A Pentagon Nomination Fight Reveals the New Rules of Trump's Washington

New York Times

17-03-2025

There's little in Elbridge A. Colby's past to suggest that President Trump's most loyal and fierce allies would embrace him.
Mr. Colby, 45, has deep roots in the foreign policy establishment that Mr. Trump is trying to destroy. He is the grandson of the former C.I.A. director William Colby; a product of Groton, Harvard and Yale Law School; someone who has spent much of his career working across party lines on some of the most complex national security issues: nuclear weapons strategy, China's military buildup, the commercialization of space.
Yet when Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Colby to a top Pentagon job, the opposition came not from the president's base but from the dwindling band of traditional Republican foreign policy hard-liners who are often at odds with the president's more nationalistic, inward-looking views.
And it was the Trump faithful, seeing Mr. Colby's confirmation as a chance to establish dominance over their ideological foes in the party, who sprang to his defense.
'This is the next deep state plot against Trump,' Charlie Kirk, a right-wing provocateur and Trump enforcer, wrote in a post on social media.
'Any Republican opposing @ElbridgeColby is opposing the Trump agenda,' opined Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son.
'Why the opposition to Bridge?' asked the billionaire Elon Musk, referring to Mr. Colby by his nickname.
Senators are likely to vote on Mr. Colby's nomination in the next couple weeks, if not sooner.
Beyond the insular world of Washington think tanks, where he spent much of his career, Mr. Colby is not well known. The job he is poised to take, under secretary of defense for policy, is critical but not the sort of position that typically stirs the passions of political activists.
The back-and-forth over Mr. Colby's nomination, though, has become a proxy for something bigger: a battle over how America should wield its power and influence globally. And as is often the case with those in Mr. Trump's orbit, it also involves Mr. Colby's willingness to echo some of his baseless assertions — most notably his insistence that he won the 2020 election.
Fallout Over Jan. 6
Mr. Colby's gray suits, shaggy blond hair and courtly manner are reminiscent of an earlier era in Washington.
So too are many of his foreign policy views, which owe a debt to the Cold War-era realists who emphasized U.S. military might and economic dominance over ideals in the conduct of the country's affairs internationally.
In the early 2000s, Mr. Colby spoke out forcefully against the invasion of Iraq and the nation-building efforts that followed, alienating his fellow Republicans. He was equally skeptical of Democrats' support for foreign aid and civil society programs aimed at spreading democracy abroad.
Mr. Colby was not initially a Trump supporter. But his status as one of the relatively few Republican national security experts who did not sign 'Never Trump' letters in 2016 made him a viable candidate for a Pentagon job.
In 2017, he oversaw the writing of the administration's first National Defense Strategy, which cast the era defined by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a 'period of strategic atrophy' that produced mounting debts and a weaker military. Over the same stretch, it warned, America's most powerful adversaries — Russia and China — were growing stronger.
After a year, Mr. Colby left the Pentagon for the Center for a New American Security, where he had worked earlier in his career. He argued for pulling troops from the Middle East and Europe so the U.S. military could focus on preparing for a potentially catastrophic fight with China over Taiwan.
'The war could happen at any time,' he warned repeatedly. 'Nobody knows.'
Like most foreign policy think tanks, CNAS strives to be bipartisan — a place where analysts put national interests ahead of partisan politics. Still, Mr. Colby, who declined to be interviewed for this article citing his pending confirmation vote, complained to friends that as a Trump supporter, he felt increasingly out of place.
His biggest fallout with his old colleagues came over the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. Days earlier, Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, became the first senator to say he would object to Congress's certification of the 2020 election results.
Mr. Colby met the senator in 2019 when he testified on the National Defense Strategy, and the two quickly became friends and ideological allies. They texted regularly.
Mr. Colby posted a message on social media in support of Mr. Hawley's decision, writing that he was speaking up 'for those who feel disenfranchised.' In doing so, Mr. Colby clearly aligned himself with those who were falsely arguing that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr. Trump.
Several of Mr. Colby's foreign policy colleagues warned him that he and Mr. Hawley were playing with fire. When riots broke out at the Capitol, Mr. Colby quickly condemned the violence.
But to many of his old friends, it was too little too late.
James M. Acton, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had attended Mr. Colby's wedding in Brazil. In 2019, Mr. Colby had thanked him in the acknowledgments of his book, 'The Strategy of Denial,' which focused on deterring a war with China.
Now Mr. Acton was falling out with his old friend.
He argued that Mr. Colby's antidemocratic actions in the days before the Jan. 6 riots had damaged his 'credibility as an analyst' and should be 'disqualifying from participation in the national security discourse.'
In the years that followed, Mr. Colby published fewer of the deeply researched think tank papers that had defined his career in favor of harder-edged social media posts.
