In his confirmation hearing for under secretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby also expressed disagreement with an official for Middle East policy.
A Trump nominee for a senior Pentagon post objected to a Defense Department policy adviser’s heterodox views on China, pledging to ensure that personnel reporting to him reflect President Trump’s views on national security.
Elbridge Colby, the president’s nominee for under secretary of defense for policy, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee today for his confirmation hearing. Chairman Roger Wicker asked for his perspective on comments made by two Pentagon appointees who would report to Colby if he is confirmed for the job, one of the department’s most senior roles.
Colby, the author of a book on deterring Chinese aggression, is known in Washington as a China hawk who views the possibility of Beijing’s dominance over the Indo-Pacific region as a cataclysmic outcome. His comments on certain personnel decisions reflect the ideologically diverse makeup of the policy team at the Pentagon and indicate that, if confirmed, he would not let officials who come from libertarian foreign policy circles temper the president’s hawkish instincts on responding to Beijing’s military aggression.
The two officials in question are policy advisers who cover specific regions of the world. As deputy assistant secretaries of defense, they report to the under secretary. Both previously worked for philanthropies backed by libertarian philanthropist Charles Koch, whose policy organizations advocate foreign policy “restraint” and a softer stance toward China.
John Andrew Byers, the official tasked with overseeing U.S. defense policy for South and Southeast Asia, has made a series of comments that are not aligned with the president’s perspective on confronting China.
Byers’s views are unusually conciliatory toward China by the standards of Trump appointees. Shortly before he started his role at the Pentagon in January, Byers wrote that the U.S. needs to lower the temperature and refrain from “belligerent military initiatives targeted at China.” He also voiced opposition to a “severe trade war” with China, despite President Trump’s emphasis on using tariffs to compel Beijing to crack down on the export of fentanyl precursors. Byers has also floated reopening a Chinese diplomatic outpost in Texas that Trump had shut down over espionage concerns in his first term.
In response to a question from Wicker about Byers’s article making these points, Colby said that Byers’s views do not reflect the president’s positions and that he also disagrees with the official’s analysis. Colby added: “I’m not intimately familiar with his work, but it seems like a quite different perspective than my own.”
The second official Wicker asked about was Michael DiMino, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East and an alumnus of the CIA and a Koch-backed defense policy think tank. In recent weeks, DiMino has faced criticism from pro-Israel groups over remarks downplaying the importance of the region to U.S. interests.
Colby answered that DiMino “does not speak for me” and that his own views “differ materially,” noting that he did not hire the official.
When Wicker asked whether he would keep the two officials on his staff, Colby indicated that it would be inappropriate to weigh in on the subject before he is confirmed.
“What I would say, is that if confirmed — obviously I would be only one person in a chain, including, of course, the secretary of defense, the presidential personnel office, and ultimately the president, the vice president and so forth — but what I would commit to you is that anybody in my organization, if I’m confirmed, should be in line with the president’s agenda, including the issues that you mentioned,” Colby said.