Trump set to appoint China critic Mike Waltz as US national security adviser

President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly decided to appoint Republican congressman Mike Waltz of Florida as his national security adviser.

Waltz, a Trump loyalist who also served in the national guard as a colonel, has criticized Chinese activity in the Asia-Pacific and has voiced the need for the United States to be ready for a potential conflict in the region.

Last week, Waltz won re-election to the US House seat representing east-central Florida, which includes Daytona Beach. He defeated Democrat James Stockton, a pastor and former president of a local NAACP branch.

Waltz is a combat-decorated Green Beret and a former White House and Pentagon policy adviser. He was first elected in 2018, replacing Republican Ron DeSantis, who ran for governor, in Florida’s sixth congressional district.

Waltz served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, and he was awarded four Bronze Stars.

Walt was one of the lawmakers appointed in July to serve on a bipartisan congressional taskforce to investigate the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.

After Waltz left the US army, he worked in the Pentagon in the George W Bush administration as policy director for former defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates.

Under former vice-president Dick Cheney, Waltz served as a counter-terrorism adviser.

In 2021, after Joe Biden ordered a chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, Waltz asked Biden to reverse course and relaunch military operations in the region. The war in Afghanistan began under Bush after the 11 September 2001 attacks.

The Intercept reported that before his run for Congress in 2018 Waltz managed a lucrative defense contracting firm with offices in Afghanistan.

Waltz has consistently expressed the need for protecting the Afghan people, saying that US “soldiers will have to go back”. Government reports have stated that US nation-building efforts resulted in the deaths of more than 48,000 civilians, over 66,000 Afghan police and military, and widespread torture.

In the latest development of Trump’s appointments, the president-elect is also expected to name senator Marco Rubio of Florida as his secretary of state, according to the New York Times. Rubio, a failed challenger to Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, was rumored to be one of the leading contenders for Trump’s vice-presidential pick before JD Vance was announced.

Since his failed run for president, Rubio has served as an informal foreign policy adviser and helped Trump prepare for his first debate against Biden in 2020.