Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby stood in Manila on Monday and delivered the clearest statement of American strategic priorities we’ve heard in years. America is not retreating from Asia. We are digging in along the First Island Chain, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and beyond, to lock in a favorable balance of power through deterrence by denial. That is not rhetoric. That is realism grounded in hard experience and the actual correlation of forces.

I’ve spent more than three decades in uniform watching great-power competition up close, from the cockpit of a B-1 to the National Military Command Center on 9/11, from nuclear planning to wing command. The central lesson never changes: you deter war by making aggression too costly and too uncertain to succeed, not by promising endless commitments everywhere at once. Colby’s approach, expanding our forward posture, accelerating combat-capable forces into the Western Pacific, hardening infrastructure, prepositioning assets and deepening interoperability with allies, does exactly that. It is the practical embodiment of peace through strength.

The National Security Strategy released last December already pointed the way: the U.S. military must be capable of denying aggression anywhere along the First Island Chain. Colby is executing it. He correctly identifies that our interests in the Indo-Pacific are more engaged than ever, economically, technologically,........

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