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 Furman used. At least Waltz acknowledges the nukes, although that hasn’t seemed to faze him, since he’s also excited with the idea of bombing Russians inside Russia. At the Republican National Convention this year, he bragged that Trump told Putin that “you try anything, and I’ll take the tops off the Kremlin.”
In an interview with NPR last week, he said that the Russian-Ukrainian war can end if the United States applies some leverage. And what is that leverage? Making sure Russia’s “war machine will dry up very quickly” with U.S. economic sanctions, Waltz said, as well as “taking the handcuffs off of the long-range weapons we provided Ukraine.” Ukraine has been demanding permission to use American missiles against targets on Russian soil. Ukrainians forces are currently only allowed to use them to defend Ukrainian soil.
From the beginning of the war, Waltz has wanted U.S. troops to be more directly involved. “I’m not advocating for American troops on the frontlines in Ukraine. Absolutely not. But what the British are doing is they’re helping with planning. They’re helping with logistics. They’re helping Ukrainians use the equipment that we’re funding at a headquarters level, in their supply depots,” he told independent journalist Michael Tracey in July 2022.
If wars in the Middle East and Europe weren’t enough, Waltz has proposed that Congress authorize a war of “cyber, drones, intelligence assets, naval assets” against drug cartels in Mexico.
Perhaps Waltz has been so successful in the competition for administration jobs because—unlike classic neocons—he’s been so successful at disguising escalation as a path to “peace through strength.” More aggression is a way to “bring the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East to a swift conclusion,” Waltz argued in an essay for The Economist that came out just before the election. And putting American boots on the ground in Ukraine? Why, that’s just a way to stop U.S. aid from going into a “black hole.”
But all the fancy word games in the world can’t change reality. What Waltz is promising is, as he admitted in 2017, more of the same “multi-generational war” that every president from George W. Bush to Joe Biden waged. And he’s going to be waging it with the same overstretched tools of American power that Biden inherited.
After all, the Biden administration itself has tried to sell the same “deescalation through escalation” strategy over the past couple months. Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss.
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