FP - Analysis
Elbridge Colby and the Reordering of the Indo-Pacific
The influential Pentagon official is narrowing choices available to U.S. allies.
February 23, 2026, 10:15 AM
By Alejandro Reyes, an adjunct professor and senior fellow at the Centre on Contemporary China and the World at the University of Hong Kong.
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Elbridge Colby stands behind a chair with a microphone, about to sit down. He wars a dark business suit and a serious expression. Behind him are seated officials, aides, and one child.
Elbridge Colby, U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, arrives for his confirmation hearing in Washington on March 4, 2025. Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/via Reuters
When the United States releases a National Defense Strategy, it is tempting to read it as a snapshot of the moment—a reflection of the threats, priorities, and politics of a particular administration. The 2026 National Defense Strategy demands a different take. It is less a snapshot than a settlement: the point at which a decade-long argument about U.S. power, limits, and prioritization hardens into enforceable doctrine.
This strategy does more than elevate China as the pacing challenge or place the Indo-Pacific at the center of U.S. defense planning. It narrows the range of acceptable ambiguity, restructures alliance expectations, and quietly redraws how much room U.S. partners across the region have to maneuver.
Formally, the strategy defines a security environment shaped by four core challenges: China as the primary pacing threat, Russia as a persistent but secondary adversary, North Korea and Iran as acute regional disruptors, and growing instability in the Western Hemisphere. It responds by organizing U.S. defense planning around four lines of effort centered on homeland defense, denial in the Indo-Pacific, allied burden-sharing, and industrial revitalization.
The coherence of the National Defense Strategy is not accidental. It reflects the maturation—and political transformation—of a line of strategic thinking most closely associated with Elbridge Colby, who today serves as the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, the Defense Department’s chief strategist and third-ranking official.
Colby occupies an unusual position in modern Washington. He was the lead official behind the 2018 National Defense Strategy, later systematized its logic in his provocative book The Strategy of Denial, and then returned to government in Trump 2.0 to oversee the drafting and implementation of the 2026 strategy. Few officials have shaped U.S. defense thinking so directly across diagnosis, theory, and implementation.
That continuity gives the 2026 strategy a clarity that is rare in American defense policy. It also reveals how ideas change under political pressure. The new document carries forward Colby’s denial-based framework but applies it through a distinctly Trumpist lens—shaped less by formal theory than by instinctive nationalism, territorialism, and power politics.
What began as an effort to discipline U.S. overextension has become a governing doctrine that tolerates less ambiguity, imposes sharper expectations, and narrows the space for maneuver, particularly for allies situated along the Indo-Pacific’s most contested frontiers.
Trump sits at the center of a boardroom table with his mouth opens as he speaks into a microphone, flanked on both sides by members of the military. All are dressed formally in business suits or military uniforms.
U.S. President Donald Trump (center) in a meeting with military leaders in Washington on Oct. 23, 2018. Win McNamee/Getty Images
The 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) marked a genuine turning point in U.S. defense thinking. For the first time since the early post-Cold War period, it stated unambiguously that interstate strategic competition, rather than terrorism, had become the central organizing problem of Washington’s defense planning. China and Russia were identified as revisionist powers seeking to reshape regional orders and constrain the choices of others. The document emphasized eroding U.S. military advantage, contested domains, and the reality of finite resources.
Yet the 2018 NDS was also deliberately incomplete. Even as it stressed prioritization, it affirmed the need to maintain favorable balances of power across multiple regions. The Indo-Pacific was elevated, but Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere all remained core theaters. Alliances were described as the United States’ durable asymmetric advantage, and reassurance remained central. The strategy named the problem while deferring its resolution.
The document had to reassure allies and signal prioritization without fully embracing its consequences. Scarcity was acknowledged, but explicit trade-offs were avoided. The document conceded that the United States could no longer do everything everywhere, yet it stopped short of specifying which commitments were structural and which were discretionary.
In hindsight, the 2018 NDS cleared the ground. It ended the illusion that the post-Cold War order could be sustained indefinitely, leaving unanswered the question that prioritization inevitably raises: If the United States must choose, where—and how—should it concentrate power?
A Chinese military helicopter flies against a hazy blue sky overhead as tourists mill about a large structure of rocks and a crumbling old building.
