Elbridge Colby

Elbridge Colby was Trump’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development, where he was responsible for “defense strategy, force development, and strategic analysis.” Per Politico, Colby is a leading proponent of the view that “China is the principal threat abroad, and that the United States should focus on Asia to the near-exclusion of everywhere else — including Russia and Ukraine.” Colby has argued that the best way to secure peace is to “prepare for nuclear war” and that “great-power competition” has returned. Multiple sources have reported that Colby is a top contender to be the next National Security Advisor in a Trump administration. Colby is a contributor to Project 2025, and in March 2023, Colby and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts co-wrote an article in Time calling for a shift away from Ukraine to China.

Colby has issued numerous critiques that would constitute dramatic changes in how the U.S. has approached foreign policy in recent decades: buttressing Trump’s criticism of NATO (urging that EU members “pay their fair share,”) claiming that South Korea should take primary responsibility for deterring North Korea, complaining that Canada does not spend enough of its GDP on the military, and abandoning Ukraine and ceding to Russia’s expansion plans. He has stated that “The fact is that our concentration on Ukraine has undermined our ability to address the worsening military situation in Asia, especially around Taiwan.”

In a talk at Providence Magazine’s Christianity and National Security 2021 conference, Colby stated that alliances are “not like love affairs they’re more like deep business partnerships and if they stop making sense for one side you know you’re not going to continue with them.” And, in 2022, Colby appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show to admonish the Biden administration’s “moral posturing” on Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the world, after which Carlson exclaimed, “Elbridge Colby. I wish you were running the State Department.”

Colby recently co-founded the Marathon Initiative, a foreign policy think tank that claims it has the strategy the U.S. needs to “succeed in an era of renewed great power competition,” which coincides with the thesis of his new book: “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict.” The book focuses on China and in it he says, “physical force, especially the ability to kill, is the ultimate form of coercive leverage.”

Much of Colby and the Initiative’s work is centered on studies and papers focused on his claim that China will invade Taiwan by 2027 and the U.S. will be at war with China within the next decade. Colby contends that the U.S. must shift focus away from the threat Russia poses to our NATO allies–specifically to Poland and the smaller Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania–to solely focus on China and Asia. In 2022, Colby gave a keynote address to the Association of the United States Army: The Land Forces Pacific (LANPAC), where he was introduced by Michael Flynn’s brother, Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, and where Colby asserted that China dominates all “other states to such a degree that they need to orient their security, diplomatic-political, and economic policies” to suit China’s desires.