Trump’s National Security Appointees, With Christopher M. Tuttle (Transition 2025, Episode 3)

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the third episode in a special presidential transition series on The President's Inbox. From now until Inauguration Day, I am sitting down with experts to unpack who will staff the Donald Trump administration and how it will likely approach the many foreign policy challenges it faces. This week's topic is Trump's picks for national security positions.

With me to discuss the people that President-Elect Trump has so far named to foreign policy and national security posts in his second administration is Chris Tuttle. Chris is a senior fellow here at the Council where his work focuses on the politics and processes behind U.S. foreign policy. Before his current stint at CFR, Chris served as the policy director of the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations under its chairman, Republican Senator Bob Corker. Chris has also held positions in the U.S. State Department and in the U.S. House of Representatives. Chris, thank you for coming back on The President's Inbox.

TUTTLE:
Always great to be here, Jim. Thanks.

LINDSAY:
So Chris, President-Elect Trump made a number of appointments or nominations over the last week. Give me your overall assessment of the team he is assembling in the foreign policy national security field.

TUTTLE:
Sure. First, I think it's important to point out that even more so than other administrations, Trump is going to run his own foreign policy. The advisors can tell us a few things about where things might go, but where I think foreign policy is likely to head is directly to the primary source, which is Donald Trump. And I think that if the past can serve as a guide to us that Trump is going to run his own foreign policy and that advisors are going to have limited capability to actually steer policy beyond what the president might like.

So what we have coming together is a very diverse team, but so diverse as to not necessarily have a whole lot of cohesion, at least as not yet. We've got Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz who are more traditional internationalist style, foreign policy Republicans. We've got people like Tulsi Gabbard who is a former Democrat and kind of all over the place in terms of positions that she's held over the course of her career. We've got Elise Stefanik heading to the United Nations, very strongly pro-Israel. We've got Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and again, very strongly pro-Israel. So we'll see how it all comes out in the end. And I also would not underestimate the power of the secretary of the treasury in all this, who has not been named yet, but that's a very important national security position that often goes overlooked when I'm thinking about where a president might head on foreign policy.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Chris, there's a lot there to dig into. Let's begin with your first point about the foreign policy of the Trump administration being essentially Donald Trump's foreign policy and that he is going to set basically the parameters of that. I hear that argument and I understand it certainly for big picture issues, think Ukraine, think China, think the Middle East, but foreign policy is just such a huge field. Do you think there are areas in which his advisors are going to be critical that maybe things that Donald Trump either doesn't care about or is a tertiary issue for him?

TUTTLE:
Yeah, absolutely. Implementation is really super important. In addition to all the things that the president has to focus on, which are all the big picture issues, there are lots of different issues within the auspices of these various officials that they will be able to steer policy on. Trump, if it's not a core issue, it's not being raised at National Security Council meetings. One thing that comes to mind is Marco Rubio on Latin America perhaps, aside from immigration, that's not an issue that's necessarily core to Donald Trump. Marco Rubio has a long history when it comes to countries like Cuba and Venezuela and Bolivia and other countries in Latin America. That's one issue area that comes to mind, but there are dozens of those types of issues. I was really referring to those core issues that you mostly read about when it comes to foreign policy in the news.

LINDSAY:
Looking at these picks, do we have a sense of what Trump will definitely make his top priorities or something about how he will approach them?

TUTTLE:
Yes. I think first and foremost is China, and we saw a China policy under the first Trump administration that was primarily economic in nature. I think you're going to see a broadening of that policy area, and I think you're going to see beyond just the economic and the tariffs and those kinds of things that we all read about. We've got Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz who are both very prominent China hawks, talk about the need for the United States to have presence in the Indo-Pacific. I think that will be an interesting dynamic with Waltz and Rubio both being China hawks and recognizing the importance of having friends and allies in the Indo-Pacific, in the neighborhood and how that plays with Trump's skepticism about alliances and alliances being a way for other countries to sort of free ride.

LINDSAY:
Now, one of the things you mentioned was as you look at this team that is being formed, and again, not all of the picks have been announced yet. You mentioned the secretary of treasury, which hasn't been announced at the time we're speaking, and also there are a number of positions below the cabinet level that are also quite important in shaping both the formulation and policy and its execution. But one of the things that struck me is that you said as you look at this team, you don't see cohesion. What precisely do you mean by that and why might it matter?

TUTTLE:
Well, I think first of all, we've got a team of, in some ways converts. We've got a team that used to have some positions and now have modified their positions. For example, Tulsi Gabbard and her previous statements. She met with Bashar al-Assad-

LINDSAY:
President of Syria, dictator of Syria.