A Chinese military helicopter flies past tourists at a viewing point over the Taiwan Strait, on Pingtan Island, the closest point to Taiwan in China, on April 7, 2023.Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images
That question is what Colby sought to answer in The Strategy of Denial. Published a few years after the 2018 NDS, the book pushed the logic implicit in that document to its conclusion. Where the NDS diagnosed great-power competition, The Strategy of Denial supplied an architecture.
At its core lies a stark proposition: The United States does not need to dominate every region to remain secure, but it must prevent any rival—above all, China—from achieving regional hegemony. In practice, this means concentrating U.S. military power on denying China control of Asia rather than pursuing global primacy or relying on threats of punishment after the fact. Deterrence, in this framework, rests on making aggression infeasible and war irrational.
Geography does much of the work. Colby anchors deterrence in the physical realities of the Indo-Pacific, particularly the first island chain, a Cold-War-era strategic term for the line of islands and archipelagos that run along the western Pacific rim of the East Asian mainland. He treats the chain as a defensible perimeter that is critical to blocking Chinese power projection. This logic forces uncomfortable conclusions. Some commitments are more defensible—and therefore more credible— than others. Sustaining denial requires accepting risk elsewhere.
Equally important is what the book avoids. The Strategy of Denial is not a manifesto for retrenchment or a populist critique of alliances. It treats alliances as indispensable but conditional, valued insofar as they support the central strategic objective of preventing Chinese regional hegemony. The aim is discipline rather than provocation.
In this sense, The Strategy of Denial resolved the ambiguities of the 2018 NDS. It accepted that prioritization entails exclusion, that credibility must be differentiated, and that U.S. strategy must be organized around a single overriding problem. What remained uncertain was how such a bounded theory would fare once translated back into governing doctrine.
Vance, standing in a dark suit and tie, leans over to shakes hands with a seated Colby, dressed similarly. Namecards on the desk in front of them identify the men.
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance (left) greets Colby during Colby’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington on March 4, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The 2026 National Defense Strategy marks the point at which denial becomes doctrine. The framework that Colby once argued now appears as settled premise. China is treated as the pacing challenge, deterrence by denial anchors force planning, and geography is decisive. The Indo-Pacific is the primary center of gravity, with the first island chain serving as the critical defensive perimeter. Alliance burden-sharing is no longer aspirational but foundational.
Colby’s public remarks underscore this translation. In his first overseas speech as undersecretary of defense for policy, delivered in South Korea in January 2026, he cast the strategy as a rejection of post-Cold War abstractions untethered from power and geography. Stability, he argued, would depend on maintaining a favorable balance of power through credible deterrence. The logic mirrors The Strategy of Denial, but what had been an intellectual correction now appears as governing doctrine, presented as the restoration of strategic realism under presidential direction.
Here, the Trumpist lens becomes fully visible. The 2026 NDS retains Colby’s architecture but hardens and reorders it in ways shaped by the president that it serves. It demands differentiated responsibility across the Indo-Pacific.
Homeland and hemispheric primacy move from background assumptions to explicit foundations. Where The Strategy of Denial treated the Western Hemisphere as largely secure, the 2026 strategy treats the Americas as a strategic sphere requiring active denial and control. The effect is to extend denial logic beyond Asia to the United States’ own neighborhood, making hemispheric security a prerequisite rather than a backdrop to Indo-Pacific prioritization.
Alliance logic shifts as well. In Colby’s book, alliances are indispensable but conditional. In the 2026 NDS, conditionality becomes enforceable obligation. Defense spending, industrial capacity, and political resolve are framed as prerequisites for strategic centrality, pushing alliance realism into a more transactional register.
These shifts do not repudiate denial. They show what happens when a theory designed to discipline U.S. overreach is filtered through a presidency that prizes territorial clarity, leverage, and visible resolve. Colby supplies the structure. Trumpism supplies the pressure.
Trump leans in close to whisper something in Xi's ear as they shake hands while standing in a building doorway. U.S. and Chinese flags are displayed on either side of the door. Aides in suits are clustered off to the side as they watch.
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands as they depart following a meeting at in Busan, South Korea, on Oct. 30, 2025.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
One of the most consequential effects of this translation is how it reconfigures allied agency. By narrowing priorities and hardening expectations, the 2026 NDS does not eliminate options for U.S. partners but reshapes them, producing a more differentiated landscape of alignment and autonomy.
For decades, many allies benefited from U.S. security guarantees while maintaining diversified economic and diplomatic relationships, including with China. The 2026 strategy tightens that slack. By anchoring deterrence in denial along specific geographic perimeters, it makes allied behavior structural rather than supplementary.
