Trump Appointees Signal a New Hawkish China Policy

In a sweeping shift toward a hard-line approach, the new Trump administration is tipped to put some of Washington’s most ardent China critics in key foreign policy positions — signaling a potentially more confrontational stance with Beijing.

President-elect Donald Trump has announced Rep. Mike Waltz as his pick for national security adviser and is expected to nominate Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of State, according to people familiar with the transition team’s thinking. Both men have been proponents of tough China policy, advocating for a diplomatic and security pivot to Asia to counter the growing influence of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Waltz takes a “more expansive view” of America’s role in the world than other Republicans, said Richard Fontaine, chief executive at the Center for a New American Security think tank.

“There had been worry among some in the foreign policy community that Trump’s penchant for making deals and his personal chumminess with Xi Jinping would lead to some relaxation in the American position vis-a-vis China,” he said. But to gauge by his potential picks, “you can imagine a continuity in terms of the overall hawkish disposition toward China, and maybe some augmentation of that.”

Waltz has argued that Trump should aim to end the war in Ukraine, which Fontaine said he hoped did not mean walking away. “If you’re inclined to somehow abandon Ukraine,” he said, “that doesn’t just give Russia a win, it gives North Korea a win, it gives Iran a win, and it gives China a win.”

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