Trump’s nominee for top defence post thinks Middle East is ‘relatively unimportant’

US President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he will be nominating Elbridge Colby for the position of under secretary for defence policy, awarding the senior post to a former Trump official who has advocated for reducing American troops in the Middle East and against striking Iranian nuclear facilities.

Colby's nomination is in stark contrast to some of Trump's other picks for national security, defence and diplomatic positions, who are more hawkish when it comes to foreign policy, like his choice for secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

Colby, the grandson of former CIA director William Colby, served in the Pentagon during the previous Trump administration, where between 2017 and 2018 he was deputy assistant secretary for strategy and force development.

Since then, he has written publicly about his foreign policy priorities and has often commented on where he believes Washington should prioritise its national security and military agenda. That focus, according to Colby, should be on China, not the Middle East.

"The United States must limit much more substantially its strategic engagement in the Middle East. This is both necessary and feasible," Colby said in an essay he co-wrote in 2021.

"The Middle East, as a whole, is relatively unimportant; its proportion of global GDP is significantly less than 10 percent."

Colby did, however, emphasise that the US priorities in the region include ensuring Israel's security, preventing the Gulf states from becoming hostile and lastly preventing transnational terrorism. But he argued that all three could be pursued without the expansive physical footprint that the US employs in the Middle East.

"The second core American interest in the Middle East is in preventing transnational terrorist attacks, particularly against Americans," he wrote in that same 2021 essay.

"As is evidenced by the experience of recent decades, large ground interventions do not help resolve this issue and almost certainly exacerbate the problem."

Colby has been a public opponent of the US-led invasion of Iraq and said that he has opposed every US intervention abroad since then - including the increasing US military support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia's invasion.

He is also against US military confrontation with Iran, which has placed him at odds with many Republicans including those currently on Trump's incoming team.

Colby has argued to contain Iran's nuclear programme, rather than directly attacking it, and in 2019 cautioned Trump against going to war with Tehran after the Iran-aligned Houthis claimed a major attack on Saudi oil facilities.

Pivotal moment

Trump is entering office next month at a pivotal moment in the Middle East.

In addition to the 14-month Israeli war on Gaza, which several rights groups have called a genocide perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians, Syrian rebels toppled the government of Bashar al-Assad in a stunning offensive that ended the 53-year rule of the Assad family in Syria. And in Lebanon, there is a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. 

Trump, who campaigned on an anti-war platform, said he doesn't want to get further involved in Syria, where the US currently has 2,000 troops.

He has also warned that Israel's war on Gaza must come to an end when he gets into office. There is also the ongoing conflict in Sudan, where a civil war between rival factions has led to a devastating humanitarian conflict. The war has displaced more than 10 million people, and brought more than a third of the 48 million population to the brink of famine.

At the same time that Colby has long argued that the US should untangle itself from the Middle East, the former Trump official thinks that Washington needs to beef up its military presence in Asia, where he believes China is the country's main threat.

"For about the past decade, I have been arguing in every available format that we should prepare ourselves to defend Taiwan," he wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in September.

"But my argument has always been that Taiwan isn't itself of existential importance to America. Rather, our core interest is in denying China regional hegemony over Asia. Taiwan is very important for that goal, but not essential."