A Bridge Too Far?

A lively and sometimes fractious debate over Donald Trump administration foreign policy is now in full swing in D.C. It started on X when pro-Trump activist Charlie Kirk posted that Sen. Tom Cotton was keeping Trump nominee Elbridge (“Bridge”) Colby from getting confirmed at the Defense Department—and it culminated with the vice president of the United States stomping on Tablet colleague Park MacDougald.

It was X, formerly Twitter, in its Platonic form, what the app was meant to be but rarely has been, a public forum inviting the famous and unknown to trade their thoughts and feelings in hope that all may profit from the exchange—sort of like when Hollywood star James Woods answers questions about the big-name actors he’s worked with, and he responds with grace and tact to give the public an inside view.

In this case, though, big-name political figures were the stars—and the gloves were off. Kirk wrote Cotton was impeding Colby because he’s “one of the most important pieces to stop the Bush/Cheney cabal at DOD,” and invited X users to venture their own theories. The editor of Tablet’s Scroll newsletter posted in response that it had nothing to do with a neocon cabal at DOD. The reason Republican senators had a problem with Colby is because he is in effect a Democrat.

That’s when the vice president stepped in. “This,” he wrote of MacDougald’s post, “is a very bad take from a normally thoughtful person.” He continued:

Bridge has consistently been correct about the big foreign policy debates of the last 20 years. He was critical of the Iraq War, which made him unemployable in the 2000s era conservative movement. He built a relationship with CNAS when it was one of the few institutions that would even hire a foreign policy realist.

A perceptive writer would ask why a serious realist was shut out of the dominant institutions of the American Right in the late 2000s. Instead this guy says “he’s a democrat.” Sloppy BS.

CNAS is Center for a New American Security, a think tank founded by Clinton officials and allies with the purpose of turning young military officers into loyal Democrats. Colby also worked at WestExec Advisors, founded in 2017 by two former Barack Obama officials, Antony Blinken and Michelle Flournoy, which became a Joe Biden administration feeder program. WestExec consultant Avril Haines went on to become Biden’s director of national intelligence, while Blinken became secretary of state. Flournoy was in line to lead the Pentagon where, it was rumored, she’d find a place for Colby, but she didn’t get the job.

Instead, Colby served in the first Trump administration at the Pentagon under James Mattis, a frequent Trump nemesis. Since then, he has advised various GOP Trump opponents including Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis.

Colby definitely qualifies as a Republican. Yet despite the fact that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, DOGE boss Elon Musk, and Sen. Mike Lee have all seconded Vance’s social media response to MacDougald, my friend Park is right on the core issue: Colby’s foreign policy ideas are the same as Obama’s and Biden’s on the issues that President Trump has identified as the top threats to America—China, Russia, and Iran.

I interviewed Colby once for a podcast and liked him very much. He’s thoughtful and sharp. We spoke about China and Taiwan and his family, especially his grandfather, who ran the CIA. William Colby was famous not only for his WWII exploits behind enemy lines in Europe but also as the CIA director who realized the clandestine service needed to be held accountable to the American public. So in 1975, he opened up Langley’s files for a Senate select committee led by Idaho lawmaker Frank Church, a hard-left Democrat who used the mandate to serve his own purposes. In the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, the committee became an instrument to flog Republicans. To political analysts like the late Angelo Codevilla, Colby’s cooperation with the Church Committee was a calculated political trade-off: Ensure the survival of the battered U.S. intelligence community by handing it over to its domestic critics, who included allies of the communist regimes that the CIA and other services were rightly targeting.

Like the 1970s, this, too, is a time of reckoning. After two disastrously failed wars and a financial crisis; a rolling coup against Trump in his first term and a postterm lawfare campaign waged against him that undermined the rule of law and public trust in institutions; a Biden administration that treated half the country as domestic terrorists, and threatened unemployment and impoverishment for anyone who didn’t submit to an experimental medical treatment, Americans left and right can be forgiven their distrust of the country we love. The worry now is the same as it was in the ’70s: that righteous demands for restoration and renewal, as well as legal remedy, may turn instead into a whirlwind of self-pity and resentment that strengthens demons at home and abroad.

Top GOP influencer Tucker Carlson hosted Colby on his podcast and described him as “one of the very few experienced national security officials who actually agrees with Donald Trump. He’s likely to play a big role in the new administration.” Colby’s supporters eyed him for the national security adviser spot, but multiple sources say that his interview with the President did not go well. Instead, Congressman Mike Waltz got the job.

