8 min read1 hour ago

–

Press enter or click to view image in full size

The Architect of U.S. Defense Strategy

The man setting U.S. defense strategy has already told you exactly how he thinks. He published the playbook years before taking office. And surprisingly few analysts have actually read it.

Elbridge Colby, or “Bridge” to those who know him, now serves as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the senior official responsible for running U.S. defense strategy.

Captain John Konrad, after spending a week inside the Pentagon, put it bluntly in his 13,000-word field report for gCaptain: “aside from Hegseth, the most powerful gravitational body in the building is Elbridge Colby.” He added that Colby’s “grand strategy remains exactly what he published in his books and interviews long before taking office. He is executing it now.”

Most officials don’t tell you how they think until they’re already in office, if ever. Colby did the opposite. He spent years laying out his framework in public. His 2021 book The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict reads less like an academic exercise and more like the playbook for how the United States is now approaching defense strategy.

For anyone doing serious macro or geopolitical analysis, this creates an unusual opportunity. The assumptions are visible. The logic is traceable. The framework is on the page. And yet most analysts I encounter haven’t read him and are consequently misreading American strategic moves in ways that lead to fundamentally flawed conclusions.

The Systems Thinker

I love when I read or hear someone talk and I can just tell this is a thinker who resonates with me. I can see their brilliance. And sometimes it’s a brilliance that others miss. That’s Colby.

What distinguishes Colby from most strategic thinkers is his recognition that strategy operates as a complex adaptive system. He doesn’t ask “what should we do about Taiwan?” in isolation. He asks “what is China’s optimal strategy, and how do we make that strategy fail?” He thinks through second and third-order effects, understands how actions in one theater affect capacity in another, and builds a framework where the pieces actually connect.

Konrad, who has known Colby for years, put it well: “He thinks in spirals, not lines. Every problem sits somewhere in the vast M.C. Escher–style Rubik’s Cube inside his head. And linear thinkers cannot follow him through its folds, so they assume he opposes what he simply refuses to oversimplify.”

This stands out because it’s rare. So much of what passes for strategic analysis is lazy thinking dressed up in confident language. People pattern-match to historical analogues without grasping the real underlying dynamics, so they misapply the lessons. They reach for convenient tropes that sound smart but collapse under scrutiny. They think linearly when the system they’re analyzing is anything but.

Colby is different. His arguments are rigorous. He defines his terms, states his assumptions, works through the logic, and shows you exactly where the conclusions come from. You can disagree with his premises, but you can’t say he hasn’t thought it through. Reading The Strategy of Denial felt like watching someone build a machine where every gear meshes properly.

For anyone doing macro or geopolitical work, this book should be required reading.

The Strategy of Denial

Colby’s core claim is that U.S. strategy in the 21st century should aim to prevent China from achieving hegemony over Asia. The rest of his framework follows from that point.

Asia already accounts for nearly half of global GDP on a purchasing-power basis, and that share is likely to grow. A China that dominates the region would control the most economically significant part of the world, sit on top of critical supply chains, and be positioned to project power in ways that directly threaten American prosperity and security.

In Colby’s view, China’s best path to regional hegemony is a “focused and sequential strategy.” Beijing would isolate and pick off coalition members one by one, starting with Taiwan, then the Philippines, then others, creating a series of faits accomplis that add up to dominance.

The answer, in his terms, is a “denial defense.” The United States must lead an anti-hegemonic coalition that can deny China the ability to achieve its objectives by force. Taiwan is the linchpin. If China can take Taiwan, the coalition fractures and the sequential strategy succeeds. If Taiwan holds, the strategy fails.

That logic sets his priorities. It explains why burden-sharing with allies matters, because the United States cannot do this alone. It also underlies his idea of “differentiated credibility,” the view that America has to prioritize commitments in Asia if it wants those commitments to be believable. And it helps make sense of decisions that might otherwise look inconsistent.

