The Deep Thinker rising through a shallow Pentagon

By Andreas Kluth

IN NATIONAL SECURITY as in other policy areas, US President Donald Trump has been gutting what he derides as the “deep state,” and turning it into what some scholars now call a “” — a government in which careers depend less on expertise and more on sycophancy.

But even a government of the shallow, by the shallow, for the shallow needs depth in certain functions. This means that the remaining people in the administration who know their brief, as long as they’re also politically adroit, may play an outsized role in setting strategy.

One such official is Elbridge Colby, the of Defense for Policy. Already influential in Trump’s first term, Colby is now masterminding the next National Defense Strategy, slated to be published in late August.

If Colby has his way, it will say — under the label “America First,” of course — that the United States is overextended and exploited by its friends, and that it must do much less in Europe, the Middle East, and other places in order to concentrate on the one defining contest to come. This is the looming confrontation against China, initially over Taiwan but ultimately over the regional hegemony in Asia which Beijing seeks and Washington .

Guided by that stance, Colby has been putting his signature on all sorts of other policy moves. The other day, the US deliveries to Ukraine of various munitions, from artillery rounds to Patriot batteries, ostensibly because America needed to conserve its own stockpiles. That initiative came from Colby, who views Ukraine as a job for the European allies but a distraction for Washington. The weapons halt not only Kyiv but also the State Department and Congress, where concerned Republicans and Democrats that Colby explain himself.

Colby was also behind an unexpected “review” of AUKUS, a trilateral quasi-alliance among the US, Britain, and Australia, under which Washington is supposed to give Canberra several top-notch, nuclear-powered attack submarines. An odd target for Colby, perhaps, since AUKUS is meant to contain China, Colby’s bugbear. But he that Washington doesn’t have any whizzbang boats to spare. Or he pressing Australia to pick up more of the bill, a tactic that would please Trump. An update on the review is expected this week.

Colby is a curious person to wield so much sway in such an ostentatiously populist and anti-elitist administration, and in a Pentagon run by an . In biography and pedigree, he’d be better cast in a deep-state role: He’s a preppy (Groton, Harvard, Yale) with both the name and the mane to show for it, and for good measure also the grandson of a former CIA director. And he has an erudite side, which he displayed when we met before he joined this administration.

Colby — “Bridge,” to his colleagues — considers himself not an isolationist (a label that better fits the MAGA fringes), he told me, but a realist in the tradition dating back to Thucydides. (A he co-founded is named Marathon, after the battle won by the Athenians of Thucydides’ father’s generation.) Having read , Colby labeled me a “rationalist.”

But Colby also has — or has learned to present — another side, one that has kept him close to the power circles around Trump but from many of his colleagues in the establishment. After Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, Colby lined up with those who spread the lie that the election was “stolen.” He later gave a slick interview to Tucker Carlson, an influencer who was rabidly pro-Trump. He started tweeting and posting in ways that seemed tailored to the attention spans of MAGAs (especially the top one) rather than wonks. It evidently worked. During Colby’s confirmation hearings, Donald Trump, Jr., the president’s eldest son, that “any Republican opposing @ElbridgeColby is opposing the Trump agenda.”

None of this would count as criticism in any normal administration, where Colby would be just one among many experts in the Pentagon, National Security Council, State Department, and Intelligence Community, debating the pros and cons of policies, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, and the rest of it.

But that intellectual rigor no longer exists. Marco Rubio, who among top officials comes closest in expertise to Colby, running both the State Department and the National Security Council, both of which are after firings and . The directors of national intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard) and the CIA (John Ratcliffe) have become flunkies.

Substantive criticism now comes from outside the government, and often from policy veterans. One such is at the Center for a New American Security (where Colby also did a stint), who served in the National Security Council of the first Trump administration, and in the CIA and State Department before that.

Colby sees US foreign policy “as a zero-sum game and I just, I don’t see it that way,” Curtis told me. The US is a global power “and we can’t pick and choose our theaters” — ignoring Ukraine and focusing on Taiwan, say. “And by the way, what happens in one theater impacts the other.” Beijing is certainly watching how much resolve Washington brings to resisting the Kremlin. “It doesn’t need to be an either or, and I think that’s the way Bridge Colby sees it.”

These are discussions that should be carried out in the Oval Office and the situation room but no longer are. By all accounts, the people around those tables are too eager to affirm a president who ultimately believes only in his own gut and acts on whim. (Trump the US will keep sending weapons to Ukraine after all. And he certainly didn’t listen to Colby when he ordered the bombing of Iran.)

But strategy still matters in the slower-moving realms of government, where ships, nukes, drones, bases, and other things are planned years in advance, delineating the future parameters of American power. And this gives sway to the few people at or near the top who still have a clue, like Colby. If he has his way — irrespective of what Trump does tomorrow or the day after — America will keep weaning itself from Europe and the Middle East, and eventually cease being a global leader to become a North American and Pacific power.

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