The president-elect is also said to plan to nominate Mike Waltz as the National Security Advisor
i24NEWS
The president-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to name Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as his secretary of state, The New York Times reported on Monday citing three people familiar with his thinking.
Rubio has demonstrated strong support for Israel in the Gaza war. When asked by a peace activist late last year what he thought about the many Palestinian civilian deaths, he said, “I think Hamas is 100 percent to blame,” NYT cited.
The Florida Senator is also known for taking hard lines on China, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba in particular. He aligns with Trump’s stance on the war in Ukraine, saying that the conflict has reached a stalemate and “needs to be brought to a conclusion.”
On top of that, Trump picked Republican Representative Mike Waltz to be his national security adviser, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. A retired Army Green Beret and a Trump loyalist has been a leading critic of Chinese activity in the Asia-Pacific.
As a national security advisor, Waltz will be responsible for briefing Trump on key national security issues and coordination of different agencies. The position is not a cabinet-level role, and thus would not require Senate confirmation.
Waltz has sharply criticized president Joe Biden’s administration for undercutting Israel over the course of the Gaza and Lebanon wars. Detailing his foreign policy views in an essay for The Economist, Waltz said: “The next administration should, as Mr. Trump argued, ‘let Israel finish the job’ and ‘get it over with fast’ against Hamas.”
“They should put a credible military option on the table to make clear to the Iranians that America would stop them building nuclear weapons, and reinstate a diplomatic and economic pressure campaign to stop them and to constrain their support for terror proxies,” he wrote, adding that Washington should “maintain a military presence in the region, but with the war in Gaza and Lebanon concluded, it can transfer critical capabilities back to the Indo-Pacific.”