Donald Trump greets Marco Rubio during a campaign rally in North Carolina on November 4, 2024. Evan Vucci/AP

A few weeks ago, Vice President-elect JD Vance double Donald Trump “the peace candidate” in a blitz of appearances on Sunday morning shows.

Vance was talking about a guy who, during his last term, would have expressed interest in firing missiles at Mexico, and disheveled about nuclear attack both North Korea and hurricanes.

And, less than a week after Trump’s election victory, the notion of the president-elect as anti-war, a common theme for Vance, has been seriously undermined by Trump’s selection of a series of national security hawks – people who advocate the use of military force to resolve international problems – for key administration posts.

During the election campaign, Trump had some success positioning himself on an anti-war path. He pledged to do so immediately impose a peace agreement for Ukraine and pushed (extremely vague) for the end of the war in Gaza. He also boasted, falsely, that there were no wars under his administration. (Trump was help by Vice President Kamala Harris’ reluctance to distance herself from President Joe Biden’s establishment-oriented foreign policy.)

Since Trump’s election last week, there has been a rush among his close supporters to embrace these anti-war changes and push the former president toward appointments that reject the neoconservative bent of many Republicans. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. would have were among the insiders who pushed the president-elect not to select former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has aggressive views on Ukraine, China and Iran. Trump gave these supporters some hope by announcing last week that he “would not invite” Pompeo or former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley “to join the Trump administration.”

But these small victories are overshadowed by Trump’s appointment of a series of hawkish figures to key positions.

Earlier this week, Trump decided to nominate Senator Marco Rubio(R-Fla.) as secretary of state, according to New York Timesand to name Representative Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) as national security adviser. (Sources said Trump’s global figures still hope to block Rubio, whose selection Trump has not announced, from receiving the nomination for secretary of state.)

This news was followed by Trump’s announcement that he would nominate Rep. Elise Stefanik (RY) as UN ambassador and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as US ambassador to Israel. Wednesday, Trump said he would name Steven Witkoff, a real estate investor and campaign donor who is also a reliable Netanyahu backer, as special envoy to the Middle East. And he chose John Ratcliffe, a loyalist who, in 2020, used his work as Trump’s director of national intelligence to selectively declassify information aimed at bolstering Trump’s false claims about the origins of the Russia scandal – as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Trump is “trying to appeal to at least two sides of the party that are diametrically opposed,” said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, who has advocated for reduced defense spending and American commitments abroad. “If these nominations go as announced, it looks like a call to Liz Cheney’s unreconstructed caucus. It remains an open question whether this is offset by anything other than JD Vance.

Although Cheney endorsed Harris this year, she and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, are identified with the Republican Party’s long-dominant nonconservative approach to national security policy.

Trump may not have figures like Pompeo and Haley and former national security adviser John Bolton at the White House this time, but “many of the people he named represent the same views,” said Triti Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute.

Although Rubio and Waltz have both followed Trump’s lead in expressing skepticism about NATO and the level of U.S. support for Ukraine, they are known to be hawks on foreign policy. Stefanik, who has espoused similar views, is likely to follow Haley’s. example of use the work of the UN as a stage to effectively support the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli far-right government.

Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Trump supporter who herself hopes to win a national security post in the new administration, in July exhorted Trump should avoid Rubio, who she says “represents the neoconservative, hawkish establishment.”

Huckabee has been an aggressive defender of Netanyahu’s expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, even adopting the arguments of Israel’s openly racist far-right, which rejects the idea that Palestinians have a right to live in the West Bank. “The West Bank does not exist”, Huckbee said during a visit to Israel in 2017. “It’s Judea and Samaria. There is no job. »

Trump has in default Biden for President limited efforts to dissuade Netanyahu from continuing his war in Gaza and Lebanon. Along with this suggestion of carte blanche, Trump’s appointments appear likely to further enable Israel to wage war, critics said.

Trump “appoints people based on loyalty rather than ideology,” Parsi said. Mother Jones. “This doesn’t look particularly encouraging from a foreign policy perspective, at least as far as the Middle East is concerned.”

Despite Trump’s appointments so far, people who hope the president-elect will fulfill the role Vance claimed are still working to distance him from war advocates (including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark. ), who is reportedly in the running for Secretary of Defense.

“The hour is still young,” Logan said. “I’m cautiously not pessimistic.”