Primacist Propaganda

The Elbridge Colby-led primacist caucus has become detached from reality in their hunt for rhetorical arguments to bolster their flagging campaign to shift all American resources to their “Strategy of Denial.” What they’ve been saying has been so utterly delusional lately, and I just wanted to take a moment to point out why it’s almost entirely nonsense.

They employ more empty rhetoric and outright falsehoods than almost any other contemporary cluster of foreign policy thinkers. It’s like they’re in a race with the Quincy Institute for who can make me question my belief in the universal innate human capacity for reason the fastest.

The proximate cause of my writing this is having been subjected to one of the single dumbest tweets I’ve seen in my life courtesy of Elbridge Colby. It goes without saying that no—North Korea is not an industrial threat to the United States with “large production.” It is an autarkic country with a GDP roughly the size of Iceland and only a couple of decades removed from widespread famine. There is no reality that we live in that the DPRK even registers as a factor in terms of industrial power.

Colby does this all the time. Follow him and the things he writes and you’ll become completely desensitized to hearing things that are just so utterly absurd they’re not even worth engaging with. The idea that we should sanction Taiwan for instance! It’s meaningless rhetoric that serves to promote a sense of impending doom!

Another constant source of annoyance for me is a “rising star” in these circles is a Heritage foreign policy guy named Alex Velez-Green. Now putting aside that working at Heritage is the participant trophy for conservative foreign policy thinkers—he is also a guy that routinely makes shit up for rhetorical purposes.

Take this recent claim for instance. The idea that the “nuclear balance is tilting towards China” is absolute nonsense. It’s just fucking made up! The Chinese barely have a triad—let alone the ability to actually compete at parity in terms of a strategic exchange! Just take like 30 seconds to go and look up delivery platforms for the United States and China! He’s just lying!

The idea that we cannot deter Chinese use of nuclear power with our current capabilities is the sort of unhinged lunacy that would have seen you turned into a Dr. Strangelove character in a different era.

There’s an almost limitless series of these pointless claims. Every single week new stupid argument will appear. I’m not writing this to collate everything they’ve ever said that annoys me though—I want to make a point about how flailing their rhetoric has become.

You can make a well-balanced argument about what American priorities ought to be in the Pacific. How we should manage our force presence, what Chinese intentions are, and how we can help assist our partners. It requires sincere thought, research, and genuine engagement with our allies on how we get to where we want to be.

But what if you’re not actually interested in being a participant in a larger dialogue on how the United States can best prioritize resources and just care about political power? Well, you learn to become really good at rhetoric. Need to defend an argument? No, you don’t because actually you can just make grandiose claims like “Taiwan doesn’t actually care about their own defense” or “the United States military is woke and can’t beat the PLAN” and how is anyone really going to argue with you? You’re basically doing metaphysics at this point.

Now, being involved in national security in the United States isn’t “nonpartisan” regardless of what a lot of people in D.C. have convinced themselves of. You are generally marketing yourself to some degree to either a current or future administration for a job. Since—and this might sound obvious—you can’t really do foreign policy unless you’re in the United States government. Unless you’re Elon Musk of course. Everyone has to employ rhetoric to some degree.

I say this because their fallacious arguments, or just claims so sweepingly grand as to impress theologians are really just a game of marketing for prospective political appointments. The idea behind all these claims is to turn the temperature up, to make things more tense.

After all, if things are this bad, well then just have to hire the one guy (or group of guys) who can fix it. Nobody is going to hire the guy who says, “Well yeah actually we should work on improving multilateral military exercises and then help provide low-interest infrastructure loans for our partners.” No. You want the guy that says he’s going to bomb TSMC.

Which is my actual point here. It’s a painful exercise where a group of people have figured out that playing partisan politics and going straight to the base with their delusional arguments is the fastest way to political power.

It’s the same nonsense as the ongoing idiots clamoring for a war with Mexico. Who needs that nerd shit like actually studying and thinking about the policies we advocate for when it feels true that the PLAN is weeks away from storming the beaches of Taipei.

They’re the used car salesmen of the foreign policy world. If you don’t buy the “Strategy of Denial” today? Well, guess what buddy you lost out forever, the United States is going to descend into communist control and all of your children are going to die. It’s just hyperventilating as a political marketing strategy.

Until these people stop getting a speaker slot onstage at every event in D.C. they’re going to just keep doing this. Think Tanks give their nonsense legitimacy by endlessly putting them in front of podiums like we would all suffer an existential crisis if we weren’t graced with Elbridge Colby’s opinions on how we need to abandon Ukraine. Just stop. It’s not that hard, I promise.

When you figure out these guys really are just engaging in empty rhetoric, it becomes way easier to just completely block them out. There are genuine challenges for the United States and our friends in the Pacific, letting these idiots dominate the pulpit will only get in the way of putting together real plans to fix this.