Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: US Department of Defense/Public Domain
ELBRIDGE COLBY, who is currently Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Trump administration, is again in the news. In particular, Colby has come under scrutiny as the responsible party for halting arms shipments to Ukraine.
The Trump administration was caught blindsided by the halting of the arms shipments, with senior members of the Trump administration and Trump himself seeming to be unaware. Trump later reinstated the arms shipments himself.
At the time, the inexplicable halting of arms shipments was seen as a deliberate move that favored Russian President Vladimir Putin. Specifically, Trump not only had stated that he could not control Putin, but apparently his administration had also suspended arms shipments to Ukraine. Since then, it has emerged that Colby may have been acting on his own, leading to criticisms of Colby’s disruptive actions in the US government.
Colby has to date claimed that he hopes for the US to scale back its support of Ukraine and to instead focus on China as America’s primary geopolitical threat. Yet there is good reason to disbelieve this claim. It is instead more probable that Colby is simply using China as a pretext to scale back US commitments more broadly.
Colby’s actions are instructive, having taken US allies such as Japan and Australia by surprise in demanding to know what their plans are if the US and China went to war over Taiwan. To this extent, Colby has called on Asia Pacific allies of the US to increase their defense budgets, otherwise risk continued US support.
This, too, is how Colby treated Taiwan. Colby has called on Taiwan to raise its defense budget to 10% of its GDP, suggesting that the US would drop support for Taiwan otherwise.
But Colby may simply be looking for a pretext to cut back US cooperation with Japan, Australia, and Taiwan. At a time when Japan believed that the US hoped for 3% to 3.5% spending of the GDP on defense, Colby unpredictably threw out the number of 5%.
This is similar with regard to Taiwan. Defense already accounts for around 1/4th of government spending. As such, even raising the defense budget to 5%, as often requested of the US, would be difficult. Raising defense spending to 10%, then, would be impossible and would require the government to cut all other spending. Such a move would be untenable for any democratically elected government–and Colby may know it, too.
Indeed, Colby is best known in Taiwan for suggesting that the US destroy TSMC in the event of war to prevent it from falling into China’s hands. Clearly, Colby’s aims are to maintain US hegemony, with scarcely any thought for states aligned with the US in the Asia Pacific. But Colby may have precisely meant to sow distrust in the US with such comments.
Colby has thrown other US relationships into question, stating that the US is reviewing a nuclear submarine technology agreement with Australia and the UK. The agreement, known as AUKUS, was broadly understood to be an attempt to proliferate nuclear submarine technology so as to contain China. It proves odd that Colby apparently calls for focusing the US on China, but aims to cut back US initiatives aimed at doing that.
Yet Colby’s true colors are visible in how he reacted to the UK sending a carrier group to Singapore for training, in that he hoped that the UK could call back the carrier group. It is probable that much of Colby’s claims to be hoping to focus the US on containing China is simply a pretext for an agenda aimed at isolationism.
Such moves are likely to alarm Taiwan. DPP presidential administrations have made it clear that they prefer US support for Ukraine, in that this reassures the Taiwanese public about continued support from the US.
As some have suggested, Colby may not ultimately subscribe to an isolationist worldview either. Instead, Colby may be committed to a multipolar view of the world in which the major powers–the US, China, and Russia–have their own respective spheres of influence, in which they should not interfere with one another.
If this is Colby’s worldview, this makes it all the more likely that Colby is looking for ways to disintegrate traditional alliance relationships of the US that would entangle it beyond its borders. It may not be surprising that he would seek to shake faith in the US in the Asia Pacific with his actions, then.