The deep thinker rising through a shallow Pentagon

Elbridge Colby, an unlikely member of Maga land, is now masterminding the next US National Defence Strategy, slated to be published in August.

- Andreas Kluth

In national security as in other policy areas, President Donald Trump has been gutting what he derides as the "deep state", and turning it into what some scholars now call a "shallow state" — a government in which careers depend less on expertise and more on sycophancy.

But even a government of the shallow, by the shallow, for the shallow needs depth in certain functions. This means that the remaining people in the administration who know their brief, as long as they're also politically adroit, may play an outsized role in setting strategy.

One such official is Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby. Already influential in Mr Trump's first term, Mr Colby is now masterminding the next National Defence Strategy, slated to be published in late August.

If Mr Colby has his way, it will say — under the America First label, of course — that the United States is overextended and exploited by its friends, and that it must do much less in Europe, the Middle East and other places in order to concentrate on the one defining contest to come. This is the looming confrontation against China, initially over Taiwan but ultimately over the regional hegemony in Asia which Beijing seeks and Washington must deny.

Guided by that stance, Mr Colby has been putting his signature on all sorts of other policy moves.

The other day, the US abruptly paused deliveries to Ukraine of various munitions, from artillery rounds to Patriot batteries, ostensibly because America needed to conserve its own stockpiles. That initiative came from Mr Colby, who views Ukraine as a job for the European allies but a distraction for Washington. The weapons halt blindsided not only Kyiv but also the State Department and Congress, where concerned Republicans and Democrats demanded that Mr Colby explain himself.