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There’s little in Elbridge A. Colby’s past to suggest that President Trump’s most loyal and fierce allies would embrace him. Mr. Colby, 45, has deep roots in the foreign policy establishment that Mr. Trump is trying to destroy. He is the grandson of the former C.I.A. director William Colby; a product of Groton, Harvard and Yale Law School; someone who has spent much of his career working across party lines on some of the most complex national security issues: nuclear weapons strategy, China’s military buildup, the commercialization of space.
Yet when Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Colby to a top Pentagon job, the opposition came not from the president’s base but from the dwindling band of traditional Republican foreign policy hard-liners who are often at odds with the president’s more nationalistic, inward-looking views. And it was the Trump faithful, seeing Mr. Colby’s confirmation as a chance to establish dominance over their ideological foes in the party, who sprang to his defense.
“This is the next deep state plot against Trump,” Charlie Kirk, a right-wing provocateur and Trump enforcer, wrote in a post on social media. “Any Republican opposing @ElbridgeColby is opposing the Trump agenda,” opined Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. “Why the opposition to Bridge?” asked the billionaire Elon Musk, referring to Mr. Colby by his nickname. Senators are likely to vote on Mr. Colby’s nomination in the next couple of weeks, if not sooner.
Beyond the insular world of Washington think tanks, where he spent much of his career, Mr. Colby is not well known. The job he is poised to take, under secretary of defense for policy, is critical but not the sort of position that typically stirs the passions of political activists.
The back-and-forth over Mr. Colby’s nomination, though, has become a proxy for something bigger: a battle over how America should wield its power and influence globally. And as is often the case with those in Mr. Trump’s orbit, it also involves Mr. Colby’s willingness to echo some of his baseless assertions — most notably his insistence that he won the 2020 election.
Mr. Colby’s gray suits, shaggy blond hair, and courtly manner are reminiscent of an earlier era in Washington. So too are many of his foreign policy views, which owe a debt to the Cold War-era realists who emphasized U.S. military might and economic dominance over ideals in the conduct of the country’s affairs internationally.
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