What the Pentagon’s Top Brain Thinks About Iran

Foreign Affairs What the Pentagon’s Top Brain Thinks About Iran Elbridge Colby gives little comfort to war skeptics. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images In a podcast released Thursday, Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy and an old friend of The American Conservative, sat down for a tête-à-tête with his old schoolmate, the New York Times’ Ross Douthat. Colby, for the folks keeping track back home, was the mastermind of the first Trump administration’s China-prioritizing defense policy and the author of The Strategy of Denial, a 2021 book further articulating his strategic vision for prioritizing Chinese containment. One of the pillars of his theory was that the Persian Gulf region is not a major priority for American national interests, and that the Middle Eastern escap