For the first time in decades, the United States is split, not over how to support Israel, but whether it should bleed strategic bandwidth to do so at all. At the center is Elbridge Colby, architect of the post-Afghanistan “Asia First” doctrine. He’s quietly drawing a red line: no more asset diversion from the Indo-Pacific to patch over Israel’s escalation spiral.
For the first time in decades, the United States is split, not over how to support Israel, but whether it should bleed strategic bandwidth to do so at all.
At the center is Elbridge Colby, architect of the post-Afghanistan “Asia First” doctrine. He’s quietly drawing a red line: no more asset diversion from the Indo-Pacific to patch over Israel’s escalation spiral. That red line was crossed when CENTCOM rerouted a Patriot battery from South Korea to the Gulf in April. Now the internal fracture is open, and visible.
CENTCOM chief Gen. Kurilla wants more, another carrier strike group, more interceptors, more direct posture. But Colby and the restrainers have clamped down. Their argument is surgical: every system shifted to Israel is a node removed from the China war map. Every THAAD redeployment, a delta in Taiwan’s kill chain. The future isn’t the Levant, it’s the First Island Chain.
Trump himself, despite the optics, leans closer to Colby. The recent ousting of Mike Waltz, partially over “intense coordination” with Netanyahu, is a message to the Likud lobby: unquestioned loyalty is no longer guaranteed currency in a reindustrializing, China-facing America.
And that’s the subtext no one wants to say aloud: the strategic divorce between U.S. Indo-Pacific doctrine and Israeli exceptionism has begun. Not a rupture, but a reassignment of priority. Israel, once the gravitational center of American foreign policy, is now being weighed against Pacific deterrence timelines, hypersonic launch readiness, and semiconductor choke points.
The Tehran strike didn’t just activate Iranian escalation. It forced a zero-sum accounting in the Pentagon, and this time, Israel wasn’t the uncontested answer.
posted by Satish Sharma at
12:00
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