Elbridge Colby and the Art of Defending the Indefensible
The Bulwark · C · trust 40/100
Trump’s impulsive foreign policy of grudges, threats, and contempt for allies is a self-defeating mess. His suave sophist struggles to spin it as strategically sound.
Joseph Stieb July 28 Upgrade to listen 17 minutes 9 3 2 (Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty Images, Shutterstock) IT’S ONE OF THE WORST JOBS IN WASHINGTON: Elbridge Colby , the under secretary of defense for policy, is tasked with explaining Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy to the public. But you could just as easily say he volunteered to launder Trump’s bellicose, bizarre acts by finding an intellectual coherence that isn’t there.
The 46-year-old grandson of former CIA Director William Colby and graduate of Harvard and Yale is a born-and-bred courtier to the powerful. He boosted lies about the 2020 election and spent the subsequent four years angling for a position in the next Republican administration. He seems to have convinced himself that Trump would be a vehicle for executing his grand vision of focusing American foreign policy on China while distancing the United States from, in his view, parasitic European allies and a hopelessly troubled Middle East.
Within right-wing foreign policy circles, Colby, a so-called “flexible realist,” is not beloved. Before taking up his role in the Defense Department, Colby drew the ire of many Republican Iran hawks by downplaying the severity of the threat posed by Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. He asked , rightly, how they proposed to “launch major strikes on Iran” and avoid a protracted war, “especially if Iran retaliates against U.S. forces and other allies and partners?” (He issued that challenge about two and a half years before Operation Midnight Hammer, in which the administration in which he serves launched a major bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, causing severe damage without provoking a major response.) In a now-comical set of tweets designed to grab Trump’s attention in December 2024, he declared that “the new GOP led by @realDonaldTrump is focused on: ending wars and avoiding new ones.”
Despite these projections, Trump has initiated a major campaign against the Houthis in the spring of 2025, the snatch-and-grab of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, and the Iran war that is now in its fifth month. And now he is now gazing hungrily at Cuba—all while paying little attention to China. Trump has landed Colby in the uncomfortable position of having to publicly defend a war that contradicts virtually everything he has written or said in his career.
Even so, we shouldn’t see Colby as an outlier in MAGA foreign policy. He fits comfortably within many of the America First precepts and performs a valuable function for the administration: crafting intellectual scaffolding for Trump’s instinct-driven approach to the world. Colby represents the America First foreign policy impulse gone legit. But however you gussy it up, that impulse remains unilateralist, nationalistic, militaristic, and utterly shortsighted.
Trump keeps finding new ways to lose friends and alienate allies. Don’t miss any of our coverage of the chaos and craziness: Join Bulwark+ today with two weeks on us.
Colby’s views on U.S. alliances illustrate the dangerous shallowness of his intellectualized Trumpism. In a recent interview with Ross Douthat, his Harvard pal and later Washington, D.C. roommate, Colby squirmed his way through a defense of Trump’s unprecedented hostility to American allies. Along with the requisite sycophancies (“the president is a master negotiator—he comes from New York”), Colby claimed that our allies had come to “take the United States for granted.” It was time to “keep them sufficiently on their toes so that they do their part” by, for instance, reducing U.S. commitments to the defense of Ukraine. Indeed, behind the scenes, Colby drove the decision to withhold arms shipments to Ukraine in 2025.
Douthat pressed Colby on the gap between a theoretical burden-sharing strategy—essentially blustering to make European allies pony up—and Trump’s actual behavior, pointing to Trump’s jokes about making Canada the 51st state and his repeated threats to seize Greenland from Denmark. Colby dodged, saying that Trump intended to reassert the Monroe Doctrine by prodding allies to spend more on defense . Such a strained claim reveals Colby’s assertion that “President Trump . . . is the savior of NATO” to be utterly risible.
COLBY’S MAIN MOVE IS TO dress up hostility to allies in the guise of common sense. “Is it cruel to ask the Germans or the Japanese or the French to spend as much as the Americans spend?” he asked. “I don’t think that’s cruel, I think that’s fair.” (Denmark, for its part, spent a slightly higher percentage of its GDP on defense than the United States did last year.) He claims merely to be trying to “price the partnership and relationship with the United States” in a more transactional way on the assumption that allies have been free-riding on U.S. power for decades.
But the fact is, Colby’s hostility to European allies goes beyond free-riding; the America Firster depicts a unified Europe as a threat to the United States, possibly a greater threat than Russia. As he wrote in his 2021 book on great power conflict, “the most plausible alternative to Russia as an aspiring hegemon in Europe is likely the European Union,” so “the United States is therefore better off if Europe is not a highly unified superstate.” The 2025 National Security Strategy , which Colby had a role in producing, is overtly hostile to the European Union, describing the EU as one of many “transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty” and leading Europe into “civilizational erasure.”
Colby dubiously points to the recent spike in European defense spending as a result of tough love from Trump. Obviously, the rearmament drive of these countries is driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. NATO members’ military spending jumped…
Read the original at The Bulwark →
Open in TruthVane →