Colby Caves to the Iran Hawks

The nominee embraced the most absurd threat inflation possible.

Elbridge Colby was coming under attack from Iran hawks for holding relatively sane views on Iran’s nuclear program in the past, so at his confirmation hearing today he predictably abandoned those views and embraced the most absurd threat inflation possible:

Elbridge Colby, the nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, said at his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Tuesday that he now views a nuclear-armed Iran as an “existential” threat to the United States homeland [bold mine-DL] and said he would provide military options to the administration to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon if necessary.

No doubt this will please Tom Cotton and the editors at The Wall Street Journal. Republican hawks have been railing against Colby’s nomination as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for weeks because they feared he wasn’t enough of a hardliner on Iran specifically and on U.S. policies in the Middle East in general. Just yesterday, the WSJ published a silly editorial that said that “his argument is less about restoring American power and more a counsel of U.S. decline and retreat.” It seems that Colby got the message that he should start sounding like Lindsey Graham.