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Mike Waltz’s Commitment to Taiwan Was Loud but Brief [1]
['Stella Robertson']
Date: 2024-11-15 08:38:20+00:00
Representative Mike Waltz has gained the reputation of being an outspoken China hawk during his relatively short political career. As Trump’s pick for national security advisor, he will likely focus on enhancing U.S. military capabilities in the Indo-Pacific, but his commitment to Taiwan is less certain.
Waltz is a Floridian with a distinguished background in military and defense, having served for 27 years in the U.S. Army and the National Guard. As a Green Beret, Waltz completed multiple tours in the Middle East and Africa and was awarded four bronze stars. Waltz served as a policy director under defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates and as a counter-terrorism advisor to former vice president Dick Cheney. He founded an analytics and training company called Metis Solutions in 2010 and was a Fox News Channel contributor before joining Congress in 2019.
Not much from Waltz’s history before 2019 can provide insight into the evolution of his thoughts on China and Taiwan. When Waltz was working at the Pentagon, China was on the rise and the U.S. didn’t yet consider it to be a direct threat. Yet Rumsfeld was wary of China’s military build-up. And Gates supported U.S. military presence in the South China Sea, ostensibly to counter China. This likely influenced Waltz, whose recent rhetoric on China and Taiwan is very much focused on building up military strength.
Waltz entered politics during an era of hawkishness. He was named to the House China Task Force in 2020, a committee of Republican lawmakers focused on coordinating China policy. This is not to be confused with the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which is more active and prominent. The China Task Force’s one major accomplishment is publishing a report on China that advocates for several updates to the U.S.’s Taiwan policy, but does not mention arms sales or shifting to a policy of strategic clarity.
In terms of legislation, in 2020, Waltz introduced a bill to prevent federal employees from using their retirement funds to inadvertently fund China’s military, as well as a bill to reduce the U.S.’s dependence on critical minerals from China. In 2021, Waltz co-introduced the Taiwan Defense Act “to maintain the ability of the U.S. Armed Forces to defeat attempts by China to invade and seize control of Taiwan.” The Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) included amendments that Waltz introduced to protect federally funded research from Chinese espionage. He also introduced an amendment for the FY23 NDAA to authorize joint military exercises with Taiwan. Waltz called for the 2022 Olympics to be moved from Beijing due to human rights concerns and for the release of Uighur detainees in 2024. He is a member of the Taiwan Caucus.
But it’s not necessarily his legislative record that has given Waltz the public reputation of being a China hawk, it is his statements in the media. Waltz was most outspoken on China and Taiwan in 2022, the same year he traveled to Taiwan to meet with then-President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文). He made numerous appearances on Fox and other networks to talk about China and Taiwan, mainly providing soundbites on the same three themes: the danger of relying on China for critical inputs, strategic clarity on Taiwan and military preparedness. He seems to echo the belief of many others in the forthcoming Trump administration that a war over Taiwan would make the war in Ukraine look like “child’s play.” He believes Xi intends to take Taiwan by 2027 and that the U.S. needs “to be clear we’ll defend Taiwan as a deterrent measure.” To bolster deterrence, Waltz thinks the U.S. needs to improve its ability to project naval power in the Indo-Pacific and transfer more arms to Taiwan.
Waltz has also discussed the importance of convincing the American public of the centrality of Taiwan to American security, which raises the question of why his focus on the island has significantly waned since 2022. On X his mention of both China and Taiwan has dropped over the past couple of years, but regarding Taiwan precipitously so — from around 40 posts in 2022 to one post in 2024 (which was not policy related). Waltz did not mention Taiwan at high-profile events about China he spoke at this year. And Waltz was not present at several Taiwan-related hearings in the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, both of which he is a member of. Perhaps, angling for national security advisor, he wanted to avoid stepping on the toes of Trump, who is not yet willing to commit to defending Taiwan.
Taken altogether, labeling Waltz as a “leading critic” of China is generous — he was indoctrinated into politics during an era of widespread hawkishness and he went on Fox a lot (many times mispronouncing “Xi” like “zee”). But what Waltz does indisputably embody is a commitment to projecting military strength in the Indo-Pacific, and this will likely be his focus as national security advisor.
While Trump and Walz certainly align on the often-mentioned notion of “peace through strength,” Waltz seems to prioritize the raw metrics of military power, and in this way is more of a traditional realist than Trump. As Trump’s former national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, wrote of Trump’s foreign policy strategy in Foreign Affairs this summer, he “adheres not to dogma but to his own instincts.” Trump believes he can influence international relations through the force of his personality. And in contrast with Waltz (and other members of the incoming Cabinet like Marco Rubio), Trump has also tended to shy away from discussing the specifics of military preparedness, preferring to focus on economic tools of coercion.
Waltz is by all accounts very solidly in Trump’s camp. Still, the differences in Waltz’s and Trump’s approaches to foreign policy underscore the difficulty of merging an establishment party with an anti-establishment leader. In the coming months, we’ll begin to see how well Trump’s Cabinet is able to mesh with each other and with the president-elect himself.
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