Neoconservatives are Following a Familiar Playbook to Stop a Trump Nominee. Why It Might Not Work This Time.

The whisper campaign against Elbridge Colby mirrors an earlier successful effort to tank a realist nomination to the Obama administration. Yet the Trump team is fighting back.

Elbridge Colby, who stands nominated by President Trump to become Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Photo credit: Monica King, U.S. Army.

Elbridge Colby, who was tapped by President Trump for the position of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, is currently the target of a neoconservative-led campaign to scuttle his nomination.

The neoconservatives and domestic Israel lobby are targeting Colby’s long-held belief that the United States should draw down from the Middle East and refocus its military prowess on the far east, where our rival China is rapidly expanding its hard and soft power.

Colby, who served in a Pentagon post in the first Trump administration, is the rare conservative foreign policy thinker who has pushed back hard on the idea of a war with Iran — which has long been a goal of the neoconservative right.

The campaign against Colby is notable for how discreet it is. No senator, Republican or Democrat, is going on record attacking Colby or his views. Doing so could possibly earn the wrath of Trump himself, who holds the lion’s share of power in the party at the moment.

Instead, Colby’s opponents have begun a whisper campaign in friendly media to imply that he’s soft on Iran or unfriendly towards Israeli interests.

Earlier this month, the Conference of Jewish Presidents, which represents major Jewish American groups and often prioritizes the viewpoints of the Israeli right, wrote a letter to senators where they pushed them to ask Colby about his opposition to a war with Iran. The implication is clear: Colby is weak-kneed in the face of Iran. The letter was reported on by Semafor’s Ben Smith, who has been a reliable conduit for Israel lobby-aligned organizations in the past.

Jewish Insider, another publication that is frequently used by neoconservatives to push back on doves, warned last week that a number of GOP senators are wary of Colby’s views on the Middle East — but the comments they got from lawmakers were vague.

“There are concerns, there are concerns,” Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, told them.

The publication also gave the privilege of anonymity to a Republican senator who seems to oppose Colby’s nomination. “He doesn’t seem to be moving, which is positive,” that senator told them.

All of this amounts to a whisper campaign to paint Colby as supportive of the Iranian government and hostile to Israel, which would ordinarily serve as the death knell for a nominee for an American foreign policy position. The Israel lobby is notoriously influential in American politics, and similar nominees have been defeated in the past.

Take, for instance, Chas Freeman.

Freeman, who spent decades faithfully serving in the American diplomatic corps, was nominated by President Barack Obama’s administration to serve as the chair of the National Intelligence Council.

Freeman, like Colby, came to be branded by his views on the Middle East (which was just one of many regions that would’ve been in his portfolio). He had previously served as an Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and knew the region well. He had criticized the Bush administration for its posture on Iran, and he had been critical of some Israeli human rights violations against Palestinians.

Like Colby, none of his views were particularly extreme among American diplomats or defense officials; they just didn’t align with a domestic lobby that wields a lot of power on Capitol Hill.

Ultimately, Freeman ended up withdrawing from the nomination. The campaign against him, which was fueled by much of the same innuendo — with Israel lobby organizations mobilizing against his nomination — was successful.

But something might be different this time.

Late last week, allies of President Trump started doing something that allies of President Obama didn’t: they pushed back.

First, right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk accused Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, perhaps the most hawkish Republican in the Senate, of undermining Colby’s nomination.

Cotton had been careful to not publicly oppose Colby, but Kirk’s intervention put a face to the whisper campaign — directing the ire of Trump’s base onto an otherwise obscure senator.

Vice President JD Vance also jumped into the fray, pushing back on an opponent of Colby’s who works at Tablet Magazine, another publication close to American hawks.

Donald Trump Jr., the son of President Trump and a close ally of Vance’s, also wrote a piece for Human Events making clear that Colby is aligned with his father.

What all of this serves to do is to elevate an obscure foreign policy position to matter of broad public debate. The neoconservatives mostly win these fights when they’re able to have them in private; politicians are easily spooked by the specter of being accused of being anti-Israel or pro-Iran. But when the broader public has a seat at the table, a man who has spent years arguing against endless wars in the Middle East suddenly doesn’t look so bad at all.

(Freeman declined to comment to me on Colby’s nomination as he said he is not following his nomination closely enough.)