Why is Tom Cotton blocking a Trump DOD nominee?

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has always seemed like a stalwart liberty-oriented conservative, untainted by his Ivy League background, and he’s long been alive to the threat from China. However, to everyone’s surprise, he’s fighting to oppose Elbridge Colby, Trump’s pick to serve as the undersecretary for policy at the Department of Defense (“DOD”).

Colby aligns with Trump’s and the MAGA-ites policy of pivoting from Europe, which is intent upon committing suicide, to focusing on the threat from China. It’s possible that Cotton’s objections may boil down to his allegiance to the International Republican Institute (“IRI”), an organization with decidedly non-MAGA values.

The starting point is the President’s authority under the Constitution to direct America’s foreign policy. That’s long been considered an Executive branch function, even though it can get fuzzy around the edges.

Image: YouTube screen grab.

In Trump’s case, as part of his foreign policy responsibilities, he’s noticed a few things about Europe:

(1) Europe has refused to carry its weight financially in NATO;

(2) Europe’s militaries are often a joke (although the US military under Biden looked similar);

(3) Europe’s governments are increasingly subordinate to the demands of the tens of millions of devout Muslims residing in Europe, people whose core values are at odds with Western liberty and who hate America;

(4) Europe’s values are also more frequently at odds with Western liberty, as JD Vance has highlighted;

(5) Europeans have replaced any residual gratitude they had for America after WWII and the Marshall Plan—a gratitude always tempered, in a bad way, with arrogance—with straight-out dislike; and

(6) Europe’s fealty to the fantasy of anthropogenic climate change has weakened it so substantially (for example, Germany backed war against Russia despite having rendered itself incapable of fulfilling its own energy needs) that propping Europe up is an increasingly futile act.

Meanwhile, Trump has noticed that China has aggressively positioned itself as a challenger to America’s preeminent status. For years,

(1) China has been using theft, fraud, and government funding to undercut American manufacturing;

(2) China’s Belt-and-Road initiative has allowed it to place Chinese outposts (ports, airfields, etc.) across the world, including at the all-important Panama Canal;

(3) China is tightening its control over the world’s necessary minerals and rare earth elements;

(4) China is flexing its muscles hard in the East Asian geographic region, whether that’s creating manmade islands to expand its military and geographic reach, illegally overfishing international waters, or encroaching on Taiwan;

(5) China is building up its military, along with its weapons, spying, and information control capabilities; and

(6) Looking back at COVID, China’s very likely amenable to using bioweapons against the West.

Because of China’s totalitarian values, when its power increases, that’s bad for America and the world.

In other words, many people (me included) think it’s sensible for Trump to pivot American foreign policy to take a stronger stand against China. This doesn’t mean abandoning Europe. It just means that it’s not 1979 anymore.

Given that Trump’s policy is sensible and that, as the elected president, he has the long-recognized authority to make this pivot, why would Tom Cotton put roadblocks in the way of Trump appointing Colby, someone who (to the DC media’s disdain) supports Trump’s policies? This is especially true given that Cotton has written an entire book about the problems with China.

Well, as always in DC, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface. In the case of Tom Cotton, it’s possible that he has a great deal of loyalty to the IRI, an organization none of us have ever heard of.

However, the increasingly essential DataRepublican X account may have an explanation for Cotton’s odd stance: He’s a director at the IRI, an “NGO[] aligned with the political establishment” (a polite way to say it’s part of the Deep State).

The IRI’s agenda is UN-centric, including all the refugee resettlement that’s destabilizing the West, and—get this—just last year, we taxpayers gave it $130,689,289. As a popular meme says, if an “NGO” is government-funded, it’s a GO, not an NGO.

I’ve always liked Tom Cotton, and it’s obvious that he knows the threat China poses. I hope, therefore, that what’s going on is that he believes Colby is insufficiently anti-China rather than that he is putting the ISI’s policies ahead of America’s needs.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/02/why_is_tom_cotton_blocking_a_trump_dod_nominee.html