Elbridge Colby Wants to Finish What Donald Trump Started

“I would have a hard time identifying a single person in my time in Washington who has had a bigger impact in moving the needle of the debate” on Ukraine and China, said A. Wess Mitchell, an assistant secretary of State in the Trump administration. Mitchell, who started a new think tank called the Marathon Initiative with Colby, is more hawkish on backing Ukraine than his co-founder.

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, one of the vocal new populists and Ukraine skeptics in the GOP, added, “Nowhere is Bridge’s leadership clearer than in the current debate over tradeoffs between aiding Ukraine and deterring China.”

Colby’s foreign policy influence is more than just another installment in the long-running fight between isolationists and hawks in the GOP. It’s part of the mounting revival of the Asia First doctrine that the party championed in the aftermath of World War II, when the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek, a hero to American conservatives, fled to Taiwan in December 1949 as Mao’s communist forces won the civil war. The result was the rise of a vocal and highly influential “China Lobby” on the political right that demanded that Harry S. Truman withhold recognition of Red China and support Taiwan. Indeed, in 1951, Sen. Robert A. Taft, who was known as “Mr. Republican,” published a book called A Foreign Policy For Americans decrying Western Europeans for failing to pay for their own defense and warning that China was enemy number one.

Today, a new China Lobby is forming in the GOP, and Colby is one of its leaders. It espouses a self-consciously “realist” approach to foreign affairs, seeking to split the difference between the MAGA isolationists and the neoconservative hawks by arguing that China — not Russia — poses a dire threat to American national security, and that excessive support for Ukraine is jeopardizing it. It holds above all that American military planning and resources should be directed toward planning for a conflict with China over Taiwan.

When I spoke with Colby, he explained, “Ukraine should not be the focus. The best way to avoid war with China is to be manifestly prepared such that Beijing recognizes that an attack on Taiwan is likely to fail. We need to be a hawk to get to a place where we can be a dove. It’s about a balance of power.”

Talk like this has won Colby admirers among those surfing the right’s new populist wave. That includes Tucker Carlson, who has proved to be an influential voice in pushing the GOP to jettison Ukraine. When Colby appeared on Carlson’s show last year and blasted the Biden administration’s “moral posturing” on Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the world, the Fox News host declared, “Elbridge Colby, I wish you were running the State Department.” This March, Colby went on Fox’s “Ingraham Angle” to warn that the ties between China and Russia were “a massive danger.” The notion that America needed to aid Ukraine first was “a delusion” and had led to it becoming “bogged down in Europe.”