Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s emerging foreign-policy and national security team, China’s megaport project in Peru, and Israel’s strike on a humanitarian zone in Gaza.
Trump’s New Team
As U.S. President-elect Donald Trump swiftly assembles his next team, some of his picks for top posts have stunned and unsettled policy circles in Washington—including Republican lawmakers and former officials who served during his first presidency.
Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s emerging foreign-policy and national security team, China’s megaport project in Peru, and Israel’s strike on a humanitarian zone in Gaza.
Sign up to receive World Brief in your inbox every weekday.
Sign up to receive World Brief in your inbox every weekday.
As U.S. President-elect Donald Trump swiftly assembles his next team, some of his picks for top posts have stunned and unsettled policy circles in Washington—including Republican lawmakers and former officials who served during his first presidency.
Trump has tapped notable foreign-policy hawks for his inner circle, including Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Rep. Mike Waltz as national security advisor. Rubio is a staunch supporter of Israel who advocates a hard-line approach toward China, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela; Waltz is a Green Beret veteran and another tough-on-China lawmaker who has been one of Beijing’s fiercest critics.
Other appointments have sent shock waves through Washington. Take, for example, Trump’s defense secretary pick: Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is a decorated Army veteran, but he has little direct experience in the Pentagon or government. He has called for firing any generals involved in “woke shit,” such as diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and said that women should not serve in combat roles. (The Pentagon removed its ban on women holding front-line combat roles in 2013.)
Trump’s selection of Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general also sparked consternation among some Republican lawmakers, with Rep. Lisa Murkowski describing Gaetz as “not a serious candidate” and Sen. Susan Collins saying she was “shocked” by his nomination.
Until he resigned from Congress on Wednesday, Gaetz was facing a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use; Gaetz has denied the allegations, and his resignation has ended the probe. Last year, Gaetz was also the subject of a Justice Department sex trafficking investigation. Gaetz denied those allegations, and the department ended its probe in 2023 without charging him.
Murkowski likened Gaetz to former Rep. George Santos, who was expelled from the House of Representatives in 2023 and in August 2024 pleaded guilty to two felony fraud charges.
“If I wanted to make a joke, maybe I would say now I’m waiting for George Santos to be named,” she told the New York Times.
On Wednesday, Trump also announced that he had picked military veteran and former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence, despite her lack of direct intelligence experience. Now a fierce Trump supporter, Gabbard broke with the Democratic Party in 2022, when she registered as an independent. She has critiqued U.S. military intervention in Syria and has argued in Foreign Policy that U.S. President Joe Biden should push for a settlement in the Russia-Ukraine war—not Ukraine’s victory.
John Bolton, one of Trump’s former national security advisors, described Gabbard’s nomination as “hilarious” in a post on X. “She’s totally not competent for the job,” he wrote. Trump ousted Bolton, who served as the third national security advisor of his first term, in 2019.
“The basic problem is that [Trump] can’t tell the difference between the national interest and his personal interest,” Bolton told FP’s Keith Johnson. “Their connection is fealty to Trump, not loyalty. Loyalty is a good thing, but fealty, that’s a medieval idea of being subservient,” Bolton added. “He just wants yes-men and yes-women.”
Rubio, Hegspeth, Gaetz, and Gabbard all require Senate confirmation before they can serve in their appointed roles; Waltz, as national security advisor, does not.
Megaport in Peru. Chinese President Xi Jinping inaugurated what is expected to be a $3.6 billion megaport project in Peru on Thursday, as part of this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. The project is one of Beijing’s biggest regional infrastructure investments in the past two decades. However, China appears to be turning away from those kinds of high-risk, high-cost infrastructure deals, as journalist Mie Hoejris Dahl has written for Foreign Policy.
Beijing is “very eager to inaugurate this new mega port on the Pacific coast of Latin America. They say that it’s going to increase connectivity between the Chinese economy and pretty much every country in South America,” said Ryan Berg, the director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It illustrates the depths of Chinese influence in Peru and how that influence has been burgeoning over the last several years,” he added.
The port project reflects Beijing’s broader bid to expand cooperation and deepen its economic ties in Latin America. Next week, Xi will also travel to Brazil for the G-20 summit.
Israel strikes humanitarian zone. As Israel continued its third consecutive day of strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Thursday, Israeli forces also bombed a densely populated area in southern Gaza that the Israeli government had previously designated as a humanitarian zone for displaced Palestinians, according to Doctors Without Borders (abbreviated in French as MSF) and the Palestinian news agency Wafa.
The strike killed at least one person, who was a child, and injured more than 20 other people, Wafa reported; a Palestinian Civil Defense spokesperson told the Washington Post that the strike hit tents sheltering displaced people.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that it had issued warnings ahead of the strike, which “struck and dismantled a loaded launcher located in the humanitarian area.” The launcher was directed toward Israel, the statement said.
In a post on X, MSF condemned the strike and said that it was not given an advance evacuation order. “The blast was huge. We didn’t receive an official evacuation order from Israeli forces, we were notified by the residents,” said a quote attributed to Myriam, an MSF coordinator. “Both staff and patients fled the clinic. We later found the facility with equipment destroyed, and shrapnel damaged the desalination plant.”
Blasts in Brazil. Brazilian authorities are investigating two explosions that occurred near the country’s Supreme Court on Wednesday night, rattling the nation as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva prepares to host the G-20 summit next week. Officials have characterized the attack as a suicide bombing, and said the suspected attacker—who was killed in one of the blasts—unsuccessfully ran for local office in 2020 as a member of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s political party. Bolsonaro condemned the attack on social media.
“The investigation will reveal if there are other connections, if there are other networks that are behind it,” said Andrei Passos Rodrigues, the director general of the Federal Police, at a news conference on Thursday. Officials are still investigating the motive of the crime, he said, although it is being treated as a “terrorist act” and indicates that “extremist groups are active.”
Moo Deng, the beloved baby pygmy hippo from Thailand, has inspired such a large global following that there are Moo Deng t-shirts, Moo Deng socks, Moo Deng mugs, and even Moo Deng-themed candles.
Her fans will be thrilled to know that she now also has an official song, released in four languages: Thai, English, Chinese, and Japanese. The music video for the song—aptly titled “Moodeng Moodeng”—features clips of the tubby hippo, set against repetitive lyrics like “boing boing boing/mommy, mommy, play with me.”
The post Trump’s Top Picks Send Shock Waves Through Washington appeared first on Foreign Policy.
