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How Michael Waltz might guide White House foreign policy 

What Waltz’s 2014 memoir tells us about Trump’s next national security advisor.

- January 14, 2025
Congressman Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) meets with Florida National Guardsmen deployed to Washington D.C., on June 8, 2020 (US Army photo by Sgt. Leia Tascarini).

One of the earliest appointments that president-elect Donald Trump announced last fall was naming Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) as assistant to the president for national security – more commonly known as the national security advisor. Waltz, a three-term member of Congress, has worked extensively on defense and foreign affairs, drawing on his prior experience as a combat veteran and as a civilian policy official in the Pentagon and White House.

Waltz released a 2014 memoir entitled, Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret’s Battles from Washington to Afghanistan. The book details his roughly decade-long involvement with the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, as a policy civilian official in different offices in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President – as well as his time as an Army Special Forces officer (first on active duty and then, for the years discussed in the memoir, as a National Guardsman).

Looking for clues in Waltz’s 2014 memoir

Can this decade-old memoir tell us anything about how Waltz might help Trump steer national security? There are good reasons to think so. After all, Good Authority editor Elizabeth Saunders has argued persuasively that leaders’ beliefs before they assume high office about the nature of threats and the best ways to confront them have enduring effects for their subsequent behavior in an often ambiguous world. These pre-office beliefs give them an imperfect toolkit that they then employ when confronting new problems. 

Importantly, Waltz wrote his memoir long before Trump’s first term in office – and many months before Trump even announced his candidacy for president. More recently, Waltz has had to adapt his public statements to Trump’s preferences, but this memoir was free of that ideational interference. (This earlier book is also much more substantive than the less weighty, more explicitly political book that Waltz released in fall 2024.)

These four key takeaways from the 2014 memoir give important clues about how Waltz might confront foreign policy challenges in the Trump White House.

1. Work with allies and partners – when they can be a force multiplier

The most central element of Waltz’s worldview – at least as expressed in the book – comes from his career as a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces, more commonly known as the Green Berets. Created in the 1950s, the Green Berets were supposed to be experts in guerrilla and counter-guerrilla warfare. To do both tasks, Green Beret training and doctrine emphasize working with a host military force to amplify the effectiveness of that force. “We tried to make friends and let them find our enemies for us. We learned local cultures and languages to work by, with, and through local members of host nations,” Waltz explains. (Waltz offers a harder-edged variant of this line in his more recent 2024 book, where he says Green Berets “like to find our friends and train them to kill our enemies.”)

Waltz’s deployments to Afghanistan involved constant negotiations with foreign militaries to achieve U.S. objectives. While he is more dismissive of foreign partners that sit around the base and avoid risk, he is also skeptical of units too focused on “kill[ing] baddies” than working with the Afghans. Waltz frequently argues in his book that the United States needed more time and more troops – and especially more information about local circumstances – to win the Afghan counterinsurgency. This is not an account by someone inherently dismissive of allies and international partners, however. Waltz may oversee an America First foreign policy, but nothing in the book suggests Waltz desires an America Alone policy.

2. NATO needs to level up

When he does criticize international partners, Waltz is most critical of U.S. allies in Europe. He argues America’s European partners often contributed inadequately sized and under-resourced troop deployments to Afghanistan. These forces, he claims, did not have the freedom to operate in the ways necessary to fight and win a war.

This is in part because European units were unable or unwilling to help Afghans win their war, in Waltz’s view. “The Europeans just either didn’t care to, or didn’t know how to, partner with the Afghans operationally,” he laments. He recounts an episode in which an Afghan colleague criticized his experience dealing with a particular French unit: “This is not how you should treat an Afghan officer in his own country,” the colleague told Waltz. “I think they believe we are still a colony.”

Even while critical, Waltz empathized with many of the European units in Afghanistan, noting, “The bottom line was that most of the NATO militaries, even the supposedly elite units, had seriously atrophied after years of paltry defense spending.” On top of this, units from NATO countries faced tight constraints on their operational conduct as their elected political leaders sought to avoid military casualties in the deployed forces, or local civilian casualties. 

Waltz points out that the variations in NATO capabilities and willingness to undertake certain tasks had direct downsides, but also complicated already labyrinthine command and control arrangements in Afghanistan. He concludes in the memoir that the NATO involvement in the war frequently did “more harm than good,” especially in insurgency-prone areas. And he is dismissive of what he frequently saw as a misguided project to show NATO relevance in the 21st century, without considering whether NATO was truly the right tool for the difficult task at hand. As Waltz contemplates U.S. policy toward Europe and Ukraine, there is little in the memoir to indicate that his extensive experience working alongside Europeans made him a trans-Atlanticist romantic. At a minimum, Waltz seems likely to support Trump’s demands that NATO increase its defense spending.

