The Republican Party used to have a label for the kind of foreign policy hawk that President-elect Donald J. Trump named on Tuesday as his national security adviser and is considering as his secretary of state: neocons.
But while they once were neoconservatives, over the past few years Representative Michael Waltz and Senator Marco Rubio, both of Florida, have gradually shifted their positions. Sounding less like former Vice President Dick Cheney or John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, they no longer talk about foreign interventions or the prospects of regime change. Instead, they speak the language of the “America First” movement, and fit more comfortably within Mr. Trump’s often erratic worldview, in which deal-making reigns over ideology.
The result is that Mr. Trump may end up with a foreign policy team composed of deep loyalists, but with roots in familiar Republican approaches. The shift that the two men have made reflects the broader marginalization of neocons throughout the Republican Party after the disaster in Iraq and the rise of America First.
For Mr. Rubio and Mr. Waltz, the drift from their previous positions to their current ones has been slow, evident in shadings of what they said at conservative conferences or in interviews on Fox News, and in how they altered their votes at key moments in the past few years. Ukraine has been a litmus test.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Rubio, the No. 2 on the Senate Intelligence Committee, applauded the rush to send arms, aid and intelligence to the Ukrainians. So did Mr. Waltz, a former Green Beret, who enthusiastically supported giving President Volodymyr Zelensky everything he needed to drive out Russian troops.
But by this spring, each for their own reasons, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Waltz voted against the last major aid package to support Ukraine. And to justify their new position, Mr. Rubio declared that the United States could not afford to fight for Ukraine’s freedom while illegal immigrants were coming over the southern U.S. border.
For his part, Mr. Waltz wrote in an opinion essay for Fox News that President Biden “has neither explained the American objective in Ukraine nor his strategy to achieve it. Will American military spending continue until Ukraine has pushed Russia back to its prewar boundaries? Its pre-2014 boundaries? Or until the Putin regime collapses?”
In fact, Mr. Biden’s objectives have shifted. His often-repeated statement that the United States will stand by Ukraine “for as long as it takes” has morphed into “as long as we can.”
But his aides largely describe their goal as a simple one: to help put the Ukrainians in a position that they could one day enter negotiations with Russia, preferably with the upper hand on the battlefield. It seems unlikely that day will come in the 10 weeks remaining in Mr. Biden’s presidency. So almost immediately, defining objectives will fall to Mr. Waltz and, if he is nominated and confirmed, Mr. Rubio.
It may be a challenge, since their boss has insisted only that there should be a deal — the details of which he has never described. Presumably, it would give Russia a large chunk of the country in return for peace and a declaration that Ukraine would not enter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for years or decades to come.
“They are still internationalists,” said Richard Haass, a longtime Republican national security official and diplomat, who worked for President George H.W. Bush in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and President George W. Bush in the run-up to the war in Iraq. “But the test of what kind of internationalist will come in how far they are willing to distance themselves from Ukraine. And it will come again in what kind of tools they would use to confront China.”
Nearly 10 years ago, when Mr. Rubio was running for the Republican nomination for president against Mr. Trump, the Florida senator spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations — the heart of the traditional foreign policy establishment. He quoted John F. Kennedy and made the case that the younger Mr. Bush had made: that American power must be “motivated by a desire to expand freedom, rather than simply expand its own territory.”
“While America did not intend to become the world’s indispensable power, that is exactly what our economic and political freedoms have made us,” he told the crowd, castigating President Barack Obama and the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, for being too timid in facing up to dictators from Syria to China. “The free nations of the world still look to America to champion our shared ideals.”
Today Mr. Rubio makes a different, more pragmatic and more Trumpian case: that the way to keep America out of wars is to build up its strength, invest in key technologies and domestic supply chains for critical materials, and use tariffs to block threatening imports.
Mr. Waltz is less known in the foreign policy world, though he is familiar as a commentator to viewers of Fox News, including Mr. Trump. He received four Bronze Stars after multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and Africa, and worked as a junior adviser to defense secretaries Donald H. Rumsfeld and Robert M. Gates, both of whom served in the administration of George W. Bush. Mr. Waltz also advised Vice President Dick Cheney on counterterrorism. Once, that pedigree granted a young foreign policy professional entry into the neocon inner circle.
But during his time in Congress, Mr. Waltz has espoused a national security doctrine that has increasingly jelled with Mr. Trump’s. A member of the House committees on the armed services, intelligence and foreign affairs, he has chastised NATO allies for not meeting their defense military spending commitments.
He was a vociferous critic of Mr. Biden’s withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. “What no one can ever do for me, including this administration right now, is articulate a counterterrorism plan that’s realistic without us there,” Mr. Waltz said in an interview in the days after the withdrawal.
Of course, Mr. Trump had proposed a similar withdrawal just months before. Mr. Waltz had opposed that as well, introducing legislation to prevent a significant troop drawdown from Afghanistan unless the director of national intelligence could certify that the Taliban would not associate with Al Qaeda.
In 2023, Mr. Waltz led legislation that would authorize the president to use military force against Mexican drug cartels because of fentanyl trafficking, production and distribution. The bill echoed the war powers Congress gave Mr. Bush before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Both Mr. Rubio and Mr. Waltz are supporters of a more hard-line economic approach toward China, as well. Although Mr. Trump’s pending picks for Treasury secretary, commerce secretary and trade representative will take a larger part in shaping tariff and trade policy, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Waltz could play an influential role. Both have supported removing permanent normal trading relations with China — a move that would result in higher tariffs on products from the country — as well as barring U.S. investment from flowing to certain Chinese companies.
Mr. Rubio has also favored sweeping economic sanctions to penalize Beijing for human rights violations. He was the co-sponsor of a 2021 law that banned the importation of any products into the United States that were made with any materials or labor from Xinjiang, a far-western province where China has carried out a crackdown against Muslim minorities.
But those bills now read as if they come from a different era, before China’s economic downturn created new vulnerabilities, and before its uneasy partnership with Russia posed a very different, more complex threat to the West.
These are issues that did not confront the first Trump administration. And the solutions are also complex. Are they addressed with Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which the president-elect describes as a cure-all, but could cost American consumers billions and fuel inflation? With more restrictions on shipping high-end semiconductors and equipments to China — a step Mr. Biden has pioneered? Or with pouring more military resources into the Pacific region, which Democrats and Republicans have promised, but don’t have the naval resources to make happen on the scale they have imagined?
Outside experts say Mr. Trump learned something from the chaos of the first term and has adjusted accordingly. “Over the past eight years, he has collected enough acolytes to staff his foreign policy and national security team with like-minded officials,” Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, wrote this week in Foreign Affairs.
“He is far less likely to meet resistance from his own political appointees. Other checks on Trump’s policy will also be far weaker,” he said, and the result will be that “the United States will speak with one voice on foreign policy, and that voice will be Trump’s.”
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