RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

That’s a debatable proposition. The other side of the argument maintains that Europe, of all places, is no “distraction.” The continent is home to America’s most powerful allies and its foremost trading partners. Its wars have a demonstrated tendency to conflagrate, dragging the United States into them whether Washington is predisposed toward intervention or not. Containing those wars is vital for the preservation of U.S. alliance structure. After all, we’re not talking about Europe’s “neighborhood” — say, for example, Libya, where America’s interests are dwarfed by Europe’s. This is the NATO frontier, a border along which a variety of critical and increasingly nervous U.S. partners reside. Deterring Moscow from testing the integrity of the alliance directly or sowing so much doubt about America’s commitment to the defense of the former Warsaw Pact states that they freelance their way into an infinitely more dangerous situation than the one we are currently confronting is no “distraction.” It’s a core, long-standing, empirically observable feature of American grand strategy.

But let’s concede for the sake of argument that beating back Russian expansionist aggression is a “distraction.” That would be easier to accept at face value if Colby weren’t similarly eager to declare almost every other hot conflict on the planet a “distraction” from his preferred priority.

“Distraction is also a choice, not just ‘forced,’” Colby commented amid his observance of the 100th day of Israel’s war against Hamas. He highlighted a passage from a Wall Street Journal article that he thought illustrated his point: “The Gaza conflict has forced the U.S. to refocus on the Middle East after years of redirecting diplomatic and military resources to counter a rising China.”

Okay, so now not only is Russian aggression a fatal “distraction,” but so, too, is Iranian aggression? That’s the upshot of the Journal article that inspired his lament. “Beyond the Gaza battlefield, the U.S. is working on containing Hamas’s backer Iran and its allies, including Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis,” the item read. Hamas is an Iranian proxy. So, too, is Hezbollah, which the U.S. has sought to deter with the deployment of a host of naval assets off the coast of the Levant. The Shiite militias executing dozens of attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria are similarly doing Iran’s bidding. Would the proper course be to allow Iran to menace and attack U.S. interests unmolested? Is the real problem the fact that America has interests in the region at all?

If the United States were to simply withdraw its assets from the Middle East, that would not suddenly liberate Washington to devote its attention exclusively to Beijing. Iranian assets would make for a more dangerous and unstable Middle East further, menacing America’s imperfect but critical partners such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq and presenting its vital allies like Israel with an existential crisis. Even Barack Obama, a president wholly committed to American retrenchment, was compelled to come to Iraq’s defense when terrorist organizations threatened its sovereignty, even at the expense of his primary foreign-policy pledge to get America out of Iraq. When faced with a choice — “pivot to Asia” at the expense of America’s interests in the Middle East — even an ideologue like Obama recognized, however belatedly, that it was no choice at all.

Nevertheless, let’s stipulate that the two biggest active threats to geopolitical stability today are distractions from America’s biggest challenge. Even if there were a principle limiting America’s capacity to tolerate attacks on the U.S.-led geopolitical order, Colby doesn’t seem to observe one. “It’s truly a mark of how off-kilter our foreign policy is that we are now embarking on ongoing military attacks in Yemen — Yemen! — without any real prospect they will be effective,” he wrote Monday. “The Middle East is a tertiary region and Yemen is a tertiary country within it. Remarkable.”

Now we’re entirely off the rails. The Middle East — some of the most fought-over landscapes in all of human history located in a strategically vital territory rich with indispensable resources — is a “tertiary” territory? Not even secondary — tertiary? That’s just not a serious proposition. What’s more, if we’re going to impugn Joe Biden for belatedly and lethargically responding to aggression that all but closed the irreplaceable Suez Canal to commerce, we’re committing ourselves to a retroactive indictment of U.S. defense policy back to the dawn of the 19th century. Indeed, protecting commerce from piratical aggression is a core interest of nation-states dating back to antiquity.

It’s just not a productive enterprise to mourn the obligation of guaranteed maritime navigation rights that the United States inherited from the British in 1945. There are no practical, much less plausible, alternatives to U.S. hegemony on the high seas. What’s more, the relative peace and prosperity the U.S.-backed global order has produced since its inception in 1991 is vastly preferable to any of the likely alternatives that would emerge to fill the vacuum a retreating America left in its wake.

We’re left to conclude that, if every live challenge to U.S. hegemony is a distraction from the theoretical one, U.S. hegemony is the problem. Colby doesn’t go that far, but the president he served certainly did. In an interview with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo, Trump revived the doctrine of “strategic ambiguity” — a principle whose passing Colby did not mourn when Biden sloughed it off. But in insisting that he was merely preserving his “negotiating position,” Trump articulated the logic for abandoning Taiwan. “If China takes Taiwan, they will turn the world off,” Trump said. “But remember this: Taiwan took — smart, brilliant — they took our business away. We should have stopped them. We should have taxed them. We should have tariffed them.” There’s no more compelling inducement for protectionist industrial policy than closing off the global marketplace.

America’s enemies make no pretense about their coordination in pursuit of their shared goal: putting an end to the age of American dominance. The United States would be foolish to conclude that it can sacrifice an ally here and a vital interest there, and that process would somehow culminate in a more stable world. America’s partners on the front lines of a potential conflict with China, to say nothing of China itself, are watching how America responds to challenges from revisionist rogue states and its near-peer competitors. If the United States sacrifices its obligations, our threatened partners will seek accommodations with their aggressive and expansionist neighbors at America’s expense. That might be a world in which the United States is blessedly liberated from having to care about all these supposed “distractions” abroad, but it would not be a safer one.