Elbridge Colby is Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as under secretary of defense for policy, but Sen. Tom Cotton is thinking about derailing his nomination. Colby not only has the president’s support, he’s also been defended on social media by the leading pro-Trump voices, from Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk to Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance. The Heritage Foundation has also called for the Senate to confirm Colby.
“There’s a chance the neoconservatives can swiftly recover.”
What makes Colby, who served faithfully in the first Trump administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, more objectionable to Cotton than Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy were? The Arkansas senator voted to confirm both of those ex-Democrats for higher offices than the one to which Colby has been nominated.
The answer, Cotton has indicated, is that he believes Colby is insufficiently fearful of Iran’s nuclear program. In 2010, Colby wrote a Foreign Policy essay arguing that Iran could be strategically contained even if it did develop a nuclear weapon, though Colby concluded, “containment is certainly not the best outcome—successfully preventing Iranian acquisition is.”
Beyond that article, Colby has called for Washington to prioritize checking the power of Communist China over further commitments to the Middle East. Cotton may disagree with that strategic vision, as he no doubt disagrees with Colby’s thoughts from 15 years ago on Iran’s nuclear program. But the senator would be imposing a very narrow ideological test indeed if these differences were grounds for scuttling a nomination. Colby is less dovish in general than Tulsi Gabbard, yet Cotton didn’t try to stop her. So what’s his angle here?
It’s this: There are three layers to American politics, and while Cotton’s long-time neoconservative friends have been routed at the highest and lowest levels, they have not been extirpated from the middle. At the top of politics are elected officials and “name-brand” politicians whether they currently hold elective office or not. Gabbard and RFK Jr. fall into this category, as does Cotton himself. The senator is no fool—he knows that his foreign-policy views, which are closer to those of George W. Bush and John McCain than to Donald Trump’s, are in eclipse at the moment. To oppose Gabbard would have been worse than futile. She or somebody much like her might still have received the position, while Cotton would have earned the enmity of Trump and the MAGA movement. When Trump chose not to appoint Mike Pompeo to any role in his second term, Cotton must have recognized that the top level of Trump’s GOP held little hope for people aligned with the senator’s perspective.
The voting public, including the base of each party, occupies the lowest level of politics. Even before Trump entered politics, the Republican party’s national base had no great zeal for a figure like Sen. John McCain. The Arizonan did win the GOP’s 2008 presidential nomination, but the neoconservatives’ chief strategist, William Kristol, understood that McCain would struggle to turn out his own party’s base unless he was paired with a populist running mate. Sarah Palin was Kirstol’s solution. Whatever neoconservative impulses the base might have, the neoconservatives’ strength is not concentrated at the popular level.
Instead, Kristol and his fellow travelers excelled at exploiting the middle layer of politics, that of staff and appointees below the cabinet level: policy wonks, bureaucrats, and “swamp creatures.” These were the government positions most easily inhabited by people whose natural environment was the magazine or think tank. The middle layer of politics is not necessarily subordinate to the higher or lower levels. The base typically has a very limited choice of candidates available, and whichever candidate primary voters choose, the same kind of middle-layer intellectual will fill out the ranks of any Republican administration. Elected officials are, in a sense, just the public faces of institutions that are really run, day to day, by staff. (Hence a senator like Dianne Feinstein or Mitch McConnell, or a president like Joe Biden, can hold office despite being obviously impaired by senescence—the staff do the real work.)
Cotton understood the three layers of politics perfectly well even before he became an elected official. He and Kristol connected through their Harvard ties and cultivated one another. Kristol became a patron to the rising young politician, who, when he was first elected, seemed to be the brightest hope for a new generation of neoconservative-aligned office-holders. Kristol attended Cotton’s swearing-in as a senator. And his son, Joe Kristol, served as Cotton’s legislative director from 2017 to 2019.
Elbridge Colby is a threat to the neoconservatives’ place in the middle layer of politics. He’s the anti-Kristol—a Harvard-educated, right-leaning intellectual, at home in a think tank or appointed government position, with a vision of what Republican foreign policy should be that is sharply at odds with the neoconservatives’. Colby is smarter than Kristol; for one thing, he wrote a real book, The Strategy of Denial, while Kristol never has. And Colby’s government career may lead higher than Kristol’s ever did. (The latter finished as Dan Quayle’s chief of staff; Colby could follow a trajectory closer to that of Kirstol’s ally John Bolton.) But Colby, like Kristol, is the sort of person around whom policy cadres could take shape, remaking the middle level of Republican politics. One Elbridge Colby could lead to more.
This is why it’s important to Cotton that Colby be thwarted. As long as non-neoconservatives only dominate two of the three levels of Republican politics, there’s a chance the neoconservatives can swiftly recover by using the middle layer as their staging ground. In the old, pre-Trump system, voters were constrained by their choice of politicians, and the elected politicians were constrained by the expertise (bureaucratic, policy-specific, and even ideological-philosophical) of the middle lawyer. Trump has disrupted that system: The think tanks and experts and government appointees and staff don’t matter nearly as much with Trump setting the direction of things himself. But after Trump, the old ways could return.
Yet Vance, who has himself spent time in the think-tank world, understands the middle layer of politics just as well as Cotton does. Vance’s strong support for Colby shows that he appreciates what’s at stake in his nomination. And the MAGA counter-elite, which in some ways parallels the old middle lawyer of politics (but in others ways is quite different) is conscious of what’s in play as well. Donald Trump Jr. and Charlie Kirk know why Elbridge Colby matters. And because they do, they’ve put Tom Cotton—and other Senate Republicans with Bush-like foreign-policy leanings—in the difficult position of having to fight MAGA directly if they want to stop Colby. This means Colby is likely to get confirmed, but this is only one battle—albeit an important one—in a much larger bureaucratic and institutional war.