Not My Marathon: The Problem with Elbridge Colby and Wes Mitchell

Two men have risen in D.C. over the past few years as B-tier right-wing thinkers. Unlike Hegseth and J.D., these are smaller stars in the constellation of brutal Americans. These men are Elbridge Colby and Wes Mitchell. Elbridge founded the Marathon Initiative project, which aims to prepare us for long-term great power conflict and is now serving as the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Mitchell co-founded this initiative with Colby and, like Colby, served in the first Trump administration. Profiling them is important. The brutal, simple Americans now in charge are not alone; they have their think tanks. 

Colby Elbridge, the brighter of the two stars, wrote a book called Strategy of Denial about how the United States should understand national defense at the grandest level. He believes an assertive China is an existential risk to the United States. Therefore, we must deny China's regional hegemony. The hill to die on is Taiwan. 

Colby believes that we are on the path to WWIII. He thinks we are overextended and on the brink of war in multiple theaters. An important fact to know is that Russia makes 100,000 artillery shells a day; for most of the war, we supported Ukraine with 30,000 shells a month. For Colby, Trump, and MAGA, re-industrialization is vital for American security because making things matters for war. Often, wars are won decades in advance by industrial policy. The North beat the South because of industry, as we beat Japan because of oil. 

Colby is a smart man; he knows much more than I do about many things, and I respect him. But I also know Colby is putting tallow in the rifles because Empire demands simple mistakes. 

That is because Colby believes that Taiwan is a hill to die on and that to win against China, we need regional alliances. On the first point, the reason why Taiwan is important is that Taiwan makes chips. Taiwan makes chips because they understand that if they did not have a vital global good, they would already be fully absorbed into China. Like Israel and a nuclear Iran, like West Germany and the Iron Curtain, Taiwan has China and chips. 

Small states effectively manipulate large states, especially when their existential survival depends on an alliance with a big state. This is a well-known fact, confirmed in academic studies of foreign policy and by regular people, who can see the world they live in with their own two eyes. Colby cites Nixon as an inspirational thinker for him. Yet, the reality is that Nixon would have been smart enough never to let a small state dictate America's foreign policy.

There is an alternative to having Americans die for Taiwan because they make chips. We could get along with the Chinese; if we get along with them, they'll give us chips. After all, they hate us because of Taiwan. That's mostly it. So if we give them Taiwan, and by giving, I mean return to Nixon's brilliant one-China policy, we can work out a good deal where everyone that needs chips gets them. Colby's belief is that we should not fall for the small state leverage trick when it comes to Israel, but we should fall for the trick for Taiwan. 

I personally think we can get along with China. That our people have almost no reason to hate each other. It's clear that the anti-China people are falling for Taiwan's cup and ball and that, more importantly, they're trying to play cup and ball with us. 

Wes Mitchell is a good reason to understand why. One time at a meeting, I heard Wes Mitchell say that we had to cut entitlements to strengthen the nuclear triad. That was the price of security. Your grandparents' retirement. On another occasion, Wes Mitchell had gained a lot of respect in Washington for saying about the Russia and Ukraine war that we needed to "sequence" our approach to Russia and China. Deal with Russia, then deal with China. His idea was to stop Russia's expansion westward by beating them in Ukraine, which would force them to invest in the east, in Kamchatka, and force them into confrontation with China.  Simply put, this is an idea I can only describe as childlike. So, of course, this idea got Mitchell listed as one of D.C.'s top 500 thinkers. 

If you have ever looked at a map of the world, you will notice something. NATO is west of Moscow. You will also notice that if the map reflects the Climate, the west of Moscow is green, and eastern Russia is white. The idea that we can force Russia east is as silly as the idea that we could win the war in Afghanistan. 

What matters, though, is not the idea. What matters is the game of cup and ball. What matters is getting Cold War boomers to support a cut to their own entitlements, telling them we have to do this to win the new Cold War. What matters is getting young men to believe that, yes, Israel may not be your friend, but Taiwan is worth dying for. 

In the 21st century, everything and everyone is a sitting duck. There is no way to make your society so strong that an adversary could not destroy it. Modernity has no fortresses. The biggest sitting duck is infrastructure, especially energy. It is, in fact, impossible for large, powerful nations to have a secure energy infrastructure. We have the Texas power grid, and China has the Three Gorges Dam. The reality is that the only way to live as a strong nation in the world is to have good, strong diplomacy. Friendship and trade are the best guarantors of security. 

There is no iron dome to be built and no perfect shield for our vulnerabilities. Therefore, any strategy that begins with force and not diplomacy is a strategy of failure.  All of us have knives on each other's throats. The only way out is conversation. 

This gets us to the actual problem with these two stars. They work for Donald Trump. So far, Donald has allowed his tariff policy to be drawn out of a hat, has entered negotiations with foreign countries with no goals, has maligned our closest allies, threatened expansion towards our neighbors, ramped up hostile rhetoric towards China and many allied nations, and has gotten himself the name comrade on RedNote. 

That these great thinkers have the hubris to believe they can meaningfully achieve rational goals while working for Trump is embarrassing. They are as silly as the people they supposedly know better than, who marched us into unwinnable foreign wars, as Trump is marching America into unwinnable trade wars. There was no clear goal in Afghanistan. There is now no clear goal with trade. And there is no clear goal with Canada. 

If, for Colby and Mitchell, a defense strategy is "a way of employing, posturing, and developing military assets, forces, and relationships to attain a set of goals that are derived from and designed to serve broader political aims," then how are we to do so when there are apparently no aims at all? When the aims change daily, at the whim of Donald Trump and the last person he spoke to? 

As much as Trump shows how hollow these men are, they are also hollow on their own merits. On Colby, if confrontation with China means that Americans must die, Americans will support confrontation with China. For Mitchell, if global hegemony means that we cannot have social security, then hegemony is a joke. Why be a hegemon if you cannot provide for your own people? Is that not the point of hegemony? 

For all of MAGA's criticism of the uniparty, of think tanks, of the war machine, and the blob, the fact remains: No one asked the American people if they wanted to do great power conflict; just as no one asked about any other issue.