The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict

Wondering what a Republican administration’s foreign policy would look like should they take the White House in 2024? Read Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict that has just been re-issued in paperback. Colby is one of those scions of American families who successfully combine business, politics and public service. Their contribution to public life is the better because of their practical experience.This is the great strength of the American thinking community, a main pool of talent for new administrations and as congressional staffers. These scholar-practitioners not only generate public policy ideas, but they are then called on to implement them and so learn how government really works. After service for the four-year life of an administration or two-year congressional session they become lobbyists, or go into business or return to think tankery, enriched by their political experience. Many return to a future administration.After working in the think tank and intelligence communities, Elbridge Colby served as deputy assistant secretary of Defense for strategy and force development in the Trump administration. He was a key player in the drafting of the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), the first time the Pentagon identified a rising China as the organizing focus of U.S. defence policy.At 11 pages, the NDS was also a model of clarity and concision. Under direction from secretary Jim Mattis, it avoided the Christmas-tree syndrome, wherein every interest, real and remote, adds its own ornament to the document. This only serves to undermine policy direction and to confuse the public. Canadian policy drafters could usefully follow the Mattis model of developing a single, coherent framework.