As Elbridge Colby - co-founder and director of the Marathon Initiative and former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense - has repeatedly pointed out, currently the main threat to U.S. 'command of the commons' - and more generally to its global military power - comes from the Indo-Pacific, not Europe
A former Pentagon official who helped draft the 2018 National Defense Strategy, Colby is a known China hawk who supports Trump's aggressive, anti-China positions regarding the Panama Canal.
Colby has lobbied the GOP to move away from Ukraine and turn to China since at least 2023. A Georgetown professor wrote recently that Elbridge is part of a group of GOP pundits referred to as “New Asia Firsters” who advocate “reduced U.S. engagement in Europe, a deal with Russia, [and] a focus on China.”
As we have repeatedly written, the current global context in which China and Russia have jointly initiated a new era of great competition between powers with the intention of dominating the globe, while also rewriting international rules, requires Europe to make itself a more diligent party to help alleviate the difficult U.S. situation in which the U.S. is simultaneously engaged “on two fronts”: the Russian one and, above all, in the Indo-Pacific.
For Elbridge Colby, author of the book The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict published by Yale University Press in September 2021, "the Biden administration, in its 2022 National Defense Strategy, he made it clear that the United States does not have the capability to fight both such an exceptionally stressful war with China and another significant conflict, such as in Europe against Russia or in the Middle East against Iran, on even roughly parallel timelines.
This military scarcity facing the United States is felt not so much in the overall number of soldiers or total expenditures, but rather in the critical platforms, weapons, and enablers that are the main sources of advantage in modern warfare: heavy bombers, attack submarines, air transport, logistics, and precision munitions [..]. Bridging this gap will be difficult, costly and time-consuming. Just look at the challenges the US defense industry is facing in supplying weapons donated to Ukraine. Meanwhile, there is a growing chorus of credible warnings that China may attempt to move against Taiwan and precipitate a major conflict with the United States, perhaps in the coming years. These warnings don't just come from military and conservative members of Congress. Rather, senior policymakers in the Biden administration, such as Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Bill Burns, have issued warnings in the previous months that together seem to indicate a similar assessment to the following: Beijing is determined to resolve the Taiwan issue in its favor; he shifted his timeline in this way; considers the most reliable way to do this through the use of overwhelming force; and an invasion of Taiwan in the coming years is a clear threat.
As Francis P. Sempa writes in “Elbridge Colby Has It Right on Taiwan and Ukraine - Without a realistic division of labor between the U.S. and its NATO allies, Taiwan will go undefended” "Elbridge Colby belongs to the new generation of defense/national security intellectuals in the mold of Andrew Marshall and Edward Luttwak and, before them, Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter." With the Trunp Administration "he paved the way for shifting U.S. strategy to focus on renewed great-power rivalry after two decades of fighting 'small' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the global war on terror. His most recent book, The Strategy of Denial – American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, is a must-read for understanding today's global security environment. Colby predicts that China may move against Taiwan in the coming years and complains that the Biden administration has left us dangerously unprepared for war in the Western Pacific. China, Colby notes, has advantages over the United States in proximity and force structure in the Taiwan Strait. If China moves against Taiwan in the near future, the United States (assuming it will seek to defend Taiwan) would have to draw on its military resources in Europe and the Middle East, thus leaving its allies in those regions alone to cope with the ongoing threats posed by Russia and Iran. And the U.S. will probably have to rely on waging an economic war against China, but to be effective, such an economic war would require the support of European allies at the very moment when the U.S. is shifting resources from Europe to the Western Pacific. Colby doubts that European allies would be willing to break away from China and takes note of the recent statement by the German Chancellor [visit to Xi Jinping in November 2022]. that Europe's largest economy will not separate from China. And the war in Ukraine, Colby writes, has already caused economic problems among European allies, which will make them even less likely to join the United States in the economic war against China. This would put a strain on the NATO alliance. Because the Biden administration has failed to pour sufficient military resources into the Western Pacific, while sending significant financial and material aid to Ukraine, the outbreak of war in the Western Pacific could lead to the worst of all worlds: a Chinese victory over the United States (and the loss of Taiwan), a fractured Western alliance due to lower U.S. resources for Europe, and Europe's reluctance to help the U.S. economically against the China. Colby advocates a more reasonable division of labor. America, [Colby] writes, should laser-focus its armed forces on Asia, reducing its level of forces and expenditures in Europe... In the meantime, Europe should focus on taking the lead in Ukraine and, more broadly, taking the primary role in its own conventional defense. This division of labor would allow the United States to rely less on economic warfare against China, thus reducing pressure on the Atlantic alliance. Here Colby demonstrates a geopolitical realism that Biden's national security team currently lacks, which seems to have prioritized Ukraine over Taiwan and, more broadly, Europe over the Western Pacific. China, Colby acknowledges, poses a much greater threat to the United States than Russia or Iran. The United States is not without limits, and our European allies have sufficient resources to provide aid to Ukraine and strengthen their conventional defenses. If we fail to defend Taiwan due to lack of resources and will, our allies in Europe and Asia will take note and act accordingly."
