In the months before the fall of Kabul, the White House insisted that the United States would continue its diplomatic work in Afghanistan after most troops departed. “Look, I know there are many who will loudly insist that diplomacy cannot succeed without a robust U.S. military presence to stand as leverage,” President Joe Biden said in April. “We have to change that thinking.” The Taliban disagreed. Countless mistakes led to the catastrophe at Kabul airport, but most important was a failure to recognize a basic truth of international relations.
“Physical force, especially the ability to kill, is the ultimate form of coercive leverage. While there are other sources of influence, such as wealth, persuasiveness, and charisma, they are all dominated by the power to kill,” Elbridge A. Colby writes in The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. When the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan rushed to strip themselves of their ability to kill or to help Afghan government forces kill, terrorists took advantage. High-minded thoughts about diplomacy meant nothing. As Colby notes, “Hard power always has the capacity to dominate soft power.”
How and where to use that hard power is a difficult question. Working under then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Colby was one of the architects of the 2018 national defense strategy. The document argued that “the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” with China and Russia should be the Pentagon’s leading concern. Yet Mattis ultimately resigned over President Donald Trump’s desire to draw down U.S. forces from Afghanistan and Syria. Colby, a critic of the withdrawal’s execution, nevertheless supports the decision to leave. His book, a thoughtful and rigorous “conceptual structure, rather than a set of specific programmatic or operational recommendations,” makes an extended case for curtailing other commitments to focus on China.
Colby argues that the American missions in Afghanistan and Iraq are a direct and indirect drain on resources. He asserts that “if the United States were to withdraw from Afghanistan, that decision would almost certainly be clearly distinguishable to Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, or India as to how the United States would treat them vis-a-vis China.” This thesis will be tested in the coming months, though the early returns aren’t encouraging.
The author still considers “the military counterterrorism enterprise” and “an effective nuclear deterrent,” which together make up some 20% of the total defense budget, core missions of the U.S. armed forces. He also acknowledges Russia as a real threat to Europe’s stability, though he believes Moscow ultimately is “incapable of mounting a serious bid for regional hegemony.” But the Chinese threat stands alone, and here, Colby’s trenchant analysis overshadows any quibbles one might have with his calculation of American interests in Eastern Europe or the greater Islamic world.
The book’s fundamental strength, and perhaps an explanation for why its acknowledgments run from Tucker Carlson to Obama Pentagon officials, is Colby’s willingness to test all sides of complicated debates. He identifies as a “conservative realist” and takes seriously the idea that the costs of resisting Chinese hegemony “are likely to be high, while the gains invariably will appear speculative.” But in the most important region of the world, the risks of inaction are simply too much to bear.
China’s military spending has risen rapidly over the past decade, and yet, as Colby warns, “its defense expenditures are considerably lower than they might be.” Chinese Communist Party leaders have vowed to annex Taiwan for years and are building up the People’s Liberation Army to achieve that goal and perhaps more. It may be an abstract issue now, but Americans would notice if a brutal, mercantilist regime took charge of the most important economic zone in the world.
Colby advocates a “denial defense” run through a U.S.-led coalition. “China, the aspirant, is the one that requires dominance or at least a very high standard of local military advantage,” he writes. “The United States and other defending states do not; they merely need to deny China the degree of advantage it needs to consummate its invasion.” Think of Britain in 1940: The Germans sought to carry out an amphibious landing and end the war. The British had a more modest goal of preventing an invasion. This sort of strategy may sound unambitious, but “the point is only that this is the bar for success — more would be better, but the threshold for defenders is relatively low.”
Meeting this threshold requires a credible but relatively informal “anti-hegemonic coalition.” Colby thinks such a group should contain Quad members Japan, Australia, and India, democratic nations with capable militaries that are clearly interested in arresting Chinese hegemony. The U.S. would need to keep its quasi-commitment to Taiwan and existing alliances with South Korea, the Pacific Island states, and the Philippines. Several Southeast Asian nations — “particularly Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Myanmar” — merit consideration as well. Outside the Pacific, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and some major European powers could “backfill in handling security threats” secondary but still important to a war in Asia.
Colby has said his aspiration is to convince a broad swath of the public to care about the fate of Taiwan and other friendly Asian nations. But this is not the kind of text my father, a retired engineer interested in current affairs, would have the patience to finish. The book’s jargon-heavy prose is a frequent reminder that it came from an academic press: “The prospects for anti-hegemonic coalitions in the world’s key regions should lead the United States to focus on acting as an external cornerstone balancer in Asia to ensure the formation and maintenance of a coalition against any Chinese bid for regional predominance.”
He may not have a bestseller on his hands, but Colby has produced something even more valuable: required reading for lawmakers, national security hands, and 2024 presidential hopefuls. The Strategy of Denial is the product of an ambitious thinker, and he’s made a persuasive case for himself to lead the Pentagon.
Adam O’Neal is a Europe-based writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
