Trump eyeing China hawk Mike Waltz as national security adviser

Florida congressman and former Green Beret has called for new accounability at Pentagon more aggressive posture towards Iran and China

Donald Trump has asked Republican Florida congressman Mike Waltz to serve as his national security adviser, multiple news outlets report.

“President-Elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second Administration soon,” Karoline Leavitt, spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, told The Independent. “Those decisions will be announced when they are made.”

The Independent has contacted Waltz for comment.

Reacting to the reported offer, former Florida governor Jeb Bush praised Waltz on X as a “great choice” and a “patriot.”

If Waltz joins the Trump White House, he’ll confront a number of complicated national security issues, including Israel’s expanding regional war with Hamas and Lebanon, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and competition with China.

The highly influential position does not require Senate confirmation.

Mike Waltz is known as a sharp China critic (Getty Images for Concordia Summi)

Waltz, a former Green Beret and policy adviser to Defense Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, is known for advocating a tougher position towards Iran and China, a country which he argues is locked in a new Cold War with the U.S.

In 2023, Waltz introduced a bill calling for more U.S. cooperation with Indo-Pacific nations to counter Chinese and other “malign” influences in the Asia-Pacific region.

He has advocated for Europe to do more to support Ukraine’s fight against Russia and has called on the U.S. to define more clearly its objectives and timeline in supporting the country, deriding the current policy as a “blank check” to Ukraine.

“The Biden administration has neither explained the American objective in Ukraine nor his strategy to achieve it,” Waltz wrote in a Fox News op-ed last year. “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?”

Waltz has been a sharp critic of the Biden administration’s national security policy on issues like the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and Chinese spying in the U.S. His wife, Dr. Julia Nesheiwat, served as Homeland Security Adviser in the Trump administration.

“I have never in my lifetime seen the world falling apart like it is under Joe Biden,” Waltz told Florida Politics in July. “We had a president who defeated ISIS, broke Iran, stood with Israel, always stood with our allies, made China pay. You didn’t see any spy balloons under President Trump, did you?”

He also claimed the military under Joe Biden was focused on “DEI” and “pronouns.”

After Trump won in 2024, Waltz told NPR the new administration has a strong “mandate” to return to the previous Trump administration’s policies on issues like the border.

He also called for more oversight of the Pentagon.

“We still have a Pentagon that cannot audit itself, despite years and years of trying the basics of understanding where every tax dollar goes,” he said. “It seems - I can go through the weapons systems. They just, over and over again, cost twice as much, deliver half as much and take twice as long as originally planned. And there is a whole slew of new technologies from Silicon Valley and elsewhere that are really chomping at the bit to help with our defense and security issues, and they can’t break through the bureaucracy.”

The Trump transition team has filled a number of key positions in recent days, choosing New York Republican Representative Elise Stefanik to serve as ambassador to the UN, anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, Tom Homan his border czar, and former New York Republican Representative Lee Zeldin to lead the EPA.