In essence, it is to compose a realistic military partership tailored to the current military needs and shortcomings of the United States and Europe.
"The Europeans can help free up U.S. strategic bandwidth in Europe so that the U.S. can properly prioritize China, but without weakening Europe's deterrence architecture."
This, the premise on which the canvas of the Euro-U.S. military strategy proposed by the U.S. think tank The Marathon Initiative in its paper titled Two Fronts, One Goal: Euro-Atlantic Security in the Indo-Pacific Age signed by Luis Simón, Daniel Fiott and Octavian Manea.
This is a key passage in which the authors show how Europeans "can contribute to U.S.-led efforts to sustain deterrence in the Indo-Pacific."
To implement this asymmetric partership, however, much closer defense planning and industrial cooperation between NATO and the EU is needed to ensure that investments are tailored to concrete operational needs and are sufficiently and appropriately directed toward critical defense. It is also necessary to make both German-Polish land and Franco-British naval cores operational. This also requires closer operational and intelligence ties between European nations and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, analysts say.
The Europeans, therefore, can contribute to a better management of America's critical "two fronts" by taking on some of the burden of conventional deterrence in Europe, while at the same time making a small but strategically significant contribution to deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.
Understand the current criticality of the "two fronts" with realism
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has sparked intense debate in the United States about how to reconcile the call for military support for Ukraine with the need to focus on the Chinese threat in the Indo-Pacific.
This is all part of broader strategic discussions on how the United States should deal with the so-called "two-front" situation, i.e., maintaining deterrence in Europe and Asia and, if it fails, fighting two wars simultaneously.
For those who analyze the current situation realistically, there is no doubt that the Biden administration's strong support for Ukraine has strained U.S. diplomatic, military and industrial resources, hampering the much-needed priority of challenging China in the Indo-Pacific. Adding to the problem, the think tank points out, is the fact that Washington's support for Ukraine has not been followed by either an equivalent investment of defense resources in Asia or a significant increase in the overall U.S. defense budget.
As Elbridge Colby - co-founder and director of the Marathon Initiative and former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense - has repeatedly pointed out, currently the main threat to U.S. 'command of the commons' - and more generally to its global military power - comes from the Indo-Pacific, not Europe.
And if Washington fails to meet the Chinese challenge in the Indo-Pacific, the entire architecture built around U.S. military power would collapse and with it automatically the European Union.
"This means that the priority given by America to China is in the European interest. And that is why the question of how Europeans can contribute to better management of the two fronts is likely to be so central to European strategy and transatlantic policies."
How can Europeans help the United States in Europe to enable it to prioritize China without weakening Europe's military architecture?