His think tank friends still defended his earlier work on nuclear weapons and the defense of Taiwan as rigorous and rooted in facts.
'I'd put his stuff up against anyone,' said Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy adviser to Senator John McCain and the chief executive officer of CNAS.
But something changed in their relationship after Jan. 6, Mr. Fontaine said. Other former colleagues described a similar shift. They muted Mr. Colby on social media or simply drifted away.
Into the Woods
A few days after Mr. Trump's 2024 victory, Mr. Colby flew to Maine for an appearance on Tucker Carlson's streaming show.
Clad in a gray suit and tie, Mr. Colby looked as if he were about to testify before Congress. Mr. Carlson wore a blue-checked shirt. A chandelier made of antlers hung from the ceiling.
Since his firing by Fox News almost 20 months earlier, Mr. Carlson had traveled to Moscow, where he conducted a mostly friendly interview with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. He also hosted a Holocaust revisionist and revealed in an online documentary that he had been mauled by supernatural demons who left claw marks on his back.
Mr. Colby needed to demonstrate his pro-Trump, populist bona fides, which was why he was sitting across from Mr. Carlson as the conservative host described him as a possible candidate for defense secretary and one of the 'few' national security professionals who 'shares the president's priorities.'
Mr. Colby made his case for a new foreign policy approach that prioritized preparing for a potential war with China and shifted U.S. military resources from Europe and the Middle East. 'We stand on the possible precipice of World War III, and we need a fundamental change before we ram right into the iceberg,' he warned.
Together, he and Mr. Carlson criticized much of the U.S. foreign policy elite as moralistic, war-obsessed and weak. Its approach, they maintained, had produced failed wars, trillion-dollar deficits and enormous trade imbalances.
'The Washington blob establishment can get us into wars and crises,' Mr. Colby said, 'but they can't fix the problem.'
'These are the dumbest people,' Mr. Carlson said.
Mr. Colby often described Mr. Trump to colleagues as a 'battering ram,' blasting away old, stale ideas. But, unlike many in Mr. Trump's movement, Mr. Colby wasn't reflexively anti-elite or opposed to research or expertise. His aim wasn't just to destroy. He wanted to build something better that could draw bipartisan support and endure beyond Mr. Trump.
'We need a better establishment,' Mr. Colby said.
'Delicate' Diplomacy
Mr. Colby's Senate confirmation hearing was a first test of whether it might be possible to fashion even the barest foreign policy consensus out of the chaos wrought by Mr. Trump.
Early this month, as Mr. Colby waited for the hearing to start, his uncle mentioned that the last time the family gathered for such an event was in the early 1970s, when lawmakers grilled Mr. Colby's grandfather about Operation Phoenix, a Vietnam War program that caused the deaths of more than 20,000 people. Some of the killings were 'illegal,' he had testified.
More than 50 years later, Vice President JD Vance introduced Mr. Colby — a sign of the importance the administration was placing on the nomination — as an independent thinker willing to break with party dogma. 'To my Democratic friends,' the vice president said, 'I think you'll find he's a person who could actually work across the aisle.'
Days earlier, Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance had publicly dressed down President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office, a scene Democrats described as 'shameful.' Before that, Mr. Trump had falsely declared that Ukraine had started the war with Russia.
Democrats on the Senate committee asked Mr. Colby six times whether Mr. Putin had invaded Ukraine.
Mr. Colby declined to answer, citing Mr. Trump's 'delicate' diplomacy.
'Shouldn't diplomacy be based on the truth?' asked Senator Angus King, independent of Maine.
Republicans pressed Mr. Colby to disavow statements that he had made 15 years ago, suggesting that the United States could tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. And they challenged his assertion that the United States could scale back its military presence anywhere in the world without emboldening autocratic adversaries.
'Just look at Joe Biden and Afghanistan,' said Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska. 'Holy cow, that was a disaster. Every bad guy in the world was like, 'Hey, I'm making my move.''
Mr. Colby stuck to his core message that the dire threat posed by China's aggressive military buildup demanded that the Pentagon make hard choices about where to put its forces; that America would have to rely on its allies in Europe and the Middle East to do more.
The three-hour hearing was ending when one of the Republican senators interrupted to say that Mr. Zelensky had expressed regret for his confrontation with Mr. Trump and was offering to 'work fast' to end his country's war with Russia.
The episode highlighted the ways in which Mr. Trump's approach to the war was shattering any hope that Democrats and Republicans might be able to cooperate on foreign policy.
To Democrats, the bullying of Mr. Zelensky was Trumpism at its worst. The president had humiliated an ally into compliance and in the process rewarded Mr. Putin, America's real enemy.
Mr. Colby saw it differently. He hailed Mr. Zelensky's statement as proof that the president's unconventional approach was working.
'You don't know what he's going to do,' Mr. Colby said of Mr. Trump, 'but you can get a deal with him.'
The Republican senators on the panel nodded in agreement. The Democrats had all left.