Representative Michael Waltz of Florida, whom President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen to be his national security adviser, is a former Green Beret and three-term congressman who established himself early on Capitol Hill as a key hawkish voice on matters of national security.
Mr. Waltz, who received four Bronze Stars after multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and Africa, has the pedigree of the type of conservative who once espoused the G.O.P. orthodoxy on foreign policy. At the Pentagon, he worked as a defense adviser to defense secretaries Donald H. Rumsfeld and Robert M. Gates. He advised then-Vice President Dick Cheney on counterterrorism.
But during his time in Congress, Mr. Waltz has espoused a national security doctrine that has increasingly gelled with Mr. Trump’s worldview. A member of the Armed Services, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees, he has chastised NATO allies for not meeting their military spending commitments and taken a hard line on China and Iran.
He has deep connections to the Trump administration.
Even during his first term in Congress, Mr. Waltz caught the eye of the Trump White House with his national security credentials. In 2020, in the days after Mr. Trump authorized the drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran, Mr. Waltz was included in a small group of Republicans invited to the White House who received a briefing on the strike. He frequently appears on Fox News as an expert on matters of national security.
His wife, Julia Nesheiwat, was homeland security adviser in the first Trump administration.
His hawkish worldview extends from Mexico to Iran to Afghanistan.
Since he was elected to Congress in 2019 to represent a district in eastern Florida, Mr. Waltz has displayed a hawkish outlook on Iran and China, but also on Mexico and Afghanistan.
He was a vociferous critic of President Biden’s precipitous withdrawal of U.S. 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.
Mr. Waltz had also opposed withdrawing large numbers of troops from Afghanistan during the Trump administration without stringent conditions, and he introduced 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 based on their fentanyl trafficking, production and distribution. The bill mirrored the war powers Congress gave former President George W. Bush before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
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