Colby was then nominated for the undersecretary of defense for policy, a plum spot for a policy intellectual. The USDP is often thought of as America’s grand strategist, with access to the vast resources of the country’s armed bureaucracy and responsible for formulating policy touching on every likely threat to U.S. peace and prosperity.

Colby believes that America has to prioritize its interests. Like any nation, we have limited resources and must choose our battles wisely. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the number one threat to America, he argues, and the defense of Taiwan is the key to securing U.S. interests. Elsewhere, we have to get out, deprioritizing especially the theaters that have caused America the most trouble: Europe, where we’ve spent hundreds of billions on a futile proxy war in Ukraine, and the Middle East, an even more obscene burden on a middle class that has sent its sons and daughters in uniform and wealth to a region dominated by an Iranian regime that chants death to America. In Colby’s opinion, we can deter an Iranian nuclear bomb and learn to live with it.

But that’s not Trump’s policy; it’s Obama’s policy. “You can’t destroy knowledge that a country already has,” argued the Obama White House as part of its rollout to sell the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Obama’s deal legalized the terror regime’s nuclear weapons program and protected it with an international agreement enforced by the U.S. To persuade the American public there was no other choice, Team Obama maintained that since you can’t destroy the knowledge it takes to build the bomb, you have to learn to live with actual bombs.

That’s not Trump’s policy on a nuclear Iran. After Biden pressured Israel in October not to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, Trump was dismayed. “That’s the thing you want to hit, right?” said Trump. “It’s the biggest risk we have, nuclear weapons.”

Trump is of the same mind today. He says he hopes for a negotiated solution: “I would like a deal done with Iran,” Trump said earlier this month. “I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it.” “But they just can’t have a nuclear bomb.” In Trump’s view, while military action against Iranian nuclear sites is hardly preferable to diplomacy, the goal of both tactics is plain and simple: No Iranian bomb.

But Colby believes it would be a terrible mistake to take action against Iranian nukes. As he said in a debate on Iranian nukes in 2012, “the only thing worse than the prospect of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be the consequence of using force to try to stop them.” Just last year Colby said it would be a mistake to take action against Iranian nukes. Iran, he posted on X, is a “formidable danger” with “a large conventional and asymmetric military that presents a threat to US allies.” Accordingly, “Any serious effort to suppress Iran’s nuclear program would be very, very demanding and consuming.”

At the same time, though, Colby also thinks that the Iranian military threat is not a big deal—which is why the U.S. can afford to withdraw its forces from the Persian Gulf. He recognizes the strategic value of the Gulf and that America’s arrangement with Saudi Arabia is the basis of the post-WWII order that has made the United States the wealthiest, most powerful country in world history.

After the Biden administration’s reckless career, many Americans began to wonder what would happen if the dollar was no longer the world’s reserve currency, a status owing among other things to the arrangement made with the Saudis at the end of World War II, and then renewed with the first Gulf War. The preeminence of the dollar is in part a payoff in a global protection racket: The world buys American bonds and invests in U.S. real estate because the United States is the chief guarantor of security around the world, a huge component of which is making sure that Gulf oil gets safely to market.

Maybe it really is time to leave the Gulf to its own designs after so long, but since FDR no American president risked the stability of our economy and society on that bet. Colby acknowledges that the Soviets “presented a real prospect of dominating the Gulf” during the Cold War. But he asserts that there are no real threats today. Iran, he writes, “lacks meaningful conventional military power projection to defeat, let alone conquer, states that do not want to fall under its sway.”

Again, that’s not how Trump sees it. His first official state visit in his first term was to Riyadh, to allay Saudi Arabia’s fears of Iran by shoring up U.S. relations with the Gulf’s leading oil producer after the traditional American ally was sidelined by the Obama administration. For reasons that remain hard to understand in traditional strategic terms, Obama prioritized the U.S. relationship with Iran and strengthened it at the expense of Saudi Arabia and Israel by legalizing its nuclear weapons program and stuffing its war chest with hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief and cash.