TUTTLE:
Exactly. Certainly no friend of Israel. But I think most—and I don't mean to keep focusing on Rubio and but—they have changed their position or the position has morphed with circumstances. If you look at a voting record on Ukraine, you've got both Rubio and Waltz being pretty consistently in support of assistance to Ukraine, and that has in the last year, year and a half changed. Both of them voted against the emergency supplemental appropriations. So there's a question of certain-

LINDSAY:
Part of the reasoning they gave in voting against the emergency appropriations was because they wanted to do things on the southern border first, which wasn't a complete rejection of U.S. support for Ukraine. In fact, Waltz, as I understand it, has been critical of the Biden administration for not doing enough.

TUTTLE:
That is absolutely true, and it's not just the southern border. There's also a strong thread within the foreign policy community of saying that we should not be focusing on Ukraine, we should be focusing on the primary threat, which is China. So I'm just saying that there is a differential between where Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz had been and where they are today, but then there's also the differential between where each of those folks are today versus others. There's not really a cohesive central message, at least not yet that has been formulated by this team.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So let's talk a little bit about Mike Waltz since he is going to be the national security advisor and the national security advisor has at least two primary responsibilities. One is to coordinate the foreign policy decision-making process across the United States government. So he is going to be the one tasked with trying to bring coherence and cohesion to what I think you quite rightly describe as a group that has very different views, but he's also responsible for providing his own personal advice to the president. So he's both an advisor, but supposed to seek to be an honest broker. From what you know of Waltz's career on Capitol Hill, what sort of strengths or weaknesses do you think he brings to that task?

TUTTLE:
Well, I think first of all, even prior to his time on Capitol Hill, he's been in the military for almost thirty years. He's worked in Special Forces. He served in the theaters of operations that have been most significant—Iraq, Afghanistan—and served in really critical positions on the ground. So I think he brings an important perspective in that regard. With regard to Capitol Hill, he sits on the Armed Services Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees. So that's excellent experience for understanding how the national security guts work, exercising oversight of those agencies. So I think he's an excellent pick. He actually does understand how each of these agencies works, at least from a congressional perspective. Now that's different from an executive branch perspective. However, there are not a whole lot of people within the Republican realm with us not having really spent a lot of time in the White House over the past several decades who know where all the buttons are, who have served—the last appointee under the Bush administration left in 2009—so of the picks, I think he's a good one.

LINDSAY:
So let's also talk about Marco Rubio. You mentioned that he has a deep and abiding interest in issues related to foreign affairs, but also particularly Latin America. But you've also mentioned in talking about Waltz not having executive experience, neither does Rubio and part of the job of the secretary of state is to represent and run a pretty large organization, maybe not the largest in the U.S. government—in fact, it's one of the smallest—nonetheless, pretty sizable organization that spans the globe. And at the second level, he also is supposed to be an advisor to the president, and he and Donald Trump have had a very famous relationship going back to the 2016 campaign when they were rivals and Trump thumped Rubio and won the nomination. How do you think this is all going to work both as Rubio, the person in the building and Rubio as the person who was supposed to be speaking on behalf of the president who many people may not believe he can speak for?

TUTTLE:
That's a great question. Rubio, having been on the Foreign Relations Committee for as long as he has, he does have that knowledge of the inside of the State Department, but that is different from executive branch knowledge and getting in there and actually understanding how all the pieces work together. Not to mention managing a group of career civil servants and foreign service officers is a challenge, but you've got him as somebody who understands, I think, the basics of the State Department. But it is certainly challenging for anybody without executive branch experience to come in and do that. In terms of the personality and the history that they have and the "little Marco" comments and that kind of thing, I think it remains to be seen.

I was surprised by the pick given the prior relationship. I think it is an open question as to how well they get along and how much Trump really listens to Marco Rubio. I mean, he could be a Rex Tillerson type where he doesn't really get much in terms of Trump being willing to talk to him or listen to him, or he could turn out to be a Mike Pompeo where he ended up being a trusted advisor, remains to be seen.

LINDSAY:
We've gotten a fair way into our conversation, Chris, and one name we haven't mentioned is Trump's pick to be secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, the news media personality with Fox News. Talk to me about Pete Hegseth.

