Elbridge Colby is the rare Trump administration official who has established a bigger profile for himself outside the administration than in it. Rarer still, he’s achieved this feat while making largely productive contributions to the national discourse. Trump’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development has devoted himself to advocating a vigorous effort to deter China from executing a potentially disastrous attack on Taiwan. But in his singular — at times, prohibitive — focus on the threat posed by China, Colby downgrades the significance of seemingly every other American strategic priority. He appears increasingly committed to a myopia that renders his advocacy unserious and undermines the cause he claims to support.
Like many on the right who are eager to slough off the old Reaganite consensus, Colby sees the conflict in Ukraine as a “distraction.” Even before Moscow launched its second invasion of Ukraine, he and his co-author, Stanford University’s Oriana Skylar Mastro, argued that the United States had succumbed to “delusion” if it thought it could compete against China and Russia simultaneously. Support for America’s partner on the European frontier would necessarily come at the expense of its effort to hem in Beijing. “To be blunt,” they wrote, “Taiwan is more important than Ukraine.”
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