Meet Trump’s Incredibly Confusing New National Security Cabinet
If President-elect Donald Trump gets his way, his National Security Council will be a very lively place to be. Michael Waltz, who would be chairing the council as National Security Adviser, has declared that there is “no peaceful solution in Syria as long as [Bashar] Assad is in power,” because Assad has “been gassing his own people for years.” But Tulsi Gabbard, who would be sitting in the meetings as Director of National Intelligence, has met the Syrian ruler in person, arguing that “Assad is not the enemy of the United States, because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.”
That’s just one of the intense contradictions on display in the incoming second Trump administration’s foreign policy staff. Trump has flirted with both extremely hawkish and extremely dovish positions. And his staffing is similarly all over the place.
Many of Trump’s nominees are conventional war hawks. His secretary of state nominee, Marco Rubio, is open to regime change wars in Latin America. Brian Hook, running the State Department transition, is obsessed with regime change in the Middle East. Elise Stefanik, nominated as ambassador to the United Nations, and John Ratcliffe, nominated to run the CIA, also want more intervention there. Waltz, perhaps the most radical of them all, is on record supporting U.S. boots on the ground in Ukraine and a reinvasion of Afghanistan.
But on Wednesday, Trump nominated some surprising antiestablishment figures: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) for attorney general and former Rep. Gabbard (D–Hawaii) for director of national intelligence, which oversees the U.S. government’s 18 intelligence agencies. Gaetz has pushed to restrain the President’s war powers under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Gabbard is an outspoken opponent of U.S. regime change efforts—both through military force and economic sanctions—in the Middle East. In 2018, when Trump was considering attacking Iran in defense of Saudi oil fields, Gabbard urged not to be “Saudi Arabia’s bitch.”
Gaetz and Gabbard are both going to face a hard Senate confirmation battle. Several Republican senators have come out as skeptics of Gaetz for reasons unrelated to foreign policy; he’s been investigated for sexual misconduct and sparked a Republican civil war over his successful effort to overthrow former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. Gabbard, meanwhile, has gone further than most other foreign policy critics would. It’s one thing to say that Assad is not a threat to America and another to meet him in person.
At first glance, Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is another dyed-in-the-wool neocon. He came up in politics as a leader in Vets for Freedom, a veterans’ organization that wanted to keep the Iraq War going. At a rally for John McCain during the 2008 presidential elections, Hegseth praised McCain for being “willing to stick his neck out for an unpopular war” and argued that “Iraq is the central battlefront in a larger battle against radical Islam.”
And when Trump ordered the assassination of an Iranian general in 2020, Hegseth was cheering for a full-on war with Iran. “None of this changes the calculation of this regime, which is an evil regime,” he fumed on
Article from Reason.com
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