Let’s deal with the simplest argument first: Is the opposition to Colby fundamentally about Israel? Some pro-Israel groups have certainly been anxious about Colby’s nomination. Others, like the Republican Jewish Coalition, have endorsed him. He recognizes that Jerusalem is a strong U.S. ally and “America should be ready to provide potent material and political support to Israel,” Colby wrote in July 2023. “But at the same time, Israel should understand that the United States, which cannot afford to be enmeshed in another Middle Eastern war, will take a supporting role.”

That’s a strange coda: No U.S. policymaker of recent memory—let alone any Israeli official—has argued that the U.S. should do anything but take a supporting role, primarily by supplying Israel with arms to fight our mutual adversaries, which include Iran-backed proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. Only Democrats like Samantha Power have ever argued for putting U.S. boots on the ground, and not for the purpose of advancing Israeli strategic aims but rather to keep Israel in check. Accordingly, Biden sent U.S. forces to Israel to limit its response to Iran.

Jerusalem doesn’t want U.S. forces in Israel and neither do normal Americans, Democrat or Republican. After all, the purpose of paying allies is to incentivize them to advance U.S. interests without risking U.S. lives. In that scheme, which is central to Trump’s foreign policy, Israel is a model U.S. ally: a collection of high-value military and intelligence assets controlled through military credits that are paid to domestic U.S. weapons manufacturers, thereby extending U.S. military power in a key area of the world on the cheap while producing well-paying jobs at home.

The suggestion that Israeli military prowess is a Trojan horse designed to lure the U.S. into fighting Middle Eastern wars on Israel’s behalf is a strange tic of Colby’s. After Oct. 7, he made the same argument again: “For those advocating a major expansion of the war in Israel by launching a U.S. strike campaign against Iran,” he posted on X, “How would you handle the major vulnerability this would open up by using weapons, platforms, etc. required to deter China from invading Taiwan?”

But no one of any significance in either the U.S. or Israel was advocating for U.S. strikes against Iran. Rather, the Biden administration was pressuring Israel not to strike Iran—which is precisely the opposite of what Trump has done since soon after the war began, urging Israel to take care of its business and finish the job.

Colby’s strange linkage of Israel and Taiwan illustrates the real issue with the nominee—which isn’t his thoughts about the Middle East, but instead what he believes should be America’s top priority.

Colby, rightly, sees Taiwan as vital to U.S. security. Like Saudi Arabia, Taiwan is important to the economic and societal health of America. Just as Saudi Arabia can raise or lower world oil prices based on its own production decisions, Taiwan plays a similar role in the digital world, since it makes 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips. Without those, America—and the world’s digital economy, which runs on advanced processing power—grinds to a halt.

Then there’s Taiwan’s strategic significance: It occupies critical real estate in the Indo-Pacific theater, connecting South Korea and Japan in the north to the Philippines and the South China Sea in the south. It sits at the heart of the “first island chain,” a crucial line of allied defense against PRC military expansion into the Indo-Pacific. If China were to control Taiwan, it would gain a strategic foothold threatening U.S. allies and potentially disrupting global shipping lanes, where over $5 trillion in trade flows annually.

The U.S. doesn’t want Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and other regional allies at the end of a PRC dagger, or to give China the last word on U.S. commerce. So Colby is right that Taiwan’s independence is vital to U.S. interests.

But the China threat is much bigger than just Taiwan. Trump groups China, Russia, and Iran together because he understands them—correctly—as a bloc. Indeed, Russia and China have conducted joint naval and air exercises off the Alaska coast. How do U.S. planners intend to keep American adversaries away from our shoreline? China and Russia have conducted naval exercises off the Gulf of Oman along with Iran. Maybe China is showing it can make a run at the Persian Gulf with the help of its partners, just as the old Soviet Union could.

Iran is part of the China problem because after Biden lifted sanctions on the terror regime, Tehran has exported 90% of its oil to China. The Chinese in turn gave the Russians dual-use material for their war with Ukraine. That is, you can’t bracket out the Middle East (Iran) and Europe (Russia) to focus on the PRC because they’re both part of the China issue.

Conversely, America’s biggest vulnerability is its dependence on China. For instance, during COVID most Americans were surprised to find how many of our pharmaceuticals came from China. Instead of encouraging domestic production, the Biden administration watched as imports of Chinese pharmaceuticals surged by more than three times, from $2.19 billion in 2020 to $7.84 billion in 2024. If you’re a defense planner, it’s important to have enough arms to deter your enemy, or use them if you have to go to war, but if your medical supplies are made by your adversary, how do you treat your wounded?

