From the series Chronicles of the new American nationalism
In the US Department of Defense led by Peter Hegseth, the undersecretary of defence for policy, Elbridge Colby, is in charge of revising the Pentagon’s defensive posture, which includes a different deployment of American troops and military resources abroad. It was Colby who stopped sending arms to Ukraine at the beginning of July, who put pressure on Japan to increase military spending, and who cast doubt on the commitment to supply Australia with the nuclear submarines, which is the primary feature of AUKUS – the defence and security partnership with the UK and Australia. His aim could be to pressure Tokyo and Canberra into playing a front-line role vis-à-vis China, as well as increasing their financial contribution to Washington.
Many laughed at Donald Trump when he put television personalities in charge of important departments. The conservative columnist of The New York Times Ross Douthat hypothesised, on the contrary, that this dynamic would increase the influence of many secondary roles still waiting to be filled, [such as] Hegseth’s deputies
. In Trump’s Pentagon, in the absence of a clear conductorship on the part of a maestro, Colby presents himself as a potential first violin.
CNAS’s “Asia-firsters”
Elbridge Colby, born in 1979 and the grandson of William Colby, CIA director in the 1970s, grew up in Japan until high school, while his father Jonathan worked for the First Boston investment bank. He returned to America to attend the prestigious Groton School, going on to graduate from Harvard and then Yale Law School. After some years at the State and Defense Departments during Trump’s first administration, he became a fellow of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the think tank headed by Kurt Campbell, Michèle Flournoy and, since 2019, Richard Fontaine.
Flournoy was undersecretary of defence for policy at the Pentagon under Barack Obama. Campbell inspired the Asian pivot in that presidency and then became the Asia Tsar
for Joe Biden, the president who launched AUKUS and consolidated the Quad, the strategic security and diplomatic partnership with Australia, Japan, and India. Fontaine, a veteran of George W. Bush’s National Security Council (NSC), has recently published with Robert Blackwell a critical account of the 2010s, which they consider a lost decade
in countering China’s rise.
Colby, critical of the 2003 war in Iraq, did not join in when, in 2016, 50 important officials from the Republican administrations, from Richard Nixon to Bush, opposed Trump, shortly before he won the presidential election. Colby was subsequently appointed as deputy assistant secretary of defence and inspired the 2018 National Defense Strategy.
CNAS and The Marathon Initiative
After Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Colby founded The Marathon Initiative, a small think tank involving scholar Edward Luttwak and some officials from the first Trump administration. Wess Mitchell, the former assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs is a co-founder of The Marathon Initiative, and Jakub Grygiel, a professor at Johns Hopkins and senior adviser in the Foggy Bottom Office of Political Planning, plays a leading role in it.
Mitchell and Grygiel argued that alliances were vital for the United States, even though they imply that there is a risk of entrapment
– exposure to an economic cost and a military risk, which increases with the extension of security guarantees and the perimeter of the alliances themselves (The Unquiet Frontier, 2016). After the Democrats’ defeat in the 2024 presidential election, Ely Ratner, one of Campbell’s former collaborators at the CNAS and subsequently an assistant secretary of defence for Indo-Pacific security affairs in the Biden administration, joined them.
Among The Marathon Initiative’s advisers there is also Alexander Gray, the NSC chief-of-staff in 2019-20, and Matt Pottinger, who was the assistant to Michael Flynn, H. R. McMaster, and John Bolton, the three national security advisers fired one after the other by Trump during his first administration. According to McMaster, Pottinger conceptualised and led the drive towards Asia in what he calls the most important shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War
. The same combination of Asianist, Democratic, and Republican political currents, alternating in power in different administrations, can also be found in The Marathon Initiative and the CNAS.
“The Strategy of Denial”
Colby set out his strategy for denying China the possibility of becoming a regional hegemon in his book The Strategy of Denial [2021]. While Asia is a priority key region
, Europe is considered a critical secondary external region
, and the Persian Gulf a considerably less important
region. Although the control of the Gulf’s energy resources provides a great source of power that could be used to put on pressure
, Colby stresses that this strategic concern does not, however, extend to the remainder of the Middle East and North Africa
, because this area would not make a material difference to American security, freedom, or prosperity
.
The United States, hegemonic in North and Central America
, would have reason to fear another State that seeks hegemony over one of the key regions of the world
. The question is how to prevent this by committing the least number of forces in a context of limited economic resources. Hence a strategy of denial
, based on the resources of allies. In Asia, this also involves European cooperation against China’s hegemonic ambitions, but without allowing the EU to become hegemonic in Europe itself.
In fact, Colby writes that, with regard to the Old Continent, the European Union is the most plausible alternative to Russia as an aspiring hegemon
. Considered solely in the transatlantic context, then, the United States is therefore better off if Europe is not a highly unified super-State
. However, Washington should not oppose any degree of European integration
but rather offer its support to a Europe that is reasonably stable and can act coherently on matters of mutual concern
, and one of these is China’s rise. But this does not mean the United States would benefit if the European Union or a successor became a truly unified entity capable of establishing regional hegemony and unduly burdening or even excluding US trade and engagement
. The United States should cultivate Europe’s collaboration in Asia, but not to the point of recognising its strategic autonomy.
Anti-hegemonic coalition in Asia
The strategy of denial
vis-à-vis China involves building anti-hegemonic coalitions
. Washington should first and foremost ensure that it upholds its commitments to its allies
in Asia. In particular, Colby draws the perimeter of the coalition to which America should provide security guarantees along the first island chain
around China – Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The United States would act there as an external cornerstone balancer
to encourage States that are weaker than China to oppose it. Taiwan would be the primary scenario
and the Philippines the second-best target among existing US allies
, if Beijing adopts a focused and sequential strategy
.
There is no hope of forming an effective anti-hegemonic coalition without Japan
but getting it to join an integrated posture with the United States
requires a significant change from its post-Second World War defence model
. This is where the pressure to increase Japan’s military expenditure – just recently doubled from 1 to 2% of GDP – to 3.5% of GDP enters the conversation: pressure which Tokyo considers excessive. Furthermore, South Korea would also be added to the American defence perimeter
.
For its part, Australia is a highly advanced economy with a significant military; it is also distant from China and therefore highly defensible
. Moreover, it has a strong interest in a forward defence in the Western Pacific
in support of the coalition. Washington should therefore seek to enlist Canberra to prepare its forces to aid US efforts to defend the Philippines and Taiwan
. Finally, Vietnam, because of its proximity to China and fierce independent streak
, will be brought into the coalition without needing or even [...] wanting
formal guarantees, given its tradition of eschewing alliances
.
Pressure on partners
According to Colby, key regional allies such as Japan and Australia are also moving [towards a strategy of denial]
against Beijing, even though the precise contours and nature
of the budding anti-hegemonic coalition remain unclear
. It may grow on existing mechanisms such as the Quad
or on other more or less formal agreements. Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and South Korea are immediately exposed to China and form the perimeter which Japan, India, and Australia should defend together with the United States, in Colby’s view.
However, Tokyo, New Delhi, and Canberra are not equally exposed: their situations
, Colby stated in his Senate hearing before his appointment are very different
. Washington must therefore ramp up the pressure. Japan is, albeit far too slowly, increasing its defence level of effort. It needs to go a lot farther, a lot faster. But you also see some hedging behaviour
i.e., balancing
moves with which Tokyo resists getting caught up in the competition between the United States and China, asserting its own specific interests. Colby has in his sights the engagement with Beijing
, which its Asian partners are continually reevaluating
. The economic ties to China form part of the Pentagon’s strategy of putting pressure on its allies.