In Waltz’s telling, many of the NATO partner forces in Afghanistan exhibited a supersized aversion to civilian casualties – and he also argues this aversion also hampered the U.S.-led war effort. Waltz’s theory of the U.S. defeat focuses much more on overcautious troops doing too little rather than overly cavalier troops risking too much. While Waltz admires “restraint” – a key theme in his 2024 book – his narrative of the Afghan war notes too much American restraint rather than too little. He is well aware of the problem of civilian casualties. In fact, he starts his memoir with the story of a young Afghan girl caught in the crossfire and killed by the Afghan National Police unit he was working alongside during a mission. 

Yet, while other accounts of the U.S. failure in Afghanistan have emphasized indiscriminate or perverse U.S. targeting, which wound up killing innocent civilians or local Afghan partners rather than the Taliban, that is not Waltz’s narrative. Instead, he emphasizes repeatedly how top-down directives against civilian casualties were amplified and distorted – in his view – as they were implemented by the layers of military bureaucracy. One criticism of Joe Biden’s foreign policy is that it was run by people with legal and academic training looking to control inherently uncontrollable processes. Waltz appears to believe that militaries need latitude, even if that latitude occasionally has tragic and deadly consequences. The alternative to that latitude is defeat, Waltz appears to believe.

3. Offense can be preferable to defense

Waltz’s policy career on Afghanistan included an early stint in the Pentagon’s counternarcotics shop. As has been extensively documented elsewhere, there was an extensive and oscillating debate in Washington and Kabul about the net effect of an aggressive policy to eradicate opium poppy fields and target drug traffickers. Some officials argued going after both drug production and traffickers was necessary to deprive the Taliban of illicit financing sources, while others believed a forward-leaning counternarcotics approach would generate enormous anti-state grievances from Afghan poppy farmers deprived of their livelihoods. 

Waltz was more sympathetic to the view that targeting drug traffickers would have been more effective. In one vignette, Waltz describes an argument with a superior officer, a lawyer from U.S. Central Command, who gave policy guidance that “counterdrug is not something for the military to be involved in.” Waltz countered that the military must “also protect things” and “to the extent that we are protecting Afghanistan from being destabilized, we [the military] should take on the drug trade….” In his subsequent career, Waltz has indicated he continues to hold this belief formed more than a decade ago. In 2023, for example, he introduced legislation to authorize the use of U.S. military force against Mexican drug cartels, announcing that it was “time to go on offense.”

This is not the only place where Waltz’s views indicate a preference for offense over defense. He holds what I might call orthodox post-9/11 views on counterterrorism. The idea here is that threats must be countered before they gather, even if that means the repeated use of military force far away from American shores. Waltz was wary that, absent sustained U.S. counterterrorism pressure, al-Qaeda would appear resurgent and again threaten the U.S. Waltz has returned to those themes in recent weeks, telling Fox News after a terror attack in New Orleans, “The terrorists around the world, ISIS, al-Qaeda and their offshoots, didn’t get the memo that the war on terror is over. They still hate us. They are plotting and planning to attack us.” And Waltz emphasized in his recent media appearances that the Trump White House would oversee “a hard look at strategy overseas, our posture, basing for our special operators and intelligence operatives to keep a lid on ISIS, al-Qaeda and others, whether it’s [in] Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other places, where they may be plotting and planning to hit us.”

4. Do Waltz’s big ideas clash with Trump’s vision?

As a deployed Green Beret officer, Waltz promised his Afghan counterparts that America wouldn’t abandon them. His 2014 memoir also mentions his promises to these colleagues that the United States and its military would be with Afghanistan for the long haul. Based on Trump’s negotiated agreement with the Taliban – and under Biden’s watch – the U.S. did eventually abandon Waltz’s Afghan counterparts. 

In Congress, Waltz directed his strong criticism not at Trump, of course, but at how the Biden administration handled the 2021 withdrawal of U.S. troops, calling its execution “callous, cold-hearted, [and] incompetent.” Yet the accounts in the memoir offer a reminder that Waltz may be less willing than Trump to undertake stark policy changes with clear costs to U.S. friends and allies.

In his first term in office, Trump struggled to find national security aides fully on board with his peculiar mix of populist nationalism. Trump cycled through four national security advisors from January 2017 to January 2021 – Michael Flynn, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, and Robert O’Brien. That marked the most turnover at that position ever in a single presidential term. Some top advisors resigned, voicing public complaints. Others left quietly. 

Whether Waltz can accommodate his hard-earned beliefs alongside the views of his often-temperamental boss will help determine whether Waltz will fare better than his predecessors.