That’s hardly all. Since Henry Paulson, who would later become George W. Bush’s treasury secretary, led Goldman Sachs’ China group in the mid-’90s, Wall Street has not only propped up the Chinese Communist Party but also funded its military, from aircraft carriers and fighter jets to next-generation missile systems and AI applications. Most U.S. investors have no idea their pension funds are being used to pay for ICBMs pointed at their neighborhoods. Presumably, they wouldn’t like it. The Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy should be at the table telling his counterparts from the departments of Treasury, Commerce, and other agencies that we can longer countenance Wall Street listing Chinese companies on U.S. capital markets to fund the totalitarian police state targeting the men and women in uniform who serve under him.

Given Taiwan’s importance, an “America First” nominee in line to become America’s top defense intellectual ought to be ringing the bell about the No. 1 strategic issue that is entirely in our power to address. If we don’t want China to take Taiwan, the first step is to stop paying for the arms with which China would take Taiwan. Yes, the bankers and tech leaders who have profited so handsomely from the U.S.-China relationship over the past three decades may not like it. But floating counterfactual theories about an ally trying to lead the U.S. into Middle Eastern wars seems more like a way of evading the concrete realities of reducing Chinese power than a way of confronting China.

So let’s talk about China, because that’s what this is really about.

Trump adversary Charles Koch doesn’t want to confront China because he and his brother David, who died in 2019, have invested billions of dollars there building high-tech manufacturing plants to make both the PRC and themselves richer. To protect their interests in China, the Kochs spent millions on ads attacking Trump because the tariffs he imposed on Chinese goods in his first term hurt their business.

Presumably, this is one reason why Trump posted on Truth Social in January that he didn’t want Koch people serving in his administration. Yet somehow a little more than a week later two analysts affiliated with Koch foreign policy institutions were pushed into the Pentagon to fill key policy roles dealing with Asia and the Middle East.

Michael DiMino was named as the Pentagon’s principal Middle East policy adviser while Andrew Byers was tapped for the South and Southeast Asia job. DiMino, a CIA military analyst who worked at DOD in the first Trump administration, was a fellow at Defense Priorities, a Koch-funded think tank. He calls for a reduced U.S. presence in the Middle East since it does “not really” matter for U.S. interests.

Byers, who oversaw Koch’s philanthropic network’s grants, believes that the U.S. should abandon belligerent military initiatives targeted at China since the two “are more geopolitical rivals than full-fledged adversaries. They both have more to gain by maintaining deep economic ties than by severing them.” He advised the second Trump administration against waging a “severe trade war.”

Press accounts have tended to fault Hegseth aide Dan Caldwell for bringing on the two Koch allies. But sources tell Tablet that another person responsible for hiring officials who are not aligned with Trump’s policy but who share Colby’s views on China and the Middle East for a policy shop to be headed by Colby is Colby.

Hegseth’s allies thought it was rotten to stick Trump’s choice for defense secretary with the type of staff the president warned against while the nominee was in the middle of a tough confirmation fight. Even outside-the-Beltway people noticed. House and Senate Republicans were besieged with calls from donors and constituents unhappy about the Koch appointments. Accommodating foreign adversaries that threaten our peace and prosperity as well as our allies is not the America First they voted for.

That’s part of what worries GOP lawmakers about having Colby as No. 3 at the Pentagon. The official in charge of policy for DOD has to push paperwork that doesn’t get to the secretary’s desk, never mind the president’s. If he’s not instinctively aligned with the commander in chief, that’s a problem.

Another concern is related to Colby’s habit of making straw-man arguments. As one former intelligence official from the first Trump administration told me, Colby’s former boss James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had a habit of presenting the president with two policy choices: One was the relatively safe policy they preferred, and the other option presented as risky with potentially catastrophic results. Naturally, their preferences usually won out.

As it happens, Colby now seems to think that defending Taiwan—the reason why the U.S. should stay out of the Middle East and Europe—is itself probably a disastrous option. In May he wrote: “It is true that Taiwan is a very important strategic interest to the U.S. It is not, however, an existential interest. America has a strong interest in defending Taiwan, but Americans could survive without it.”