In my work on the Venezuelan crisis and autonomous underwater vehicles, that framework turned out to be a useful guide. I noted that Colby, if he had his way, would station every carrier we have in the Western Pacific. So, when he signed off on diverting high-end naval assets to the Caribbean, I didn’t read it as random overreach or a political stunt. If a planner with that worldview is willing to divert capacity away from Asia, the threat assessment must have been serious enough to override his core strategic instinct to prioritize the China threat above all else. That is why I read the Venezuela buildup as a real maritime-denial problem and correctly predicted, months in advance, that the administration would not stop short of regime change.

From Theory to Execution

If you want to see Colby’s framework translated into policy, read the White House National Security Strategy released in late 2025. His fingerprints are all over it.

The document opens with a critique that could have come straight from his book. It argues that American strategies since the Cold War “have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states” that “have not clearly defined what we want” and “have often misjudged what we should want.” A strategy, the NSS insists, “must evaluate, sort, and prioritize. Not every country, region, issue, or cause — however worthy — can be the focus of American strategy.”

That is Colby’s voice. Strategy is about painful choices, and trying to do everything means doing nothing well.

The regional priorities match his book exactly. On Asia, the NSS says that “the Indo-Pacific is already the source of almost half the world’s GDP based on purchasing power parity, and one third based on nominal GDP. That share is certain to grow over the 21st century.” On Taiwan, it notes that “given that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea, this has major implications for the U.S. economy. Hence deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.”

The burden-sharing logic is there too. The NSS calls for allies to spend more and take primary responsibility for their own regions, freeing American resources to concentrate where they matter most. On Europe, the document notes that “European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons.” The implication is that Europeans can handle their neighborhood.

Even the Western Hemisphere focus fits his framework. Securing the home base is not a retreat from Asia. It is a prerequisite for sustaining power projection into the Indo-Pacific. You cannot fight a war in the Western Pacific if hostile actors control your southern approaches.

He wrote the playbook. Now he is running it.

Against the Spheres-of-Influence Story

There is a theory that the United States has made a silent agreement with Russia and China to divide the world into spheres of influence. America gets the Western Hemisphere, Russia gets Europe, China gets Asia. Clean lines on a map.

You have probably seen some version of it:

It pattern-matches to Yalta or the Concert of Europe without engaging with the strategy actually being executed. That theory is hard to reconcile with Colby’s book.

His entire framework is built on the premise that preventing Chinese regional hegemony in Asia is the non-negotiable core interest of U.S. strategy. Ceding Asia to China is not burden-sharing. It is strategic suicide. You do not hand over the most economically consequential region on earth to your principal competitor.

The confusion comes from mistaking prioritization for abandonment. When Colby argues that Europe should take primary responsibility for its own defense, he is not saying “Russia gets Europe.” He is saying Europeans have the resources to handle their own continent, so American resources should concentrate where they are actually needed for the balance of power to hold.

The Western Hemisphere focus is not America retreating to its corner either. It is securing the base of operations. You cannot project power into the Indo-Pacific if hostile actors control the Gulf shipping lanes, your canal access, or critical supply chains in your own hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine reassertion enables the Asia strategy. It does not replace it.

On Taiwan, the NSS is explicit that the United States “does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.” That is not ceding Asia, its drawing a hard line at the most strategically critical node.

The spheres-of-influence story is popular because it is simple: three great powers, three regions, neat boundaries. Colby’s framework shows why strategy does not work that way. He spent hundreds of pages explaining how to prevent Chinese hegemony in Asia. The idea that he then quietly agreed to hand Beijing the region does not survive contact with the text.

Conclusion

Elbridge Colby is one of the most influential strategic thinkers in the U.S. government right now, and he laid out his thinking in public before he took office. That combination is rare.

For anyone doing macro or geopolitical analysis, ignoring his work is a mistake. The Strategy of Denial is not light reading, but it is a central framework shaping American defense policy. If you want to understand why the administration is making the moves it is making, this is where you start.

The book will not give you trade recommendations or ticker symbols. What it gives you instead is more valuable. It gives you a map of how the people setting strategy actually think. When you understand the framework, the signals become legible. When you do not, you end up drawing lines on a map and mistaking them for strategy.

Read the book.