This former Pentagon official could serve in a Trump administration. He has thoughts on Australia

While Washington has warmed to the AUKUS submarine deal in the last couple of years, Elbridge Colby has stood against the tide.

Indeed, the former Pentagon defence strategist emerged as its most important critic in the US. It was “crazy” he said earlier this year. Not because he’s unfriendly to Australia. He counts Australia as America’s “best ally”.

“I mean, Australia has been in even our ill-advised wars like Vietnam and Iraq,” he tells me. “I’m a big fan”.

Elbridge Colby is a self-proclaimed “big fan” of Australia. That feeling doesn’t extend to the AUKUS pact.

So while Australia loses points for its strategic judgement, it wins on dogged loyalty.

Colby’s objection to AUKUS is that the US faces the prospect of war with China any time now so “why are we giving away this crown jewel asset when we most need it?” he posed in June.

Colby, the lead author of the 2018 US National Security Strategy under the Trump administration, is widely mooted as a potential national security adviser to Trump if the Republican should win the November election.

His opposition matters.

So it’s notable that he’s now started to relent.

“Even in the last couple of months, I would say that my views on AUKUS have become a bit more receptive,” he tells me. “I would describe myself as maybe an AUKUS agnostic. I’m not an atheist, which is to say I’m prepared to be convinced in the existence of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I have not seen the weight of compelling evidence thus far.”

Colby won’t be swayed by groupthink, but his changing attitude does coincide with a gathering political momentum in the Biden White House and the US Congress to make AUKUS happen.

President Joe Biden this week signed the legal authority to allow the US to transfer submarines and technology to Australia and to entrench Canberra’s promises of nuclear non-proliferation.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles called it “a key foundational document”. It will go before the Australian parliament, and the US Congress and UK parliament, for ratification in the coming days.

“We are making this happen,” said Marles during a trip to Washington D.C. this week.

The deal’s most important advocate in the US Congress, Democrat Joe Courtney of Connecticut, tells me that both Democrat and Republican congress members and senators, after some initial scepticism and apathy, have now “got religion” on AUKUS.

He measures its political popularity by congressional vote counts on supplemental budgets. There were three before the Congress at the same time in April – one for aid to Israel, one for aid to Ukraine and one for the Indo-Pacific, including help to Taiwan and AUKUS-related funding.

“Actually there was a very strong consensus [in favour of] the Indo-Pacific area,” says Courtney. “Indo-Pacific had by far the largest bipartisan vote,” by a ratio of about 10 votes in favour to one against.

As it went through the various committee processes, “it’s something that sort of actually grew in terms of popularity and support, particularly among Republican members. Why? Chiefly because it’s part of the US effort to deter aggression by China.”

He also credits Kevin Rudd as “the perfect man for the time” because of his expertise on China – “his book The Avoidable War was doing the rounds on Capitol Hill” – and effectiveness in persuading Republicans to support AUKUS.

While pro-AUKUS consensus forms among the Washington political class, a mood of isolationism develops among the broader public, led by disillusioned combat veterans.

Dan Caldwell is a veteran of the Iraq war and now an adviser at Defence Priorities, a Washington think tank advocating “restraint” in US defence policy, the opposite of activism or adventurism.

“There is distrust of a lot of national security institutions, both in government and outside, because these institutions, these individuals – you’ve probably heard the term ‘the blob’ [the nickname for the Washington foreign policy establishment] – have been consistently wrong for the last 30 years,” Caldwell says.

A clear indicator of popular mood is that Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Barack Obama have all boasted that they led the US into no new wars.

Yet political support for AUKUS consolidates.

The two countercurrents today coexist in the person of Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance. Like Caldwell, he’s an Iraq combat veteran who favours military restraint, but has endorsed AUKUS to confront China.

Whether the two can continue to coexist is an open question.

Why has Elbridge Colby become less hostile to AUKUS?

He’s been learning about the ancillary benefits of the deal: “Because I have heard not only from the Australians, but the Americans, including about Australian investments in the submarine base.”

A $US3 billion contribution from the Australian government is to allow increased tempo of Virginia class submarine-building in American shipyards, up from 1.3 vessels a year to a projected 2.3 a year by the end of the decade.

And “allowing an expanded, you know, opening access for US submarines in
Australia,” as the US increasingly disperses its forces to Australia as an operating base out of range of China’s missiles.

Further, says Colby: “I’m impressed that there are very capable and competent and serious people working on this problem, not only in government, but an industry here and in the UK and in Australia.”

But he’s still not on board: “I remain a sceptic, a very friendly and supportive sceptic. Which is to say, if somebody could show me how it is that we will end up with a better attack submarine situation, throughout the period of vulnerability, then I’m all for it.

“But my problem is very clear, which is that we don’t want to diminish our material war fighting capability in the near term,” when the US sells Australia three to five of its existing submarines in the early 2030s, “for benefits that are well beyond the beginning of the period of vulnerability” when Australia and the UK are manufacturing a new line of nuclear-powered submarines about a decade later.

Colby’s intellectual interrogation of AUKUS is the thinking man’s version of Trump’s instinctive America First doctrine.

AUKUS is well-launched in Washington. But if it needs to adjust to new management under a Trump White House, Anthony Albanese, Richard Marles and Kevin Rudd will need to demonstrate mastery of what Trump’s 1987 book called The Art of the Deal.

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