Politics The Latest Step in the Establishment Campaign to Stop Elbridge Colby  Senate Republicans are working overtime to isolate and undermine the Department of Defense undersecretary. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) After nearly one year into the Trump administration, there is one thing bringing Democrats and Republicans together on Capitol Hill: the urge to kneecap Elbridge Colby. Senate Republicans in particular have struggled with a loss of relevancy in the Trump vortex, but when it comes to the issue of war and maintaining business as usual, especially military force projection and the war in Ukraine, they suddenly find their collective backbone. Nothing gets the old predator instincts moving like a realist treading on their marked territory. Colby, who was confirmed as undersecretary of war for policy by the skin of his teeth with the begrudging help of Senate hawks like Tom Cotton, is now increasingly isolated, as the Senate Armed Services Committee just scrapped a confirmation vote for his deputy, Alexander Velez-Green, and Austin Dahmer, the nominee to be assistant secretary for strategy, plans, and capabilities, on November 19. Both are widely considered realists, “prioritizers,” and allies for Colby in a front office at the Pentagon that is increasingly described as “chaotic” and “dysfunctional”—those being the more polite characterizations shared by sources with The American Conservative this week. The die has been cast, and the odds are not in Colby’s favor. For those who saw him as the antidote to decades of wrong-headed policies that overextended U.S. armed forces and supplies in foreign wars and endless deployments—or as Charlie Kirk once said, “one of the most important pieces to stop the Bush/Cheney cabal at DOD”—this is a real blow. “While senators may have concerns with the nominees themselves, stalling their nominations could be a way to even more clearly signal their discontent with Colby,” wrote Joe Gould and Connor O’Brien for POLITICO after SASC cut off a realistic pathway for Velez-Green’s and Dahmer’s confirmation.  That’s an understatement, said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, in an email to TAC. “Republicans are stuffing President Trump’s DoW [Department of War] nominees for two reasons: One, they oppose Trump’s foreign policy. Two, they fancy themselves shadow commanders-in-chief.” As such, he added, “they want [Sen.] Mitch McConnell’s foreign policy, not Donald Trump’s.”  Trump, of course, had campaigned on a Jacksonian version of restraint, rebuking the architects of the past two decades’ wars of choice and leaning into the idea that, rather than serve as a global policeman, the U.S. must be prepared to strike hard only if provoked.  Whether he has always been consistent on that score is a matter for debate, but realists like Colby have found a place because of Trump’s disdain for the old Cold War thinking of McConnell and others like SASC Chairman Roger Wicker, both of whom have criticized Trump’s foreign policy, especially his desire to bring an end to the Ukraine War not on the battlefield, but at the bargaining table.  For his part, Colby agrees with Trump, and has long argued that the U.S. should prioritize deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, believing that Washington has squandered its readiness for multifront wars. While realists agree and believe the U.S. should refocus on what it can do, the ossified Washington establishment insists that lots and lots of instant money will prepare America to fight wars in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East all at the same time. There is an entire political and financial economy in Washington and Brussels committed to this enduring fantasy. Conforming is essential. What they are doing to Colby “is a telling indicator of how far the bomb-everything-at-once old guard is willing to go to thwart a thoughtful and effective proponent of prioritizing deterrence in East Asia, where America’s biggest future challenges and opportunities lie,” Sohrab Ahmari, U.S. editor of UnHerd, told TAC. POLITICO said the senators who scuttled the nomination were complaining that they were being “kept in the dark” on the National Defense Strategy. They are probably fuming over reports that the strategy, which supposedly landed on Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desk in September for approval, reflects a pivot to the Western Hemisphere and the homeland, a shift that downgrades even the Indo-Pacific, apparently. This is a real departure from past policy strategies, which identified Russia and China as the major “pacing threats.” It is also what Trump wants, say observers. “They [senators] think SASC should have outsized influence on the NDS, a document that statutorily belongs in OSD,” said Logan. “But here again the reason they’re trying to insinuate themselves into the document is because they want to shape it themselves, or at least be able to leak what they don’t like to the press.” In his strained November confirmation hearing before SASC, Velez-Greene refuted the idea that somehow the policy shop was going rogue and wasn’t even conferring with the secretary’s office during the NDS process.  “I believe we developed that document in direct coordination with the secretary’s front office for his direction and intent,” Velez-Green said. “With respect to interagency coordination or notification, there were discussions, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to discuss the particulars in this setting.” Senators are also reportedly miffed about a “pause” in U.S. aid to Ukraine this summer, which turned out to be a tempest in a teapot, but for which Colby has somehow taken the blame. They are also disgruntled about Colby’s review of a Biden-era deal to sell nuclear-powered American Virginia-class submarines to Australia (a review that concluded with no interruption of the deal), and more recent news that the Pentagon has decided to bring home a rotational brigade of troops (approximately 3,000) from Romania. This was also somehow partly blamed on Colby, though Secretary Hegseth and ultimately President Trump have the final word on all of these decisions. “The heat coming down on Elbridge Colby is based on an embarrassing misunderstanding of his role as undersecretary for policy,” said Logan. Sources who spoke with TAC say McConnell, the lone Republican vote against Colby’s confirmation in April, is the ringleader of the Colby detractors advancing the notion that he is acting off the reservation and “freelancing” foreign policy within the E-Ring.  “He is pissing off just about everyone I know inside the administration,” one unnamed source told POLITICO in July. “They all view him as the guy who’s going to make the U.S. do less in the world in general.” More recently, Cotton went so far as to liken Colby’s shop to a Peanuts character. “I understand that media reports can be wrong, believe me, but it just seems like there’s this Pigpen-like mess coming out of the policy shop that you don’t see from, say, intel and security and acquisition and sustainment,” he said in the recent hearing for Dahmer’s nomination on November 4. The acrimony coming from the powerful former Majority Leader’s office and more interventionist Republicans is longstanding and began, sources say, when Colby clashed with colleagues serving as an advisor on the Mitt Romney presidential campaign in 2012. Years later he was considered but passed over for an important post with the Jeb Bush campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015. His sin? According to the Wall Street Journal at the time: Mr. Colby has prominently advocated against a military strike on Iran and has called for the Republican Party to move closer to its roots of pragmatism and containment.  Specifically, Mr. Colby has argued that an open-ended military attack against Iran could be a worse outcome than a nuclear-armed Iran and that containing a nuclear Iran was both “plausible and practical.” The bad blood continued through Colby’s tenure during the first Trump administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 to 2018. His critics, especially the pro-Israel crowd at Jewish Insider, attempted to revive the Iran brief against him to kill his confirmation earlier this year. “This is a story that’s now more than a decade old, in terms of a lot of the antipathies that linger in the elite establishment of the Republican Senate in particular,” a source with knowledge of the Pentagon told TAC.  He added that McConnell’s office is likely coordinating the campaign against Colby. TAC contacted McConnell’s longtime aide Robert Karem, a “forceful interventionist” who was on the Jeb Bush campaign in 2015 at the same time as Colby, and now works with McConnell as a clerk on the Senate Appropriations Committee Defense Subcommittee. Karem referred TAC to the committee communications team, which declined to comment for the story. Not every Republican on SASC jumped on the bandwagon against Colby in these recent hearings. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo) said he saw through his colleagues’ complaints. “I think much of the criticism, which is cloaked in terms of transparency and communication, really is just an effort to undermine a shift in our foreign policy orientation, which I support, which is to realism, as opposed to some of the failed points of view that have dominated permanent Washington over the last 30 years,” Schmitt said, noting that the foreign policy status quo “has repeatedly failed the American people.” Today, the nominees are in limbo and the NDS has yet to be released. They are victims of a self-sustaining organism driven by orthodoxy and conditioned to defend itself against threats—Threats like “realists.” According to POLITICO, “nominees that aren’t confirmed by the end of a Senate session [mid-December] are returned to the White House to be renominated the following year, restarting the confirmation process unless senators agree to keep certain nominees.” Without some Executive intervention, the pathway forward for Velez-Green and Dahmer looks uncertain at best. “Everybody wants to maintain their piece of the pie,” said TAC’s source, “and they’re going to do whatever they can to not allow change to happen.” The post The Latest Step in the Establishment Campaign to Stop Elbridge Colby appeared first on The American Conservative.