Trump’s Reported National Security Advisor Supports Bombing Russia and Afghanistan
So much for keeping out the war hawks. President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly chosen Rep. Mike Waltz (R–Fla.) to be his national security adviser and Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) to be his secretary of state. Rubio is a longtime regime change and war enthusiast, although he’s recently pivoted to Trump’s position that the war in Ukraine has to end diplomatically.
Waltz, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a pretense of wanting to stay out of wars. He’s been passionately in favor of escalating conflicts that Trump wants out of, including in Afghanistan and Ukraine. And he supports not only threatening to attack Iran but also militarily confronting Russia, which Waltz calls a “gas station with nukes.”
If last week was a bad time to be a member of the Cheney family, this week is shaping up to be a good one. After working as a Department of Defense policy planner for the Bush administration, Waltz served as former Vice President Dick Cheney’s counterterrorism adviser. And it shows.
“I think we’re in for a long haul and I think our nation’s leadership needs to begin telling the American people, I’m sorry, we don’t have a choice, we’re 15 years into what is going to be a multi-generational war because we’re talking about defeating an idea,” Waltz said about Afghanistan at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2017.
Lest anyone think that Waltz has changed, he fought tooth and nail against Trump’s negotiations to withdraw from Afghanistan, voting to tie the president’s hands and whining that Afghanistan is strategic real estate on the “flank” of Iran, Russia, and China. (That idea seems to have caught on with Trump, who argued during the campaign that Afghanistan would have been a good base from which to confront China.) After U.S. forces left in 2021, Waltz called for restarting the war with both “American air power” and boots on the ground.
It’s no surprise, then, that Waltz voted against ending U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen and voted for keeping the Iraq War authorization on the books…in 2021. And, of course, he’s been arguing for years that the United States should be threatening to bomb Iran. Last month, he begged President Joe Biden to go ahead and “punch Iran in the nose” in response to Iraqi guerrilla attacks.
At an event with the liberal Atlantic Council last month, Waltz got excited about the idea of fighting outside powers in the Middle East, praising Trump for bombing Russian forces in Syria. “The facts show that [Trump] was far tougher on Russia than the narrative that floats around Washington,” he said, arguing that Russian leader Vladimir Putin is “struggling, he’s a gas station with nukes.”
The “gas station” turn of phrase is the same one that former Sen. John McCain and former Obama administration adviser Jason Fu
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