President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly decided to appoint the prominent China hawks Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz as his respective secretary of state and national security adviser.
Rubio was arguably the most hawkish option on Trump’s shortlist for secretary of state, and he has in past years advocated for a muscular foreign policy with respect to America’s geopolitical foes, including China, Iran and Cuba.
Over the past several years the Florida senator has softened some of his stances to align more closely with Trump’s views. The president-elect accuses past US presidents of leading America into costly and futile wars and has pushed for a more restrained foreign policy.
A failed challenger to Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Rubio had been rumored to be one of the leading contenders for Trump’s vice-presidential pick before JD Vance was announced.
Since his failed run for president, Rubio has served as an informal foreign policy adviser and helped Trump prepare for his first debate against Biden in 2020.
Trump has not confirmed the planned appointment, which was first reported by the New York Times. If confirmed, Rubio would be the first Latino to serve as America’s top diplomat once the Republican president-elect takes office in January.
While the famously mercurial Trump could always change his mind at the last minute, he appeared to have settled on his pick as of Monday, sources told Reuters.
While Rubio was far from the most isolationist option, his likely selection nonetheless underlines a broad shift in Republican foreign policy views under Trump.
Once the party of hawks who advocated military intervention and a muscular foreign policy, most of Trump’s allies now preach restraint, particularly in Europe, where many Republicans complain US allies are not paying their fair share on defense.
“I’m not on Russia’s side – but unfortunately the reality of it is that the way the war in Ukraine is going to end is with a negotiated settlement,” Rubio told NBC in September.
Waltz, a Republican congressman and Trump loyalist who served in the national guard as a colonel, has criticized Chinese activity in the Asia-Pacific and voiced the need for the US to be ready for a potential conflict in the region.
Last week, Waltz won re-election to the US House seat representing east-central Florida, which includes Daytona Beach. He defeated the Democrat James Stockton, a pastor and former president of a local NAACP branch.
Waltz is a combat-decorated Green Beret and a former White House and Pentagon policy adviser. He was first elected in 2018, replacing the Republican Ron DeSantis, who ran for governor, in Florida’s sixth congressional district.
Waltz served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, and he was awarded four Bronze Stars. He was one of the lawmakers appointed in July to serve on a bipartisan congressional taskforce to investigate the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.
After Waltz left the US army, he worked in the Pentagon in the George W Bush administration as policy director for former defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates.
Under the former vice-president Dick Cheney, Waltz served as a counter-terrorism adviser.
In 2021, after Joe Biden ordered a chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, Waltz asked Biden to reverse course and relaunch military operations in the region. The war in Afghanistan began under Bush after the 11 September 2001 attacks.
The Intercept reported that before his run for Congress in 2018 Waltz managed a lucrative defense contracting firm with offices in Afghanistan.
Waltz has consistently expressed the need for protecting the Afghan people, saying that US “soldiers will have to go back”. Government reports have stated that US nation-building efforts resulted in the deaths of more than 48,000 civilians and 66,000 Afghan police and military, and widespread torture.
In other developments on Trump’s appointments, the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, has been picked to become the next secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, CNN reported on Tuesday, citing two sources.
Earlier this year, Noem was widely seen as a potential presidential running mate for Trump. She lost out after recycling a two-decade-old story designed to illustrate decisive leadership that involved her shooting dead a puppy that did not hunt and had bitten members of her family.
Reuters contributed to this report
