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Elbridge Colby, elevated to undersecretary of defense for policy, sat with Ross Douthat and offered measured words on Iran while flames already burned across the Persian Gulf. Where once he had written that Middle Eastern adventures served no prudent national purpose, his present office compelled him to speak as one bound by the managerial priesthood rather than the strategist who placed China first.
This shift does not arise from fresh intelligence or altered geography. It flows from the same apparatus that has long subordinated American blood and treasure to distant quarrels chosen by interests alien to the household and the republic. The Dispossessor class profits whether the theater lies in Asia or Arabia; the American people pay in debt, in sons, and in the steady dissolution of their own borders and industries.
Western Christendom once measured its strength by the integrity of its realms and the defense of its own hearths, not by the projection of power across every sea. From the collapse of the Western Empire through the high Middle Ages, rulers who squandered their strength on peripheral crusades invited invasion at home. The same law operates today.
The governing principle remains simple: a nation exists to secure the life, property, and inheritance of its own people under God. When policy detaches from that end and serves abstract global commitments or corporate supply chains, it ceases to be statesmanship and becomes predation upon the commonwealth.
Colby’s earlier book correctly identified the strategic error of endless Gulf commitments. His present reticence confirms that the institutional restraints of office now override that clarity. The actor has not changed; the uniform has silenced the author.
The faithful remnant therefore rejects every new rationale for Persian intervention. It demands that defense resources return to the true perimeter: the southern border, the industrial base, and the containment of the Chinese threat that actually imperils the next generation’s survival.
No further tribute may be paid to the fiction that American security requires the perpetual management of foreign tribes. The household economy cannot endure another decade of wars that enrich distant powers while emptying the American purse and fracturing American cohesion.
