Joshua Shifrinson
Joshua Shifrinson

Should seeking to prioritize threats to US national security disqualify officials from leading policy positions? The campaign underway to prevent former Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby from gaining a senior position in the Trump administration certainly suggests so. Colby made his name in the first Trump administration working to reorient US defense policy toward competition with China, an effort that has since become widely embraced across the political spectrum. Since then, he’s continued to argue for rigorous prioritization of a US grand strategy to handle great power competition with Beijing.
All of which is to say that his views are anathema to those who would prefer the United States embrace the sort of neoconservative primacy that informed much of US foreign policy over the last three decades. Most directly, Colby has come under criticism over the previous 48 hours by unnamed sources for supposedly being soft on Iran (and insufficiently pro-Israel). The evidence behind this claim is weak: consistent with his calls to focus on China, Colby has argued that a nuclear Iran could be deterred and contained, and, thus, the United States need not threaten war with Iran for the sake of stopping Iran from going nuclear. Still, the pushback has been pronounced. As one unnamed source put it, “I don’t know how you how you put a man who says he’s OK [sic] with Iran having a nuclear weapon in charge of any serious defense or national security job.”
There is something amiss here. To be sure, Colby himself may be overstating the China threat; we should not take his views as writ. Still, after three decades of American adventurism in the Middle East, mounting budget deficits, demands for domestic investment in the US, and a growing recognition that—so far as the US faces external threats—China is the pacing candidate,  » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/war-iran-keep-out-government