TUTTLE:
There's not a whole lot to know, at least not yet about Pete Hegseth. In terms of broad policy comments, there has not been a lot to go on. So I think we really just don't know the answer to that. Aside from some of his commentary criticizing the Pentagon for having the wrong priorities—focusing on what he described as "woke management style" and some of the things that the Pentagon has been doing in terms of what he would view as social activism— there's not a ton to go on in terms of a Foreign Affairs article laying out his worldview or anything like that. We really don't know much.

LINDSAY:
Does he have any executive branch experience or experience running a large organization? After all, the Department of Defense is the largest agency in the U.S. government, spends something on the order of $800 to $850 billion a year and has 3 million people working for it. It's a pretty big organization to try to run.

TUTTLE:
Not that I'm aware of. Now, he does have military experience—he's Army National Guard and deployed—so he does have that experience having worked inside the beast as a military person. But in terms of the big management question, I don't see anything in his resume or biography indicating that he has that kind of experience.

LINDSAY:
Should we be worried that there is that lack of managerial experience or, as some people have said, this is going to be about bringing fresh perspectives to the Department of Defense to shake it up and it badly needs to be shaken up?

TUTTLE:
Yeah, I think this is what Trump is looking for, actually. He's looking for people who in his view can do the job but are not so co-opted by the machine that they're not afraid to go in and break the machine in part in order to rebuild it.

LINDSAY:
Well, obviously the challenge is knowing how to break it in the right way because it's pretty easy to break organizations and then regret what you've done to it.

TUTTLE:
Yes, exactly. That's exactly right. And so we'll see. I think there are some questions about whether or not Hegseth actually gets the nomination. There are some things out there that are at least preliminarily looking at it, some derogatory information. Now, I think likely he will get through, you would need to lose four Republican senators in order for him not to be confirmed. And there are other targets out there that I think are more likely to not get confirmed.

LINDSAY:
I want to come back to the confirmation process. Before we do, let's just go through a few more names. President-Elect Trump has also listed a number of people who are going to be responsible for his Middle East policy. He has named former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, to be ambassador to Israel. He's named real estate developer—his golfing buddy Steven Witkoff—to be a special envoy for the Middle East. He's also sending Elise Stefanik to Turtle Bay to be the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. She has been critical of both the UN and has a staunch defender of Israel. How do you see that team working? Because while Stefanik has clearly worked this issue a lot, neither Governor Huckabee nor Mr. Witkoff have anything—as best I can tell—in the way of diplomatic experience, let alone deep experience in Middle Eastern negotiations.

TUTTLE:
So let's start with Huckabee. What are you looking for in an ambassador? You're certainly looking for some experienced knowledge of the area, but you're also looking for someone who's going to be an effective emissary in the way that the president wants to the country they're being sent to. And I think Huckabee actually is, in some ways, if you are President Trump, a good pick. Trump is a staunch supporter of Israel, will I think permit Israel to take the gloves off even more as opposed to the Biden administration, which has hemmed Israel in when it comes to the Israel-Hamas war. So I think if you're the Israelis, you're pretty happy about Huckabee coming in and I don't know that Trump is going to be delivering tough messages to the Israelis so much as having somebody there who the Israelis view as a friend.

Now, on the flip side of that, there is some question about whether or not Trump is going to want to put some pressure on the Israelis to wind this thing down so he can move along with the Abraham Accords. So this is the Abraham Accords, the agreements that were struck during the first Trump administration, normalizing relations between the Israelis, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Trump would very much like to get Saudi Arabia and potentially other countries to do the same. And the war is the primary obstacle to making that happen. So to the extent that Huckabee will be in a position to deliver maybe some tough messages from Trump saying, "you need to wrap this thing up and we need to get a cease-fire done," I think it's an open question.

LINDSAY:
At that point I would say the pivotal thing there is if Trump decides to put pressure on the Israelis. So far we haven't seen signs of that. Indeed, looking at decision-making within Israel, certainly members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition have decided that Trump is going to give them the green light—or they're going to try to create the conditions where President Trump will give them the green light. And that would certainly confound the efforts of Mr. Witkoff to be the special envoy for the Middle East because the Saudis essentially upped the price to get them to sign on to the Abraham Accords. Stephen Cook and I discussed this last week on The President's Inbox, but I mean I think that there is going to be a bit of a challenge, because there are expectations in the Arab world and certainly in the Persian Gulf that the Trump administration is going to bring this war to an end.

TUTTLE:
Yeah, all that is correct and totally agree. So on Witkoff, I think that is a real unknown. We just don't know exactly what his experience is beyond the small things that we've read about his enthusiastic support for Israel and his relationship with Trump.

