In a podcast released Thursday, Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy and an old friend of The American Conservative, sat down for a tête-à-tête with his old schoolmate, the New York Times’ Ross Douthat.
Colby, for the folks keeping track back home, was the mastermind of the first Trump administration’s China-prioritizing defense policy and the author of The Strategy of Denial, a 2021 book further articulating his strategic vision for prioritizing Chinese containment. One of the pillars of his theory was that the Persian Gulf region is not a major priority for American national interests, and that the Middle Eastern escapades that characterized policy in the early part of this century are not exactly the sort of thing that a prudent administration should continue.
Time passed. The Times’ civilizing spectacle of two Harvard men chatting it out took place against the backdrop of the current conflagration in the Persian Gulf. Speaking as a public official rather than a commentator, Colby is now constrained by the administration’s line. It is, I think, fair to say that he put on a game performance, and probably articulated the smartest case that can be made for the current course. It is worth drawing out a few points.
On the topic of munitions stockpiles, a point of serious concern for many analysts (including those writing for this magazine), Colby is dismissive: “One, I think that point is exaggerated, and obviously I can’t get into the details here. But the capabilities that are most significant have not really been, are not really in scarce supply. … I can’t give you a specific example, but I can say with confidence — and we are paying a lot of attention to this — that we’re in good shape.” Naturally, by virtue of his position, Colby has more information than the press or the public, but “whom do you believe, me or your lying eyes” does little to allay the fears that arise from, say, temporarily cannibalizing missile systems in the Korean Peninsula to feed the Iranian theater, particularly when the speaker can hardly come out and say that, yes, we are in fact running short on things. If the administration were interested in shoring up the flagging public support for the war, showing a little leg on this issue might go a long way.
Colby also danced around worries about the war’s temporal scope. He objected to Douthat’s characterization of the war as a “stalemate,” but not in the terms you might hope: “In terms of it being a stalemate, I don’t think that’s necessarily true, and I don’t think diplomacy has been ruled out. … I think it remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t regard it as a stalemate. I don’t think that’s a fair assessment.”
“I don’t think that’s necessarily true”? “I think it remains to be seen”? Willikers.
Similarly, Colby insists that the war just needs a little more time—an unspecified amount—to accomplish its goals: “People have to give some time for the strategy to work out, and part of that is military force, which we’re applying effectively. Part of it is the diplomatic international pressure, the economic pressure on Iran, the restoration of sanctions, etc.” Asking the public for more time on a war they weren’t sold and which they do not want to become an open-ended affair is an admirable bit of cheek. Nor does the appeal to sanctions seem promising. Sanctions have not been conspicuously successful in conditioning Iranian behavior. (Indeed, they helped to entrench the IRGC, which controls the financial mechanisms for getting around sanctions.) Granted, matching them with the exertion of hard power is a new condition, but appealing to longstanding policies that have done little to advance the cause as game-changers sounds a little hollow.
Nor would his brief justification for the war satisfy skeptics. “We’re denying Iran a nuclear weapon — that’s something that started with Operation Midnight Hammer, but has continued with this operation — and also substantially degraded Iran’s ability to project military power throughout the region,” Colby said. “We’re talking about drones and missiles. That problem obviously remains. But Iran’s navy and air force — there’s been a very substantial degradation of Iran’s capability as well as significant parts of its defense industrial base.” Here indeed is the crux of the problem that more than one commentator has articulated: Absent a durable diplomatic settlement — which, lest we forget, seemed eminently achievable before the bombs started falling and now seems far less likely after giving Iran the best reasons in the world to make itself a frightening military prospect — these aims set us on the course of “mowing the grass” indefinitely, which is an unstable and politically undesirable upshot. Nor does one draw comfort from Colby’s appeals to self-perpetuating processes, for example, the fact that Iranian strikes on bases in Jordan are “thereby proving the point that [Iran] remains a threat.” The fact that a country can respond militarily to an attack is an almost universally applicable pretext for war.
There is much that is stimulating and thoughtful in Colby’s conversation with Douthat, particularly his comments on Europe and the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s cockamamie middle-powers entente idea. But when it comes to Iran, more time, more pressure, the whole story isn’t out there, and “we’ll see”—these are not encouraging things to hear from the top mind at the Pentagon. Is this the best they can do?
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