President-elect Donald Trump once again ran on promises to limit United States military intervention overseas, declaring in his victory speech, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”
Vice President-elect JD Vance dubbed him the “candidate of peace”; the Arab American leaders who backed Trump, in part due to outgoing President Joe Biden’s unquestioning support for Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, expressed confidence in the same.
But Trump’s selections for top national security and diplomatic posts in his administration significantly undercut those claims.
For the positions of secretary of state, national security adviser, United Nations ambassador, U.S. ambassador to Israel, and secretary of defense, Trump has picked a group of classic foreign policy hawks with ideological views that would be right at home in the same trigger-happy George W. Bush presidency that Trump criticised so heavily in 2016.
Stephen Miles, president of Win Without War, was not expecting any better of Trump, saying he governed as a war hawk last time in spite of his campaign rhetoric.
“Despite what he says, Donald Trump’s not now, nor has he ever been, an antiwar candidate,” Miles said. “So it’s not a surprising cast of characters to me.”
Other anti-interventionists are taking a wait-and-see approach to Trump’s policy and taking heart in his nomination of former Hawaii Representative. Tulsi Gabbard, a deep critic of U.S. military adventurism and intelligence agency operations, as director of national intelligence.
“So far, it’s been a mixed bag,” said Arta Moeini, head of U.S. operations for the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, a think tank that advocates military restraint. “Tulsi Gabbard as DNI is a historic pick against the deep state, but [Florida Senator.] Marco Rubio as secretary of state signals business as usual.”
Trump has picked Fox News TV host Pete Hegseth, an Iraq War apologist, as secretary of defence; New York Representative. Elise Stefanik, a former George W. Bush administration official and staunch Israel defender, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and evangelical Christian supporter of West Bank settlements, as U.S. ambassador to Israel.
But no appointments have raised anti-interventionist eyebrows quite like the selection of Florida Representative Mike Waltz as national security adviser and Rubio as secretary of state.
Referring to Waltz and Rubio, conservative anti-interventionist commentator Saagar Enjeti told HuffPost, “The only restraint case you make is that Trump will try to moderate them or not take their advice.”
Waltz, a former Army Green Beret who served in the Afghanistan War, vehemently opposed even Trump’s efforts to negotiate troop withdrawals with the Taliban. In 2017 remarks at a conservative conference, Waltz said the country’s leaders needed to tell the public “we’re 15 years into a multi-generational war” in Afghanistan. And in September 2019, Waltz cited the approaching anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to blast Trump for a planned peace conference with Taliban leaders at Camp David.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Waltz has encouraged Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and prevent it from exporting oil.
Walz is also a staunch China hawk, claiming the United States is already in a “cold war with the Chinese Communist Party” and suggesting the U.S. needed to be prepared to defend Taiwan militarily. Waltz has likewise opposed bipartisan efforts to sunset the post-9/11 authorization for the use of military force but wants to introduce a new AUMF for the U.S. to conduct military operations against Mexican drug cartels.
At the same time, Waltz shares Trump’s skepticism of continued military aid to Ukraine, which he has voted against multiple times.
Perhaps most ironically, Waltz advised then-Vice President Dick Cheney about counterterrorism while working in the White House following his combat tours.
In the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump got great mileage out of Dick Cheney’s and his daughter Liz Cheney’s endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris. “He’s the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September in response to the elder Cheney’s endorsement announcement.
For his part, Rubio has a similar record and ideology with a few differences in emphasis. While competing against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in March 2016, Rubio attacked Trump for suggesting he might adopt a neutral stance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, accusing him of being “anti-Israeli.” And in May 2016, by which time Rubio had withdrawn from the Republican presidential primary and ruled out a role as Trump’s running mate, he slammed Trump’s isolationist rhetoric. “If we are not engaged in the world, the price we pay will be much higher in the long run than the price we pay to be engaged,” he said.
Once Trump was in office, Rubio backed Trump when he was hawkish, and critiqued him when he was not. For example, he criticised Trump for withdrawing troops from Syria in the war against ISIS in 2019, when he said it was too early. He supported Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, encouraged the U.S. military to prepare to defend Taiwan from China, and sees the Israeli government’s military operations in Gaza and Lebanon as vital for U.S. interests. He is a staunch Latin America hawk as well, cheerleading Trump’s pursuit of regime change in Venezuela.
But while Rubio has long advocated an aggressive approach to confronting Russia, he too has come around to the idea that the Ukraine war must end through a “negotiated settlement” and has defended Trump’s calls for diplomacy to commence.
“One area Trump likely is going to make a major priority for himself, and as a result, make it a bit more difficult for some of these other players to take charge of the policy is probably on Ukraine,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an anti-interventionist think tank.
“I don’t think, in his heart of hearts, Marco Rubio is on board with that, but I think this is such a crucial issue for Trump and also for [Vice President-elect] JD Vance that that’s probably one of the areas in which the policy will probably not be very impacted by some of these personnel choices.”
News of Rubio’s tentative selection, which became official Wednesday, nonetheless prompted swift condemnation from anti-interventionists on the right who see him as an unrepentant “neoconservative” — that is, a proponent of reshaping foreign governments for reasons other than immediate military necessity.
“Marco Rubio is a disaster. Might as well give Liz Cheney the State Department. Awful sign,” Dave Smith, a Trump-supporting libertarian commentator, wrote on X on Tuesday.
Michael Tracey, a dovish foreign policy journalist critical of both Democrats and Trump, wrote in his newsletter that if the Senate confirms Rubio, Trump will be “entering his second Administration with arguably the most zealously interventionist administration in decades.”
“Who is in the room makes a huge difference.”
- Trita Parsi, executive vice president, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Glenn Greenwald, who, like Tracey, frequently fulminates against the excesses of Trump’s liberal critics, was only slightly less pessimistic, warning on a Monday episode of “System Update” against being “premature” about a “Trump administration that has yet to begin.”
But, he added, “If you’re looking for signals in these early appointments and these early gestures, I don’t think you can find anything here to say that it looks like Donald Trump is going to wage war against American neoconservatives or warmongers in Washington.”
Following Trump’s selection of Gabbard on Wednesday, Greenwald posted approvingly about her selection.
Parsi held out hope that mid-level foreign policy officials would be more dovish than the Cabinet-level picks for which Trump “appears to be going more on loyalty and the wishes of big donors, rather than on ideology.”
Parsi, who was born in Iran and advocates for a more conciliatory approach with the historic U.S. adversary, believes hawkish advisers played a key role in pushing Trump to ratchet up tensions with Iran.
“Who is in the room makes a huge difference,” Parsi said. “The adviser you choose is very much the policy you choose.”
Moeini had a similar assessment, noting the tendency of some Trump administration officials to quietly undercut Trump’s foreign policy instincts during his first term when they conflicted with their own.
“I am very worried that people like Rubio and Waltz are not necessarily interested in ending the wars,” Moeini said. “They only think about the language of force, and they will use the idea of America as the victor, as the dignified presence, to project any changes in policy as defeats.”