This does not force a binary choice between Washington and Beijing. Economic engagement with China remains compatible with stability so long as it does not erode the strategic balance. What becomes less sustainable is security ambiguity among states whose geography places them at the core of the denial architecture.
The result is a more differentiated alliance system. States that invest in defense capacity and assume operational responsibility gain greater latitude and influence. Those that seek maximum flexibility while minimizing contribution face a narrowing range of credible options. Hinging persists, but it is increasingly conditional.
Eight military ships at sea head toward the camera, the white waters of their wakes extending off toward the horizon.
South Korea, the United States, and Japan sail in formation during a joint naval exercise in international waters off South Korea in this handout image on April 04, 2023. South Korean Defense Ministry/via Getty Images
These dynamics play out unevenly across Asia.
Nowhere is agency more compressed—or more consequential—than around Taiwan. Although the 2026 National Defense Strategy does not name the island directly, its emphasis on denial along the first island chain, of which Taiwan is a key strategic part, places it at the center of the regional balance. In The Strategy of Denial, Taiwan is the linchpin: Its loss would fracture the defensive perimeter and push U.S. and allied forces back toward the central Pacific.
The 2026 strategy reflects this logic while avoiding overt declaratory commitments. It prioritizes denial-oriented capabilities, resilience, and force posture around the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan’s agency lies less in diplomatic maneuver than in preparation, investing in survivable defenses, and aligning its posture with a strategy designed to make rapid conquest infeasible. Political ambiguity may persist; military ambiguity becomes harder to sustain. Taiwan is expected not only to be defended but also to be defensible.
The South China Sea occupies a different category. While strategically important, it is not treated as a denial centerpiece. Here, the strategy tolerates greater variation in state behavior. Southeast Asian claimants retain wider agency within clearer limits.
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This differentiation is visible across regional actors. The Philippines, through expanded access arrangements and closer operational cooperation, moves nearer to the outer edge of the denial architecture. Vietnam, not referenced in the strategy and not a formal ally, retains greater latitude to hinge while deepening security ties with Washington. Diplomatic and economic engagement with China continues, but security choices that erode the military balance face tighter constraints.
The Korean Peninsula sits between these poles. The 2026 NDS signals maintained deterrence against North Korea while placing greater emphasis on South Korean self-reliance and burden-sharing within a broader Indo-Pacific balance. Seoul gains autonomy in conventional defense but less latitude to free ride. Economic and diplomatic flexibility persists; military ambiguity does not. The alliance is recast less as guardianship against a discrete threat than as part of a wider denial posture.
Beyond the denial core, the strategy is more flexible. The 2026 National Defense Strategy places less emphasis on minilateral groupings than on functional alignment. India, though not mentioned, retains significant strategic autonomy, which the strategy appears to accept as compatible with regional balance. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue coordinates without binding. AUKUS integrates deeply among a smaller subset of trusted partners. The result resembles what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has described as “variable geometry”: tight integration where geography demands it and looser coordination where autonomy still serves strategic ends.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations occupies the outer edge of this architecture, largely by omission. The strategy does not treat the region as an institutional anchor deterrence or expect its members to enforce denial. Their agency lies instead in shaping the regional environment through access, infrastructure choices, and diplomatic posture.
Even here, limits are visible. As denial logic hardens elsewhere, autonomy becomes more conditional, bounded less by formal alignment than by whether local choices reinforce or complicate the balance of power.
Taken together, these dynamics reveal what the 2026 National Defense Strategy represents. It does not abolish agency for U.S. partners. It redistributes it. Geography, contribution, and operational relevance now determine how much room states retain to maneuver—and how much discipline they are expected to accept.
This clarity may strengthen deterrence in the short term but carries risk. Alliances long accustomed to flexibility may comply when conditions are benign yet resist when discipline demands real sacrifice. A system that relies less on reassurance and more on enforcement must contend with the possibility that predictability becomes brittle under stress.
The deeper significance of the strategy lies not only in what it says, but in what it closes off. It narrows the space for permissive alignment and signals that the next phase of U.S. strategy will test not only adversaries but also partners accustomed to discretion. Whether denial holds as governing doctrine will depend less on its internal coherence than on how allies respond when clarity constrains rather than comforts. That is the wager that the United States has now made.
Alejandro Reyes is an adjunct professor and senior fellow at the Centre on Contemporary China and the World at the University of Hong Kong. He is also a scholar-in-residence at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center.
