Who Let the Peacocks Out?

Did you know that “the U.S. military used to be sized and shaped to conduct regime change operations?”

Did you know that South Korea is a “model ally,” but that Japan “needs to step up.”

Did you know that U.S. presidents, possibly including incumbent President Donald Trump, and past U.S. commanders in the Pacific have been engaging in “peacocking”?

Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Andrew Colby knows these things and has been speaking publicly about them, including recently in Seoul and Manila.

But what if there is no real distinction between capabilities for regime change, which, incidentally, the United States last truly conducted in 2003, and a plan for “a defensive function of denial” that Colby desires? Do offense and defense not require a full set of military capabilities and related doctrine--and the realization that in war being good at defense may mean being good at offense?

What if anyone who understands South Korea grasps that the “model ally” isn’t really an ally as most Americans understand the word, if, as some suspect, it would never actually help us if China started a fight? What if even though South Korea spends fractionally more of a percentage of its GDP on its military than Japan does--2.4% of its GDP compared to 2% for Japan--Japan’s far-more-massive economy yields a far-more-consequential military? What if those who understand anything about Japan grasp that it and the Philippines are the only two relevant allies in Asia that would fight with us if China attacked? And what if Japan, unlike South Korea, has doubled its defense spending over the past five years, enacted taxes specially to fund defense increases successive American presidents have requested, and is now likely to undertake further increases?

As for the “peacocking” that Colby and his boss, Secretary of Defense Peter B. Hegseth, decry, what exactly the hell are they talking about?

Foreshadowing Colby, SecDef Pete said in Singapore in May, “We will prioritize lethal capabilities, strategic discipline, and businesslike cooperation over empty rhetoric and peacocking.” Huh? For context, there was no context. SecDef Pete’s next two paragraphs shifted to “deterrence by denial along the First Island Chain” and “Now we are reestablishing the Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine, as I like to call it...”

Can you guess which clause was written by Colby and which was written by SecDef Pete?

One hopes that the men are not decrying steps taken by Trump and his predecessors to sharpen language against China’s government as that government has become more bellicose in the Western Pacific and globally. Do they object to efforts to assure our allies and adversaries that the United States intends to keep the peace it won in wars since 1898, but especially in the obscenely costly Pacific War, and rebut persistent if stupid claims that we are withdrawing?

Colby’s policy, according to him, centers upon “defensive function of denial,” “stable equilibrium,” “decent peace,” “favorable escalation management,” “concrete interests,” “common sense,” “flexible realism,” “practicality,” “pragmatism,” and “realism.”

But is this a policy? Or is it Kamalaesque word salad? Is it what AI would spit out if you asked it to generate verbiage to explain the scatterbrained, isolationist-adjacent foreign policy of Vice President JD Vance, who, if promoted, would surely need an erudite national security advisor to explain his really interesting world view?

Certainly Colby is erudite. He was graduated from the Groton School, Harvard University and then was part of “that whole Yale thing” for his juris doctorate. Maybe we’re too dumb to get the 3-D chess that the Pentagon’s E Ring is playing.

Perhaps Trump’s first-term Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, wondered the same thing. The former Marine reportedly found Colby “wonky, pretentious, and condescending,” including for using terms like “heuristic” and “opprobrious.”

Frankly, us morons could use a good heuristic to understand why Colby has been “obsessed” with visiting China. Politico reported: “His number one goal right now is to speak at China’s National Defense University, and he has everyone push it in meetings.”

In Seoul, Colby assured our chief adversary in the world: “We are not pursuing regime change against Beijing nor seeking to dominate China. We acknowledge and respect China’s proud history.”

Technically, China’s government doesn’t respect China’s proud history. It killed more than a million Chinese in the Cultural Revolution to erase it. And while no one envisions or seeks military regime change against China’s government, would it not be useful to hope for--perhaps even stimulate--internal political problems for the Chinese Communist Party so it has less bandwidth to screw with the United States and our allies? Would it not be useful to try to emulate against the communists in Beijing a successful Reagan-era policy “To promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system”?

Could a heuristic be developed to explain such a policy to fancy Yalies like Colby and Vance?

Maybe, maybe not.

Fred Fleitz, former Trump NSC chief of staff, observed:

Colby’s speech was terrible and does not represent America First or anything President Trump has said. It is not “peacocking” to state that China is an existential threat to US security. Colby should retract this speech or resign.

Well, far from the Western Pacific, at least the Pentagon is winning against Iran, right? As a Babylon Bee headline read in June: “Trump Sets New World Record By Winning War With Iran 27 Times In One Year.”

Or did Vance and his boys goof that one too?