LINDSAY:
Well, as a special envoy, having a close relationship with the president can be critical.

TUTTLE:
It can be critical, but also those diplomatic skills to be able to go over and do what needs to be done, I think is an open question.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, it certainly helps to know both the issues and the players well to be able to negotiate particularly where tensions are so high and the interests are so divergent.

TUTTLE:
Particularly in the Middle East where there are so many different players and knowing precisely who's where, when, what their positions are and what you do in one way may have a secondary and tertiary effect you have not thought of or planned on. It's like a Rubik's Cube—you're trying to get one side all orange and but trying to do so, you're flipping everything else around.

LINDSAY:
I think the other interesting about having a special envoy is that it can create tensions within an administration because the secretary of state is the person who does America's diplomacy and now all of a sudden you have somebody else in the room, somebody who can say, "I have a closer relationship to the president than you do." And the history of special envoy has been mixed, shall we say.

TUTTLE:
Yes, mixed at best.

LINDSAY:
And the Senate, which you once worked at, has been unhappy with having the proliferation of special envoys.

TUTTLE:
That's right. And actually when I was on the Foreign Relations Committee, we tried with our State Department Authorization Act to force them to be Senate-confirmed. We weren't able to succeed. However, in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, they did put in a requirement that special envoys receive Senate approval. Although the Biden administration was able to skirt that with John Podesta, who is special envoy for climate by essentially writing up a job description that was so nondescript for them to be able to claim that they didn't need to go through Senate confirmation. So if the Biden administration were willing to do that, I can't imagine that the Trump administration wouldn't try to do the same.

LINDSAY:
I certainly haven't seen anything in the press about whether the Trump administration is going to approach Mr. Witkoff's position as requiring Senate confirmation. But there actually is an important constitutional issue here because the framers gave the Senate the right to provide its advice of consent on nominations. And if you create an apparatus that allows an end-run around the Senate's role, you diminish the Senate's role and obviously increase presidential authority.

TUTTLE:
That's right. That's right. And you and I have talked about this many times about the Congress either abdicating its role or the executive branch effectively running roughshod over Congress and many of the problems that creates, and they're problems that are bipartisan. One administration tries to circumvent Congress and everybody thinks that, the supporters of the president think, "Oh, this is great. It's supportive of a policy we like." And then when the shoe's on the other foot, they change their tune.

LINDSAY:
As a former secretary of the Navy once put it, "I am a strong president man when my party is in the White House, I'm a strong Congress advocate when the other party is in the White House."

TUTTLE:
Well, at least they were honest.

LINDSAY:
Certainly were. I want to finish up talking about some of the individuals by looking at the appointments for national intelligence director and director of the CIA. We've already mentioned Tulsi Gabbard. You've spoken a bit about her, but there's also John Ratcliffe, the former Texas Congressman who was previously director of National Intelligence. He is Trump's pick to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Now, I think it's important to stress that, in formal terms, as we think about the policymaking process in the U.S. government for foreign policy, the DNI and the director of the CIA are not seen as being policy positions. They are intelligence positions. They're supposed to be providing information, not drafting up policy proposals. But what do you make of Gabbard and of Ratcliffe having the intelligence portfolios that Trump's giving them?

TUTTLE:
Yeah, I'll start with Gabbard. Gabbard is somebody who's gotten to know Trump well on the campaign trail, views her as loyal and views her as somebody who's going to be willing to go into the intelligence community and change things pretty dramatically.

LINDSAY:
He's not a fan of the intelligence community because of what he experienced during his first administration.

TUTTLE:
That's exactly right. So I think that he views her first and foremost as a change agent going into the intelligence community and somebody who has a reputation, I think within the intelligence community as being questionable, which I think Trump likes. John Ratcliffe, as what used to be director of Central Intelligence but now is the CIA director, a player within the first Trump administration, maybe not a major player within the Trump administration. I don't know that we have particular data points as to where he wants policy to go in terms of strategy, that kind of thing. But as you point out, these are intelligence positions. They are not strictly speaking advisory positions.

LINDSAY:
So let me ask you, Chris, as you look at this, you have a team that has divisions in terms of worldview, someone like Marco Rubio, I guess you could say is an internationalist, someone like Tulsi Gabbard is what we might call a restrainer or a non-interventionist. You also have different degrees of experience running large organizations. Some people have a lot of foreign policy experience on this incoming team. Some of them don't have a lot of foreign policy experience, so they're going to come in and shake things up. But as they do so are we going to see some significant firings of existing bureaucratic officials? There's been all this talk about so-called Schedule F, which is this plan to reclassify civil servants so they don't have the typical protections that civil servants have. Their positions would in fact become political positions, meaning they could be fired at will. Do we have any sense whether that talk is going to translate into reality, and if so, how would that play into having an administration with some people who really don't know the issues that well losing people who have been working these issues for years?

