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US President-elect Donald Trump has picked former a army special forces veteran and noted China hawk, Michael Waltz, for the crucial National Security Advisor post in the White House, reports said on Monday.
Waltz looks set to be a key advisor in the incoming adminstration as it faces a raft of foreign policy challenges, including the wars in Ukraine, Lebanon and Gaza.
The New York Times and CNN reported his impending appointment on Monday, citing unnamed sources.
The Florida congressman delivered a speech praising Trump at the Republican National Convention in July in which he called for “peace through America’s strength”.
Asked about Trump’s plans to end the war in Ukraine, he told CNN on election night last week that there was “a way to drive this war to an end, we can do it economically, we can do it diplomatically.”
He mentioned specifically enforcing sanctions on Russia’s energy sector, having previously dubbed the country a “gas station with nukes”.
“You could win this economically,” he said during an interview to promote his book “Hard Truths: Think and Lead Like a Green Beret” last month which also suggested flooding the oil market with US crude to drive down prices.
He said “just pouring more billions in (to Ukraine) is the definition of insanity at this point,” he told an interviewer at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute.
On China, he wrote in his book that America faced an “existential struggle” with the Chinese Communist Party.
He expressed concern about what he termed a “1930s-era, Nazi Germany-style military build up” in China during a talk at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation last month.
In his speech at the Republican Convention, Waltz also focused on his desire to see “accountability” for Washington’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 under President Joe Biden.
He called it “a stain on our national conscience” and praised Trump for promising to release official documents and communications over the withdrawal which could prove to be a major embarrassment for the Biden administration.
Waltz served in Afghanistan during a 27-year career in the army.
He has extensive experience in Congress, sitting on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committee in the House of Representatives and the Foreign Affairs Committee.