On March 3, Elbridge Colby found himself in the unusual position of having to defend a war he has spent most of his career warning against. The top Pentagon strategist appeared before a Senate committee only three days after President Donald Trump announced the launch of Operation Epic Fury over the skies of Iran.
When Senator Elizabeth Warren asked him how the Iran war was “America First,” Colby didn’t miss a beat. “I would say America First and peace-through-strength are served by rolling back, as the military campaign is designed to do, the threats posed by Iran’s very large and growing missile and one-way attack drone program, its navy, and of course, ensuring that it doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.”
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For most senior Trump administration officials, testifying to the merits of the president’s war would be unremarkable. But Colby, known as Bridge to his friends, is a different story. The sandy-haired 46-year-old policy intellectual made his name in and out of government by warning about the perils of overstretched U.S. military commitments.
His job in the second Trump presidency as the under secretary of defense for policy seemed like a perfect match. Colby was serving a commander in chief who campaigned against the Middle Eastern wars of his predecessors. Yet the Iran war is a reminder that Trump’s worldview cannot be reduced to campaign slogans. For years, Colby has tried to persuade Washington to focus on the growing threat from China and shift away from Europe and the Middle East. And yet here he is, serving in an administration that has launched another war far away from America’s chief adversary.