As far as Europe is concerned, the paper identifies two strategic-military functions critical to the successful operation of deterrence. In practice, there needs to be transatlantic burden sharing in the context of two areas:
the provision of strategic enablers and enhancement of deterrence (i.e., through nuclear deterrence, command and control (C2), intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), ballistic missile defense (BMD), cyber and electronic defense, etc.);
a direct contribution to conventional deterrence through reserve forces, especially in and around the "front line" of Eastern Europe.
"While we expect the United States to continue to play a leading role in providing strategic facilitators and enhanced deterrence, we believe the Europeans should step up their efforts in this regard."
More specifically, Britain and France should distinguish themselves on the nuclear level, while Germany and other countries could strengthen themselves in areas such as integrated air and missile defense, ISR or C2.
"Thanks to the nuclear sharing agreement, several allies such as Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands host U.S. nuclear weapons deployed on their territory and provide dual-capable aircraft ready to deliver them in the event of nuclear war."
"In any case, greater European responsibility in terms of strategic facilitators and increased deterrence should not undermine the principle of U.S. leadership, which remains essential for any rebalancing at this level to be strategically credible and politically feasible."
According to Marathon Initiative strategists, in order to make a direct contribution to conventional deterrence in and around the front line, the greatest potential is achieved through a complesive "rebalancing" in terms of burden-sharing and Europeans taking the lead.
"However, we believe it is important for the United States to maintain some sort of conventional military role and presence in Europe, for assurance purposes but also to manage the dynamics of escalation."
A European-led effort in conventional deterrence should revolve around a Polish-German core within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), expanded by other allied countries, around which would gravitate the Swedish, Finnish, Baltic, and Romanian "nodes" operating in the northern, eastern, and southeastern European regions, respectively.
Second, the authors add, "any credible effort led by Europe in conventional deterrence presupposes a fundamental change in the way Europe invests in skills, capabilities and technologies. It also requires an increased focus on the EU-NATO relationship, with the need for NATO to continue to focus on defense planning and operational aspects of deterrence and for the European Union (EU) to focus on the industrial and technological aspects of deterrence."
How can Europeans contribute to U.S.-led efforts to sustain deterrence in the Indo-Pacific?
"We argue that the Europeans can make a strategically significant military contribution in the Indo-Pacific, both in peacetime and wartime."
In primis, in the nuclear force. The dominance of the "underground," the paper states, "would be particularly critical in any Indo-Pacific contingency, and the combined underground nuclear power (SSN) of the United Kingdom and France would account for about 15 to 20 percent of that of the United States, which is far above what the U.S.'s regional allies may be able to exert at least within the next decade."
In addition to this, "the Europeans can contribute by securing the sea routes of communications in the Indian Ocean, which would be important in an Indo-Pacific contingency, but also in other important areas such as space and munitions, as well as by investing in a joint inter-theater capacity pool."
"In the case of the Indo-Pacific, the Europeans will not play a central role, but the reward for securing naval support and other contributions is a strengthening of the U.S. position and inter-theater alliance frameworks."
How to achieve both goals?
It is necessary to substantially increase defense investment, analysts say.
"Two percent of GDP is simply not enough anymore, but the reality is that most European allies do not even reach this figure."
Similarly, NATO Europe and the European Union must take greater responsibility for developing ISR, outer space, cyber defense and electronic warfare capabilities and must also develop a defense industrial base to produce these technologies. In this sense, the report argues, "the United States has every interest in finding ways to encourage and push European allies to increase their defense spending, and the same is true for U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific."
In this respect, however, the Vilnius summit did not result in any substantial change in NATO's spending targets (2 percent of GDP), although the language regarding meeting capability requirements became clearer.
"Although European defense spending efforts remain inadequate in many quarters-yes, even after the war in Ukraine-we see faint signs of change for the better."
Poland, for example, is building one of Europe's most robust multi-layered defense systems with tanks, air defense, artillery and long-precision fires.
"In the end, we recognize that Europe is limping along chewing four-day-old gum, but getting Europe back on track is vital for its own defense and for the health of the U.S. global network of alliances."
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