Elbridge Colby will now assume the Pentagon’s number three post after a contentious Senate battle ended in a vote to confirm him to the role.
The Senate voted 51 to 45 to confirm the national security strategist as Defense Department undersecretary for policy, with three Democrats joining most Republicans in voting in his favor. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was the lone Republican no vote.
Colby successfully overcame skepticism from GOP hawks like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who worried over his previous statements on Iran, even as he lost the former Senate majority leader.
‘Elbridge Colby’s long public record suggests a willingness to discount the complexity of the challenges facing America, the critical value of our allies and partners, and the urgent need to invest in hard power to preserve American primacy,’ McConnell said in a statement after the vote.
‘The prioritization that Mr. Colby argues is fresh, new, and urgently needed is, in fact, a return to an Obama-era conception of à la carte geostrategy. Abandoning Ukraine and Europe and downplaying the Middle East to prioritize the Indo-Pacific is not a clever geopolitical chess move. It is geostrategic self-harm that emboldens our adversaries and drives wedges between America and our allies for them to exploit.’
Colby, a co-founder of the Marathon Initiative and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development under the Trump administration, is best known for his role in authoring the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which reoriented long-term military strategy toward a great power competition with China.
He has long argued the U.S. military needs to limit its resources in the Middle East to pivot to the Indo-Pacific region. Colby had staunch backing from Trump’s inner circle, which turned up the heat on Senate Republicans to get behind his confirmation.
Colby had tempered some of his earlier statements, including one that suggested living with a nuclear Iran was safer than bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, and one that suggested the U.S. could ‘live without’ Taiwan.
Pressed by Cotton during his confirmation hearing, Colby said he believes Iran to be an ‘existential’ threat to the U.S.
‘Yes, a nuclear-armed Iran – especially, Senator, given that… we know they’ve worked on ICBM-range capabilities and other capabilities that would pose an existential danger to the United States,’ Colby said.
He promised to provide ‘credible good military options’ to the president if diplomacy with Iran fails.
‘The only thing worse than the prospect of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be [the] consequences of using force to try to stop them,’ Colby had said in 2012.
‘I would say a lot of what I was arguing against at the time, these conversations 15 years ago, a lot of the opponents I felt had a casual or in some cases even flippant attitude toward the employment of military force,’ Colby explained at the hearing. ‘That’s a lot of what I was arguing against. Was my wording always appropriate? Was my precise framing always appropriate? No.’
‘Your views on Taiwan’s importance to the United States seems to have softened considerably,’ Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., told Colby at one point during the hearing.
‘What I have been trying to shoot a signal flare over is that it is vital for us to focus and enable our own forces for an effective and reasonable defense of Taiwan and for the Taiwanese, as well as the Japanese, to do more,’ said Colby.