TUTTLE:
Yeah, I think the effort is real. I think there are legal questions surrounding it, so we'll see what happens. But I think it's definitely something that the Trump administration is going to try. As far as the diminishment of the capacity within the agencies to effectively advise, I think you will see some of that, not necessarily from the people who might get moved out as Schedule F employees, but by others who decide to leave and not stick around in their civil service positions or foreign service positions because of what they see either as the policy or as being under threat by this new Schedule F process. But again, I think the effort is real. I think there are legal questions surrounding it and whether or not they're actually going to be able to get it done, but I think there is some legitimate concern about a hollowing out in terms of the intellectual base and the knowledge that is needed to conduct foreign policy. That said, the Trump administration would argue that we need fresh thinking and that many times bureaucrats become stuck in certain ways of doing things that are counterproductive.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about your former place of employment, the United States Senate. We've already alluded to the advice and consent role that the Senate plays in the confirmation process. There's been a lot of talk about whether or not the Senate will go along with these nominations and it's taking place against the backdrop of two other nominations we haven't spoken of. One of them being Matt Gaetz to be attorney general and the other being Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be secretary of health and human services. And those appointments have been criticized by a number of people, not just on the Democratic side of the aisle, but I think by a fair number of Republicans. Do you think it's realistic that the United States Senate would vote not to confirm Donald Trump's nominees? And I ask that against the backdrop of the fact that the last time the Senate declined to approve a nomination was back in 1989 when a Democratic majority in the United States Senate declined to confirm Senator John Tower, Republican of Texas.

TUTTLE:
Yeah, I think it's very unlikely, at least on the national security team side, that you're going to see any of these nominees not get confirmed.

LINDSAY:
Barring the release of some person.

TUTTLE:
Barring the release of some new information that changes the conversation, in which case the administration may in fact just pull the nomination rather than risk defeat in the Senate. But I don't see a scenario where any of these nominees do not get confirmed. The Republican members of the Senate are seeing a president who, whether they like him or not, has the power to control what happens in their primary election campaigns. And a president who also has come in with a sizable number of votes, he's won the popular vote, and this is what the American people voted for. So I think Trump is in a very strong position to push for his nominees to get through, and it's going to be really difficult to get four Republican members to vote against anyone, at least on the national security team side.

LINDSAY:
My guess would be if any nomination goes down, wouldn't that make it less likely that other nominations would go down? It's hard for me to imagine that the Senate would just vote no, no, no on a series of...Or am I just imagining?

TUTTLE:
No, that's right. Because you would have probably the members who would vote against, say, a Matt Gaetz or a Robert Kennedy Jr., they would really be testing the president's patience by repeatedly voting against Trump nominees. So I think it's likely that members view it as having one opportunity to say, "No, we're going to say no to this particular nominee," which actually clears the way for them to probably have to vote yes on some of the other nominees they view as slightly less offensive.

LINDSAY:
So looking forward, Chris, are there other appointments that you're keeping an eye on to see who comes to fill them?

TUTTLE:
Yeah, I'm looking very much at the Treasury secretary nominee and also USTR, the U.S. trade representative, because I think those are going to be absolutely critical positions in the next administration because while it's not strictly considered foreign policy that economic diplomacy and economic tools of statecraft are going to be a primary go-to item in the toolbox for Donald Trump.

LINDSAY:
I agree with you on that, Chris, and I think that that's going to be a very interesting thing to follow, and there'll be a real potential for there to be some very significant differences, not necessarily on the goal or even on the tactics, but how to sequence them, how to roll them out in essence, how far to go, how fast to go with what message as you go.

TUTTLE:
Absolutely. And how to integrate those tools of economic statecraft with the broader national security strategy. Not to mention the reality that some of these tariffs are going to put strain on relationships and within alliances that some on the national security team might view as important.

LINDSAY:
On that very diplomatic note, I'm going to close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Chris Tuttle, senior fellow here at the Council. Chris, as always, thank you for joining me.

TUTTLE:
Thanks, Jim. Always glad to be here.

LINDSAY:
This presidential transition series is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy and peace. More information at Carnegie.org. Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us your review. We'd love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page through The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.