to be named CIA Director under Trump II. Thankfully, he was unsuccessful. But other neocons made the cut: the uncomprehending Waltz at NSC, for example.

Colby’s confirmation devolved into a kind of proxy war between the warring America First and Republican/Neocon camps. A leader of the former, Donald Trump Jr., took to X to declare that any Republican “opposing ElbridgeColby is opposing the Trump agenda.” In a statement announcing his vote against Colby, former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell stated that Colby’s elevation to the post,

…leaves open the door for the less-polished standard-bearers of restraint and retrenchment at the Pentagon to do irreparable damage to the system of alliances and partnerships that serve as force multipliers to U.S. leadership.”

A better endorsement would be hard to imagine.

Yet viewing Colby’s confirmation as a sign that anti-interventionists have the wind at their back would be a mistake. The neocon faction of the GOP has necessarily, thanks to Trump, lowered its profile, but it is far dead. It counts as its members the Secretary of State; CIA Director; the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the Chair of the Senate Armed Service Committee; the Senate majority leader; and (probably) the Speaker of the House.

As of this writing, it is trying to undercut Trump on Ukraine by pushing an absurd new sanctions bill against Russia, while pushing hard for military action against Iran.

James W. Carden is editor of TRR.