Both Republicans have more hawkish foreign policy views than the incoming president, who ran on a platform of restoring peace to a war-torn world.
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to nominate Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state and has asked Rep. Mike Waltz to be the White House national security adviser, people familiar with the matter said Monday, elevating two Florida Republicans with more hawkish foreign policy views than those of the incoming president, who ran on a platform of restoring peace to a war-torn world.
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, built his political identity on support for upending autocratic governments from Latin America to the Middle East to Asia, but he has softened his once-neoconservative worldviews in recent years on economics, immigration and foreign policy. He is vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and had been among those Trump considered to be his running mate before settling on Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, now the vice president-elect.
Waltz, a retired Special Forces officer who used to work for Vice President Dick Cheney, is one of the most vocal critics of China in Congress and previously advocated for an open-ended U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan. He has sat on a number of key national security committees in the House.
The picks may foreshadow the kind of clashes between Trump and his aides that dominated his first term in office when he sought to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and negotiate a nuclear arms deal with North Korea, moves that were ardently opposed by some of his more hawkish aides, such as national security adviser John Bolton and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. But Trump has prioritized loyalty as a prerequisite for joining his administration, an attempt to stamp out challenges to his decisions.