“Taiwan,” he posted on X in October, “is a very important but not existential interest for America. The real focus is denying China regional hegemony there. Thus defending Taiwan must make cost-benefit sense for Americans.” America depleted its stockpiles by arming Ukraine and Israel; plus the Taiwanese don’t spend enough on their own defense. So, he posts, “*the only logical and coherent position* is to raise alarm that we are heading to a situation in which defending Taiwan won’t make sense and may not even be possible.”

In other words, Colby went from arguing that Taiwan is the linchpin of U.S. security, far more important than the Middle East and Europe and even other China issues, to Taiwan is only relatively important and there’s not much we can do about it. What happened?

Perhaps it’s because territorial disputes between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea have escalated over the past year. In August alone, the two countries reported six confrontations, with most taking place at or near Scarborough Shoal and the Sabina Shoal in the Spratly Islands, an area within the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone but where China claims sovereignty.

Accordingly, the effort to deprioritize in other theaters by claiming that only China matters may have backfired now that the U.S. might actually be forced to engage in the Indo-Pacific theater. Colby’s shift seems to lend weight to what critics say of his policy preferences: He’s not a priortizer—rather, focusing on Taiwan was a way to justify ignoring Europe and the Middle East and now that his bluff has been called it’s increasingly clear his preference is simply to draw down American power everywhere abroad.

Whatever his motivations, the fact is that Colby keeps moving further and further away from Trump’s own stated policies on both China and the Middle East. For instance, last week the State Department amended its website by removing a statement that it does not support Taiwanese independence. Taiwan’s foreign minister “welcomed the support and positive stance on U.S.-Taiwan relations.” In Beijing, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said: “This is yet another example of the United States’ stubborn adherence to the erroneous policy of ‘using Taiwan to suppress China’. We urge the United States side to immediately rectify its mistakes.”

That Colby is moving in the opposite direction from Trump was inadvertently underscored by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat when he, too, came to Colby’s defense on X. “The Trump administration is formally committed to a strategy of rebalancing American commitments from Europe to the Far East, containing and repelling Chinese aggression and adapting to a multipolar world,” wrote Douthat. “Very, very few people the GOP over the last decade have argued and written more seriously about what that kind of strategy looks like and how to make it work than Bridge.”

But that’s not Trump policy. The 47th president of the United States says China, Russia, and Iran are the threats facing the country. And if adapting to a “multipolar world” means America is not exceptional but rather waits in line with the rest, that’s not what the MAGA president with his eyes on Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Gaza means.

No, what Douthat is describing is the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.” But that wasn’t a real policy, highlighted by the fact that the name of the policy did not specify any purpose to the policy, except to prioritize Asia. Like most Obama initiatives, the Asia pivot was a communications campaign—this one was designed to obscure Obama’s real policy focus, which was to realign U.S. interests in the Middle East by making Iran an ally and legalizing its new partner’s nuclear weapons program. This is not Trump’s Iran’s policy, nor is the Asia pivot his China policy.

The Asia pivot represented a thorough rout of U.S. prestige and power. During Obama’s tenure, China expanded its territorial claims in the South China Sea, building artificial islands and militarizing them with airstrips, radar systems, and missile defenses. Chinese jets and naval vessels repeatedly conducted dangerous maneuvers near U.S. surveillance aircraft and warships in the Pacific, including a 2013 near-collision between the USS Cowpens and a Chinese warship and multiple aggressive intercepts of U.S. reconnaissance planes. PRC hackers targeted U.S. companies, government agencies, and critical infrastructure, including most famously the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management, in which Chinese hackers stole the personal data of over 20 million U.S. government employees—an event that somehow did not perturb the same Democrats who are apoplectic about federal agencies being audited by Elon Musk’s DOGE.

The effect of the Asia pivot was simply to preserve the status quo with China—a status quo that has benefited Beijing while impoverishing millions of Americans by collapsing entire industries and industrial regions; and then killing Americans by flooding economically devastated areas with fentanyl, then COVID. Since the opening to China in 1972, the U.S.-China relationship has been a deadly pact benefiting corrupt U.S. and PRC elites while devastating the U.S. middle class. Yet until Trump, no American political leader dared to disrupt it, even as many ordinary Americans were enraged by its effects. Trump understood their anger and promised to put America First—sending the U.S. establishment into a panic.

“We don’t seek to block China from its role as a major power, nor to stop China,” said Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down.” And Colby winds up in the same place as his former WestExec colleague. “I am signaling to China that we are status quo,” he told a reporter, “that my policy is status quo.”