Fool around and find out. That’s essentially the Donald Trump model of foreign policy deterrence, and it’s being tested right now in the confirmation process for Elbridge Colby, his pick for undersecretary of defense for policy.

A couple of weeks ago, we got a glimpse of FAFO in action: “That would be a terrible thing for them to do, not because of me,” said President Trump when asked about Iran’s repeated assassination threats of both him and his senior staff as payback for the Qasem Soleimani hit on January 3, 2020. “If they did that, they would be obliterated. That’d be the end — I’ve left instructions. If they do it, they get obliterated.”

Here’s more FAFO: In a 2022 interview, Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked Trump about the remarkable 18-month period of safety for American troops in Afghanistan that began during the months of his first term — a period during which we didn’t incur a single combat death. Prior to those 18 months, Trump had been negotiating with the Taliban on an orderly American withdrawal from the country, which had at that point seen the deaths of 2,448 of our warriors there since October 7, 2001. “You told me in a previous interview,” said Hannity, “that you told the leader of the Taliban, before you ever talked about any withdrawal, you said to me that in no uncertain terms, you would obliterate him if he dared not to follow every dotted I, cross T, comma, period.”

Trump replied: “No, I sent him a picture of his house. He said, ‘But why, but why do you send me a picture of my house?’ I said, ‘You have to figure that one out.’ I said, ‘If you do anything — from that point on, we didn’t lose one soldier — we’re going to hit you harder than any country has ever been hit.’ He said, ‘I understand, your Excellency.’” Trump to the Taliban: FAFO.

One more example, this one involving Russia: In February 2018, American-led coalition forces in the Russian proxy of Syria came under brief attack from a tank there, to which Trump responded within hours by greasing as many as 200 Russian mercenaries in the area with an airstrike by drones and B-52 heavy bombers. To our knowledge, that was the last time any Russian or Syrian tank commanders in the region sneezed near any American forces. FAFO.

All this brings us back to Elbridge Colby, who’s set to meet with Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee that’s overseeing the Colby confirmation process. Cotton took some friendly fire over the weekend from Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk and other pro-Trump forces when he raised legitimate concerns about some of Colby’s previously stated policy positions, most notably his stance on Iran potentially obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Recall that it’s been a near article of faith among both Republican and Democrat administrations that Iran absolutely cannot be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Why? Because their ruling mullahs are nuts. For decades, they’ve been the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, vowing “Death to America” and the destruction of our strongest ally in the region, Israel.

Colby’s offense? Having written in an op-ed 15 years ago that “containing a nuclear Iran is an eminently plausible and practical objective.” Even having written this, though, Colby has also said that “preventing an Iranian nuclear capability should be the objective of Washington and the international community.”

I’m not sure what Colby might’ve meant by “eminently plausible and practical.” Still, I suspect Donald Trump might feel the same way, even if he said two weeks ago in an executive order applying “maximum pressure on Iran” that the U.S. would be “denying Iran all paths to a nuclear weapon.”

The Trump administration, like past American administrations, doesn’t want Iran to get a nuke. At the same time, Trump knows that he has a very strong FAFO deterrence card at his disposal — one that might be accurately summed up thusly: “If they did that, they would be obliterated.”

Elbridge Colby is a deep thinker and a shrewd geopolitical strategist. Indeed, the mission of the think tank he founded, the Marathon Initiative, is focused on “great power competition” and “the conviction that strategy is possible and, in situations such as today in which America cannot simply outspend or overwhelm its rivals, more necessary than ever.” Colby is about smart projection more so than massive projection. And he’s going to need this mindset given the well-documented bad-joke waste within the Pentagon, and given Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent order to cut 8% of the defense budget within the next five years.

But it’s this more nimble defense posture — a posture more focused on our nation’s foremost geopolitical threat, China, than on the Middle East — that has Colby at odds with more traditional national defense conservatives such as Cotton and Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker. As columnist Tom Rogan writes in the Washington Examiner:

The United States cannot deter or defeat China in a war over Taiwan if U.S. naval and air forces are spread thinly across Europe, the Middle East, and China. The U.S. can deter Russia by maintaining Army deployments in Eastern Europe and nuclear strike preeminence. The U.S. can deter Iran by responding to acts of Iranian terrorism with decisive force. The U.S. cannot deter China unless an abundant Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps presence is fixed in the Pacific and in healthy readiness to deploy to the Pacific at short notice. These sentiments broadly align with Elbridge Colby’s philosophy on the future of U.S. military posturing.

Unfortunately, [Wicker and Cotton] have both released statements and statements via proxies indicating they don’t want Colby at the Pentagon. These senators are specifically concerned with Colby’s call for the U.S. to divert military assets away from the Middle East and Europe and into the Pacific. Cotton also appears resistant to Colby’s skepticism that attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities would best serve U.S. national security.

In the end, Cotton and Colby are both Patriots, and we expect them to iron out their differences. We then expect Colby to be confirmed by the Armed Services Committee and then by the full Senate. After all, Donald Trump deserves deference in his vision for our national defense, and he deserves deference toward his choices for the people he wants to carry out that vision.

Republican senators are to offer their advice, which Cotton is rightly doing, but then, ultimately, give their consent.

(Updated)

(Correction: The chairman of the Armed Services Committee is Roger Wicker, not Tom Wicker as originally stated.)