Elbridge Colby is Both Cause and Symptom

What Bridge's foreign policy adventurism tells us about the Trump administration.

Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash

Late last year Henry Farrell and I had an exchange about whether Trump’s foreign policy would be more rationalist or chaotic. I articulated my theory as follows:

Making use of a different Elizabeth Sanders article, let me suggest that the key variable at play here is Donald Trump’s knowledge, experience, and interest about different subject matters. In the foreign policy areas where he has keen interest, I would expect my theory would outperform Farrell’s. Trump was president for four years, and by the end of that term had finally begun to figure out his levers of power. As Saunders notes, an experienced foreign policy leader should be able to ride herd over his policy team. So on tariffs, or on immigration, or on alliance management, I expect a constant Trump.

While important, these areas are just a small fraction of American foreign policy. Beyond those areas there are whole vast territories of knowledge that has never interested Donald Trump. Trump telling RFK Jr. to “go wild on health,” for example, is a sign that Trump does not give a flying fig about health. It bores him. In these areas, Trump remains an inexperienced and uninformed president who mostly wants his underlings to display fealty to him. These are the issue areas where Farrell’s argument likely carries greater sway: Trump will care less about the specific policy and more about the loyalty that his subordinates will display to him. If a subordinate goes off the reservation — which is easier to do when Trump is substantively uninterested in the issue area — headlines will trigger Trump’s intervention. The result would be a lot of inconstancy and policy reversals and Trump-level personnel churn.

I think this framework mostly holds up. The past week has served up an interesting case study in the form of Elbridge Colby, the Beltway nepo baby undersecretary of defense for policy. We know that Colby was behind the DoD decision to suspend arms shipments to Ukraine earlier this month, a move that surprised and angered Trump’s allies as well as Trump himself.

This, in turn, prompted a flurry of stories about how Colby has pissed off loyal Trump supporters within and without the administration. For example a Politico story from earlier this month contained the following passage: “since joining the second Trump administration as the Pentagon’s top policy chief, Colby has made a series of rapid-fire moves that have blindsided parts of the White House and frustrated several of America’s foreign allies, according to seven people familiar with the situation.”

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Gordon and Lara Seligman summarized the state of play with respect to Ukraine:

Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, wants to refocus the U.S. military on countering China. That has put him at the center of the Trump administration’s abrupt moves on providing weapons to Ukraine.

It was Colby, a 45-year-old grandson of a former Central Intelligence Agency director, who wrote a memo to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in early June outlining how Ukraine’s requests for U.S. weapons could further stretch already depleted Pentagon stockpiles.

The memo didn’t have a recommendation and was described by a defense official as a tool for assessing how arms deliveries would affect U.S. stockpiles. But some officials in the administration and in Congress say it figured in the Pentagon’s decision to suspend some arms shipments to Kyiv, a move President Trump later reversed….

In arguing for doubling down on China, Colby is known as a “prioritizer” who favors limiting U.S. obligations outside Asia to free up resources to counter Beijing. In so doing, he has differentiated himself from “restrainers” who have urged that the U.S. pull back from overseas commitments, as well as traditional Republican hawks.

Though presidents from both parties, starting with Barack Obama, have called for focusing U.S. national security strategy on China, putting the idea into practice has proven difficult, partly due to new threats that have emerged outside Asia and partly due to the Pentagon’s longstanding commitments in Europe and the Middle East.

Colby’s calls to de-emphasize demands on U.S. forces other than in Asia have left him out of step with some Republicans….

It was the classified memo that preceded the pause in arms deliveries to Ukraine that especially spotlighted Colby’s views. It tallied the numbers of weapons sought by Ukraine along with how many the U.S. has in its stocks for training and warfighting around the world. Trump later told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he wasn’t responsible for the pause in shipments that followed, which he has since lifted.

The WSJ story is a classic of the genre, describing a deep policy thinker who is secretly pulling the strings on an administration’s grand strategy. However, for some observers, like Alexander Clarkson, Colby is merely the “convenient scapegoat” for Trump and Hegseth’s blunders. Which is it?

The answer is yes — or, rather, it’s both. Colby does seem to wield outsized authority over national security policy. But the reason he wields it is due to the enabling empty shirts who are Trump and Hegseth.

On the one hand, as all of the stories makes clear, Colby possesses a clear set of defense policy preferences, one that prioritizes the Pacific Rim over every other region. Possessing a simple, coherent strategy — regardless of its merits — is a tremendous advantage in an administration where most of the policy principals are driven by sycophancy and impulse than anything else. Hegseth in particular seems spectacularly out of his depth — which helps explain why Colby had felt so willing to be as aggressive as he has been.

In an administration in which even the policy principals are not terribly well informed, motivated staffers like Colby or Stephen Miller can accomplish an awful lot on their own.

At the same time, however, Colby was not just the cause of the Ukraine aid suspension; he was also the inevitable symptom of an atrophied national security process in which neither Trump nor Hegseth feel any need to exercise persistent hands-on control.

According to CNN, Hegseth failed to inform the White House prior to the aid suspension. That same story notes that, “The Pentagon’s decision to suspend the shipments of weapons — including Patriot interceptor missiles and artillery ammunition — came after Trump asked Hegseth last month during their trip to the NATO summit to provide him with an assessment of US weapons stockpiles…. But Trump did not specifically direct Hegseth to halt weapons shipments to Ukraine as part of that review.”

Furthermore, that pause came to an end yesterday when Trump reversed course yet again and announced that Ukraine would be getting top-of-the-line weaponry. As predicted, a raft of negative stories roused Trump from his policy torpor, leading him to act.

The result is a bit of a hodge-podge. Trump’s more intellectually coherent subordinates can often take action without prior consultation — because they know that Trump is largely uninterested in detailed policy implementation. But actions that lead to negative news cycles can cause Trump to take actions to reassert his control.

None of this leads to good foreign policy. The only virtue this mishigas possesses is the relative transparency of Trump’s policy formulation. Make no mistake, however: mostly it will lead to inchoate flip-flopping.